Rationality Vs Its Literary Genre

I have long been somewhat skeptical of LessWrong. Recently, I read Holden Karnofsky's 2011 LW post explaining why he doesn't recommend the Singularity Institute to donors. The post is harsh and criticizes almost every aspect of SI but the point I found the most interesting point was the following:

"Many of the things that SI and its supporters and advocates say imply a belief that they have special insights into the nature of general rationality, and/or have superior general rationality, relative to the rest of the population. (Examples here, here and here). My understanding is that SI is in the process of spinning off a group dedicated to training people on how to have higher general rationality. Yet I'm not aware of any of what I consider compelling evidence that SI staff/supporters/advocates have any special insight into the nature of general rationality or that they have especially high general rationality...
"I endorse Eliezer Yudkowsky's statement, "Be careful … any time you find yourself defining the [rationalist] as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility." To me, the best evidence of superior general rationality (or of insight into it) would be objectively impressive achievements (successful commercial ventures, highly prestigious awards, clear innovations, etc.) and/or accumulation of wealth and power. As mentioned above, SI staff/supporters/advocates do not seem particularly impressive on these fronts, at least not as much as I would expect for people who have the sort of insight into rationality that makes it sensible for them to train others in it. I am open to other evidence that SI staff/supporters/advocates have superior general rationality, but I have not seen it."

Luke Muehlhauser only responded that rationality is a poor predictor of life success. But then how do we assess rationality?

One thing that can't be denied is that LessWrongers have a lot of information and ideas about rationality and how to be more rational in one's life. They're familiar with a lot of philosophy, cognitive science, and economics. They've come up with life hacks, mind hacks, productivity tricks like the Pomodoro technique, tools for reasoning, de-biasing techniques, etc. And these tricks are likely effective when practiced.

They're clearly high on epistemic rationality and they even have epistemic rationality about instrumental rationality, but do they have more instrumental rationality than ordinary smart people? I don't think there's evidence that knowledge (and perhaps use) of effective rationality techniques make people more instrumentally rational than others.

Take the following scenario. There are two humans, PlainJane and SuperNerd. PlainJane is a social, smart woman with no knowledge of philosophy, psychology, the literature on heuristics and biases, or any rationality techniques. She makes her decisions based on common sense, experience, and received advice. She is what Eliezer Yudkowsky would call a "muggle." SuperNerd is less social and extroverted but he studies the above topics on a daily basis. He knows how to apply Bayes Theorem, he practices his belief calibration, and so on.

Both PlainJane and SuperNerds want to accomplish the same goals. These could be to get the jobs they want, or to make friends, or to stay in a good mood, or to get healthier.

Who is more likely to accomplish these goals? Personally, I don't think one has a major advantage over the other. (If I'm stereotyping and drawing from information not provided in the character descriptions, then I'd bet on PlainJane to be better at accomplishing her goals.)

But let's assume both people managed to accomplish one of the goals, say to become more productive.

PlainJane thinks she needs to waste less time so she tries to avoid watching movies, declines to hang out with her friends one night so she can get work done, and concentrates harder whenever she's working.

SuperNerd looks into the literature on productivity and finds all sorts of hacks, tricks, and techniques for boosting productivity. Through careful practice, the instalment of new habits, and micro-optimizing his routine, he also manages to boost his productivity.

Who has demonstrated more rationality here?

I again feel as if there's no real difference between the two. They accomplished the same thing, snagged their utilons, and that's that. I think some people are biased toward SuperNerd in this case because he displayed more micro-rationality. He was jumping through hoops and de-biasing, while PlainJane doesn't even know roughly how brains work. But rationality isn't assessed by your proximity to the literary genre of rationality, it's assessed by your ability to make it rain utilons. PlainJane and SuperNerd both accomplished the same goal and both displayed the same proficiency at instrumentalizing their ends. Your chosen pathway to accomplishing the goal shouldn't be relevant.

Most of the rationality I've witnessed in my life has come from "muggles" like PlainJane rather than from people like SuperNerd. Ordinary people are decent at accomplishing their goals. Some knowledge, new techniques, and micro-adjusting could definitely improve on common sense, but my impression is that most rationalists are spending too much time obsessing over the literary genre of rationality rather than actually being rational and accomplishing things. If you consider yourself to be of high rationality but can't point to ways in which your life success is very high, than that should be a giant red flag. (One possibility is that you started off in such bad conditions that you had to be extremely rational just to get yourself up to an average place.) A good question to ask yourself is: Since "becoming more rational," how has my life changed? If it hasn't changed in any significant way, then you probably haven't become more rational.

