Rationality Quotes September 2014

For the opposite claim: If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics:

Remember the Bayes mammogram problem? The correct answer is 7.8%; most doctors (and others) intuitively feel like the answer should be about 80%. So doctors – who are specifically trained in having good intuitive judgment about diseases – are wrong by an order of magnitude. And it “only” being one order of magnitude is not to the doctors’ credit: by changing the numbers in the problem we can make doctors’ answers as wrong as we want.

So the doctors probably would be better off explicitly doing the Bayesian calculation. But suppose some doctor’s internet is down (you have NO IDEA how much doctors secretly rely on the Internet) and she can’t remember the prevalence of breast cancer. If the doctor thinks her guess will be off by less than an order of magnitude, then making up a number and plugging it into Bayes will be more accurate than just using a gut feeling about how likely the test is to work. Even making up numbers based on basic knowledge like “Most women do not have breast cancer at any given time” might be enough to make Bayes Theorem outperform intuitive decision-making in many cases.

I tend to side with Yvain on this one, at least so long as your argument isn't going to be judged by its appearence. Specifically on the LHC thing, I think making up the 1 in 1000 makes it possible to substantively argue about the risks in a way that "there's a chance" doesn't.

I have to ask, do people ever really believe that these sorts of thing are actually about helping people? I seem to recall my own ragpicking was pitched mainly in terms of how it would help my CV to have done some volunteering. That said, I can't tell if I'm just falling to hindsight bias and reinterpreting past events in favour of my current understanding of altruism, which is why I'm asking.

Makes me wonder how things would look if schools had a lesson on effective altruism a few times a year. Surely not everyone would agree, but the waterline might raise a little.

It would be a sign of wisdom if someone actually did post "I'm stupid: I can hardly ever understand the viewpoint of anyone who disagrees with me."

Ah, but would it be, though?

Hacker School has a set of "social rules [...] designed to curtail specific behavior we've found to be destructive to a supportive, productive, and fun learning environment." One of them is "no feigning surprise":

The first rule means you shouldn't act surprised when people say they don't know something. This applies to both technical things ("What?! I can't believe you don't know what the stack is!") and non-technical things ("You don't know who RMS is?!"). Feigning surprise has absolutely no social or educational benefit: When people feign surprise, it's usually to make them feel better about themselves and others feel worse. And even when that's not the intention, it's almost always the effect. As you've probably already guessed, this rule is tightly coupled to our belief in the importance of people feeling comfortable saying "I don't know" and "I don't understand."

I think this is a good rule and when I find out someone doesn't know something that I think they "should" already know, I instead try to react as in xkcd 1053 (or by chalking it up to a momentary maladaptive brain activity change on their part, or by admitting that it's probably not that important that they know this thing). But I think "feigning surprise" is a bad name, because when I'm in this situation, I'm never pretending to be surprised in order to demonstrate how smart I am, I am always genuinely surprised. (Surprise means my model of the world is about to get better. Yay!)

I dunno. I feel like "I don't understand how anyone could believe X" is a much, much better position to take on issues than "I know exactly why my opponents disagree with me! It is because they are stupid and evil!" The former at least opens the possibility that your opponents believe things for good reasons that you don't understand -- which is often true!

I am imagining the following exchange:

"I don't understand how anyone could believe X!"

"Great, the first step to understanding is noticing that you don't understand. Now, let me show you why X is true..."

I suspect that most people saying the first line would not take well to hearing the second.

We could charitably translate "I don't understand how anyone could X" as "I notice that my model of people who X is so bad, that if I tried to explain it, I would probably generate a strawman".

Does that happen?

You don't have to share a taste for, or approval of "...refined murderous evil of the particularly uncommon kind..." It can be explained as a reaction to events or conditions, and history is full of examples. HOWEVER. We have this language that we share, and it signifies. I understand that a rapist has mental instability and other mental health issues that cause him to act not in accordance with common perceptions of minimum human decency. But I can't say out loud, "I understand why some men rape women." It's an example of a truth that is too dangerous to say because emotions prevent others from hearing it.

Then what does it mean in those cases? Because the only ones I can think of are the three Megan described.

If you mean "I can't imagine how anyone could be so stupid as to believe in homeopathy/creationism", which is my best guess for what you mean, that's a special of the second meaning.

