Luca's newsletter – On ethics and solving the right problem (2021-05-01)

The real problem

Paul Craven tells us the following story: “Houston airport kept receiving complaints about the wait time at luggage collection for one of their routes, so they switched the gate to make the walk there five minutes longer and the complaints stopped.” (Twitter link)

Rory Sutherland commented, “This raises an interesting issue. Let’s suppose you had been tasked with reducing waiting time in actual seconds, not perceptually. Proxy metrics prevent you from solving a problem by recontextualising it, and hence are an obstacle to creative problem solving.” (Twitter link)

The Unintelligence Quotient

“IQ is not a measure of intelligence, but one of unintelligence” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Twitter link) in response to a table showing that drivers with an IQ between 80 and 84 are much more likely to die in a car crash than people with an IQ between 85 and 99, and that drivers with an IQ between 85 and 99 are more likely to die in a car crash than people with an IQ of 100 or more, BUT drivers with an IQ between 100 and 115 have exactly the same likelihood of dying in a car crash than those with an IQ above 115.

Taleb refers here to the fact that IQ correlates with survival only in the case of low IQ. From average IQ levels upwards, it seems like IQ stops being correlated with positive outcomes (unless in the presence of circularity – of course, high IQ correlates with passing IQ tests).

Taleb wrote a longer article on the topic. In general, we should be wary of measures that correlate with outcomes only on part of their range. The previous point of this newsletter was a warning on the danger of using proxies.

Malleability

“We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it’s really we who are malleable and the world that is largely fixed.” – Naval Ravikant (link)

Most mistakes are forms of clinging to the past.

Clinging:

– to who we were,

– to what we were doing,

– to what we knew how to do,

– to what our ego was invested in.

(from my book “100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late”)

Ethics

“Intentions do not count.” – Joe Norman (Twitter link)

I do not know what catastrophe will destroy the human race, but I suspect it will be something heralded as progress. Its inventors’ last words will be, “Don’t blame me, I had good intentions, I couldn’t have known.”

Of course, ex-post, we know that intentions do not count. When faced with a tragedy, we focus on the suffering and are quick to condemn the perpetrators, even if they did it involuntarily. But ex-ante, before the tragedy takes place, it’s easy to overlook foolish risk-taking and focus on intentions alone.

Concepts such as unintended consequences, ergodicity, and the precautionary principle should be widely taught, so that we can better discuss the consequences of decisions before they are taken.

Runaway cultural selection

“Runaway sexual selection occurs when mating preferences become uncorrelated to environmental fitness. The same thing applies to cultural selection, when cultural success becomes unrelated to real-world achievement.” – David Boxenhorn (Twitter link)

Sadly, lots of cultural selection occurs based on intentions. Think about communism, the ideology perhaps with the best intentions and the most people killed, and yet still very much alive and supported.