Rationalists should put more effort on accomplishing concrete impressive things (awards, degrees, grants, starting companies, impressive jobs, displaying extra productivity, contributing to good causes) than to just talking about and testing out different rationality-genre subjects.

Personally, I have found it very interesting to learn about cognitive science, philosophy, and rationality but I'm not sure I've gained many utilons as a result. I'm Less Wrong but not necessarily More Rational. I would probably be More Rational if I spent less time trying to micro-optimize and more time just getting stuff done.

Effectiveness Case Study: Development Media International

In November, I completed eight media effectiveness case studies. The goal of these case studies was to hierarchize media uses according to a utilitarian rubric. My eight posts dealt with James Cameron’s Avatar, Marcel Duchamp’s The Fountain, Homer’s The Odyssey, Ludovico Einaudi’s Primavera, the Idle No More movement, producing media for a good cause such as the Against Malaria Foundation, and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, and the bibliotherapy organization Changing Lives Through Literature.

After completing these case studies, I decided that they had been useful in forming my thinking on these issues, but that I should not use them in my thesis paper, as they aren't objective enough to prove anything. Upon my recent discovery of a highly effective media charity, I decided it would be useful to do a ninth effectiveness case study on this organization to see whether my criteria appropriately judge it to be better than the other projects I examined.

Development Media International (DMI) provides media interventions in developing countries around the world. These interventions involve fiction and non-fiction radio and television broadcasts containing insights and information into proper health. As roughly two thirds of deaths in the developing world are by causes deemed "preventable," very simple health messages ("wash your hands," "use condoms") could realistically lead to the very simple behaviour changes required to limit this death rate. Assisted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, DMI estimates that their media interventions can lower rates of child mortality in poor countries by 16-23%. They believe they can do this at the rate of $2-10 per DALY, making it among the most cost-effective causes one could possibly donate to.

Strength of Impact:

1. How many people does the project reach?
2. How significantly does it impact the people it reaches?
3. How likely are the people it impacts to spread this impact?
4. How long lasting is its impact?
5. How grave was the issue pre-impact?

My answers: 

1. High
2. High
3. Medium
4. High
5. High

Explanation:

DMI reaches a "High" amount of people. Some of their most successful programs regularly reach hundreds of millions of viewers. For example, a detective series about HIV/AIDS in India received a weekly viewership of 140 million, becoming India's top-rated drama. One might suspect the reach of programming in Africa to be quite low, but communication technologies are on the rise in Africa.

Furthermore, DMI has a strong impact on the people it reaches. Not only can these campaigns keep people healthy and remove stigmas, they also saves lives.

People impacted and informed by these campaigns are then moderately likely to spread this impact to others. DMI deals with the types of issues that people both tell each other about and are willing to change their minds on. One 12-month campaign about leprosy in India is claimed to have changed the minds of 172 million people, while saving 200,000 lives and reducing the stigma toward leprosy patients. A follow-up study three years later demonstrated that the persuasive effects were "broadly sustained over time." My intuition is that much of their other meme-spreading would also be long lasting. When you discover a way to avoid dying young, you tend to remember it.

With reference to SoI-5, DMI also scores a "High." Rather than appealing to middle class Westerners like many of the other examples I examined did, these media interventions are targeted at some of the world's worst off individuals, preventing millions of early deaths.

Quality of Impact:

1. How much does it increase the accuracy of people's models of reality?
2. How much does it improve people's quality of life?
3. How much more likely does it make people to act altruistically toward others?

My answers:

1. +1
2. +3
3. +2

Explanation:

DMI's media interventions are not about education as much as they are about behaviour change. There are facts to be learned from these programs, and acting on these facts can make a life or death difference, but the quantity of information is not of the sort that I would call highly "increasing of the accuracy of models of reality." It's more "advice" than it is epistemic rationality. For this reason, I scored it a +1 for QoI-1.

The impact of these interventions on people's lives can be massive, especially if it prevents death. A +3 to QoI-2 strikes me as obvious.

