Privileging the Question

The correct response to Hamming's question is "Because I have a comparative advantage in working on the problem I am working on". There are many, many important problems in the world of greater and lesser degrees of importance. There are many, many people working on them, even within one field. It does not make sense for everyone to attack the same most important problem, if indeed such a single problem could even be identified. There is a point of diminishing returns. 100 chemists working on the most important problem in chemistry are not going to advance chemistry as much as 10 chemists working on the most important problem, and 90 working on a variety of other, lesser problems.

This point was first made to me by Richard Stallman who told me quite clearly that free software was not the most important problem in the world--I think he cited overpopulation as an example of a more serious problem--but software freedom was the problem he was uniquely well situated to address.

There are seven billion people in the world. I know of no problem that actually needs 7 billion minds to solve it. We are pretty much all well advised to find the biggest problem we have a comparative advantage at, and work on solving that problem. We don't all have to, indeed we shouldn't, all work on the same thing.

The comparison that leapt into my mind was Chomskians talking about how politicians and the media decide which topics are even discussed. Not sure if they have a term for that. I guess what you call "Privileging the Question" is part of framing in the social sciences sense. It's handy to have a phrase for this particular thing, though.

Before going back to check the name, I just assumed the academic asking awkward questions and making people feel bad about their life-choices was Robin Hanson.

This seems related to Robin Hanson's concept of "pulling sideways",. Some questions (e.g. income tax levels or gay marriage) get privileged because the alternative answers align with pre-existing political coalitions, so they give people an opportunity to cheer for their side and against the Enemy, whereas other questions whose answers would involve "pulling sideways" are ignored.

There's a Swedish word for this, "problemformuleringsprivilegiet," which roughly translates as "the privilege to formulate the problem."

In a way of self-fulfilling prophecies, a privileged question becomes important when it is brought to everyone's attention. It becomes the question to decide whether you are a Green or Blue. Refuse to deal with it, and all Greens will suspect that you are a Blue, and all Blues will suspect that you are a Green. Then you may feel the social consequences of having enemies but no allies.

The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now, even in politics (I'd guess that the economy is more important). Outside of politics, many LWers probably think "what can we do about existential risks?" is one of the most important questions to answer, or possibly "how do we optimize charity?"

(This is not meant as a criticism of the post:) I hope I'm not the only one who went "gaaah" here about the latter two not being questions we could be answering right now in politics :-) Not that I have much hope that this is doable, but still.

(I started out writing "not that I have any hope", but then remembered that GiveWell didn't manage to find good opportunities for funding immunizations or micronutrient supplementation -- the first of which they "consider to have the strongest evidence base of any intervention we know of" -- with a major reason being that government and multilateral funders are already taking the best opportunities. See also Eliezer's comment and Holden's reply, suggesting the reason is that there are some people in government to whom measurable, quantifiable, tangible benefits make a very attractive pitch.)

Often, my mother will ask me "what do you think about [some issue that's been discussed in the media lately]?" and I'm like "how the heck should I know, and why should I even care?" It usually irritates her -- "you surely must have an opinion about that! How can you have no opinion?" (Sometimes I retort by asking for her opinion about some unanswered question about physics or something like that, but then she usually says something to the effect that her question, unlike mine, is so intrinsically important that any good citizen has a duty to form an opinion on it.)

I think this line of thinking is very important. People would benefit immensely from becoming better at deciding what questions to address with their scarce cognitive resources. However, I do not think this problem of "meta-rationality" is an easy one, and in particular I'm not sure your heuristic is a good one. The principle that a good question has a clear-cut policy implication conflicts directly with the principle of curiosity. Maybe if an individual is an high-stress, high-stakes decision-making role, he or she may want to ignore questions that are not immediately relevant to the problems at hand. But the whole idea of academia is that society benefits when some individuals have the time and the incentive to go out and answer questions of academic interest - because, of course, we don't know what we don't know and some ideas, or their consequences, may have nonobvious policy implications somewhere down the road.

