Reading Moldbug - "Why I Am Not A Libertarian"

Content: I summarize the core of Moldbug's blog post Why I Am Not A Libertarian. This is a first impression. Usually I keep my distance from political philosophy, but tonight I needed a distraction from other things.

Liberty, like peace, is a desirable outcome. Reforming a government to restrict itself, in conformance with the desires of its constituency, is not an effective way to achieve that outcome, because the government can abandon those restrictions at any time, and probably will do when it becomes profitable. People do not behave morally alone by conviction and remembrance of sacred principle, and neither will government.

What then should be the design of a government? Moldbug introduces two principles, called formalism and neocameralism.

Before stating them, a digression into the nature of property, which will help us to define government: In contrast to the usual normative incidents recognized by western property law, let us say simply and summarily that a person has ownership of a resource if they control it. Then property is a system guaranteeing persons exclusive stable control of resources.

A government is an organization that controls property, stably and exclusively, through the use of military force (or through the threat of its use). A government also leases property to its constituents in exchange for rent, which practice is called taxation. In addition to securing its own resources against foreign militaries and domestic paramilitaries, the government seeks to prevent involuntary property transfer among its constituents. Now we are ready to introduce Moldbug's first principle of government design.

Formalism: A government should prevent involuntary property transfers among its constituents, regardless of whether the distribution of resources satisfies the egalitarian preferences of the constituents, or is in accordance with some conception of natural or contractual property rights, et cetera. Moldbug hints that this principle derives from his desire, and his engineer's realism about what is required, to reduce violent conflict.

Moldbug identifies two components to the practice of formalism, which are really two fronts on which deterrence is waged: the government maintains control of its property through military force, and it prevents involuntary transfers of rented resources among its constituents through the enforcement of law. In both cases, the government must make clear to parties that the distribution of property is secure against involuntary transactions: that a party attempting to produce an involuntary change in the distribution of property would fail in their attempt and incur costs of the conflict. This is of course not sufficient to deter human parties from violence generally, but it's a good start, and formalism remains an interesting principle, akin to legal positivism.

Before we state the second principle (neocameralism) another digression is in order. 

Why do observed governments restrict liberties of their constituents, in excess of what is needed to maintain a military force, collect taxes, and perhaps enforce laws to limit involuntary property transfer? Why do government prohibit some activities, when they could instead tax those activities and gain revenue (putting aside that we've here introduced quite a new form of taxation)? 

Moldbug poses an analogy: these prohibitions by current governments are like the poor customer service offered by companies controlled by employees. In contrast to joint-stock corporations, employees of such companies (and employees of governments) operate with "no capacity for unitary financial or managerial planning" and "no local incentive to steward the equity of the entire operation".

The principle of neocameralism is simply that governments should be designed like joint-stock corporations. Governments should be publicly owned, and their shares traded. Instead of elections, executives would be hired, because that's the effective procedure that markets have found for making corporations profitable. Moldbug suggests that this project could start through the founding of private cities.

One place I wish Moldbug had expanded this post is in addressing an objection to neocameralism that he mentions: that the sovereign corporation "might restrict not immigration but emigration, converting itself into a sort of large open-air prison or slave camp." His reply to the objection is this: "I invite the reader to imagine the effect that this decision might have on property values, or to think about how profitable it has proven for North Korea". Truly, I have heard more persuasive rhetoric.

If Moldbug has more principles of government design, I look forward to reading them some day. If these are the core of his philosophy, I look forward to understanding why he has selected these two for special attention, and what relationship he sees between them. On the whole, this post was surprisingly light on the obscurantism that I expected of Moldbug, perhaps unfairly?

The Endorsed Toxidrome

When I'm fucked up, that's the real me. 

When I'm fucked up, that's the real me. 

This lyric is sung by The Weeknd in The Hills. Hearing it, I wondered what was going on in the mind of the lyricist. Why would a person identify more strongly with a substance-intoxicated form of themselves than with their sober form?

One possibility is that the intoxicated man reliably outperforms the sober man on a criterion which the sober man values. A causally interleaved trio of common biological effects of recreational intoxication seem likely to enable this: elevated self-concept (including elevated estimates of one's social appearance, skill, and the task-adequacy of one's holdings), decreased anxiety relating to expected social persecution for potential violations of respect- and etiquette-based social conventions, and a generally elevated, euphoric mood. This trio of effects together produces greater motivation, reward-seeking approach behaviors, and attentive physiological arousal. In short, the sober man may find himself inhibited from following desired courses of action, of which inhibitions his drugs relieve him.

