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>What makes for a crony belief is how we're rewarded for it. And the problem with beliefs about climate change is that we have no way to act on them — by which

>What makes for a crony belief is how we're rewarded for it. And the problem with beliefs about climate change is that we have no way to act on them — by which I mean there are no actions we can take whose payoffs (for us as individuals) depend on whether our beliefs are true or false. Completely and totally wrong. We can vote for politicians who will implement policies, or even implement some changes via initiative that are liable to be disadvantageous to us personally in terms of higher taxes or a slower growing economy for a longer term payoff even if the perceived payoff is for our progeny. We can incur costs in exchange for benefits. It MAY be a crony belief but it isn't categorically so.

GranularRecipe 6y ago
I think "crony belief" is a negatively connotated misnomer. A better term would be "coordinated belief" which enables us to coordinate our actions in a very complex system. According to his logic, most of the scientific theories I hold to be true are "crony beliefs" in that -- in practical terms -- I can't/don't test them.
duckerude 6y ago
The expected personal payoff of voting is extremely small. One vote only makes a small difference. The probability of your vote tipping an election is on the order of winning the lottery. If you look at the payoff for society as a whole then voting is worth it, because it potentially affects an enormous number of people. But your individual payoff of your individual vote can easily be a million times smaller, practically irrelevant.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  The point is not the size of the effect it is there being an effect at all. The author declares that ones view on climate change is inherently a crony belief because there is no skin in the game not that there isn't enough skin in the game. In fact people's perceptions of the relative importance of their actions is generally bigger that it really is from a global view. Their natural scope is the tiny world they inhabit not a birds eye view of society.
- js8 6y ago
  > The expected personal payoff of voting is extremely small. One vote only makes a small difference. That's an education issue. Consider that voting means you're deciding about the government's budget, which translates to handsome sum of money per vote.
  - duckerude 6y ago
    A handsome sum of money, but it's distributed over a lot of people. As a crude US-scale example, imagine that a hundred million people vote about the allocation of a trillion dollars. Each vote allocates 1e12 / 1e8 = $10,000. So voting is clearly worth it. But that $10,000 doesn't end up with the voter, it ends up diffused across all of society. $10,000 is the society-wide payoff of your vote. Your individual payoff of your own vote is only 1e4 / 1e8 = $0.0001. Your vote barely affects yourself. So there's an altruistic payoff to voting, but not any egoistic payoff to speak of. And we're specifically talking about individual reward here.
    - js8 6y ago
      > And we're specifically talking about individual reward here. No we are not. Altruistic payoff is also part of it, you're calculating it wrong by dividing it twice. Your total payoff is also the contribution that other voters pay to you, and they pay to you because you pay to them. In democracy, you're effectively deciding of the fate of certain amount money. Yes, it is distributed, but it doesn't matter, it is still lot of money. It's not really that different from your money on your bank account if you think about it, only small amount of daily spending gets immediately back to you as "reward" for the decisions you made.
      - duckerude 6y ago
        > Your total payoff is also the contribution that other voters pay to you, and they pay to you because you pay to them. That's too indirect. It's a tragedy of the commons style situation: if nobody votes then everybody is much worse off, but if any one person doesn't vote that barely hurts them individually. The concrete incentive to vote is social. If you don't vote then people will consider you a freeloader. That changes the equation: while there's still barely any individual election result payoff of your individual vote, there's a social cost of not voting that's higher than the cost of voting, so voting is worth it even for purely selfish reasons. And that takes it into crony belief territory. You're doing it for social reasons, not just because you think it's correct, but because your social group thinks it's correct. (That doesn't make it wrong, or bad. It's a useful mechanism.) > It's not really that different from your money on your bank account if you think about it, only small amount of daily spending gets immediately back to you as "reward" for the decisions you made. The difference is that coordinating with myself is much easier than coordinating with other people. There's no way to freeload off myself in the long term, but freeloading off other people is a real possibility with all kinds of countermeasures. Social pressure is one such countermeasure.
notahacker 6y ago
Yep, it was a spectacularly bad example. Climate change is a belief which is not only well supported by evidence, but also one which belief in has a generally negative payoff (it makes us feel bad about our foreign holiday and makes entire countries switch to more expensive energy supplies) and not one which is likely to make you any more popular at picnics than bringing up the subject of the minimum wage. Needless to say there's also plenty of literature on incentive structures and practical limitations which discourage humanity from doing more. Of course, it's possible to become a climate activist to try to impress others, or to avoid making what you feel is a completely watertight argument in favour of Big Oil to avoid being accused of being a monster, but I don't think this incentive structure explains why so many people believe what their teacher and news anchor and favourite documentary presenter tell them about what scientists think. Indeed I'm reminded of earlier in the piece where the author argues that 'crony beliefs' encompasses the tendency to "bristle and hold unorthodox beliefs, in order to demonstrate that we're independent thinkers" earlier in the piece. In this case, it's not to difficult to see how the edgy example of how everyone else might be acknowledging well established scientific fact in bad faith (or due to inappropriately motivated reasoning) validates the rationalist community's core beliefs in prediction markets and how superior their way of reasoning is to the average person That argument also, incidentally, actually fails the author's own implicit test for a 'merit' belief (i.e something the author actually acts on or would with better incentive structures).
- autarch 6y ago
  > it makes us feel bad about our foreign holiday and makes entire countries switch to more expensive energy supplies But it sure feels good to tell people that we're skipping that foreign holiday and switching to wind power for our home. BTW, I switched to renewable for my home years ago ;)

