In a previous post, I remarked that philosophers are probably strongly influence by their advisors, and then argued this should cause us to reduce our credence in our own work and our reliability. Irfan Khawaja finds the claim (that advisees significantly get pushed/influenced to believe what their advisors believe) implausible and wonders why I didn’t cite a study to prove it. Admittedly, I thought the claim was so obviously true and widely accepted that I didn’t need to argue for it; instead, I was exploring an implication of what I thought was a commonly accepted fact.

I don’t know of a study that actually tests this empirically. It seems there is lots of correlation between what advisors and advisees think, but it’s hard to know how much is selection and how much treatment, that is, influence.

However, I’m not sure it matters. Either way, it should make us worried about how reliable we are. Consider the options:

1. Selection effect: You form your view X while you still suck at philosophy. You then self-select an advisor who agrees, and/or choose to attend a program with people who agree. You then get trained by someone who shares your views to defend them better. Great job rationalizing what you believed anyways, before you really knew what you were talking about.

2. Treatment effect: You believe X because largely by a somewhat random processes you happen to be trained by a believer in X. You have social pressure to share their views, plus you tend to see good arguments for X and weaker arguments against it, just because of who happens to be in your program.

Either way, should reduce credence in X.

Further, one of my political theorist FB friends notes that advisors tend to write strong letters and work harder for disciples than for advisees with contrary points of view. So there is probably some pernicious selection involved in who ultimately gets a job and keeps publishing. Again, this is not a process that should inspire much confidence.

Context: Michael Huemer claims that the “great” philosophers are usually bad thinkers. They defend implausible ideas with bad arguments.

Vallier responds that the great philosophers are like architects. Their great achievement is that they build coherent systems of thought.

I’m not much convinced by Vallier’s response in part because, when I studied the history of philosophy or read papers in the field, it seems that the “greats” often have incoherent systems. A large number of published papers on the greats, and good number of the classes, take the form of “Great Thinkers says X here and Y here, but X and Y are seemingly incompatible. Let me try to figure out a way to spin X and Y to render then coherent.”

Anyway, I’m rather pessimistic about philosophy in general, not just the value of the studying the history of philosophy or of the greats.

Look through the PhilPapers Survey results here. You’ll notice that for most interesting philosophical debates–the kinds of issues that would draw you into philosophy in the first place–philosophers are fairly evenly split. If there are three major positions on some question, you see roughly a third taking each position.

At most, one of these positions can be true. For some debates, the positions do not necessarily exhaust the logical space, and so it might be that none of the major theories are true. Further, the positions are defined broadly (e.g., all communitarian political philosophies are lumped together, as are all forms of theism), so even if one of the major positions listed is correct, that doesn’t mean that most of the people who subscribe to that position know the truth. If theism is correct, but it turns out that Odin is the one true God, it doesn’t seem to much vindicate Christian and Muslim theists that they got “theism vs. atheism” right. If Rossian pluralism is the correct moral theory, it’s hardly a victory for the Kantians that they got the deontology vs consequentialism debate right.

It seems, then, that studying philosophy is unlikely to induce you believe what’s true. After all, after studying philosophy and becoming a philosopher, only a minority believe any given major position. This means the majority by necessity believe something false. If there are three options, A, B, and C, with 1/3rd believing each, then by necessity at least 2/3rds are wrong. If you were assigned to A, B, or C at random, you’d have at most a 1/3rd chance of getting the right answer. Of course, you aren’t exactly assigned at random, as I’ll discuss below.

Now, one might object that even if most philosophers end up believing something false, perhaps studying philosophy at least tends to move people toward the correct position. That’s at least logically possible. After all, suppose A is the correct answer to some philosophical question. Imagine that before studying philosophy, only 1% of people believe A, but afterward, a whopping 22% believe it. Studying philosophy helps, even though it doesn’t make it more likely than not that you’ll believe the truth.