A second possibility is that the man is dissatisfied with himself when sober and that recreational intoxication inhibits this judgment, but without producing an elevated self-concept as before. This could be achieved by a different cluster of effects of recreational intoxication; that of sedation, numbing, insensibility, blunted affect, and disorientation (including derealization and depersonalization).

A third explanation, this one pragmatic: the man maintains separate peer groups; in one group he claims credit for his sober behavior, and in the other group he claims credit for his intoxicated behavior. One benefit of this arrangement is that the man has opportunities to act according to one group's standards or the others', as suits him, without losing as much face if he did the same without the excuse of intoxication (respectively, without the excuse of sobriety).

One test of this third explanation, as a strategy of general human use (because of course I'm looking at this through the lens of CEV), is to see whether people endorse, in restricted social contexts, other personal conditions of diminished capacity which could excuse them from bearing credit for their acts. People often maintain distinct peer groups wherein they are credited for their youthful acts versus their mature acts. Fatigue, I think, does not present such a strong confirmatory case, maybe because fatigue is too (common, transitory, graded, ...?) for the one to join a group of peers for its occurrence and other peers for its remission. Duress of a limited kind does fit here I think; for example, people can claim as an excuse that they were acting under familial social pressures. The condition of physical disability doesn't fit here, but I'm sure it would if people went through regular phases of physical ability and disability. Mood disorders with phases do fit, I think. Automatism doesn't fit, which is weird from the perspective I used a second ago because it's kind of like a transitory form of disability. "When I'm habituated, that's the real me / When I'm habituated…" I'll have to think about that one more, later. Lycanthropy, though fictional, would certainly fit if it existed. I should probably do a better job unifying the cases where excuses don't fit, especially by analyzing automatism and fatigue, but for the moment this is a satisfying list.

I welcome any alternative explanations of why a person would, at least sometimes, endorse their intoxicated behavior.

Edit: Someone who is more often intoxicated than not might identify more strongly with their more familiar mental state. The lyricist could either be in such condition or wish to persuade others of that he is. This part of the edit I like. The next part is crap.

I don't know my Evo Psych, but I pattern-match this attempt at persuasion as consonant with a certain reproductive strategy; trying to piece my half-thoughts into a full sentence of a theory, it comes out something like this: impulsiveness\risk tasking, criminality, and sensation seeking are, for a man, marks of high testosterone (or high testosterone sensitivity?), which promotes seeking of mates and aggression\competitiveness in domains of male-male conflict (territoriality, mate guarding, food competition), while reducing the individual male's investments into mates and offspring.

The reasons why this testosterone-promoted strategy of high mating investment and low parental investment works...are even more tangled in my mind, and probably causally-disordered. It's clear that men who appear to have a lower mutational load or higher genetic parasite resistance, being more valued by women, can afford to offer less support to those women and to their offspring than can men of lower apparent genetic quality.

"The eugenic man can purchase sex at a lower price" is the usual case. There might be confounding factors relating to, like, seasonality of reproduction, or selection pressures that vary with the prevalence of high versus low parental investment in a breeding population, or...whatever. But with the usual case being usual, if a man's genetic status is known by his potential mates to be quality, or even if his genetic status is uncertain to potential mates, then being neglectful, unfaithful, criminal, impulsive, et cetera, are behaviors to be expected.

I'm not impressed with this as even a micro-theory of human male sociosexuality, but I also don't know the reasons why it's wrong. One problem is that it doesn't account for the unemployment of some other possible counter-signals, like maintaining poor nutritional status. Even if the sociosexual counter-signalling idea were right, the connection to the song lyric is tenuous. Grr.

I'd still appreciate hearing any alternative explanations of the lyric, or pointers for putting the micro-theory aright.

Edit 2: Will Newsome provided two more explanations on twitter. First, the mind of a frequent drug user might be more lethargic when they're sober and more creative when they're drunk or high. The second explanation I'm producing verbatim because I don't trust myself to summarize all of his nuances:

"but there's a moral dimension to the utterance as well that is important. He sees himself as tragically flawed"
"the weeknd is all about being hedonistic to cope with pragmatic-lesson-teaching tragedy, certain kind of chick crack"
"(thereby creating a powerful mate of a man who otherwise would have been expected to remain a genetic contractor so to speak)"

These are good points, and they make me want to write a piece on authenticity and forgery of social appearance in the context of negotiating dyadic intimacy.

Feature Centrality as Conceptual Immutability

Previously I wrote that, given an object category defined over object representations, a prototype might be a set of features distinguished by some nice semi-formal properties:

1.  Prototype feature values are individually typical of the category, so that p(feature value is true of object | object is a category member) is high, and
2. A prototype feature value set is jointly diagnostic of category membership, so that p(object is category member | all the prototype feature values are true of the object ) is high.

