Direct effects matter!

I've noticed a similar neglect of obvious first order effects too. Intuitively the signalling and counter-signalling explanations seem the most likely to be correct to me.

This reminds me of the following popular meme template:

In this template you have very smart people and very dumb people coming to the same conclusion by using similar simple arguments, while the moderately intelligent come up with complex, clever, but ultimately wrong arguments for why the obvious policy choice is incorrect. Here, I've made a version with the very dumb & very smart arguing that death is bad using the obvious argument that "it kills people", while the moderately intelligent person argues that death is good because of various commonly argued second-order pro-death arguments.

Parenting advice is an interesting example that might shed some light on what's going on here. It's 100% clear that as a parent you are "supposed" to care entirely for your kid's long-term well-being, ignoring the short term, and short term considerations are only important as a kind of practical "you can only push so hard" issue. The more you manage to successfully optimize your kid for the long term, the better a parent you are in the eyes of society, and that's all there is to it.

Humans do tend to favor the short term in most domains, sometimes to what seems like a stupid degree. It seems to me that in general, many direct effects are short-term effects, and many second-order effects are postulated long-term effects. So maybe exhorting about second-order effects and ignoring direct effects are really an attempt to get people to pay an appropriate amount of heed* to the long term. I certainly see that in some of your examples.

* As Eliezer memorably wrote [LW · GW] in his meta-honesty post:

Because any rule that's not labeled "absolute, no exceptions" lacks weight in people's minds. So you have to perform that the "Don't kill" commandment is absolute and exceptionless (even though it totally isn't), because that's what it takes to get people to even hesitate. To stay their hands at least until the weight of duty is crushing them down. A rule that isn't even absolute? People just disregard that whenever.

Have you considered the possibility that people do not list first-order effects to individuals because huge swaths of the political establishment do not actually care about people they don't know?

The water they swim, the air they breathe: Bringing up how something affects the outgroup's feefees is not "obvious" or "direct", it's bringing up Nth-order civil breakdown effects in the most vague and indirect way possible, with figuring out all the critical details left as an exercise for the listener.

We live in a society; aka we have a tenuous contract to be copacetic and trade resources with others. They give the smallest amount of fucks about the outgroup's happiness because an unhappy outgroup may have second-order effects in breaking down civil society with associated third-order effects on them and theirs.

In my experience, in most crowds there are certain aspects of issues that are considered acceptable topics of conversations, and others that aren’t. Stoners are fine talking about the details of how to have fun with drugs, bad trips, the price of weed, etc. But try to discuss the research on the possible psychiatric issues of chronic marijuana use and it’s a faux pas. At the dinner tables of middle class healthcare professionals, it’s often the other way around.

This is maybe connected to the discussion around filtered evidence. The Blues only want to talk about personal experience with drugs, while the Greens only talk about it from a “public health perspective.” And yeah, when we chop up reality like this, it becomes very difficult to find the truth.

The image of this tweet isn't present here, only on Substack.

I've been thinking about this – thanks!

One problem is that 'direct' or 'first-order' is ultimately nebulous. There is no unique direct effect or first-order consequence to anything, i.e. it depends crucially on context, scale, scope, etc..

Consider the direct effects or first-order consequences of a heroin overdose. Restricting ourselves to the macroscopic, i.e. human-scale, I'd imagine that a heroin overdose is initially very positive! It does seem a little ... insensitive? besides the point? to emphasize "Heroin overdoses are really great until you start to die shortly thereafter!".

A part of not emphasizing the direct effects or first-order consequences is an implicit claim that, whatever they are, they are swamped (or maybe simply just outweighed) by subsequent effects or consequences.

Hence the long-term focus of a lot of your examples, e.g. unemployment insurance, basic income.

Similarly, consider rent control – it really is awesome and amazing! At least it is for the people that 'win the lottery' and get to live in a rent controlled unit. And yet, overall, it's a terrible deal for everyone.

But I'm not against including all of the effects and consequences, including the 'direct' or 'first-order' ones – we should shut up and multiply (or add, or whatever).

These are all valid and important points to consider, but nowhere is a mention of the most direct and obvious effect of drug use: if 10% more people smoke weed because of decriminalization, that’s a lot in chemical-induced pleasure!

That assumes that decriminalization increases drug usage but it's questionable that this is what happened. In Glenn Greenwalds Cato report which is a base for a lot of the this discussion he says: "Although postdecriminalization usage rates have remained roughly the same or even decreased slightly when compared with other EU states, drug‐​related pathologies — such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage — have decreased dramatically. "

Changes in drug use is not a a direct effect of police action on drug users. The direct effect of police action on drug users is them spending time in prison.

Saw an example of this in Hacker News today. California and Cambridge, MA removed algebra from their middle school math curriculum for a stated reason of equity. Here's the Boston Globe challenging the equity argument with another equity argument:

Udengaard is one of dozens of parents who recently have publicly voiced frustration with a years-old decision made by Cambridge to remove advanced math classes in grades six to eight. [...]

“The students who are able to jump into a higher level math class are students from better-resourced backgrounds,” said Jacob Barandes, another district parent and a Harvard physicist. “They’re shortchanging a significant number of students, overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.”

In contrast the blogger Noahpinion points out the direct effect, but then also ties it to equity. Later he (unfairly) accuses the proponents of removing math of hereditarian, un-progressive views on education.

When you ban or discourage the teaching of a subject like algebra in junior high schools, what you are doing is withdrawing state resources from public education. There is a thing you could be teaching kids how to do, but instead you are refusing to teach it. In what way is refusing to use state resources to teach children an important skill “progressive”? How would this further the goal of equity?