However, this is still merely hypothetical. To know whether philosophy at least “helps” in this way, we’d need to know what the correct positions are. We’d then need to compare treatment vs control groups to see how studying or writing philosophy professionally changes their beliefs. We’d have to control for confounds. We’d then be able to see whether and how much philosophical study has a positive influence. However, since we don’t have the philosophical answer sheet next to us, we can’t quite do that sort of research.

Further, we have good reasons to suspect there are pernicious biases and other improper factors which tend to affect what people believe. If you read the literature on bias in political thinking, it seems likely that people join political tribes for non-cognitive reasons, and that the more ideological members of those tribes simply try to rationalize whatever random things the tribe endorses. Further, we have strong incentives to share the beliefs of those around us. It’s not obvious philosophers are particularly good at overcoming political tribalism.

Second, what people believe tends to depend a great deal on who their advisors were. People who go to Harvard tend to come out Kantians of some sort. People who go to Arizona tend to come out Gaussian contractualists or Schmidtzean pluralists. Now, some of this is due to selection–the Kantians are more likely to apply to Harvard than, say, consequentialist ANU. Part of it, though, is that when you attend a program with people who defend X, you encounter much better arguments for X and weaker arguments for other positions. But this seems to a rather unreliable mechanism for changing your beliefs. A Guassian contractualist like Kevin would have ended up believing something else had he gone to a different program. Is it just lucky for him he attended Arizona and not Harvard? Is it just lucky for him that he had Gaus as an advisor instead of Christiano, Schmidtz, Wall, Pincione, or someone else?

Third, there are some probably selection effects, where people who believe certain things are more likely to specialize in a given subfield, and perhaps end up dominating it. For instance, most philosophers are atheists, but most specialists in philosophy of religion are not merely theists, but adherents to Abrahamic religions. It could be that studying philosophy of religion intensely causes you to realize not merely that some god exists, but that the real god is Abraham’s. Or it could be that Abrahamic theists self-select into that specialty and have succeeded in capturing the field and its journals. This it turn can tend to decide who ends up not only getting to become a specialist in those fields, but what the texts say and what ideas people encounter.

Fourth, in philosophy, one way to improve your status, get published, for get a job, is not to conform to what others think. Another is to instead come up with novel and exciting arguments on behalf of what others already believe. Philosophy, to its credit, still respects challenging the status quo and still sees itself as having the job of challenging conventional belief. (this is one reason philosophy is still better than some of the deeply corrupt fields, such as history.) Accordingly, we have incentives to come up with clever arguments for surprising and unconventional conclusions. People who do so tend to end up believing what they write. But neither background influence–the push to conform or the push to challenge–seem particularly reliable.

Imagine you have two goals: A. Believe the true answers to interesting philosophical questions. B. Avoid believing the false answers to those questions. If you value avoiding falsehood as strongly as you value believing the truth, it seems the best strategy would be to try to remain as agnostic on philosophical questions as you could possibly be. What’s the answer to Newcomb’s Problem? Answer: I don’t know. Is the mind material? I dunno. What’s the best systematization of ethics? Dunno.

One of the pastimes of various second- and third-rate intellectual activists is to complain about the perniciousness of Koch money and of other sources of private funding that go to libertarians. (P.S., I am not Koch-funded. I’m posting this in part because I’m witnesses a new round of brouhaha on Facebook.)

I would have far more respect for people who do this if they just came clean and said, “I think libertarianism is wrong and I want to fuck with libertarians to stop them from succeeding in the academy. I only want people who share my politics to get jobs.” We all know that’s what’s really going on. They keep up a pretense that it’s about academic freedom or academic purity. However, it’s clear they don’t mean it, because they do not apply their arguments consistently. (See below.)

On this point, I have a paper in the book The Value and Limits of Academic Speech. Here’s a reprint of a summary that piece, originally posted at IHS’s open inquiry project.

The Koch Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, or various libertarian-friendly billionaires fund a number of free market university research centers. Left-wing faculty, activists, and the media (often with backing from the George Soros-funded UnKoch My Campus¹) complain:

1. The centers do not produce honest research but instead promote an ideological agenda.
2. The lure of easy money corrupts professors and graduate students, inducing them to advocate positions they would not otherwise support.
3. The money allows libertarians or supporters of free markets to have outsized influence in academia.
4. Because the centers are not supervised by other departments, they are a threat to academic freedom at the host institutions.
5. The centers in question are governed by different rules from other centers; in particular, they supposedly allow funders to have significant discretion over what these centers do.

