I recently read Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. All in all, it is an informative read. I found parts of ch. 10 on startup culture particularly interesting. Here’s the section “What’s under Silicon Valley’s Hoodies”:

Unlike people on the East Coast, who all wear the same skinny jeans or pinstripe suits depending on their industry, young people in Mountain View and Palo Alto go to work wearing T-shirts. It’s a chliché that tech workers don’t care about what they wear, but if you look closely at those T-shirts, you’ll see the logos of the wearers’ companies—and tech workers care about those very much. What makes a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers. The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.

Max Levchin, my co-founder at PayPal, says that statups should make their early staff as personally similar as possible. Startups have limited resources and small teams. They must work quickly and efficiently in order to survive, and that’s easier to do when everyone shares an understanding of the world. The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd. We all loved science ficion: Cryptonomicon was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek. Most important, we were all obsessed with creating a digital currency that would be controlled by individuals instead of governments. For the company to work, it didn’t matter what people looked like or which country they came from, but we needed every new hire to be equally obsessed.

In the section “Of cults and consultants” of the same chapter, he goes on:

In the most intense kind of organization, members hang out only with other members. They ignore their families and abandon the outside world. In exchange, they experience strong feelings of belonging, and maybe get access to esoteric “truths” denied to ordinary people. We have a word for such organizations: cults. Cultures of total dedication look crazy from the outside, partly because the most notorious cults were homicidal: Jim Jones and Charles Manson did not make good exits.

But entrepeneurs should take cultures of extreme dedication seriosuly. Is a lukewarm attitude to one’s work a sign of mental health? Is a merely professional attitude the only sane approach? The extreme opposite of a cult is a consulting firm like Accenture: not only does it lack a distinctive mission of its own, but individual consultants are regularly dropping in and out of companies to which they have no long-term connection whatsover.

[…]

The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed. You’re not going to learn those kinds of secrets from consultants, and you don’t need to worry if your company doesn’t make sense to conventional professionals. Better to be called a cult—or even a mafia.

When taking others’ preferences into account, we will often want to idealize them rather than taking them too literally. Consider the following example. You hold a glass of transparent liquid in your hand. A woman walks by, says that she is very thirsty and would like to drink from your glass. What she doesn’t know, however, is that the water in the glass is (for some reason not relevant to this example) poisoned. Should you allow her to drink? Most people would say you should not. While she does desire to drink out of the glass, this desire would probably disappear upon gaining knowledge of its content. Therefore, one might say that her object-level preference is to drink from the glass, while her idealized preference would be not to drink from it. There is not too much literature on preference idealization, as far as I know, but, if you’re not already familiar with it, anyway, consider looking into “Coherent Extrapolated Volition“.

Preference idealization is not always as easy as inferring that someone doesn’t want to drink poison, and in this post, I will discuss a particular sub-problem: accounting for cognitive biases, i.e. systematic mistakes in our thinking, as they pertain to our moral judgments. However, the line between biases and genuine moral judgments is sometimes not clear.

Specifically, we look at cognitive biases that people exhibited in non-moral decisions, where their status as a bias to be corrected is much less controversial, but which can explain certain ethical intuitions. By offering such an error theory of a moral intuition, i.e. an explanation for how people could erroneously come to such a judgment, the intuition is called into question. Defendants of the intuition can respond that even if the bias can be used to explain the genesis of that moral judgment, they would nonetheless stick with that moral intuition. After all, the existence of all our moral positions can be explained by non-moral facts about the world – “explaining is not explaining away”. Consider the following examples.

Omission bias: People judge consequences of inaction as less severe than those of action. Again, this is clearly a bias in some cases, especially non-moral ones. For example, losing $1,000 by not responding to your bank in time is just as bad as losing $1,000 by throwing them out of the window. A business person who judges the two equivalent losses equally will ceteris paribus be more successful. Nonetheless, most people distinguish between act and omission in cases like the fat man trolley problem.