This was meant as a plausible weakening of the folk intuition of category essentialism, wherein categories are defined by individually necessary and jointly sufficient criteria.

I also had some underwhelming speculation about replacing typicality with average values for graded and scalar-valued features (meant to capture the notion of "feature centrality"), and a little rant about fuzzy\graded category membership judgements being the result of individuals equivocating between similar but distinctly-motivated categories when they don't have domain expertise or introspective fluency to articulate the criteria distinguishing membership.

I've since mostly given up on the conception of prototypes as weakened-essence feature sets for categories. The experience that motivates people to talk about prototypes of object categories is just mental imagery of category members, which from the outside view is something like inferences about perceptual features of category members. Since these inferences aren't necessarily tied to memories of the situations from which the category's concept was learned, we usually think of prototypes as being unnamed and source-unsituated.

I've also since found a much more persuasive notion of feature centrality: the authors of "Feature Centrality and Conceptual Coherence" (Sloman et al., 1998) give an account of central features of a concept as being those features which are less mutable, in the senses that other object-features depend upon the central ones (within the subject's intuitive explanations of category feature co-occurrence), such that imagining mutations to central features (while maintaining explanatory coherence over the object features) may result in large downstream changes of dependent\peripheral features, with the possible effect of excluding the hypothetical object from category membership. Breathing is a central feature of the concept of birds, because we have difficulty imagining a bird which has never taken breath, except for example if it is stillborn, or if it's an ornament that looks like a bird, et cetera.

Fuzzy membership is still dumb though.

Dyadic Belief Modelling

Let A be a person, and A(B) be a description of person B as given by A.

A(A) will be very close to A, because of A's familiarity with and privileged access to particulars of A's character. Often, deviations between A(A) and A seem like evolutionarily adaptive non-conscious self-deception, producing mistaken inferences which support systematically distorted conclusions of one's own competence or status, which mistaken beliefs make belief-aligned social impression management efforts more persuasive in the minds of others.

Differences between A(B) and (B) will be mostly due to A's unfamiliarity with B, and access to particulars of B's character being costly for A, but there are also distortion effects from evolutionarily-politically-motivated social perception of others,  and distortions of convenience from using resource-inexpensive mental models.

At two levels deep, A(B(A)) corresponds to this situation: we go to A and say, "We asked B for a description of you. What do you think they said?".  A's answer, A(B(A)), might be thought of as properly contained within A(B) - since B's beliefs about A are features of B, but it's also sometimes useful to maintain the distinction. The distortions of A(B(A)) from A(A) will stem from A's guesses of what particulars B knows, or does not know, or misbelieves about A, relative to A(A). Of course, we expect that A(B(A) will be a multiply distorted version of A, but there are also a few improbable opportunities for A(B(A)) to be a more accurate account of A than either A(A) or B(A): A could inaccurately fill in details from A(A) which are unfamiliar to B, and A could incorporate B's presumed-mistaken but actually-accurate beliefs about A, correcting for A's self-misperception.

A(B(B)) is A's account of B's self-misperceptions. It's also properly contained within A(B). Not much to see here.

A(A(A)) is A's account of A's self-misperceptions, properly contained within A(A). Differences between A(A(A)) and A(A) should probably all be due to failures of logical closure; a deductively productive mind can be mistaken about many of their attributes (so that A(A) differs from A), but their beliefs should probably not be mistaken about those beliefs themselves (so that belief in belief contracts to belief, and A(A(A)) becomes equivalent to A(A), and not merely contained within it). Likewise, A(A(B)) should contract to A(B).

At 3rd level, if A thinks that B can contract belief in belief, then A(B(B(A))) becomes A(B(A)), and A(B(B(B) becomes A(B(B)). Of A's eight possible 3rd-level representations of the two people, the only ones which are not trivially contracted are A(B(A(A))) and A(B(A(B))), both of which are properly contained within A(B).

 The first kind is useful for correcting self misperception: Alan muses to himself, "Bettie and Barb say that I under-estimate myself as a programmer, so maybe I'm better than I think," and then contracts his belief in belief with an update.

The second kind, A(B(A(B))) could be elicited in this way: we go to Alan and say, "We asked Bettie to describe herself as you would describe her. What did she say?". Alan thinks of Bettie, A(B), and how she thinks of herself, A(B(B)), and what she knows about Alan, or does not know, or misbelieves (relative to A(A)), which is A(B(A)), ... and then he segfaults and asks you to repeat the question.

"We asked Bettie to describe herself as you would describe her. What did she say?"

