Episode 158: Marshall Abrams discusses the nature of the evolutionary process

In this episode, Matt sits down with Marshall Abrams, Professor of Phhilosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, to talk evolutionary theory. One phrase sometimes associated with the theory of evolution is “the survival of the fittest.” Organisms evolve traits through random mutation, and then the organisms that lack the traits that are fittest get killed off, leaving behind the organisms with traits that are less fit. But what does it really mean to be fitter? Marshall Abrams points out that a lot of the answers you hear people give to this question are on the lines of: being fitter is surviving. That answer sounds kind of okay in isolation, but when you plug it back into the original phrase, it starts to sound kind of loopy: according to the theory of evolution, the organisms who survive are the ones that survive. Wut? It’s hard to imagine a biology teacher teaching that.Abrams offers a couple suggestions for how to define fitness in a way that avoids this circularity. One is to talk not about survival, but about a probabilistic disposition or tendency to survive. An organism having a tendency to survive is different from its actually surviving. Maybe you’re a deer, physically strong with an impeccable immune system, but you have an unlucky day and get struck by lightning. You nonetheless had a tendency to survive. A second suggestion our guest makes is to scale what we’re looking at up beyond the level of the individual. A trait will be considered fitter when there is a greater tendency for it to be prevalent in an entire population, not just when there is a higher probability for it to lead to the survival of an individual organism.Marshall Abrams wants to work with that notion of what it is for a trait to be fitter or less fit, but then keep scaling our view even farther past the population level, up to what he calls a population-environment system. This can encompass multiple populations that interact with a population undergoing natural selection, the chemistry of the terrain they live on, the weather patterns in that area—almost anything at the micro or macro level that might affect the long-term behavior of the population. One basic reason for scaling our perspective up in this way is that the same trait on the same organism can be fitter than a competing trait in one context but less fit in another. For instance, a brown mouse can blend in more easily if the ground happens to be brown where they live. So having brown fur could be a fitter trait, insofar as it helps a mouse avoid being eaten, but it can’t really be fitter or less fit in and of itself. It depends on other features of the environment where the mouse lives.It was a fascinating conversation, and I hope you enjoy it!-Matt Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Matt and Joseph sit down with Robin Hanson, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, to discuss prediction markets. A prediction market is a kind of betting market, wherein people place bets on whether or not some future event is going to happen by investing in market shares associated with that event. If the event happens, the people who predicted it correctly get paid. If not, they lose the money they invested. So far, so good: all that is pretty normal for a betting market. But in the case of a prediction market, there is a further twist. Before the future comes to pass and the people who guessed it correctly get paid, there’s a mathematical formula you can use, based on all the bets that have been placed so far, to determine what the probability of that event happening is. In other words, before the payout, the current prices of all shares in market give us the ability to subtly aggregate the wisdom of every individual speculator into a combined judgment about what is probably going to happen.So what, you might think. Well, it turns out that this system for forecasting the future is unusually accurate, particularly when it comes to making the most difficult predictions about the behavior of large, complex systems. And so, for several decades now, our guest has been thinking hard about how can we leverage the information provided by various prediction markets to assist with a wide range of challenging forecasting tasks that might nonetheless be important to do.Although prediction markets have mostly been set up, thus far, to determine the outcomes of things like elections or sporting events, Robin Hanson thinks they can be also be used for more ambitious purposes. One small-scale example is: the board of a public corporation could use a variation on a prediction market (called a decision market) to make decisions about whether to hire a new CEO. A bolder example would be a new system of government he calls futarchy, in which legislators abandon their role of drafting and passing legislation, and instead turn their attention to coming up with precise, measurable definitions of success. Each individual question about what policies to pass when can then be adjudicated by prediction and decision markets, which require measurable definitions of success to function.Robin Hanson is always abrim with fresh ideas, and it was a pleasure talking to him. I hope you enjoy our conversation.Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For this episode, Matt Teichman and Joseph Diller sit down with Oliver Traldi (University of Toledo, Mercatus Center) to talk about political expertise.What does it mean to be an expert in something? Our guest opens by noting that we use the term expert in two different ways: in the normal sense, a person is an expert in something if they know a lot about it, but in the social sense, a person is an expert in something if they have the social status of knowing a lot about it—like maybe they have a lot of degrees and credentials. Although those two things can go together, they don’t necessarily in every case: there are autodidacts who build up a deep understanding of a topic on their own, and there are people who squeak through the educational system without really learning anything.What about a political expert? One way to get to what a political expert would be is to think about what it means to be political. There are lots of different ways that people have tried to define the