Generally people have very different meta-ethical positions from each other, so moral terminology should be dissolved and replaced with its underlying semantics for the sake of clarity in most conversations.

At my funeral, there will be a guest list and not everyone will be on it (sorry). And, i'm going to be working the door, to make sure only the correct people get in. (After everyone is, since i've studied alot with rip van winkle, about easter sunday, and with uridice from the book Orpheus in greece, and with F Tipler (physics of immor(t)alityi'll go to my casket for the viewing.

However, because i'm not a ZentoDone or 'getting things done' type, I haven't set a date for my funeral yet. The only thing I really get done is my list of new year's resolutions, and i make one every year and follow it religiously. It has one item---'next year, i'll stop procrastinating'. (since i need to learn some new skills for employment purposes). This follows from the more fundamental principle or commandment 'If you can do it tomorrow why do it today?'. (I may also sell advance tickets to my funeral at a discount, so get them early!!! After all, you can't take it with you, and i think the role of helping people get things done by rendering unto mammon what is his or hers is one of the most inspiring (though i guess the song Frankenstein by NY Dolls has other possible inspiring figures.)

Of course I read In the Beginning was the Command Line. The supply of writing from witty bearded men talking to you about cool things isn't infinite, you know.

unless you're one of the six people besides me who were obsessed enough to read In The Beginning... Was The Command Line).

It's a well-known essay. It even has a Wikipedia article.

I just re-read, well, re-skimmed it. Ah, the nostalgia. It's very dated now. 15 years on, its prediction that proprietary operating systems would lose out to free software has completely failed to come true. Linux still ticks over, great for running servers and signalling hacker cred, but if it's so great, why isn't everyone using it? At most it's one of three major platforms: Windows, OSX, and Linux. Or two out of five if you add iOS and Android (which is based on Linux). OS domination by Linux is no closer, and although there's a billion people using Android devices, command lines are not part of their experience.

Stephenson wrote his essay (and I read it) before Apple switched to Unix in the form of OSX, but you can't really say that OSX is Unix plus a GUI, rather OSX is an operating system that includes a Unix interface. In other words, exactly what Stephenson asked for:

The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed GUI that was easy to set up and use, but that included terminal windows where I could revert to the command line interface, and run GNU software, when it made sense. A few years ago, Be Inc. invented exactly that OS. It is called the BeOS.

BeOS failed, and OSX appeared three years after Stephenson's essay. I wonder what he thinks of them now—both OSX and In the Beginning.

I think everyone who belongs to a certain age group and runs Linux has read In the Beginning was the Command Line. And yes, that's me admitting to having read it, and kinda believed the arguments at one point.

On the other hand, he does occasionally succumb to a sort of mild geek-supremacist streak

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Instead of giving your employees $100 raise, give them $1200 bonus once in a year. It's the same money, but it will make them more happy, because they will keep noticing it for years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Basically what Lumifer said.

I speaks to anchoring and evaluating incentives relative to an expected level.

Basically, receiving a raise is seen as a good thing because you are getting more money than a month ago (anchor). But after a while you will be getting the same amount of money as a month ago (the anchor has moved) so there is no cause for joy.

While you are getting a raise you might be more motivated to work. However after a while your new salary becomes new salary and you would need a new raise to get additional motivation.

With regards to your example, you try to fix the gap between "consumption will increase" and "that will be a bad thing as a whole" by claiming little good use and much bad use. But I don't think that's the strongest way to bridge that gap.

Rather, I'd suggest that the good use has negligible positive utility - just another way to relax on a Friday night, when there are already plenty of ways to relax on a Friday night, so how much utility does adding another one really give you? - while bad use has significant negative utility (here I may take the chance to sketch the verbal image of a bright young doctor dropping out of university due to bad use). Then I can claim that even if good-use increases by a few orders of magnitude more than bad-use, the net result is nonetheless negative, because bad use is just that terrible; that the negative effects of a single bad-user outweigh the positive effects of a thousand good-users.

As to your main point - what to do when your best effort to fill the gap is thin and unconvincing - the simplest solution would appear to be to go back to the person proposing the position that you are critically commenting about (or someone else who shares his views on the subject), and simply asking. Or to go and look through his writings, and see whether or not he addresses precisely that point. Or to go to a friend (preferably also an intelligent debator) and asking for his best effort to fill the gap, in the hope that it will be a better effort.