Why does Noahpinion mention equity even after bringing up the direct effect? I think it's because equity is a frame that everyone (in the debate among progressives) cares about, so your argument is guaranteed to at least land. Some people care more about equity than the direct effect of teaching advanced students more math. This is basically explanation 3 (domains of respectability), but it's less about status and more about being universally important vs maybe not important to the opponents of your argument.

I agree with the main idea. You could even argue that it's a diseased way of thinking, in the same sense as materialism. People focus on the "objective" pros and cons, the subjective is entirely neglected.
But the person who makes music because he loves music is much more healthy than the person who makes music because he wants to sell it for money.

Your examples are mainly cases in which the direct effects are subjective and/or psychological. My creative thinking is stunted right now, but with more examples we'd be able to tell if this effect is a fallacy caused by neglecting the obvious, or if it's a result of utilitarian thinking which neglects psychological values.

I also want to nitpick a bit: Drugs aren't a good long-term strategy to happiness.

Edit: I was under the wrong impression that this was a new post. Oh well, surely this kind of engagement is more healthy.

Four arguments you start with also have "heres what I think other people should do" in common. If someone is deciding on whether or not use drugs or whether or not to exercise they will not miss the "fun" and "sucks" parts you point out below. When you Hanson out the "real" goal of saying something like that it's not strange at all, altho it might be explaining away too much, I'm not sure.

Good post. I think when you look at the likely neural wiring underlying concerns like the ones you're bringing up, it's simply the case that unless you've developed the type of logic loops which actively consider these types of issues, they just don't occur to most people at a conscious level. This is an argument for the "Fish in the water" possibility.

For instance, the first 'caveperson' who discovered that eating rotten food would likely make you sick might have gone around telling everyone that "eating rotten food might make you sick" as he or she had probably eaten rotten food, gotten sick but didn't die. 

This meant their brains created a new circuit which equated the experience of eating rotten food, getting sick, and then not being sick after they recovered, and 'making the connection' between these experiences, neurally speaking. The risk of death involved would likely recruit a large amount of neural wiring to cement the importance of this event into their very being. 

Additionally, they could report back to people why they got sick becausethey had lived to talk about it, and could now formulate a plan to avoid getting sick and possibly dying from the same thing in the future.

So this news might have started the rounds in the tribe, and all of a sudden there was legislation passed to look for rotten food and discard it, and everyone's neural circuitry was modified to include this new idea that rotten food was unsafe and might be the cause for many of the mysterious deaths in the tribe. Because they only had one media outlet they all paid attention to, which had really good investigation and reporting and didn't serve up opinion as fact or twist the facts in horrible and destructive ways, this new idea of Food Safety was communicated and absorbed efficiently by all members of the tribe with a few exceptions.

Some people, liked to eat rotten food, maybe they fermented grapes or hops or something which turned into alcohol, so they argued that it wasn't all rotten food that would kill you, as the neural wiring they had, included this enjoyment of fermented foods. 

All of these ideas though, the arguments and counter-arguments, were 'at the forefront' of the tribes thinking as the top level thinking they were doing included these concepts and the neural wiring which encoded these ideas in their brains was at the top levels of consideration in these thought loops., both at the individual level and at the tribal level, as the neural loops in the individuals brains resembled the logic loops formed in the tribe as certain members discussed certain things with some people, but discussed other things with other people, and might totally avoid even crossing paths with yet others so that no discussion took place. 

As time progressed though, this wiring became lower level consideration as it was consolidated into larger thoughts and ideas, as additional experiences caused that wiring to become tertiary or below higher order thinking. The people who made alcohol might have created businesses so that their major concerns regarding these concepts were economically based, and since the tribe was dealing with this issue of rotten food, instead of just at an individual level of concern, fewer people were getting sick and dying.

Much later though, people just began to assume the food they ate was safe because other people were supposed to be concerned with these issues. Food safety legislation created a group of people who kept ideas about rotten food at the forefront of their minds all the time, so that other people didn't have to waste mental and physical effort to do so. This tribe delegated the work of maintaining Food Safety to Food Inspectors, who were 'experts' in the field. 

So the amount of neural wiring and circuitry dealing with these ideas in the broader tribe became less and less as they relied on the experts to maintain food safety more and more. So the obviousness of safety issues of Food was pruned from the neural circuitry of the majority of the tribe, so that they could grow new neurons and make connections between other concepts and help the tribe progress in other ways.

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Much later on though, we have the Internet, which allows everyone to be an expert on everything! There are few real experts left because of the democratization of knowledge and expertise, and the growing field of AI and ML means eventually humans won't need to devote any neural wiring to anything but the cultivation of pleasure! 

We will off load all this horrible 'thinking about uncomfortable things' and 'critically thinking about our culture' to computers so we won't have to worry anymore! Instead we will focus on 'lolz' and creating new memes and doing drugs and reproducing in the correct proportions, even though computers will still come up with funnier/more ironic lolz and deeper and more meaningful memes, and will create better drugs and allow us to experience the best sex humans have ever had!

The matrix seems scary until you realize there won't be any Morpheus's to wake us from our dreams, so we'll never know it when all of our neural wiring has been repurposed for reasons we'll never know about! We will finally become real fish, without the ability to even contemplate the water around us!  At that point, even talking about the obvious implications of flawed application of technological effort will seem so lower class everyone will just ignore it and laugh while they get high off rotten food and have orgasms which last for days at a time!

The Left seems to think all social issues boil down to education, not taking into account some people are just stupid. The Right tends to think that all social issues have roots in lack of motivation/taking personal responsibility, without taking into account that there are many in circumstances that just cannot exercise those without hurting others.