I propose the following heuristics, noting that in this area one should adopt a "fox-like" strategy and try to apply as many different perspectives as possible:

Does this question have a definitive answer? Will I know I have the right answer when I find it?

It is a good sign here if the answer is "yes". Mathematics as a field is worthwhile, in large part, because mathematicians know with a very high degree of confidence when they have produced a correct result (in contrast, say, to medical science).

Is this question in a reference class with other questions that led to important or significant answers?

For example, in the field of AI one of the most standard strategies is to try to take a key insight from some other domain of knowledge - economics, physics, evolution, etc - and try to apply it to the problem of intelligence (a famous immunologist, Gerald Edelman, has made significant efforts to apply his insights from immunology to the problem of consciousness; in computer vision there is a very well known paper about edge detection that is very clearly inspired by the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics). I personally believe that questions in this reference class don't typically yield much progress, but YMMV.

Is the mental algorithm I ran to conclude that this question is important vulnerable to "meta-bias", i.e., from meta-level analogues to known cognitive biases? For example, did I falsely conclude that this question is important because of group pressure and conformity effects?

The Overton Window is a related concept, but it's at least as much about what people may not consider as it's about what's drawn to their attention.

Related:

Merely reflecting upon my own life, I can see how vastly the kinds of things I find interesting and important have changed. Some topics that used to matter so much to me are now essentially irrelevant except as whimsical amusements, while others that I had never even considered are now my top priorities.

The scary thing is just how easily and imperceptibly these sorts of shifts can happen. I've been amazed to observe how much small, seemingly trivial cues build up to have an enormous impact on the direction of one's concerns. The types of conversations I overhear, blog entries and papers and emails I read, people I interact with, and visual cues I see in my environment tend basically to determine what I think about during the day and, over the long run, what I spend my time and efforts doing. One can maintain a stated claim that "X is what I find overridingly important," but as a practical matter, it's nearly impossible to avoid the subtle influences of minor day-to-day cues that can distract from such ideals.

Those who dismiss postmodernism are condemned to reinvent it, one piece at a time.

Great post. Similar thoughts have been expressed by some LessWrong users on Twitter, but having a nice long summary here is much better. I'd advocate promoting this one to Main.

Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media.

It's not that simple. Getting views is important but it isn't the only consideration. Journalists want to win publisher prizes. Journalists have an interest to build relationships with people who can supply them additional stories.

Owners of newscorporations have their interests. Buyers of advertisement have interests.

Another variable is that stories have to be relatively easy to research. Journalism is under tight deadlines. If the story is just to complex the time that the journalist needs to write the story isn't used "productively".

It's rather against the point of the article to start talking about the above examples of privileged questions...

Even so, it's worth noting that immigration policy is a rare, important question with first-order welfare effects. Relaxing border fences creates a free lunch in the same way that donating to the Against Malaria Foundation creates a free lunch. It costs on the order of $7 million to save an additional American life, but on the order of $2500 to save a life if you're willing to consider non-Americans.

By contrast, most of politics consists of policy debates with about as many supporters as opponents, suggesting there isn't a huge welfare difference either way. What makes immigration and international charity special is the fact that the beneficiaries of the policies have no say in our political system. Thus the benefits that accrue to them are not weighted as heavily as our benefits, which means there's a free lunch if overall welfare is what you care about.

It's only an aside to your main point, but "work on the most important problems you can think of" is a horrible heuristic for everybody to follow. If you want to advance human knowledge, then work on the most important problems you can think of, as weighted by your best estimate of the likely time advantage of "when I would discover a solution" over "when someone else would have discovered a solution". Unless you are one of the smartest people in the world, this weight is likely to be negligibly greater than 0 for many of the most important problems you can think of, simply because there are already plenty of smarter people already working on them.

That's okay. Many of the most important solutions in the world came about because someone was working on an unexpectedly-related problem that would never have made it onto a "most important problems" list.