Quote: "The third perhaps is especially tricky. If you "re-express your target’s position ... clearly" you remove the obfuscation that concealed the gap. Now what? Leaving the gap in clear view creates a strawman. Attempting to fill it draws a certain amount of attention to it; you certainly fail the ideological Turing test because you are making arguments that you opponents don't make."

Just no. An argument is an argument. It is complete or not. If there is a gap in the argument, in most cases there are two eventualities: (a) the leap is a true one assuming what others would find obvious, or (b) either an honest error in the argument or an attempt to cover up a flaw in the argument.

If there is a way to "fill in" the argument that is the only way it could be filled in, you are justified in doing so, while pointing out that you are doing so. If either of the (b) cases hold, however, you must still point them out, in order to maintain your own credibility. Especially if you are refuting an argument, the gap should be addressed and not glossed over.

You might treat the (b) situations differently, perhaps politely pointing out that the original author made an error there, or perhaps not-so-politely pointing out that something is amiss. But you still address the issue. If you do not, the onus is now on you, because you have then "adopted" that incomplete or erroneous argument.

For example: your own example argument has a rather huge and glaring hole in it: "bad-use will increase a lot and good-use will increase a little". However, history and modern examples both show this to be false: in the real world, decriminalization has increased bad-use only slightly if at all, and good-use more. (See the paper "The Portugal Experiment" for one good example.)

Was there any problem there with my treatment of this rather gaping "gap" in your argument?

I realize your questions may be rhetorical, but I'm going to attempt an answer anyways, because it illustrates a point:

The morality of the shipowner's actions do not depend on the realized outcomes: It can only depend on his prior beliefs about the probability of the outcomes, and on the utility function that he uses to evaluate them. If we insisted on making morality conditional on the future, causality is broken: It will be impossible for any ethical agent to make use of such ethics as a decision theory.

The problem here is that the Shipowner's "sincerely held beliefs" are not identical to his genuine extrapolated prior. It is not stated in the text, but I think he is able to convince himself about "the soundness of the ship" only by ignoring degrees of belief: If he was a proper Bayesian, he would have realized that having "doubts" and not updating your beliefs is not logically consistent

In any decision theory that is usable by agents making decisions in real time, the morality of his action is determined either at the time he allowed the ship to sail, or at the time he allowed his prior to get corrupted. I personally believe the latter. This quotation illustrates why I see rationality as a moral obligation, even when it feels like a memetic plague.

The shipowner is pronounced "verily guilty" solely on the basis of his thought processes.

Part of the scenario is that the ship is in fact not seaworthy, and went down on account of it. Part is that the shipowner knew it was not safe and suppressed his doubts. These are the actus reus and the mens rea that are generally required for there to be a crime. These are legal concepts, but I think they can reasonably be applied to ethics as well. Intentions and consequences both matter.

if solely by improbable luck the wreck of the ship did arrive unscathed to its destination, would the shipowner still be guilty?

If the emigrants do not die, he is not guilty of their deaths. He is still morally at fault for sending to sea a ship he knew was unseaworthy. His inaction in reckless disregard for their lives can quite reasonably be judged a crime.

He had doubts, he extinguished them, and that's what makes him guilty.

This is not the whole story. In the quote

He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.

you're paying too much heed to the final clause and not enough to the clause that precedes it. The shipowner had doubts that, we are to understand, were reasonable on the available information. The key to the shipowner's... I prefer not to use the word "guilt", with its connotations of legal or celestial judgment -- let us say, blameworthiness, is that he allowed the way he desired the world to be to influence his assessment of the actual state of the world.

In your "optimistic fellow" scenario, the shipowner would be as blameworthy, but in that case, the blame would attach to his failure to give serious consideration to the doubts that had been expressed to him.

And going beyond what is in the passage, in my view, he would be equally blameworthy if the ship had survived the voyage! Shitty decision-making is shitty-decision-making, regardless of outcome. (This is part of why I avoided the word "guilt" -- too outcome-dependent.)

It's not quite clear to me that the judgments being made here are solely about the owner's thought processes, though I agree that facts about behavior and thought processes are intermingled in this narrative in such a way as to make it unclear what conclusions are based on which facts.