I also think DMI programs can make people behave more altruistically and pro-socially. Not all of their campaigns are about basic health tips like sleeping under insecticide-treated bed nets. Some of them are about changing attitudes. DMI is responsible for Vietnam's most popular radio program for youth, "Window of Love." Window of Love is a phone-in radio show for young people about sexual issues. It started in 1999 and is still on the air and very successful.

So as expected, DMI surpassed all of the causes I had looked at up until now. It is the first cause I have written about to have both excellent SoI and QoI scores. According to my chart, Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL) is a close competitor, but that exposes the fact that some of my categories are worth more than others. CLTL reaches a low amount of people, and probably couldn't reach DMI sized audiences even if it wanted to, significantly limiting its ability to impact the world.

A Turning Point in My Research

It took me six months of researching effective uses of mass communication for changing behaviour to discover the existence of a field called, well, behaviour change communication (BCC).

Ozzie Gooen from 80000 Hours pointed me to an interview with Will Snell of an organization called Development Media International (DMI). I visited the organization's site to find out that they (1) use radio and television programs to promote healthy behaviour in developing nations, (2) that they consider mass media interventions to be the world's most cost-effective cause as measured in DALYs, and (3) that their campaign is evidence-based and well-researched. Their page introduced me to the field of behaviour change communication, which it immediately became clear to me I should have known about back in September.

Upon informing him of my discovery, Brian Tomasik of Animal Ethics pointed me towards an ex-GiveWell recommendation Population Services International. PSI also draws from the BCC literature to support their social marketing work in developing nations. Looking at their web site led me to some of their resources and many useful blogs about social marketing. Considering I've been researching marketing principles that could be applied to create social change, I probably should have been aware there was a field called social marketing.

In my research, I'm again and again finding that one of the most important things you can have is the right name of a field, or at least the right buzzword that gets mentioned in all the papers on that subject. Without knowing what to search for, you can easily get led into dead ends and assume relevant bodies of knowledge don't exist. Once you have the name, Google Scholar is all you need.

To give another example, I was recently asked to write an article for an academic journal about several terms that I was not familiar with. I could find absolutely nothing on either Google or Google Scholar about these terms. After several minutes of annoyed investigating, I discovered the field was called Conversation Analysis (CA). I typed "Conversation Analysis" into Google Scholar and I got tons of useful sources.

Now that I have BCC and social marketing in my arsenal of names, I have a lot more reading to do. Although it's kind of embarrassing to discover after six months that I'd been neglecting the #1 most cost-effective use of media in my thesis paper on the subject, it's also motivating to know that now I'm about to get some answers. I probably spent too much time trying to pioneer an extremely difficult field (optimizing the artistic landscape and, a bit less difficult: journalism, news, and social media) when I knew perfectly well third world interventions had a higher potential utility. What I didn't know was that organizations already existed that were doing this, researching this, and showing good results.

For the next while, I will likely spend less time writing about art, media, and culture on this blog, and spend more time writing about media interventions in the developing world, behaviour change communication, and social marketing.

Lastly, I'd like to point out that my original research question is now answered. At the start of my research, I intended to learn how a media producer could maximize the amount of good they can do in the world with their work. I now have a decently clear answer to that: spread healthy memes in unhealthy countries like DMI and PSI do. I also wondered whether mass media use could be established as a fifth focus area of effective altruism with cost-effectiveness and impact large enough to rival the other four. I can now answer "Yes" to this question, when for the past couple of months my feeling was "No." What's left are the details: learning about which methods are  more effective than others. Based on my preliminary research into BCC, a lot of useful experimental research on these methods has already been published.

Competing Methods Lessening Cause Priority

In researching Controlled Atmosphere Killing, I thought to myself that getting the world's slaughterhouses to convert en masse from electric immobilization systems to CAK systems might be the greatest realistically attainable accomplishment one could contribute to in one's lifetime.

After reading this Peter Singer article on advancements with in vitro meat, I'm a bit less sure. If in vitro meat becomes mainstream first, then there may be no need to prioritize a CAK revolution. Both changes could definitely work in tandem to do more good than either change on its own, but the existence of other good methods lessens each method's Utilon Share Value.