I think I'm missing the point of something.

Can you give examples of overpriviledged questions and what harm might come from overpriviledging them?

Promote to Main?

[pollid:460]

What do I plan on doing with an answer to this question? With the worst privileged questions I frequently find that the answer is "nothing," sometimes with the follow-up answer "signaling?" That's a bad sign.

Do you mean by this that one should always have a non-"nothing" answer to this question, or just that the "nothing" answer frequently (though not always) indicates a privileging problem?

General note: you are demonstrating a pattern of posting comments that seem to depend on more shared context than actually exists, and which I suspect are consequently pretty much unintelligible to the majority of readers.

The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now, even in politics (I'd guess that the economy is more important).

I don't know about that. Probably the most important question that can be asked in politics is "how can we produce a perfect society in every which way according to the following list of criteria...."

The trick, of course, is that for most people, the "most important" questions are defined by more than just what the impact of the answer would be when we get one. Likelihood of finding an answer, feasibility of being able to implement an answer, ability to implement it using partial steps, and similar real-world considerations are also part of what makes a question the "most important". Based on those real-world criteria, the questions that you call privileged actually score pretty high on the importance scale. If enough people vote for gay marriage or gun control, we can have it tomorrow (maybe not literally tomorrow, since the system takes time, but still fairly soon). It may be harder to get, for instance, life extension tomorrow.

With the worst privileged questions I frequently find that the answer is "nothing,"

What? "Vote for a politician who I feel has a chance of stopping/expediting (depending on my conclusion) gay marriage, gun control, and such" isn't "something"? Even just discussing a subject and affecting public opinion (to the extent that one person out of millions can do so at all) is "something".

All the examples of privileged questions given are disguised manifestations of moral uncertainty

should gay marriage be legal?

is the struggle between a morality that favors equality, and one that has a certain set of values surrounding purity and/or respect for religious authority.

Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?

is the struggle between individual autonomy vs. harm avoidance

Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed?

is the struggle between in-group preference and lack thereof

The questions themselves are unimportant...but the deeper moral undercurrent which causes those questions to be privileged is important. If someone is against gay marriage and stem cells, how do you expect them to react to trans-humanist memes, life extension, and the AI?

When society makes a decision about the morality of gay marriage and stems cells, they have also gone part of the way to making a decision about AI, since a lot of the same moral circuitry is going to be involved.

Side comment: Can anyone find an example of a "privileged" question which isn't a disguised moral struggle?

Academics answer questions that have been privileged in various ways: perhaps the questions their advisor was interested in, or the questions they'll most easily be able to publish papers on. Neither of these are necessarily well-correlated with the most important questions.

Important to whom? To the people who choose low-hanging research topics that promise easy tenure? Could easily be the most important questions for them.

The apocryphal Hamming-story only shows that people would like to conflate their own "most important" which takes into account their career trajectory with "most important in the field", and don't appreciate being told they compromised in favor of paying the bills.

The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now, even in politics (I'd guess that the economy is more important).

I would say that the economy has a theoretical potential for higher utility payoffs, but I have much less confidence in the government's ability to implement one of the better responses out of the vast possible response space.

It would be much better to develop a new, abundant clean energy source than to come up with some slightly more efficient recycling scheme, but if you had to assign one or the other as a project for a bunch of high schoolers, you'd be better off choosing the second, because they'd stand a chance of actually accomplishing it.

The correct response to Hamming's question is "Because I have a comparative advantage in working on the problem I am working on". There are many, many important problems in the world of greater and lesser degrees of importance. There are many, many people working on them, even within one field. It does not make sense for everyone to attack the same most important problem, if indeed such a single problem could even be identified. There is a point of diminishing returns. 100 chemists working on the most important problem in chemistry are not going to advance chemistry as much as 10 chemists working on the most important problem, and 90 working on a variety of other, lesser problems.