Scope neglect: The scope or size of something often has little or no effect on people’s thinking when it should have. For example, when three groups of people were asked what they would pay for interventions that would affect 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 birds, people were willing to pay roughly the same amount of money irrespective of the number of birds. While scope neglect seems clearly wrong in this (moral) decision, it is less clearly so in other areas. For example, is a flourishing posthuman civilization with 2 trillion inhabitants really twice as good as one with 1 trillion? It is not clear to me whether answering “no” should be regarded as a judgment clouded by scope neglect (caused, e.g., by our inability to imagine the two civilizations in question) or a moral judgment that is to be accepted.

Contrast effect (also see decoy effect, social comparison bias, Ariely on relativity, mere subtraction paradox, Less-is-better effect): Consider the following market of computer hard drives, from which you are to choose one.

Hard drive model	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3 (decoy)
Price	$80	$120	$130
Capacity	250GB	500GB	360GB

Generally, one wants to expend as little money as possible while maximizing capacity. In the absence of model 3, the decoy, people may be undecided between models 1 and 2. However, when model 3 is introduced into the market, it provides a new reference point. Model 2 is better than model 3 in all regards, which increases its attractiveness to people, even relative to model 1. That is, models 1 and 2 are judged by how they compare with model 3 rather than by their own features. The effect clearly exposes an instance of irrationality: the existence of model 3 doesn’t affect how model 1 compares with model 2. When applied to ethical evaluation, however, it calls into question a firmly held intrinsic moral preference for social equality and fairness. Proponents of fairness seem to assess a person’s situation by comparing it to that of Bill Gates rather than judging each person’s situation separately. Similar to how the overpriced decoy changes our evaluation of the other products, our judgments of a person’s well-being, wealth, status, etc. may be seen as irrationally depending on the well-being, wealth, status, etc. of others.

Other examples include peak-end rule/extension neglect/evaluation by moments and average utilitarianism; negativity bias and caring more about suffering than about happiness; psychological distance and person-affecting views; status-quo bias and various population ethical views (person-affecting views, the belief that most sentient beings that already exist have lives worth living); moral credential effect; appeal to nature and social Darwinism/normative evolutionary ethics.

Acknowledgment: This work was funded by the Foundational Research Institute (now the Center on Long-Term Risk).

(This post assumes some knowledge of the decision theory of Newcomb-like scenarios.)

One problem in the decision theory of Newcomb-like scenarios (i.e. the study of whether causal, evidential or some other decision theory is true) is that even the seemingly obvious basics are fiercely debated. Newcomb’s problem seems to be fundamental and the solution obvious (to both sides), and yet scholars disagree about its resolution. If we already fail at the basics, how can we ever settle this debate?

In this post, I propose a solution. Specifically, I will introduce a very plausible general principle that decision rules should abide by. One may argue that settling on powerful general rules (like the one I will propose) must be harder than settling single examples (like Newcomb’s problem). However, this is not universally the case. Especially in decision theory, we should expect general principles to be especially convincing because a common defense of two-boxing in Newcomb’s scenario is that Newcomb’s problem is just a weird edge case in which rationality is punished. By introducing a general principle that CDT (or, perhaps, EDT) violates, we can prove the existence of a general flaw.

Without further ado, the principle is: The decisions we make should not depend on the utilities assigned to outcomes that are impossible to occur. To me this principle seems obvious and indeed it is consistent with expected value calculations in non-Newcomb-like scenarios: Imagine having to deterministically choose an action from some set A. (We will ignore mixed strategies.) The next state of the world is sampled from a set of states S via a distribution P and depends on the chosen action. We are also given a utility function U, which assigns values to pairs of a state and an action. Let a be an action and let s be a possible state. If P(s,a) = 0 (or P(s|a)=0 or P(s given the causal implications of a)=0 – we assume all of these to be the equivalent in this non-Newcomb-like scenario), then it doesn’t matter what U(s,a) is, because in an expected value calculation, U(s,a) will always be multiplied with P(s,a)=0. That is to say, any expected value decision rule gives the same outcome regardless of U(s,a). So, expected value decision rules abide by this principle at least in non-Newcomb-like scenarios.