world political, but Traldi thinks a topic is generally considered political when there is disagreement or controversy associated with it. Particularly if the disagreement is in some way emotionally charged.So a political expert would be someone who knows a lot about areas that there is some broad disagreement about. And now, if you think of political expertise in that way, assuming we are talking about real expertise and not just the social kind, it seems there are factors that conspire to make it unlikely. For example, most of the people who are in a position to have inside information about how a political system works are themselves political actors, which means that everything they say is going to either have ulterior motives or seem like it does. This makes genuine political expertise rare to obtain, and elusive to identify when it does.This was a partcularly fun conversation to have, and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed having it.Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last episode, we talked about free speech, and this time, we sit down with Rebecca Lowe (Mercatus Center) to discuss the related but slightly different topic of speaking freely. Speaking freely: the thing you feel entitled to do when a superior says to you: “you may speak freely.” But although speaking freely is the phenomenon our guest is interested in characterizing, rather than trying to characterize it directly, her approach is to get granular about what it means not to speak freely. What are the different ways you might be blocked from saying what you would otherwise say, if you were fully unfettered?Rebecca Lowe discusses three broad categories of failing to speak freely. Type 1 is where you lack the capacity either to utter words or to determine their content, e.g. because you have laryngitis, or because someone put their hand over your mouth, or because an evil demon controls everything you say. Type 2 is where you’re able to speak, and you’re able to control what you say, but something is preventing you from communicating in the way you’ve decided to, e.g. when you want to call your friend, but your phone battery is dead. Type 3 is where you’re able to speak, you’re able to control what you say, and the situation allows you to communicate in the way you’ve decided to, but you refrain from speaking your mind because of some perceived risk, e.g. when you want to suggest your friend dump her boyfriend, but hold back because you’re worried she’s going to get offended.One subtlety of these categories is that they are not logically independent. If you’re blocked from speaking freely in the Type 1 way, you’re thereby also blocked from speaking freely in the Type 2 and Type 3 ways. And if you’re blocked from speaking freely in the Type 2 way, you’re thereby also blocked from speaking freely in the Type 3 way. The converse doesn’t hold: for example, as our bad boyfriend example emphasized, you can be blocked from speaking in the Type 3 way without being blocked from speaking in the Type 1 way. Indeed, as Rebecca emphasizes, it’s only people who can speak in the Type 1 way who can be blocked from speaking in the Type 3 way!In this episode, our guest argues that the public conversation about a person’s right to speak their mind would go more smoothly if we tried to keep these distinctions in view. That is, whenever we feel indignant about someone’s ability to speak being suppressed, we should consider the details of the situation. Which of these three types of obstructions was it? Was the person able to speak their mind in the situation? Then, we can consider whether they were entitled to do so. Generally we are, but it seems there are certain exception cases. The hope is that by breaking down what is at issue in any particular case we’re discussing, we’ll arrive at a better understanding of what its moral lessons are.It was a fun and lively conversation, and I hope you enjoy it! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the latest episode of Elucidations, Greg Salmieri (University of Texas) joins us once again, this time to discuss freedom of speech.Free speech talk has been in the air, on the internet, for the past decade. But what exactly is going on with freedom of speech? Do I have the right to criticize my alderman’s second term on my blog without getting thrown in jail? Do I have the right to publish cartoons that make fun of venerated religious figures without being physically attacked Do I have the right to tell my work colleagues who I voted for in the last election without getting fired? Do I have the right to express an opinion on whether R2-D2 or BB-8 is the superior Star Wars droid, without getting kicked out a group chat I have going with my friends? Which of these things is a right and which isn’t? What even is a right?Our esteemed guest offers a few suggestions to help us navigate these questions. One core suggestion is that we should think of a right as something defining spheres of action: having the right to do something means that on such and such a question, deciding how to act and then acting that way is my purview, rather than anyone else’s. It doesn’t mean that every possible decision I make is the right one. I could have the right to make a given decision, even if the actual decision I end up making in that case ends up being morally wrong; that doesn’t change the fact that it would also be morally wrong to block me from making it. For instance, even if I decide to regularly do drugs, knowing that it will turn into a harmful habit, that doesn’t change the fact that I have the right to decide whether or not to get into drugs, and it also doesn’t mean that it would be okay for others to prevent me from making that decision.This idea of a right as tied to spheres of action and decision making leads naturally to a distinction between the different examples on our original list. I do have the right to mock revered figures, or to express unfashionable political views, without being physically attacked or thrown in jail. However, there is no such thing as the right to say whatever you want to your friends in a group chat, without getting kicked out. Indeed, if there are any rights in the vicinity of that question, it’s your friends who have the right to decide who they want to associate with and invite to their group chats. Why is that? The idea is that you aren’t being physically forced away from a decision that’s in your purview. If your friends don’t want you in their group chat, it’s their prerogative, and it would probably be best for you to find a group chat in which your hot takes on droids would be received more favorably.Salmieri then goes on to argue that similar reasoning applies to both social media platforms and workplaces. The overall view that emerges is that the right to free speech is central and important, but that in recent discourse, it has strangely been extended beyond its natural reach.I found this to be an illuminating conversation that had a big impact on how I think about freedom of speech. I hope you enjoy it.Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the latest episode of Elucidations, Sam Enright (Progress Ireland, The Fitzwilliam) instructs us in the delicate art of learning forever. If you’re one of those people who responds well to formal education, chances are you’ve spent 10-20 years of your life as a student. When you finally graduate, it can feel jarring, like you’re kissing all this efficient infrastructure for mastering difficult skills goodbye. How are you going to keep learning, without a teacher you can pester with questions in the classroom, without regular feedback on homework assignments, and without exams? Sam Enright is here to tell you that just because you’re moving into the next phase of your life, that doesn’t mean you need to turn your back on the learning experience.In this episode, he discusses his study regimen, which ranges over philosophy, history, economics, math, and computer science, via a couple different formats that are easier to integrate into your everyday life than full-time study in the classroom. The first is something called spaced repetition. This is a method that involves repeating your study practice less and less frequently over time, in order to maximize your direct recall ability. The version that our guest practices involves using software that leans into quizzing you more often on whatever you have the most trouble with, and less often on whatever you have the least trouble with. The quiz questions are of your design, and every time you answer one, you’re given the opportunity to revise it for the future. This allows you to update your study materials over time in light of the expertise you accrue.Another method Sam Enright recommends is reading groups. Echoing similar recommendations from the Elucidations podcast in Episode 126, our guest tells us about a recurring reading group he runs in Ireland that spans a wide variety of disciplines. The key here is to select reading material that is too difficult for you to fully make sense of on your own, and to establish a culture of staying on topic. Sam Enright’s reading group has been in existence for years now and attracts researchers from all over.Finally, our guest discusses how he is able to use AI chatbots to supplement the reading process and drill deeper. In addition to traditional techniques such as notetaking, being able to upload an entire text into a chatbot’s context window and then ask it questions about what you’re reading allows you to explore the terrain it opens up interactively. You can restate your understanding of what you just read, invite the chatbot to identify mistakes in your summary, revisit the parts of the original text that are relevant to those mistakes, and so forth. Interestingly, he even reports having success when the platform he is using hallucinates a little, because trying to sniff those hallucations out allows him to cultivate the kind of skeptical attitude that makes reading itself a bit more like the classroom experience.It was a tremendously fun discussion for me to have, and I hope you enjoy it.Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This time around, Matt talks to Luca Gattoni-Celli about why it’s so expensive to buy a house.In the 80s, people from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds were able to afford apartments and houses in places like New York City, San Francisco, or London. Now, on the other hand, even many wealthy people are getting priced out of the city. And indeed, the issue is no longer specific to urban areas: the problem of seemingly infinitely increasing real estate prices would appear to be creeping into the rest of the US, and into many other areas that were typically regarded as affordable in the recent past.Why is this the case? In this episode, Luca Gattoni-Celli discusses three factors that have artifically inflated housing prices far beyond the equilibrium point between supply and demand. One is zoning regulations, which impose limits on how maximum building size in a given area, how many people can live on a single property, and so forth. Another is permitting, which has the effect of introducing delays into the building process that make it financially infeasible and thus effectively block it from happening. The third is building codes, many of which were introduced for the purposes of making buildings safer to inhabit, but which have the perverse effect of preventing the construction of new buildings that would be safer than the old buildings that are currently in use.Our guest also makes the argument that zoning regulations have a sordid racist and classist past, which you can see, to an extent, in some of the original proposals that led to some of the original policies. More broadly, the claim is that population density is the way that low-income people band together to be able to afford real estate for which there is high demand, and that a push to block density effectively amounts to a push to keep lower-income people out.I found the discussion quite stimulating; I hope you enjoy it.Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Note: this episode was recorded in August of 2022.In the latest Elucidation, Matt talks to Witold Więcek about the difficulties that come up for researchers who would like to draw upon statistics. Lots of academic fields need to draw heavily on statistics, whether it’s economics, psychology, sociologym, linguistics, computer science, or data science. This means that a lot of people coming from different backgrounds often need to learn basic statistics in order to investigate whatever question they’re investigating. But as we’ve discussed on this podcast, statistical reasoning is easy for beginners to mess up, and it’s also easy for bad faith parties to tamper with in undetectable ways. They can straight up fabricate data, they can cherry pick it, they can keep changing the hypothesis they are testing until they find one that is supported by a trend in the data they have. So what should we do? We can’t give up on statistics; it is simply too useful a tool.Witold Więcek argues that researchers have to be mindful of “p-hacking”. Statistical significance, the golden standard of academic publishing, can easily be guaranteed by unscrupulous research or motivated reasoning: statistically speaking, even noise can look like signal if we keep asking more and more questions of our data. Modern statistical workflows require us to either adjust the results for number of hypotheses tested or to follow principles of Bayesian inference. As a broader strategy, Więcek recommends that every research project making significant use of statistical arguments bring in in an external consultant, who can productively stress test those arguments in an adversarial way, given that they aren’t part of the main team.It was a great conversation! I hope you enjoy it.Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Matt sits down with Shruti Rajagopalan (Mercatus Center) to talk about what the future holds for India.We often have a tendency to think of the current economic and geopolitical situation as simply the way things are. Especially for people who grew up in the United States over the past 50 years, the fact that it is an economic and military superpower sorta feels set in stone. But in this episode, Shruti Rajagopalan encourages us to take the long view, regarding the current state of the US as just one phase in a decades or possibly centuries-long economic development life cycle. First, the country logs a certain number of decades as a manufacturing hub, under conditions of minimal top-down interference from regulatory bodies. This enables it to build wealth, which eventually pushes it away from being a manufacturing economy, but it’s a race against the clock. With economic growth comes a rise in average life expectancy, plus a lower birth rate, which together can lead to large aging population. Once the aging population increases, the country’s economy needs to be strong in order to accommodate all the caregiving that an aging population makes necessary.Interestingly, it’s starting to look like some other countries—particularly India—are currently poised to undergo a similar trajectory of economic development that the US did. What makes India stand out is that among the countries in the world with a large young population, they have an unusually high GDP per capita. They also have a pretty sizeable early-career, STEM-savvy middle class that is ready to move anywhere in the world, build a life wherever they end up, and culturally assimilate.Our esteemed guest argues a) that the relaxation of economic restrictions which took place in India in 1991 made this siutation possible, and that b) a few conditions still need to be met for the future to unfold in the optimal way. One is that India needs to build up its manufacturing sector that the country can get richer before the population gets too old. Another is that other countries need to take advantage of the fact that India’s young workforce is ready to emigrate. She even suggests that wealthier countries with a rising elderly population, low birthrate, or declining heritage language could perhaps address those issues by welcoming an incoming population of young workers from India.Join us as our guest outlines the (hopefully) upcoming rise of India on the world stage! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we are joined by Lainie Ross (University of Rochester Medical Center) and (once again!) Christos Lazaridis (UChicago Medicine), this time to talk about the different ways of defining death.In our previous episode with Christos, we talked about death and the vexed history of attempts to define it. Prior to the advent of modern life support technology in the 1950s, it was usually enough to check whether a person had a heartbeat and could breathe to determine whether they were dead. But once machines were invented that could breathe and circulate blood in patients whose lungs or hearts were failing, a new moral conundrum was born: how do you decide whether a medical patient is dead when it is now possible to keep their lungs breathing and their heart beating indefinitely?In this episode, our distinguished guests talk about the actual criteria that physicians use to determine whether a patient is dead, as well as some possible criteria that no one has tried applying but which some doctors think would be more appropriate. Furthermore, Lainie Ross argues that every person has the right to choose which criteria will be used to determine whether they are dead. These two topics interact in interesting ways.For example, I might have a strong preference for my doctor to pronounce me dead only if I have permanently lost all consciousness, even if I can still spontaneously breathe. Although we currently have no good method of objectively measuring whether a patient has permanently lost consciousness, Dr. Ross argues that I have the moral right to sign an agreement stating my preferences. Specifically: the agreement could state that if, in the future, the technology for determining whether someone has permanently lost consciousness gets invented, and, at that time, I have permanently lost consciousness, then I should be declared dead. On the flipside, some patients prefer a stricter criterion, often for religious reasons. Perhaps it is my religious belief that if I am breathing, then I should be considered to be alive. Lainie Ross argues that in that case, I have the moral right to sign an agreement stating that that is the criterion that doctors will use on me, in the event that I lose consciousness but am still able to spontaneously breathe.As of right now, people only have the legal right to sign these types of agrreements in a handful of states in the US. Join us for this episode as Christos Lazaridis and Lainie Ross argue for making this legal right more widespread! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.