Still... the owner had doubts suggested about the ship's seaworthiness, we're told, and this presumably is a fact about events in the world. The generally agreed-upon credibility of the sources of those suggestions is presumably also something that could be investigated without access to the owner's thoughts. Further, we can confirm that the owner didn't overhaul the ship, for example, nor retain the services of trained inspectors to determine the ship's seaworthiness (or, at least, we have no evidence that he did so, in situations where evidence would be expected if he had).

All of those are facts about behavior. Are those behaviors sufficient to hold the owner liable for the death of the sailors? Perhaps not; perhaps without the benefit of narrative omniscience we'd give the owner the benefit of the doubt. But... so what? In this case, we are being given additional data. In this case we know the owner's thought process, through the miracle of narrative.

You seem to be trying to suggest, through implication and leading questions, that using that additional information in making a judgment in this case is dangerous... perhaps because we might then be tempted to make judgments in real-world cases as if we knew the owner's thoughts, which we don't.

And, well, I agree that to make judgments in real-world cases as if we knew someone's thoughts is problematic... though sometimes not doing so is also problematic.

Anyway, to answer your question: given the data provided above I consider the shipowner negligent, regardless of whether the ship arrived safely at its destination, or whether it was destroyed by some force no ship could survive.

Do you disagree?

Paul Graham's quote is about a way to fight the trend Sailer describes, unfortunately that trend frequently ends up winning.

I disagree with you on 5; it works better as I am than I'm.

EDIT: Also, 9 works better as "I'm"

Well, she's only 7.

The context is specifically a description of the theory of utility and how it is inconsistent with the preferences people actually exhibit.

Also, let me emphasize that the solution to the problem is not to say that people’s preferences are correct and so the utility model is wrong. Rather, in this example I find utility theory to be useful in demonstrating why the sort of everyday risk aversion exhibited by typical students (and survey respondents) does not make financial sense. Utility theory is an excellent normative model here.

Which is why it seems particularly silly to be defining these preferences in terms of a nonlinear utility curve that could never be.

It’s as if you went into a bathroom in a bar and saw a guy pissing on his shoes, and instead of thinking he has some problem with his aim, you suppose he has a positive utility for getting his shoes wet.

I would say it should be the one with best expected returns.

True, but not as easy to follow as Taleb's advice. In the extreme we could replace every piece of advice with "maximize your utility".

I would say it should be the one with best expected returns.

Not quite, as most people are risk-averse and care about the width about the distribution of the expected returns, not only about its mean.

His point is that the upside is bounded much more than the downside.

What? He's crusading against GMOs? Can you give me some references?

I like his writing a lo, but I remember noting the snide way he dismissed doctors who "couldn't imagine" that there could be medicinal benefit to mother's milk, as if they were arrogant fools.

Neither! The statement he is 'awfully sure of' is a probalistic conclusion he has derived from experimental evidence via Bayesian reasoning on the world's first programmable computer. Specifically, that statement is this:

"The Nipponese cryptosystem that we call Azure is the same thing as the German system that we call Pufferfish," he announces. "Both of them are also related somehow to another, newer cryptosystem I have dubbed Arethusa. All of these have something to do with gold. Probably gold mining operations of some sort. In the Philippines."

Part of the argument used to convince Comstock:

"But those places send out thousands of messages a day," Comstock protests. "What makes you think that you can pick out the messages that are a consequence of the Azure orders?"

"It's just a brute force statistics problem," Waterhouse says. "Suppose that Tokyo sent the Azure message to Rabaul on October 15th, 1943. Now, suppose I take all of the messages that were sent out from Rabaul on October 14th and I index them in various ways: what destinations they were transmitted to, how long they were, and, if we were able to decrypt them, what their subject matter was. Were they orders for troop movements? Supply shipments? Changes in tactics or procedures? Then, I take all of the messages that were sent out from Rabaul on October 16th--the day after the Azure message came in from Tokyo--and I run exactly the same statistical analysis on them."

Waterhouse steps back from the chalkboard and turns into a blinding fusillade of strobe lights. "You see, it is all about information flow. Information flows from Tokyo to Rabaul. We don't know what the information was. But it will, in some way, influence what Rabaul does afterwards. Rabaul is changed, irrevocably, by the arrival of that information, and by comparing Rabaul's observed behavior before and after that change, we can make inferences."