Considering the multiplicity of sorta realistic ways to reduce animal suffering in factory farms, each individual method is less of a priority. The fact of there being multiple upcoming technological saviours to a problem is also a reason to shift one's belief in that cause downward, as there is likely to be an abundance of attention and funding in that area.

Artistic Integrity

[This is the fifth and final post in my Sequence on artistic value. The entire Sequence can be viewed here:

1. Art Consequentialism
2. Art Should Accomplish Something
3. Art Has Barely Left the Womb
4. Taste and Social Intuitionism
5. Artistic Integrity

Together these five posts argue for a theory of artistic value that I have never encountered before.]


The world's ideas about art are especially crazy.

People believe things about art, considering it to be sacred, that they don't believe about anything else - except for maybe religion, which they consider to be sacred. 

In this post, I'll look at the concept of "artistic integrity," which I consider to be crazy.

Hollywood is a smart system. It has an end goal - to maximize its profit - and it efficiently optimizes toward that goal. It hires the best people it can get for the cheapest it can pay them. It invests a large chunk of its budget into marketing to get more people interested in paying for its products. It has established conventions, formats, genres, and dramatic techniques that make films more likely to be profitable. It spends money on eye-tracking, biometrics, focus groups, surveys, and other research methods to determine what will sell and what won't. And it optimizes toward its end goal of maximizing profit.

Art is not quite so smart as that. It's driven by heuristics, intuitions, and impulses. Its end values can be aesthetic beauty, high praise from peers, accurate self-expression, feelings of catharsis, pride in one's own abilities, the exchange of ideas, or a million other things.

When a "great" artist makes an unconventional creative decision, the producer could veto it on the grounds that it will hurt the film's commercial potential. When both parties insist, a struggle for "creative control" ensues. Fans usually side with the filmmaker, claiming that the producer is stepping on the artist's "artistic integrity." Apparently, "artistic integrity" refers to the idea that an artist is given the control to make whatever creative decisions she wants to achieve her end-values. For a producer to step on this fundamental artistic right would be to prioritize profit over artistic quality. As we know, trading the sacred good of artistic quality for the decidedly non-sacred good of money is blasphemous.

Where does this idea of artistic integrity come from? We don't expect chair-makers to be given "chair-making integrity" - we expect them to take orders from dollar-maximizers. We don't expect philosophers to be given "philosophical integrity" - we just expect them to do philosophy to the best of their ability, according to certain political and economic realities. We don't expect mathematicians to be given "mathematical integrity" - we just expect them to do math on whatever problem they happen to be working on. If a mathematician cannot find funding for his work because the problem is deemed to be without real-world application, well, he finds another problem to work on.

Maybe there's something different about art. Maybe, unlike those other disciplines, art is precisely about pure creativity, about not having any rules to follow, about not making sure to maximize cost-effectiveness, and about not having any practical use. If that is the case, then, unlike those other disciplines, art must not take place in the real world.

The production of art uses up real resources. The products of art are really experienced by real people. Art has real effects on the world. Why should we create it if it really serves no practical purpose? Now, I happen to think that art does serve many practical applications and that it generally helps society. We all know the reasons why art exists: people enjoy it, people are inspired by it, people exchange ideas with it, people have deep experiences with it, people can talk about it with others, etc. As much as some may want to classify these as spiritual, sacred, or non-practical, there is no good reason for them to be exempt from utilitarian calculations. 

Will my paintings inspire ~5,000 people? That's great! How much money does it cost to produce? What else could I do with that money? Oh, I could save 1 life with that money by donating it to AMF. What's better, inspiring ~5,000 people or saving 1 life? That sort of shit. Art is created with real money that could otherwise be used to save real lives. It should therefore be made with the utmost care to have the best real-world effects possible. Copy the intelligent Hollywood system but optimize in a different direction: in the direction of maximizing wellbeing.

Where does the concept of artistic integrity fit into all this? The artist's job is to maximize wellbeing. I know of no artists who attempt this. Instead, they heuristically maximize according to their own aesthetic tastes and preferences. In struggles for creative control, the artist is pitted against a producer whose job is to maximize profit. Where does artistic integrity fit into this picture? Is the artist's goal fulfilled more desirable than the producer's goal fulfilled? This is like a creative struggle between the scientist that wants to rig the experiment toward achieving his desired result and the funding organization that wants the scientist to rig the experiment toward achieving its desired result. What about just getting the correct answer? In art, no parties involved are after the correct answer. The artist is after spiritual fuzzies and the producer is after material fuzzies.