My essay in The Value and Limits of Academic Speech casts doubt on these complaints.

The Burden of Proof

Many of these complaints are in principle open to empirical investigation. Complainants could try to provide data indicating such centers have a pernicious effect, that they unfairly sway faculty, or that faculty hired in such programs have weaker credentials than others. They could try to provide hard evidence that unfair hiring practices occur. And so on. But what’s striking is that they do nothing to discharge this burden of proof—they simply assert, insinuate, and accuse. The centers are presumed guilty without any actual evidence.

What If Libertarianism Is True?

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the supposedly easy money associated with such centers somehow increases the incidence of libertarianism on campus. Suppose it solidifies professors’ libertarianism or induces non-libertarian students and professors to become friendlier toward libertarianism.

Is that corrupting? Answer: it depends. It depends both on how the money caused the change, but also on whether libertarianism is true. Or, more precisely, it depends on the degree to which libertarianism contains true claims, or whether pushing people in a libertarian direction brings them closer to the truth.

To illustrate, suppose X is the true theory of some intellectual domain. Suppose there is a pill which, if swallowed, will cause people to believe X and also memorize the evidence and arguments for X. Suppose I pay you $5000 to take the pill. If you then take the pill, you may have had impure motives. However, by hypothesis, you know have a better set of beliefs than before. The pill improved you.

My point is that even if the money sways people, that does not automatically mean it corrupts them. It depends in part on what they end up believing. If they money brings they closer to the truth, it has a net positive effect.

Libertarians think libertarianism is true, so they might assert that their research centers improve people. Their leftist critics claim that such centers corrupt. But the argument depends in part on which doctrines are closest to the truth. We cannot make a purely ideologically neutral argument.

Academic Freedom?

At Wake Forest University, the faculty senate demanded discretion over each of the following:

1. Whether the Eudaimonia Institute would be created.
2. Whether and from whom the institute would receive funding.
3. The right to determine whom the institute may hire.
4. The right to decide what the faculty affiliated with the institute may present or publish.²

They asserted that without such rights and powers in place, the Koch funding was a threat to academic freedom. But their argument makes no sense.

In general, individual departments at research universities have tremendous latitude and power to set their own standards and to choose, almost unilaterally, whom to hire. The provost, chancellor, or president may have to sign off on hires, but nearly always defer to individual departments. While tenure and promotion decisions often require candidates to be screened by an ad hoc committee with professors from around the school, these committees generally just count publications and make sure professors are publishing in the appropriate journals in their field; they do not check the actual work other professors do. Perhaps this is a mistake, but nevertheless, this is the basic structure of the research university.

Further, faculty never ask permission to present or publish on anything. They write the papers they feel like writing. They present where they are invited to and agree to speak. They publish whatever and wherever they get past double-blind peer review. Imagine that in order to start a new church or to publish religious materials, you first had to get permission from all the other churches and religious leaders. We wouldn’t call that academic freedom. Imagine that in order to start a business, you first had to get permission from your competitors. We wouldn’t call that economic freedom. Imagine that in order to start a romantic relationship, you had to get permission from other would-be suitors. We wouldn’t call that personal freedom. And so on.

In short: The faculty senate at Wake Forest obviously are not trying to protect academic freedom, but impede it. A university in which the Senate had the enumerated powers above would be a joke.

Could Bias Correct Bias?

Even if outside funding is corruptly motivated by false ideology, it might nevertheless improve the university rather than corrupt it. Corrupt money might indeed spoil a pristine academic environment. But the actual academic environment is highly biased and ideological, and so it’s possible corrupt money has an ameliorative or counterbalancing effect.

