Inconvenient Facts

The strongest pieces of counterevidence against beliefs I hold.

Any epistemically honest thinker can quickly rattle off the strongest empirical evidence against the most interesting/important beliefs they have.

Here are a few of mine:

1. Assassinations frequently work for the intended use-case in Japan

   1. Belief: Political assassinations don’t work. Assassins sometimes succeed in killing a person, but they rarely/almost never achieve their intended political aims, especially domestically.

   2. Counter-evidence: The assassinocracy in Japan in the 1930s. Further, the recent assassin of Shinzo Abe had a specific political aim he wanted to achieve via assassination: to de-legitimize cults in general and the Unification Church in particular. It worked.

   3. Synthesis: Perhaps assassinations sometimes work in Japan but not other places? Or maybe they just occasionally succeed in their political aims but rarely enough that “political assassinations don’t work” is an accurate enough overall gloss for now.

      

      This is Shinzo Abe, the assassinee. As a matter of principle, I try to avoid showing photographs of killers, or other potential glorification.

2. Many people, especially Americans, die from “deaths of despair,” and this number appears to be rising.

   1. Belief: A robust and significant factor in modern times is the rising premium of life. Our willingness to keep living, and our willingness to pay in both monetary and non-monetary costs to avoid incremental chances of dying, has gone up significantly over the last 100 years.

   2. Counter-evidence: American life expectancy actually declined from 2014-2020, driven by what Case and Deaton call “deaths of despair”: suicide, overdoses, alcohol-related disease. Drug overdose deaths alone increased 500% from 1999-2021. If we value life so highly, why are so many people actively destroying theirs? This seems like a direct contradiction to my thesis.

   3. Synthesis: Unclear. Some possibilities

      1. Broader or even bimodal distribution: Maybe most people value life more, but a desperate minority values it less, and averages hide this polarization.

      2. Paradox of choice: Perhaps extreme safety culture creates its own pathology: when life becomes too controlled, some rebel through self-destruction.

      3. Compositional issues: “Deaths of despair” is a cute moniker, but it might hide different underlying issues. For example, maybe the increase in suicides was due to failures of gun control. Maybe drugs are more potent, or just more enjoyable, etc. Maybe deaths of alcoholism are a result of a combination of increased secularism and greater life expectancy (so people die from alcohol because they don’t die from other things), etc.

3. Bullshit jobs do exist.

   1. Belief: Middlemen are extremely important. Coordination problems (that middlemen solve) are real problems, and the bottlenecks to global wealth and flourishing. People who think middlemen are useless just don’t understand the modern economy.

   2. Counter-evidence: Real bullshit jobs do exist. Some middlemen are really just there to be rent-seekers. Many people feel their jobs to be fake and are alienated from their jobs. It’s easy to construct theoretical models of the economy where some people just leech productive surplus by seeking rent, and we see some empirical evidence of them.

   3. Synthesis: My current guess is that many of the pieces of evidence are real but highly over-rated. Rentseeking is a real problem but limited by both market factors and (to a lesser extent) regulation. People thinking their jobs are fake is minimal to no evidence.

      1. Most people are not smart/curious enough to consciously understand how their jobs connect to an important role according to the hivemind that is the global economy (put another way, I trust The Market’s assessments of whether you delivered economic surplus much more than I trust your self-assessment)

      2. Further, there’s no strong evolutionary reason to believe that people’s subconscious sense of alienation matches something real, our evolved intuitions are very different from the empirical world we live in.