But note that Elinor doesn't use it as a debate stopper, or to put down or belittle Ferrers. She simply chooses not to engage with his arguments, and agrees with him.

Somehow I doubt that this argument is meant to be limitless in strength. It's more of a 'don't feed the trolls' guidance.

Airplanes may not work on fusion or weigh millions of tons, but still, substituting a few words in I could say similar things about airplanes. Or electrical grids. Or smallpox vaccination. But nobody does.

Are you sure? I looked for just a bit and found

There is no sport equal to that which aviators enjoy while being carried through the air on great white wings.

http://inventors.about.com/od/wstartinventors/a/Quotes-Wright-Brothers.htm

I imagine if inventors have bombastic things to say about the things they invent, then frequently keep those thoughts to oneself to avoid sounding arrogant (e.g. I don't think it would have gone over well if Edison had started referring to himself as "Edison, the man who lit the world of the night").

I think you're reading a lot into that one sentence. I assumed that just to mean "there should not be inconsistencies due to irrelevant aspects like the language of delivery". Followed by a sound explanation for the unexpected inconsistency in terms of system 1 / system 2 thinking.

(The final paragraph of the article begins with "Our research does not show which choice is the right one.")

What do we suppose is meant by 'the very core of our moral being'? If people react differently depending on language, isn't that evidence that there is a connection? Or at least that the moral core is doing something different?

Someone who characterized the results the way they characterize them in this quote has learned some facts, but failed on the analysis.

It's like a quote which says "(correct mathematical result) proves that God has a direct hand in the creation of the world". That wouldn't be a rationality quote just because they really did learn a correct mathematical result.

Possible that they understood the question, but hearing it in a foreign language meant cognitive strain, which meant they were already working in System 2. That's my read anyway.

Given to totally fluent second-language speakers, I bet the effect vanishes.

It's also possible that asking a different language causes subjects to think of the people in the dilemma as "not members of their tribe".

The inner critic that is disabled during regular dreaming turns back on during lucid dreaming. People who have them seem to be quite impressed by lucid dreams.

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I think the comment in this thread would have been equally relevant and possibly better without the last sentence, but don't see how the Cryptonomicon quote (which I assume to be the one you meant?) as nerd-pandering, since it doesn't imply value judgments from it about being or identifying as a nerd.

Well, if you think the quote doesn't say significantly more than "nerds are great" you are right to downvote it.

It might be possible (and useful) to design an ethics curriculum that helps students to think more clearly about their own views, though, without giving their teachers much of an excuse to preach.

Thinking back to my own religious high school education, I realize that the ethics component (though never called out as such, it was woven into the curriculum at every level) was indeed important; not so much because of the specific rules they taught and didn't teach; as simply in teaching me that ethics and morals were something to think about and discuss.

Then again, this was a Jesuit school; and Jesuit education has a reputation for being somewhat more Socratic and questioning than the typical deontological viewpoint of many schools.

But in any case, yay for personal finance.

but only very loosely related to rationality

Rationality involves having accurate beliefs. If lots of people share a mistaken belief that causes them to take harmful actions then pointing out this mistake is rationality-enhancing.

I wonder how these people who dislike LW feel about geeks/nerds in general.

The use of the word "instrument" makes the phrase more obscure than it needs to be, but it refers to the word "cheque" earlier in the sentence. I suspect most modern British people probably don't know what it means, but most will have noticed that all the cheques in a chequebook have "A/C Payee only" written vertically across the middle - or at least those old enough to have used cheques will! But people in 1935 would have most likely known what it meant, because 1) in those days cheques were extremely widespread (no credit or debit cards) and 2) unlike today, cheques were frequently written by hand on a standard piece of paper (although chequebooks did exist). The very fact that the phrase was used by a popular author writing for a mass audience (the cases were originally published in Punch and The Evening Standard) should incline you in that direction anyway.

Note incidentally that Herbert's most famous case is most likely The Negotiable Cow.

I don't know for sure, but judging from context I'd say it's probably instructions as to the disposition of a check -- like endorsing one and writing "For deposit only" on the back before depositing it into the bank, as a guarantee against fraud.

Granted, in these days of automatic scanning and electronic funds transfer that's starting to look a little cobwebby itself.

You do need to know dates at close to that granularity if you're trying to build a detailed model of an event like a war or revolution. Knowing that the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Hong Kong both happened in 1941 tells you something; knowing that the former happened on 7 December 1941 and the latter started on 8 December tells you quite a bit more.