If faculty, administrators, and students are for the most part epistemically rational, disinterested, truth-seekers—then the money would most likely do harm. However, if they are mostly biased, team-oriented, ideological and activist team-players—then the money might, despite the donors’ possibly corrupt motives, improve things, in two ways:

1. Since the academy discriminates heavily against non-leftists, it might help to partially correct the imbalance, and get the academy slightly closer to where it would be if only faculty were not such partisan players. (There are lots of papers showing that left-wing scholars openly discriminate against libertarian and conservatives in hiring, even when politics is irrelevant to the topic. There are lots of papers showing that, in general, outside of academia, people discriminate on the basis of politics in hiring. Further, there are a few papers showing that libertarians and conservatives have to publish more and better than their left-wing peers to get equivalent jobs.)
2. By helping to place and secure faculty with points of view different from the mainstream, the funding makes it more likely that students will be exposed to vigorous debate and honest, good faith defenses of different points of view. It makes it more likely that debate in the academy will be vigorous rather than an echo chamber.

Double Standards

Many academics claim that Koch funding is bad, and then rationalize arguments to that effect. But they do not apply similar standards to their own sources of funding.

For instance, Wake Forest hosts various left-wing research institutes—e.g., the Pro Humanitae Institute and Anna Julia Cooper Center—which receive funding from various left-wing foundations and sources. The Pro Humanitae Institute’s directors and faculty are not more impressive or accomplished than the director of the Eudaimonia Institute. Further, the Pro Humanitae Institute actively pushes left-wing social justice causes. As far as I can tell, it focuses almost entirely on activism rather than on scholarship.³ In contrast, the Eudaimonia Institute is research and teaching center with no apparent activist activity. The Anna Julia Cooper Center focuses on “advancing justice through intersectional scholarship”; by its own self-description, scholarship is meant to serve a political outcome.⁴ Further, their website reveals they only invite speakers or hire faculty who share their narrow political viewpoint.⁵ But the Wake Forest faculty senate has no problem with any of this.

Billionaire Henry Samueli gave UC Irvine $200 million to fund a new building and fifteen faculty and research positions in homeopathic, holistic, and integrative medicine. The Samuelis pay the university to research and promote pseudo-science, but no one protests or complains.

And so on. There are hundreds of such examples.

Why the difference in treatment? Perhaps the well-motivated faculty petitioners at Wake Forest or elsewhere simply overlooked these centers. Perhaps the well-motivated Wake Forest faculty petitioners scrupulously examined how their left-wing centers were funded, examined how hires were made, and then concluded (despite the intellectual uniformity) that they were free of any corrupting rules or behaviors. But most likely, faculty have not raised concerns about academic freedom simply because they like the centers’ political agenda.

Similar remarks apply to government-funded centers and research grants. Government agents and bureaucracies can and often are captured by groups pushing their own agendas.⁶ It’s silly to treat the National Endowment for the Humanities as ideologically pure but the Koch Foundation as ideologically loaded. The honest assessment is that both are motivated.

I invoke the double standards point here because it provides evidence that many complaints about outside funding of centers are insincere. The reasons activists use to explain why outside funding is dangerous could be levied against government and left-wing foundationfunded centers and research programs as well. But in practice we only see them made against market friendly centers.

¹UnKoch My Campus claims its fiscal sponsor is the Center for Media and Democracy. https://centerformediaanddemocracy.salsalabs.org/unkochmycampus/index.html. The Center refuses to disclose where it gets its funding, but it has received at least $200,000 from Soros. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/12/11/left-obama-escalate-war-on-banks-intodangerous-territory.html#ixzz1gWfrRwHS. It receives money from a number of other left-leaning foundations:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Center_for_Media_and_Democracy#Funding. See also
https://fdik.org/soros.dcleaks.com/download/index.html%3Ff=%252Fmemo%2520on%2520climate.pdf&t=us and http://freebeacon.com/issues/soros-tied-networks-foundations-joinedforces-create-trump-resistance-fund/. Note that Lindsey Berger, UnKoch’s Executive Director, also works for Greenpeace.

