On Getting What You Deserve
Mmm... desert.
I started writing a structured version of this post, with links and quotes and a clearly-defined arc, and it really fucking sucked.
Nothing kills a good blog post like an outline.
So here’s take two, thoughts in the order they come to me.
1.
I’m getting better at Minesweeper!
From around 350 seconds to 248 already. Target is 140, though, so still a ways to go.
And I worry that I’ll be plateauing soon. At this point, I think my fingers have just caught up with my mind. There’s not much room to improve without a metric ton of practice. Dexterity comes faster than pattern recognition.
Is there a better way to learn it? Should I be researching the meta? Memorizing the patterns intentionally? I don’t think so, though I think my resistance is out of pride not reason.
The reason is this: memorization in the mind is not what I’m after. I want muscle memory, and muscle memory will be built with repetition, not intentional study.
The flaw is this: the mind is the muscle and the muscle is the mind, and the memory flows freely between them. I think it probably would help to know what patterns I oughta be looking for. Then I can skip the 100 games it takes to figure out what they are, and focus on the 1000 it takes to build an automatic response to them.
And the pride: the girl who’s better than me at this didn’t do any sort of studying. She just put in the time and the brainpower. And the whole point of this is to give my ego a bump. So I’d rather not Goodhart all the signal away. Rather be sure that when I do beat her, it’s thanks to an intrinsic quality, not a training strategy. That it’s deserved.
2.
What does it mean to deserve something?
It seems like we care a lot about this question. “So and so deserved an A, but he got a B-. So Mrs. Whatever The Hell deserves the electric chair.”
Philosophers have tried to analyze desert1 as a moral concept, but it’s really fucking hard to.
It starts with this realization, which even a dumbass non-philosopher could make: when someone deserves something, it’s for a reason. Often they’ve done something to deserve whatever else, but we can generalize this to just having some trait.
Philosophers call this desert-generating trait a “desert base,” and there’s totally an Iraq War joke there. I will give five actual US dollars to anyone who comes up with a funny one. It’s been nagging at me for about a week now, and I got nothing.
From a desert base, one makes a bombing run on Mosul desert claim. This is the thing that you deserve. An A, for example, in the case of a student who’s done good work. The good work is their desert base.
Alright, so we’ve defined some terms. The question is still: why is a student who did good work deserving of an A? Justification is missing.
As far as I can tell, nobody’s really come up with a good answer to this question. Nobody knows how to justify a desert claim! Some candidate theories are:
Consequentialism! (<3) S, having some desert base DB, deserves a reward D on account of DB, if S getting D would have high utility.
This seems to work out nicely in most cases. It’s high utility for a good student to receive a high grade, since that student will continue to work hard and learn new things. Therefore, a good student deserves a high grade.
But consider another case, stolen from John Rawls who stole it from Edgar Frederick Carritt:2
…if some kind of very cruel crime becomes common, and none of the criminals can be caught, it might be highly expedient, as an example, to hang an innocent man, if a charge against him could be so framed that he were universally thought guilty…
Could we really say that the innocent man deserved to be hanged? His desert base is that “a charge against him could be so framed that he were universally thought guilty.” According to a consequentialist desert justification, this desert base is as legitimate as the desert base: “guilty of the very cruel crime.” In fact, it might be more so, if it were harder to sway public opinion against the true criminal.
Institutions! (also <3 actually) S, having some desert base DB, deserves a reward D on account of DB, if there’s a social institution I which governs S, and I says that people with DB should get D.
To be clear, there are kinda two versions of institutional justification—actual and ideal. On actual institutional desert (AID), I is an institution which exists and governs S. On ideal institutional desert (IID), I is some imaginary institution that really really should exist and govern S.
AID falls apart for obvious reasons: if slavery was an existent and governing institution, a slave still wouldn’t deserve to be enslaved by someone with the desert base of holding their title.
IID is just consequentialism repackaged. First we ask “what would it mean for an institution I to be ideal?” And there are two good answers here: “I creates the most utility” or “under I, everyone gets what they deserve.” The latter is circular, and the former is subject to the same “convict people who it’s easy to frame” horn.
Appraisal! S, having some desert base DB, deserves a reward D if it would be fitting for observers X to appraise S positively for DB.
Hopefully you can see the issue here. Hint: X marks the spot.
Who are these observers exactly? Terrorist commanders tend to be very approving of their terrorist underlings—but that doesn’t mean the terrorist underlings deserve praise and wealth and so on.
And… that’s the end of it? I mean, you can check my work here. But it seems like that’s where we are in terms of desert justification, and maybe where we’ll always be.
3.
Which begs the question: is desert even coherent?
I mean, really, if it’s this hard to justify, might we be able to override our dumbass human instincts just this once?
For one thing,
very convincingly argues that utilitiarianism is true. Flat out, end of story.Then consequential desert is a good way to explain certain moral outcomes that feel like desert claims, but the dilemmas and divergences that arise are actually just unfortunate collisions between intuition and ethicality.
For a clearer example: does the one guy in the trolley problem deserve to get run over? No, but you still should run him over and save the five. Similarly, the innocent man doesn’t deserve to be hung, but you still should hang him.
Desert is nice, but best served after a hearty meal of utilitarianism.
4.
In Spanish class, we’re learning about immigration. I mean, we’re learning Spanish, but via immigration. I mean, we’re not immigrating anywhere, to be clear. We’re learning Spanish via learning about immigration. But really, we’re learning neither and nothing and we’re all gonna fail our exams.
In any case, we took the US citizenship test. In Spanish, or in English if you wanted to. Also you could just not do it and play Minesweeper instead, I heard.
A buddy took it and got 97/100 right (holy shit, right?) but most folks were struggling a shocking amount. And he was upset by this and said something along the lines of “every current American citizen should have to take this test” (presumably in order to keep their citizenship).
And I looked up from my Minesweeper citizenship test and said something along the lines of “what the fuck, man? Not only shouldn’t Americans have to take this test, immigrants shouldn’t have to either!”
Living in America is incredibly awesome. This is the best country in the world (Scandinavia is shit and the HDI is fake), and I’m very happy to live here. But I certainly didn’t do anything to deserve it.
This is what I think my buddy was pointing at: natural-born Americans don’t deserve to be here any more than immigrants do—so, he reasoned, we should force them to develop a desert base for citizenship in the same way immigrants have to.
But desert is incoherent!
We’re all just people, put here on this crazy planet by chance alone, or maybe by some inscrutable utility-maximizing God who’s creating endless net-positive worlds with a ton of evil. And none of us actually deserves anything any more than anyone else.
Holding American citizenship increases the utility of your own life, and of your fellow citizens’ lives. Forcing immigrants to take a test to prove they deserve this basic decency is inhumane, and impoverishes us all. Open the borders.
Lukethoughts
(a new section on Mistakes Were Made, more or less inspired by The Office, and authored by Luke Mathew)
Shaylee’s hair looks like a mermaid. (Ed. note: it’s unclear if Luke considers Shaylee herself a part of the mermaid, or just her hair.)
I would make a good girlfriend. (Ed. note: this is in no way a consensus opinion.)
No, it’s not a typo. “Desert,” one s, but pronounced like “dessert.” Isn’t English fun?
Lot of homophones today. “Edgar Carrot” is a great name for a bunny though, if anyone’s looking.