GranularRecipe 6y ago

I think "crony belief" is a negatively connotated misnomer. A better term would be "coordinated belief" which enables us to coordinate our actions in a very complex system. According to his logic, most of the scientific theories I hold to be true are "crony beliefs" in that -- in practical terms -- I can't/don't test them.

duckerude 6y ago

The expected personal payoff of voting is extremely small. One vote only makes a small difference. The probability of your vote tipping an election is on the order of winning the lottery. If you look at the payoff for society as a whole then voting is worth it, because it potentially affects an enormous number of people. But your individual payoff of your individual vote can easily be a million times smaller, practically irrelevant.

michaelmrose 6y ago
The point is not the size of the effect it is there being an effect at all. The author declares that ones view on climate change is inherently a crony belief because there is no skin in the game not that there isn't enough skin in the game. In fact people's perceptions of the relative importance of their actions is generally bigger that it really is from a global view. Their natural scope is the tiny world they inhabit not a birds eye view of society.
js8 6y ago
> The expected personal payoff of voting is extremely small. One vote only makes a small difference. That's an education issue. Consider that voting means you're deciding about the government's budget, which translates to handsome sum of money per vote.
- duckerude 6y ago
  A handsome sum of money, but it's distributed over a lot of people. As a crude US-scale example, imagine that a hundred million people vote about the allocation of a trillion dollars. Each vote allocates 1e12 / 1e8 = $10,000. So voting is clearly worth it. But that $10,000 doesn't end up with the voter, it ends up diffused across all of society. $10,000 is the society-wide payoff of your vote. Your individual payoff of your own vote is only 1e4 / 1e8 = $0.0001. Your vote barely affects yourself. So there's an altruistic payoff to voting, but not any egoistic payoff to speak of. And we're specifically talking about individual reward here.
  - js8 6y ago
    > And we're specifically talking about individual reward here. No we are not. Altruistic payoff is also part of it, you're calculating it wrong by dividing it twice. Your total payoff is also the contribution that other voters pay to you, and they pay to you because you pay to them. In democracy, you're effectively deciding of the fate of certain amount money. Yes, it is distributed, but it doesn't matter, it is still lot of money. It's not really that different from your money on your bank account if you think about it, only small amount of daily spending gets immediately back to you as "reward" for the decisions you made.
    - duckerude 6y ago
      > Your total payoff is also the contribution that other voters pay to you, and they pay to you because you pay to them. That's too indirect. It's a tragedy of the commons style situation: if nobody votes then everybody is much worse off, but if any one person doesn't vote that barely hurts them individually. The concrete incentive to vote is social. If you don't vote then people will consider you a freeloader. That changes the equation: while there's still barely any individual election result payoff of your individual vote, there's a social cost of not voting that's higher than the cost of voting, so voting is worth it even for purely selfish reasons. And that takes it into crony belief territory. You're doing it for social reasons, not just because you think it's correct, but because your social group thinks it's correct. (That doesn't make it wrong, or bad. It's a useful mechanism.) > It's not really that different from your money on your bank account if you think about it, only small amount of daily spending gets immediately back to you as "reward" for the decisions you made. The difference is that coordinating with myself is much easier than coordinating with other people. There's no way to freeload off myself in the long term, but freeloading off other people is a real possibility with all kinds of countermeasures. Social pressure is one such countermeasure.

notahacker 6y ago

Yep, it was a spectacularly bad example. Climate change is a belief which is not only well supported by evidence, but also one which belief in has a generally negative payoff (it makes us feel bad about our foreign holiday and makes entire countries switch to more expensive energy supplies) and not one which is likely to make you any more popular at picnics than bringing up the subject of the minimum wage. Needless to say there's also plenty of literature on incentive structures and practical limitations which discourage humanity from doing more. Of course, it's possible to become a climate activist to try to impress others, or to avoid making what you feel is a completely watertight argument in favour of Big Oil to avoid being accused of being a monster, but I don't think this incentive structure explains why so many people believe what their teacher and news anchor and favourite documentary presenter tell them about what scientists think. Indeed I'm reminded of earlier in the piece where the author argues that 'crony beliefs' encompasses the tendency to "bristle and hold unorthodox beliefs, in order to demonstrate that we're independent thinkers" earlier in the piece. In this case, it's not to difficult to see how the edgy example of how everyone else might be acknowledging well established scientific fact in bad faith (or due to inappropriately motivated reasoning) validates the rationalist community's core beliefs in prediction markets and how superior their way of reasoning is to the average person That argument also, incidentally, actually fails the author's own implicit test for a 'merit' belief (i.e something the author actually acts on or would with better incentive structures).

autarch 6y ago
> it makes us feel bad about our foreign holiday and makes entire countries switch to more expensive energy supplies But it sure feels good to tell people that we're skipping that foreign holiday and switching to wind power for our home. BTW, I switched to renewable for my home years ago ;)