The concept of "artistic integrity" is fundamentally at odds with the concept of "effective altruism." Consequentialist ethics is the correct answer. It is the optimal driver of artistic decision-making.

There is one last possibility. Maybe optimizing to artist tastes and preferences reliably leads to better consequences than does optimizing producer profits. +Trust Artists, Not Producers+ might be a good rule to follow if we want to generally get decent results over the long haul. This is true if we're talking about struggles between artists and producers, but it isn't true of struggles between The Rational Way of Art and the individual artist's taste, which is unlikely to be in line with The Rational Way of Art because there are no Rational artists. Generally trusting artist judgments over producer judgments may very well be wise. The problem is that artist judgments are highy sub-optimal. 

In addition to most artists not having +Maximizing Expected Utility+ as their primary goal, no artist can possibly know what they're doing given the lack of information available to them, and thus we should be cautious of assigning too much weight to their decisions.

Even in the case of artist vs producer squabbles, how would we know who to route for? Is there any research on the correlation between the standard criteria of artistic greatness and positive real-world consequences? Does a more sophisticated movie do more good than a less sophisticated movie? Does tragedy have better effects than comedy? Is narrative cinema more useful for world-optimization than non-narrative cinema? Is theatre a more effective medium than radio or literature at reducing suffering? Does sad art teach people valuable skills or does it glorify counterproductive negative thinking?

We cannot answer these questions 
because nobody has ever attempted to research them
because nobody has ever asked the questions
because the world's ideas about art are especially crazy.

Taste and Social Intuitionism

[This is the fourth post in my Sequence on artistic value. The entire Sequence can be viewed here:

1. Art Consequentialism
2. Art Should Accomplish Something
3. Art Has Barely Left the Womb
4. Taste and Social Intuitionism
5. Artistic Integrity

Together these five posts argue for a theory of artistic value that I have never encountered before.]


How we should treat moral and aesthetic intuitions given that they are (1) automatic and yet (2) often at least somewhat within our control?

A Few Examples

(a) I don't like fruit. It would be better for me to eat fruit but I just don't like them, so I don't. Am I off the hook? True, my reaction to the taste and texture of fruit is an automatic process, a fact of my biology. But if I really wanted to, I could probably train myself to enjoy more fruits with some success. Should I be held to the standard of training myself to like fruit? 

If this was a simple dispute over chocolate vs vanilla, there would be no reason to do any training. The differences between the two options are so inconsequential that we should be happy to settle with whatever our intuitive preference happens to be. But in the case of fruit, there are health benefits on the line and thus the Liking Fruit option could be justifiably called "better" than the Not Liking Fruit option.

(b) I see an amateur painting and like it more than I like looking at and thinking about the Mona Lisa. I can see why other people judge the Mona Lisa to be better according to traditional criteria of artistic greatness, but I just don't like it as much. It's an automatic reaction. I look at the painting and my brain goes into state XZ_7200913, which happens not to be a state of aesthetic appreciation. 

An art critic might point out elements of the Mona Lisa that I don't notice due to my limited knowledge of art history and painting technique. The critic could also point out ideas in the work and why those ideas are more important or sophisticated or praise-worthy than the ideas embedded in the amateur painting. I still don't like it as much though. Should I be held to the standard of training myself to have "better" aesthetic intuitions? In the same way that eating fruit is "better" for me than eating less healthy foods, is it "better" to have aesthetic intuitions in alignment with System 2 judgments of "artistic value"? Can you blame me for preferring the "lesser" work or do we just chalk it up to a fact of my hardware?

(c) As a white Canadian, I am statistically less likely than an Iranian to be comfortable with the idea of wearing burqas. So I think about burqas and feel an intuition that it's immoral to force people to cover up that way. An Iranian might see the same phenomenon and not only would she not have the same opinion as me, but she wouldn't even have the same moral intuition. Knowing that moral intuitions don't prove anything, we could try using reason to figure out whether women should wear burqas or not. I could make a utilitarian argument based on burqas degrading women and the Iranian could counter with a utilitarian argument based on burqas keeping women modest. Suppose I feel that my argument is clearly the "better" one. Should I hold her to the standard of training herself to have new moral intuitions? Can I blame her for having a "worse" intuition than me or is her automatic reaction just a fact of her hardware?