On the other hand, the details of wars and revolutions are probably the least useful part of history as a discipline. Motivations, schools of thought, technology, and the details of everyday life in a period will all get you further, unless you're specifically studying military strategy, and relatively few of us are.

Dates are a very convenient way of specifying the temporal order of many different events.

The time between them also matters. If X happened a year before Y it is more plausible that X caused Y then if X happened a century before Y.

Great. I have approximately 6000 years worth of events here, happening across multiple continents, with overlapping events on every scale imaginable from "in this one village" to "world war." If you can keep the relationships between all those things in your memory consistently using no index value, go for it. If not, I might recommend something like a numerical system that puts those 6000 years in order.

I would not recommend putting "0" at a relatively arbitrary point several thousand years after the events in question have started.

It's not just the order but the distance that matters. If you want to say that X caused Y, but X happened a thousand years before Y, chances are that you're at the very least ignoring a lot of additional causes.

In the end, I think, dates are important. It's only the arbitrary positioning of a starting date (e.g. Christian vs. Jewish vs. Chinese calendar) that genuinely doesn't matter; but even that much is useful for us to talk about historical events. I.e. it doesn't really matter where we put year 0, but it matters that we agree to put it somewhere. (Ideally we would have put it somewhat further back in time, maybe nearer the beginning of recorded history, so we didn't have to routinely do BCE/CE conversions in our heads, but that ship has sailed.)

Some day the light speed delay might become an issue in historical investigations, but not quite yet :) Even then in the statement "if you claim that X caused Y, the minimum you need to know is that X came before Y, not afterwards" the term "before" implies that one event is in the causal future of the other.

Agreed. I think what Lanier should have said that a perception of magic is a subset of things one doesn't understand, rather than claiming that they are equal. Bugs that I am currently hunting but haven't nailed down are things I don't understand, but they certainly don't seem magical.

That people will judge your morality by your actions without regard to your intentions. I don't claim that V is particularly rational, but he embodies (exaggerated versions of) traits that real people have. Our moral decisions have consequences in how we are treated.

Someone who says something like the first sentence generally means something like "questions that are significant and in an area I am concerned with". They don't mean "I don't know exactly how many atoms are in the moon, and I find that painful" (unless they have severe OCD based around the moon), and to interpret it that way is to deliberately misinterpret what the speaker is saying so that you can sound profound.

But then, I've been on the Internet. This sort of thing is an endemic problem on the Internet, except that it's not always clear how much is deliberate misinterpretation and how much is people who just don't comprehend context and implication.

(Notice how I've had to add qualifiers like 'generally' and "except for (unlikely case)" just for preemptive defense against that sort of thing.)

Is he giving advice about making correct predictions given that you just randomly feel like predicting stuff? Or is he giving advice about how to predict things you actually care about?

The latter. Specifically predicting high impact events.

People predicted the housing bubble collapse using Taleb's reasoning.

I really can't see how this is a rationality quote.

This is how:

• it exposes the common fallacy that people who love each other should get married to make their relationship last
• it uses the standard sunk-cost trap avoidance technique to make this fallacy evident

The rest of the logic in the link I gave is even more interesting (and "rational").

It is simply a pithy and marginally funny statement about one topic.

Making one's point in a memorable way is a rationality technique.

As for your rule, it appears to me so subjective as to be completely useless. For one where one sees "what to believe" another sees "how to think".

The point of the quote is that it tends to make it harder to stay in love. Which is the opposite of what people want when they get married.

Then he would let them work out a custom solution free of societal expectations, I suspect. Besides, an average romantic relationship rarely survives more than a few years, unless both parties put a lot of effort into "making it work", and there is no reason beyond prevailing social mores (and economic benefits, of course) to make it last longer than it otherwise would.

If this is a criticism, it's wide off the mark.

Note his disclaimer about "the best economic arrangement". And he certainly speaks about the US only.

I am unable to find any data on the Chinese national savings rate before 1980, and I am surprised by the claim that it was remarkably low. Does the author cite data to that effect (or any authors blaming that on Confucianism)?

[edit]Found household data for Japan going back to 1962, when it was solidly higher than European numbers.

A useful paper on the topic. I agree with Vaniver that the quote looks iffy.