Experiential heterogeneity – Econlib

There’s a thought that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while, and it’s recent after by Scott Sumner helped bring attention. He argued that there can sometimes be an inability to understand and appreciate how people can think fundamentally differently from you, and how this can lead to political polarization. As he put it:

This is similar to what Jeffrey Friedman called “ideational heterogeneity” – the idea that different minds process information in different ways. As Friedman described it:

While Friedman talked about differences in the way we process information leading to differences in interpretation and action, the more general case I had in mind and which was clarified by Scott Sumner’s post was the unknowability of the subjective views of others. experience, not just their thought processes. If you see that modern art finds nothing valuable about the experience, but you don’t take into account that different people have different subjective experiences that are fundamentally inaccessible to you, you might be tempted to think that anyone who claims to enjoy of the experience of looking at modern art, just role-playing. Call this phenomenon “experiential heterogeneity” – to paraphrase Friedman’s description, it could be described in the following way:

Besides modern art, there are two other cases in which experiential heterogeneity can play a role. The first comes from my own experience, the second comes from someone else.

I used to be a very heavy smoker. Towards the end of my time in the Marine Corps, I worked at the rifle range, and most recently served as the Range Safety Officer and lead Combat Marksmanship Trainer for the annual pre-deployment rifle qualification and combat training. This was a job that required me to be outside all day for obvious reasons, which in turn meant I never had to go outside for a cigarette. I could light up at any time – and at that point I easily needed three packs a day. Finally I decided to stop. I knew my income would drop after I left the Marines and became a college student, so I had to cut back on the amount I spent. (Plus, there were several other excellent reasons to quit smoking – you can probably think of a few yourself!) The difficulty of quitting smoking is well known enough to be a cultural meme, and after so many years it is so Having been a heavy smoker, I knew I was in for a difficult transition. Only what I ‘knew’ turned out not to be true. I had no real problems quitting; it was actually quite easy for me. What should I take away from this? Here are two possibilities:

1. Quitting smoking is actually not that difficult. Any smoker who has complained about the effort it takes to quit is just a big baby.
2. Quitting smoking is actually very difficult, but I have such enormous willpower that I can easily achieve things that are simply too difficult for the average person.

Although both interpretations offer me the opportunity to achieve superiority, I do not think they are true. I know people who have had tremendous difficulty quitting smoking and who were not simply weak-willed babies. I knew too much about the many difficult things they had accomplished in their own lives to dismiss them as a lack of willpower or discipline. If I’m honest, I can’t claim to have a uniquely strong degree of willpower either. There are many things in my life that I have found to be a struggle that probably don’t seem difficult to most other people.

So what is a third option? My subjective experience with quitting smoking was simply different from most other people’s. So it wasn’t that I had superior willpower compared to my friends who had trouble quitting. It’s more likely that it simply took a lot less willpower on my part than it did on theirs. Although it may be tempting for me to simply say, “Quitting smoking isn’t that hard – I know that from personal experience! You’re just lazy!”, that wouldn’t be justified. The truth is, I have no idea what the process of quitting smoking feels like for anyone else – and neither do you.

The second case comes from Ben Carpenter, one of the many online fitness personalities on YouTube. Provided you don’t have an aversion to profanity, I recommend you take a few minutes to watch his video, but the short version is this. Although Ben himself is very thin (as a fitness model and workout coach), his sister has struggled with her weight her entire life. He talks about a time when he dieted to absurdly low body fat levels for a photo shoot, and the insane struggle he felt with his hunger while trying to maintain that level of leanness. His sister asked how he was feeling and he described to her in detail how extreme his hunger was, how nothing he ate made a dent in his hunger, and as soon as he finished eating all he could think about was when he would doing. eat again. Her response was, “You basically described how I feel every day.” Timmerman describes the realization this gave him:

Ben Carpenter describes his sister as an “incredibly hardworking” person, so he knows her well enough to know that her struggles with controlling her weight aren’t due to her being just a lazy, weak-willed glutton. But if you assume that other people’s subjective experience is the same as your own, then you can also just assume that people like Emily Carpenter are lazy and weak-willed – despite the incredible work and effort they put into reveals other aspects of her life. But you don’t know what someone else’s hunger feels like to him or her. You can’t know that.

So where do I go with all this? Well, I think in cases like the one I described above, involving addiction or weight management, the views of myself on the former and Ben Carpenter on the latter are usually seen as the kinder, more compassionate view, while the view that it’s all having only to do with willpower and voluntary choice are considered the harshest view. On the other hand, the views of libertarians and classical liberals to have certain issues dealt with ‘in the marketplace’ are often seen as a harsh view. To some it sounds callous and indifferent participation “While having a secure job is good, money is also good. Jobs that are unusually dangerous—in the contemporary United States these include fishing, logging, and trucking—pay a premium over other working-class occupations precisely because people are reluctant to risk death or dismemberment on the job . And in a free society it is good that different people can make different choices about risk and reward.” But I think that far from being callous and indifferent, this approach actually shows respect and even compassion for people.

Libertarians and classical liberals are much more willing to accept that “it is good that different people can make different choices about risk and reward.” But modern liberals and progressives shy away from this: they regard these types of choices as suspect and feel compelled to override them through the state. Disbelief is often expressed that anyone could actually make such a choice – and certainly no one would really believe that higher risk for higher pay was a good trade-off. Such choices must certainly be made under duress or perhaps out of ignorance, making their choice open to external veto from third parties.

Scott Sumner concluded his post by saying, “Don’t assume you know what’s going on in other people’s minds. You do not. Don’t believe your neighbor needs a painkiller? How would you know? We need free markets precisely because we don’t know what other people see, feel and taste.” I wholeheartedly agree. Modern liberals see others making choices that seem wrong or misleading and think this shows that those choices are not real, or do not deserve respect, and therefore can be denied. Classical liberals see the same thing and understand that although these choices may seem strange to us, they are nevertheless worthy of respect and should not be subject to outside interference, because we cannot truly know the thoughts or subjective experiences of the other, and therefore we cannot not really knowing the other person’s thoughts or subjective experiences. what value that arrangement offers them. If I see someone making a trade-off of higher risk for higher pay that seems insane to me, that is excellent evidence that such a trade-off is not worth it to me – but exactly zero evidence that such a trade-off is. ‘ It’s really not worth it for them. As is often the case, Adam Smith said it best:

The statesman who should attempt to direct the people in the manner in which they should employ their capital would not only burden himself with very unnecessary attention, but would also assume an authority which can be safely entrusted, not only to no one person, but to no some advice. or senate, whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to think himself fit to exercise it.