Subjective vs Objective

There are two fundamental approaches to dealing with these sorts of clashes of preferences. One of them is to write it off as "all subjective." When I look at a painting or eat a fruit or think about wearing a burqa, my brain goes into state JH_8973402 (dislike) while your brain goes into state JB_4324585 (like). There's not much we can do other than shrug and continue to see things the way our brains are apparently hardwired to see them. There's no point trying to convert someone to having your opinion, when they aren't sharing your sensory experience of the event. And it's crucial to understand this - that their very experience is different. When blindfolded people taste Coke and Pepsi, they prefer Pepsi, but when they know which drink is which, they prefer Coke. Similarly, art appears better to us once we're told that it's highly revered. Our thinking affects our future intuitions.

Another approach is to choose terminal goals and then try to mind hack ourselves until we are better hardwired to achieve those goals. This is the approach where I say, "eating fruit is better for me so I should try learning to like them" and "my taste in paintings sucks so I should try to learn to appreciate better art."

I prefer this side precisely because our thinking affects our future intuitions. We are not so stuck with ourselves as that. Disliking fruit is likely "all in my head" (where else would it be?). Just as an arachnophobe can get over his fear of spiders - and wipe out such a powerful intuition! - so could I probably get over my dislike of fruit. If we can find a rational reason to value one thing more than another thing, than we should follow reason, rather than our intuitions. At the same time, we are not perfectly malleable and sometimes, such as with chocolate vs vanilla, the reward for having the "right" intuition isn't worth the cost it would take to switch from the "wrong" one.

This has ethical implications at the intersection of biological programming and free will. If I leave my child outside in the backyard during a snow storm, I would be considered cruel  even though our experience of the weather can be controlled. There are Buddhist monks that can sit in snow, manually raise their own body temperature, and melt the snow around them. Why can't I throw my kid in the cold and then blame him for not knowing how to think productively? He was free to change his thinking and not suffer in the cold, but he didn't. This is intuitively a really bad argument, but it works to show the difficulty of establishing a line beyond which we can call intuitive reactions to be outside of our control.

On the surface, this framing could be seen to cause problems for the ethical subjectivist who believes ethical claims only express the speaker's emotional reactions to things. I don't think that is the case, however. The subjectivist could believe her terminal goals to be fundamentally arbitrary, yet still optimize herself and her environment so as to maximize her probability of fulfilling those goals. Even if all normative claims were arbitrary, that wouldn't make it nonsensical for people to attempt to satisfy their preferences.

Implications for Art

Our ideas about artistic value, like our ideas about moral value, are formed by both immediate, automatic reactions ("That's gross!") and reasoned arguments ("This provokes thought and provoking thought is good"). Lacking perfect rationality and a coherent theory of artistic value, people tend to let the two sources of opinions interact in disorderly fashion. This leads to regular inconsistencies in artistic judgments. 

Meet Todd, our resident movie reviewer here at A Nice Place To Live. Here are some of Todd's movie opinions:

"Avatar sucks. It was exactly the same as Pocahontas, Ferngully, and Dances With Wolves"

"The Lion King is such a great movie, it's so much fun!"

"Zoolander was just so childish. All it has is joking around."

"Antichrist is a pretentious piece of crap. It's pure shock value. Completely unwatchable."

"Mothlight goes way too far in trying to be experimental and original. Nothing whatsoever happens. Yeah, it looks cool, but what does it mean?"

"Coffy looks like crap and is completely exploitative."

"Django Unchained is the funnest movie of the year."

It's easy to make someone look bad when you're making up what they believe, but I think the argument I'm about to make applies to how just about everyone engages with art, no matter what their tastes happen to be. 

In the Avatar evaluation, the deciding factor for Todd was that Avatar was too similar to pre-existing movies. The Lion King evaluation not only ignores the previous criterion (the fact that The Lion King is an adaptation of Macbeth), but it establishes an entirely new criterion for artistic greatness that wasn't used to evaluate Avatar. Todd then bashes Zoolander for it being too childish and fun, despite his appreciation of The Lion King, a children's movie, which was attributed to how fun and watchable it is. The Zoolander evaluation both ignores the previously consulted "fun" criterion, while establishing a new criterion, maturity or seriousness. The following two reviews then ignore the presence of maturity/seriousness by calling for watchability and for something to happen. In bashing Mothlight, Todd also downplays the importance of aesthetics and yet then dislikes Coffy for having low production quality. He also claims Coffy is too exploitative but then champions Django Unchained, which is also highly exploitative (and rooted in the tradition of exploitation cinema) and also, bringing us full circle, a kind of mash up of pre-existing movies.

