Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Wealth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wealth. Show all posts

Thursday, September 21, 2023

The Myth of the Secret Genius

Brian Klaas
The Garden of Forking Path
Originally posted 30 Nov 22

Here are two excepts: 

A recent research study, involving a collaboration between physicists who model complex systems and an economist, however, has revealed why billionaires are so often mediocre people masquerading as geniuses. Using computer modelling, they developed a fake society in which there is a realistic distribution of talent among competing agents in the simulation. They then applied some pretty simple rules for their model: talent helps, but luck also plays a role.

Then, they tried to see what would happen if they ran and re-ran the simulation over and over.

What did they find? The most talented people in society almost never became extremely rich. As they put it, “the most successful individuals are not the most talented ones and, on the other hand, the most talented individuals are not the most successful ones.”

Why? The answer is simple. If you’ve got a society of, say, 8 billion people, there are literally billions of humans who are in the middle distribution of talent, the largest area of the Bell curve. That means that in a world that is partly defined by random chance, or luck, the odds that someone from the middle levels of talent will end up as the richest person in the society are extremely high.

Look at this first plot, in which the researchers show capital/success (being rich) on the vertical/Y-axis, and talent on the horizontal/X-axis. What’s clear is that society’s richest person is only marginally more talented than average, and there are a lot of people who are extremely talented that are not rich.

Then, they tried to figure out why this was happening. In their simulated world, lucky and unlucky events would affect agents every so often, in a largely random pattern. When they measured the frequency of luck or misfortune for any individual in the simulation, and then plotted it against becoming rich or poor, they found a strong relationship.

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The authors conclude by stating “Our results highlight the risks of the paradigm that we call “naive meritocracy", which fails to give honors and rewards to the most competent people, because it underestimates the role of randomness among the determinants of success.”

Indeed.


Here is my summary:

The myth of the secret genius: The belief that some people are just born with natural talent and that there is nothing we can do to achieve the same level of success.

The importance of hard work: The vast majority of successful people are not geniuses. They are simply people who have worked hard and persevered in the face of setbacks.

The power of luck: Luck plays a role in everyone's success. Some people are luckier than others, and most people do not factor in luck, as well as other external variables, into their assessment.  This bias is another form of the Fundamental Attribution Error.

The importance of networks: Our networks play a big role in our success. We need to be proactive in building relationships with people who can help us achieve our goals.

Thursday, April 22, 2021

Liberty University vs. Jerry Falwell Jr.: A white Christian morality tale

Anthea Butler
MSNBC.com
Originally posted 20 Apr 21

Here is an excerpt:

The story of Falwell's fall from grace, the Liberty lawsuit and the struggle to regain Liberty's moral high ground is a larger morality tale for the white evangelical movement. After years of proclaiming that sexual, fiscal and spiritual morality were important for their faith and institutions, white evangelicals showed America otherwise by overwhelmingly supporting Donald Trump. Falwell's role in solidifying that support, like his father's Moral Majority movement, was about aligning white evangelicals to Republican power, money and prestige.

But now that's coming back to haunt him. His sin, in the eyes of Liberty University, was to betray the carefully crafted image his father, Jerry Falwell Sr., created, with social media posts and an unseemly public persona that worshipped wealth. White evangelicals have been very good at consolidating power, which they often prioritize over true morality. But heaven help the man who tarnishes the brand.

In response to the lawsuit, Falwell claims that the university has "gone off the rails" and that the suit is "full of lies and half-truths." Falwell filed his own defamation lawsuit against Liberty in October, only to drop it two months later. He continues, however, to claim that the university has damaged his reputation.

Responding to the lawsuit via Twitter, Falwell alleged that "the Exec. Comm of the LU board has made another attempt to defame me and discredit my record following a series of harsh and unnecessary actions against my children, Becki and me."

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Billions spent rebuilding Notre Dame shows lack of morality among wealthy

Gillian Fulford
Indiana Daily News Column
Originally posted April 23, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Estimates to end world hunger are between $7 and $265 billion a year, and surely with 2,208 billionaires in the world, a few hundred could spare some cash to help ensure people aren’t starving to death. There aren’t billionaires in the news rushing to give money toward food aid, but even the richest man in Europe donated to repair the church.