²https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-anti-koch-meltdown-at-wake-forest-1491521075

³http://phi.wfu.edu

⁴http://ajccenter.wfu.edu

⁵http://ajccenter.wfu.edu/events/anna-julia-cooper-lecture/

⁶Mueller Public Choice III

“Voting is effective altruism,” many EAs say.

Is it, though?

It’s weird that so many effective altruists celebrate voting. Here’s why:

1. The question of the best way to calculate the probability of a vote being decisive is still open. Most models say it’s very low. EAs love to latch on the Edlin, Gelman, and Kaplan view, which says it can be pretty high if you live a swing state.

2. They often just assign subjective values to the differences in the expected value of two different candidates or parties. This seems rather anti-EA. Aren’t we supposed to carefully measure the differences using the best available research, just like we do when assessing where to donate our cash? Also, lots of research says that parties and candidates have little to no real impact on policy.

3. They ignore how votes cancel each other. If voting for a Democrat is like donating $5000 to charity, isn’t voting Republican like stealing $5000?

4. They ignore how difficult it is for a typical person–and even the typical academic–to figure out which way to vote is better. Voters are in a very bad epistemic state. Most have few stable political beliefs, and the few they have are not justified. Their reasons for being attached to one party instead of another are almost always non-doxastic and non-epistemic, but are instead based on arbitrary historical connections that do not track their interests or anyone else’s. Most voters should be highly self-skeptical and should think they have as much chance of doing something harmful as they do of voting in helpful ways.

And so on.

Here’s the rub, though. Utilitarianism, like most moral theories, is often self-effacing. That is, telling people the truth about consequences might have bad consequences.

A good consequentialist will almost never vote. In addition, the good consequentialist will realize they probably are not in a position to judge which candidate or party is better in major election. However, for the rare cosequentialist who does justifiably believe that party D > R and who also has lots of public influence, they should try to convince as many people as possible to vote the right way.

The EA pro-voting message is probably false but also useful. Given who hears the EA message, it’s strategically useful to convince lots of people in the audience to vote, even though it’s still the case that for any single one of them, their vote is not a form of effective altruism.

Brennan in USA Today: Voting is almost never a form of effective altruism. If you want to help others, go to work and donate your earnings to a GiveWell charity.

As a field, history seems to have gotten worse. It seems to have become more political and ideological, and less concerned with the truth. Prominent historians often come across as warriors for a cause rather than academics.

For instance, consider the responses to Edward Baptist or Nancy MacLean, both of whom regularly engage in quotation alteration, by inserting words that aren’t there or removing words that are to change the meaning. This practice is considered a serious form of intellectual dishonesty in serious fields—it’s the kind of thing that would get you expelled from a graduate program or even make you lose your tenured job. But when confronted about these problems, they and they defenders respond that economists and others simply don’t understand proper historical methods. False. Lying is not a valid method in any field.

The reason why this is especially bad for history is that the facts are all history has. Let’s be blunt. Historians are not social scientists. With a few exceptions here and there, they do not learn how to collect and analyze data. They do not learn how to construct models or test them rigorously. They do not learn how to identify and test natural experiments, let alone laboratory experiments. They do not learn econometrics, or how to use difference-in-differences methods to find causation. All they really can do is uncover and collect facts, and try to arrange them in a way that tells a story. In some cases, they may succeed in showing causation because no special model is needed. However, historians rarely can generalize from one story to another and rarely discover laws.

That’s not say history as a field inherently lacks value. On the contrary, dealing in facts is a big deal. Consider, for instance, how 1491 demolishes Western prejudices about the pre-Columbian Americas.

But when history no longer cares about the facts–when instead they think they have the right and the duty to fabricate or alter quotes, to state connections where they are none, to disparage rather than confront critics honestly, to misrepresent what others say in the hopes that no one will read the original sources, and to serve an ideology rather than the truth, then the field has lost the one thing it could contribute better than other fields.

Perhaps the appearance of an illusion. Perhaps it’s just the most public faces of the field, and regular historians are still doing good work. It’s hard to say. From the outside, it sure looks like the field is rallying around the dishonest rather than disparaging them.