Let us now apply the principle to a Newcomb-like scenario, specifically to the prisoner’s dilemma played against an exact copy of yourself. Your actions are C and D. Your opponent is the “environment” and can also choose between C (cooperation) and D (defection). So, the possible outcomes are (C,C), (C,D), (D,C) and (D,D). The probabilities P(C,D) and P(D,C) are both 0. Applied to this Newcomb-like scenario, the principle of the irrelevance of impossible alternatives states that our decision should only depend on the utilities of (C,C) and (D,D). Evidential decision theory behaves in accordance with this principle. (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to verify this.) Indeed, I suspect that it can be shown that EDT generally abides by the principle of the irrelevance of impossible outcomes. The choice of causal decision theory on the other hand does depend on the utilities of the impossible outcomes U(D,C) and U(C,D). Remember that in the prisoner’s dilemma the payoffs are such that U(D,x)>U(C,x) for any action x of the opponent, i.e. no matter the opponent’s choice it is always better to defect. This dominance is given as the justification for CDT’s decision to defect. But let us say we increase the utility of U(C,D) such that U(C,D)>U(D,D) and decrease the utility of U(D,C) such that U(D,C)>U(C,C). Of course, we must make these changes for the utility functions of both players so as to retain symmetry. After these changes, the dominance relationship is reversed: U(C,x)>U(D,x) for any action x. Of course, the new payoff matrix  is not that of a prisoner’s dilemma anymore – the game is different in important ways. But when played against a copy, these differences do not seem significant, because we only changed the utilities of outcomes that were impossible to achieve anyway. Nevertheless, CDT would switch from D to C upon being presented with these changes, thus violating the principle of the irrelevance of impossible outcomes. This is a systematic flaw in CDT: Its decisions depend on the utility of outcomes that it can already know to be impossible.

The principle of the irrelevance of impossible outcomes can be used beyond arguing against CDT. As you may remember from my post on updatelessness, sensible decision theories will precommit to give Omega the money in the counterfactual mugging thought experiment. (If you don’t remember or haven’t read that post in the first place, this is a good time to catch up, because the following thoughts are based on the ideas from the post.) Even EDT, which ignores the utility of impossible outcomes, would self-modify in this way. However, the decision theory resulting from such self-modification violates the principle of the irrelevance of impossible outcomes. Remember that in counterfactual mugging, you give in because this was a good idea to precommit to when you didn’t yet know how the coin came up. However, once you know that the coin came up the unfavorable way, the positive outcome, which gave you the motivation to precommit, has become impossible. Of course, you only give in to counterfactual mugging if the reward in this now impossible branch is sufficiently high. For example, there is no reason to precommit to give in if you lose money in both branches. This means that once you have become updateless, you violate the principle of the irrelevance of impossible outcomes: your decision in counterfactual mugging depends on the utility you assign to an outcome that cannot happen anymore.

Acknowledgment: This work was funded by the Foundational Research Institute (now the Center on Long-Term Risk).

Omoto and Snyder (1995) is only a single study on volunteerism with a sample of 116 AIDS volunteers, but the results are quite interesting nonetheless. In a Snyder, Omoto and Crain (1999) they summarize:

Motivations [..] foreshadow the length of time that volunteers stay active (Omoto and Snyder, 1995). In one longitudinal study, volunteers who were more motivated […] when they began their work were more likely to still be active 2.5 years later. Interestingly, relatively self-focused motivations (i.e., personal development, understanding, esteem enhancement) were more predictive of volunteers’ duration of service than those that were more other-focused (i.e., values and beliefs, community concern). That is, volunteers remained active to the extent that they more strongly endorsed relatively self-focused motivations for their work. Other-focused motives, even though they may provide considerable impetus for people to become volunteers, may not sustain volunteers faced with the tough realities and personal costs of volunteering.

The study also has other interesting results. For instance, “90% of respondents expected to continue volunteering with the agency for at least another year. In actuality, 54% of the volunteers were still active 1 year later, whereas only 16% of them were still active 2.5 years later.” (Omoto and Snyder 1995, p. 677)

I haven’t looked into the literature much more but this seems to be exactly the kind of research one should turn to if I wanted to design a successful social movement.