Repairing churches is not a life and death matter. Churches, while culturally and religiously significant, are not necessary for life in the way that nutritious food is. Being an absurdly wealthy person who only donates money for things you find aesthetically pleasing is morally bankrupt in a world where money could literally fund the end of world hunger.

This isn’t to say that rebuilding the Notre Dame is bad — preserving culturally significant places is important. But the Roman Catholic Church is the richest religious organization in the world — it can probably manage repairing a church without the help of wealthy donors.

At a time when there are heated protests in the streets of France over taxes that unfairly effect the poor, pledging money toward buildings seems fraught. Spending billions on unnecessary buildings is a slap in the face to French people fighting for equitable wealth and tax distribution.

The info is here.

Monday, March 18, 2019

The college admissions scandal is a morality play

Elaine Ayala
San Antonio Express-News
Originally posted March 16, 2019

The college admission cheating scandal that raced through social media and dominated news cycles this week wasn’t exactly shocking: Wealthy parents rigged the system for their underachieving children.

It’s an ancient morality play set at elite universities with an unseemly cast of characters: spoiled teens and shameless parents; corrupt test proctors and paid test takers; as well as college sports officials willing to be bribed and a ring leader who ultimately turned on all of them.

William “Rick” Singer, who went to college in San Antonio, wore a wire to cooperate with FBI investigators.

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Yet even though they were arrested, the 50 people involved managed to secure the best possible outcome under the circumstances. Unlike many caught shoplifting or possessing small amounts of marijuana and who lack the lawyers and resources to help them navigate the legal system, the accused parents and coaches quickly posted bond and were promptly released without spending much time in custody.

The info is here.

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Letting tech firms frame the AI ethics debate is a mistake

Robert Hart
www.fastcompany.com
Originally posted November 2, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Even many ethics-focused panel discussions–or manel discussions, as some call them–are pale, male, and stale. That is to say, they are made up predominantly of old, white, straight, and wealthy men. Yet these discussions are meant to be guiding lights for AI technologies that affect everyone.

A historical illustration is useful here. Consider polio, a disease that was declared global public health enemy number one after the successful eradication of smallpox decades ago. The “global” part is important. Although the movement to eradicate polio was launched by the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the United Nations’ World Health Organization, the eradication campaign was spearheaded primarily by groups in the U.S. and similarly wealthy countries. Promulgated with intense international pressure, the campaign distorted local health priorities in many parts of the developing world.

It’s not that the developing countries wanted their citizens to contract polio. Of course, they didn’t. It’s just that they would have rather spent the significant sums of money on more pressing local problems. In essence, one wealthy country imposed their own moral judgement on the rest of the world, with little forethought about the potential unintended consequences. The voices of a few in the West grew to dominate and overpower those elsewhere–a kind of ethical colonialism, if you will.

The info is here.

Saturday, September 29, 2018

Want to live longer? Consider the ethics

John K. Davis
TheConversation.com
Originally published

Here is an excerpt:

Many people, such as philosopher John Harris and those in the Pew Center survey, worry that life extension would be available only to the rich and make existing inequalities even worse.

Indeed, it is unjust when some people live longer than the poor because they have better health care. It would be far more unjust if the rich could live several decades or centuries longer than anyone else and gain more time to consolidate their advantages.

Some philosophers suggest that society should prevent inequality by banning life extension. This is equality by denial – if not everyone can get it, then no one gets it.

However, as philosopher Richard J. Arneson notes, “leveling-down” – achieving equality by making some people worse off without making anyone better off – is unjust.

Indeed, as I argue in my recent book on life extension ethics, most of us reject leveling-down in other situations. For example, there are not enough human organs for transplant, but no one thinks the answer is to ban organ transplants.

Moreover, banning or slowing down the development of life extension may simply delay a time when the technology gets cheap enough for everyone to have it. TV sets were once a toy for the wealthy; now even poor families have them. In time, this could happen with life extension.

The info is here.

Thursday, July 5, 2018

Crispr Fans Fight for Egalitarian Access to Gene Editing

Megan Molteni
Wired.com
Originally posted June 6, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Like any technology, the applications of gene editing tech will be shaped by the values of the societies that wield it. Which is why a conversation about equitable access to Crispr quickly becomes a conversation about redistributing some of the wealth and education that has been increasingly concentrated in smaller and smaller swaths of the population over the past three decades. Today the richest 1 percent of US families control a record-high 38.6 percent of the country’s wealth. The fear is that Crispr won’t disrupt current inequalities, it’ll just perpetuate them.