The notion of a "better question" seems inherently relative, even using the suggested counter-question, "What do I plan on doing with an answer to this question?" If the answer "nothing," flags privileged questions, then what answer(s) would indicate more important ones? You imply that the answers to these better questions impel us to do something, but what does "doing" mean? Perhaps more specifically, what does action include (and exclude) in this context?

Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media.

Journalists are not paid to print the truth. They are paid to sell newspapers. (This correlates to your "most views" idea.)

However, people buy newspapers (and consume other forms of media). People choose to read celebrity gossip and trivia rather than constructive solutions for world peace (and other things you might think 'important'). I think its intellectually lazy to blame the media. They produce for their audience.

Also, there are diverse media with diverse views of what is 'important'. And a lot of people don't want answers to questions. They don't want solutions to problems. They want to be entertained. They want to be amused.

Is this so terrible?

Another form of this is asking questions that are motivated by obtaining material goods for the self. More altruistic questions that seek first the profit of others seem less privileged in general.

Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media.

I don't know exactly how popular he is around these parts, but I have been watching a quite a bit of John Oliver recently. From what I understand, he is relatively free to pick his own content and HBO has supported him through and through. He isn't dependent on sponsorship, so I doubt HBO will place too much pressure on views every month, though I expect they will want him to at the very least not drive viewers away.

Nevertheless, there are a number of shows where John Oliver is actively critical of both the popular mainstream media, for not paying enough attention to the most important stories. Very often these are politically sensitive topics (including drone strikes, international politics et al.). But he does try hard and I would argue, successfully, for the inclusion of stories that aren't nearly covered often enough in the media.

It seems like a good idea for someone to study the model on which his show, last week tonight is modeled and try to come up with a better one. PS. he did claim that no one had been able to explain it successfully to him.

Its a slightly unfair challenge to make, as for day to day purposes it matters less what you think the most important questions are, but what the majority, or people of high status, think is important. The obvious answer is "because I am less powerful than people who think different things are important, and they determine if I have a job/funding/social status."

As a tool for combating privileged questions, what about consciously prioritizing which issues you spend time thinking about?

Gay marriage and gun control are privileged questions? I disagree. They're not important if you're thinking about them in purely utilitarian terms, as in how many people get killed per year by illegal firearms. But they are important if you are concerned about the role of government.

Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views.

I think the more relevant question here is why do such questions get more views in the first place. I'd say the reason is they divide people along party lines. So it's more fun to ask those questions than a question like what to do in order to make charity more effective. It's entertainment, and who's to say entertainment is not important? There's no privileged value system.

I think most people who watch talk shows know that they are watching them for entertainment, not news.

ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.

If I apply this principle to this author and this post, I'd wonder why take these three issues to make his point, instead of something clear and simple like the Casey Anthony brouhaha, which was clearly and indisputably a privileged question. Is he trying to signal something?

This is a good article.

So far I've found one tool that helps combat the worst privileged questions, which is to ask the following counter-question:

What do I plan on doing with an answer to this question?

With the worst privileged questions I frequently find that the answer is "nothing," sometimes with the follow-up answer "signaling?" That's a bad sign.

This strikes me as a bit strong. What kind of answer could Kepler or Newton have given to this question regarding the theory planetary motion?

"When did you stop beating your wife?"

This is basically framing effect, no?

"Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, & Chinn cite several studies supporting the success of the constructivist problem-based and inquiry learning methods. For example, they describe a project called GenScope, an inquiry-based science software application. Students using the GenScope software showed significant gains over the control groups, with the largest gains shown in students from basic courses.[24]

In contrast, Hmelo-Silver et al. also cite a large study by Geier on the effectiveness of inquiry-based science for middle school students, as demonstrated by their performance on high-stakes standardized tests. The improvement was 14% for the first cohort of students and 13% for the second cohort. This study also found that inquiry-based teaching methods greatly reduced the achievement gap for African-American students.[24]""