For Todd's judgments to be coherent, there needs to be a lot of relevant information that he left out of his reviews. Maybe Avatar was too unoriginal but Django Unchained was only a little unoriginal, while, at the other end of the spectrum, Mothlight was too original. Maybe Zoolander was too childish but The Lion King was only a little childish. And so on. If this is the case, then we can salvage the case for Todd's consistency by saying that he just isn't very good at articulating his thoughts maturely. For each movie, he only named one quality when he should have named all the criteria he valued and rated where each movie fell on each of those little spectrums. In doing this, we're approaching what I've been referring to as a "coherent theory of artistic value."

But does anybody have one of those? 

Think back to moral philosophy and the difficulty of articulating a one-size-fits-all theory of good that we can apply to every individual action. The analogy immediately makes it visible how unlikely it is for Todd to be basing his artistic judgments on such a theory. Even if he offered one and showed all of his judgments to be consistent with it, it would likely be very easy to question his chosen criteria. They were likely chosen to include the sorts of movies that he already valued. This is a decidedly arbitrary way to "objectively" judge anything.

My opinion is that almost any time somebody makes a new artistic judgment, they are contradicting previous artistic judgments they have made. I think this is because the arguments people provide in support of their artistic judgments are post-hoc rationalizations for intuitive reactions to the work. This has been found to be true of moral judgments, as well.

Social Intuitionism

This is a social intuitionist approach to art evaluation. That means that artistic judgments are influenced by social and cultural factors more than they are influenced by rational arguments. Rational arguments for artistic judgments are more like lawyers defending their clients than they are like detectives trying to get to the bottom of a case.

Does that mean that it's all subjective then? There can be no coherent theory of artistic value because reason is doomed to be controlled by biased intuitions?

Well, think about ethics again. Is that all subjective?

The social intuitionist model of morality doesn't reject that reason plays any role at all in our opinions. It just integrates reason into the other important processes of moral judgment formation. The path is still open to devise a rational theory of value but that theory needs to be based on  a solid foundation, rather than atop an inconsistent mix of randomly selected intuitions.

When it comes to ethics, I subscribe to idealized preference utilitarianism. I find this theory to have a firm basis in reason because it can only be rejected by claiming that we may want to not do what we want to do. To me, that idea doesn't quite make sense. Idealized preference utilitarianism is what remains. As explained in earlier posts in this Sequence, I see nothing special about art that makes it exempt from these ethical considerations.

Measuring News Slant

In Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power, Robert Entman tries to re-conceptualize media effects within the context of bias. Drawing from the literatures on media framing, priming, and agenda setting, Entman theorizes about the role of news slant, or bias, in the struggle for political power within the mainstream media.

One useful contribution that Entman makes is distinguishing between three types of media bias:

• Distortion bias: News that distorts or falsifies reality
• Content bias: News that favours one side
• Decision-making bias: News twisted to serve the motivations of impartial journalists

Unlike the field of agnotology, which interests itself in the first kind of bias (among others), Entman suggests focusing on only the next two if we are to formalize a concept of media bias.

He offers the following equation:

NS = the slant of a news item
F = the perceived facts
SWH = the skill of White House news managers
SO = the skill of opposition news managers
BE = decision biases arising from evaluation of the political game
BM = decision biases arising from market competition
BI = decision biases arising from personal ideology
E = event context and other sources of variation

This equation demonstrates the complex interaction of decision biases with other factors such as the skill of a political administration's news managers.

Entman also suggests applying the Hirschman-Herfindahl index (HHI) used in economics to media slant. The HHI represents the relative power of a firm with the square of its market share percentage. Thus if one firm holds a monopoly over the market, its HHI score is 10,000 (100 x 100), but if the power is divided up among a huge number of equal competitors, their individual scores near 0. Through content analysis, something like the HHI could be applied to the media to determine aggregate slant.