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CrisprCon excels at providing a platform to raise these kinds of big picture problems and moral quagmires. But in its second year, it was still light on solutions. The most concrete examples came from a panel of people pursuing ecotechnologies—genetic methods for changing, controlling, or even exterminating species in the wild (disclosure: I moderated the panel).

The information is here.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real

benjerry.com

Here is an excerpt:

Racism at Every Level of Society

Systemic racism is about the way racism is built right into every level of our society. Many people point to what they see as less in-your-face prejudice and bias these days, compared to decades past, but as Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

While fewer people may consider themselves racist, racism itself persists in our schools, offices, court system, police departments, and elsewhere. Think about it: when white people occupy most positions of decision-making power, people of color have a difficult time getting a fair shake, let alone getting ahead. Bottom line: we have a lot of work to do.

The blog post is here.

Friday, November 6, 2015

People Don't Actually Want Equality

By Paul Bloom
The Atlantic
Originally published on October 22, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Can Frankfurt really be right that people don’t value economic equality for its own sake? Many scholars believe otherwise. The primatologist Frans de Waal sums up a popular view when he writes: “Robin Hood had it right. Humanity’s deepest wish is to spread the wealth.”

In support of de Waal, researchers have found that if you ask children to distribute items to strangers, they are strongly biased towards equal divisions, even in extreme situations. The psychologists Alex Shaw and Kristina Olson told children between the ages of six and eight about two boys, Dan and Mark, who had cleaned up their room and were to be rewarded with erasers—but there were five of them, so an even split was impossible. Children overwhelmingly reported that the experimenter should throw away the fifth eraser rather than establish an unequal division. They did so even if they could have given the eraser to Dan or Mark without the other one knowing, so they couldn’t have been worrying about eliciting anger or envy.

It might seem as though these responses reflect a burning desire for equality, but more likely they reflect a wish for fairness. It is only because Dan and Mark did the same work that they should get the same reward. And so when Shaw and Olson told the children “Dan did more work than Mark,” they were quite comfortable giving three to Dan and two to Mark. In other words, they were fine with inequality, so long as it was fair.

The entire article is here.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

The wealth gap and inequality can and should be fixed

In his column dated 27 January, Johann Redelinghuys argues that economic inequality is part of the natural order of things, and that attempts to fix it are, essentially, a waste of time and resources. He is wrong on every level: morally, practically and factually.

By Marelise van der Merwe
Daily Maverick
Originally published January 29, 2014

Let’s take the factual level first. In essence, Redelinghuys argues that “individual differences and inequality are clearly established elements in the natural order of things” and that they are “the predictable outcomes of the capitalist economic system which most of the world now subscribes to”. Crucially, he mentions neither the degree of inequality nor the way that it got there, which I would argue is central to the discussion. Certainly, a degree of difference is arguably natural; but glaring or crippling inequality, especially if it got there by unnatural means, is not.

I’m not attacking capitalism. I have no interest in a socialism-vs.-capitalism standoff, which I believe to be unnecessary, since unlike Redelinghuys, I don’t believe gross inequality to be an inevitable or “predictable outcome” of the capitalist system. I believe it is possible to be both capitalists and decent human beings. 

Friday, August 9, 2013

Is income inequality 'morally wrong'?

By John Sutter
CNN
Originally posted July 25, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

So is extreme inequality amoral?

To think this through, I called up four smart people -- Nigel Warburton, a freelance philosopher and writer, and host of the (wonderful) Philosophy Bites podcast; Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute and author of "Wealth and Justice"; Thomas Pogge, director of the Global Justice Program at Yale; and Kentaro Toyama, researcher at the University of California at Berkeley.

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I'll end this list back on John Rawls, the philosopher whose 1971 book, "A Theory of Justice," is a must-read (or at least a must-become-familiar-with) for people interested in this topic. One of Rawls' theories is that inequality can be justified only when it benefits everyone in society, particularly those who are most poor and vulnerable.