Alan starts describing Bettie as he would normally describe her, making small omissions where he thinks Bettie thinks he doesn't know about her, or small substitutions where he thinks Bettie misperceives herself and doesn't know what Alan thinks, and other substitutions where he thinks that Bettie thinks his beliefs are mistaken about her relative to her B(B), when in fact he and Bettie agree, and probably other things, I don't know. This is probably useful for impression management, but I don't want to think about it any more today.

Prototypes

What is a prototype? One hypothesis: given a category defining membership over fully specified things, a prototype is a certain underspecified object whose features are individually typical and jointly discriminative\diagnostic of objects within the category, so that each prototype feature probably holds for an object drawn from the category, and category membership is probable for any object having all the prototype features.

This view of prototypes is just a less committal version of the idea that a category is defined by necessary and sufficient criteria; now a category has (or is associated with a prototype object having) individually kind-of-necessary (i.e. typical) features and jointly kind-of-sufficient (i.e. discriminative) features.

I. Centrality
When I posted this on #slatestarcodex at FreeNode, several people said that a definition of prototypy\prototypicality should make reference to "centrality". What does "centrality" introduce that isn't captured by typicality? Here's a guess: central position refers to average feature values for scalar\graded features of a category. Thus instead of saying that a prototypical willow tree has typical proportions, so that most willow trees have those proportions, we now say that prototypical willow trees have average proportions, whether or not most willow proportions are close to the average value. I don't think this is a very good guess! It would probably help if I had intuitions about the importance of centrality to prototypes.

II.  Underspecification and graded membership
Another comment, this one from grognor alone, was that underspecification wasn't playing a well motivated role in my definition of prototypes. To grognor, a prototype can be a fully specified object, and graded judgements of category membership can be made by gauging the similarity of objects to the prototype.

I'm receptive to the idea that prototypes can be fully specified objects, but I don't think I like the second part. People don't say "This tangelo is 70% an orange", and rarely say things like "Tangelos are more oranges than are lemons." Surely they can make judgements of relative similarity, but those judgements aren't then stated as relative partial memberships.

III. Articulating membership
Or consider, if you ask an articulate person to make a hard-ish categorization, like whether curtains are furniture, they're often capable of providing fine introspective criteria distinguishing category membership definitely. They might say, "Curtains are furniture in the sense of semi-functional, semi-stationary materials which I use to decorate my house, but they are not furniture in the sense of bulky objects that I use to support things off the ground in my house." Or they'll say, "Curtains, like pillows and clocks and dishes, are furnishings, not furniture. That's not a hard categorization. Who do you think you're talking to? I am the queen of home decor categorization judgements. Get out of my kitchen, you uncultured swine."

So some people can figure out distinguishing criteria on-the-fly for different categories, and other people who are familiar with a domain might have a remembered repository of more and finer categories with distinguished labels for objects in the domain. I think it's mostly the less articulate people who are sweating about having to make a binary judgement: the ones who know that words are rough equivocations of categories across minds, but who don't have lots of finely distinguished expert category labels or the ability to invent longer phrases on the fly to explain the motivations behind potentially conflicting membership judgements; to them, hard categorization prompts are a trap. Some people recognize the trap and stop sweating: they give up on reductionism and say, "Curtains are kind of furniture. I'm sure there's no binary answer. Fuzzy concepts. Get with the psychological research zeitgeist." I guess that's fine, and I don't want to trap people. But I don't think I want to make "partial membership" part of my own ontology either.

IV. Uncertain membership
We just saw a fictional case where someone was uncertain about category membership because they didn't know what judgements were relevant to another person's label applications. This is maybe a special case of a category judgement depending on unknown empirical features. Another source of membership uncertainty: the person might not be able to make a confident binary judgement because of logical uncertainty, like if the category is not specified directly in terms of objects having membership\non-membership. Most aren't!

Maybe someday I'll work these sources of membership uncertainty into my definition of prototypes, along with an improved understanding the centrality caveat. And maybe a prototype is still a thing which has individually typical (or central) and jointly discriminative features, but it's fine for any other features to be specified also, in a less principled way, like just cutting and pasting from the population as they do in instance-based statistical learning techniques.

My next post will be about stereotypes as privileged objects of categorical cognition. It's gonna be so sweet.

Tactile Qualia

I'm working on two long essays: one about existential meaning and one about the function of the basal ganglia in time perception, attention, task engagement, and impulsivity. Hopefully those will be complete some time mid-May. Until then, here's some crap about an indecorous quale.
 
The internet does a good job chronicling idiosyncratic human pleasures. One cluster of these I will call "visceral fit", for lack of a better term. (Edit: What a bad term!) The stereotypical elicitor is popping bubble wrap. Visceral fit is felt in response to some haptic stimulation, and other-modality cues that co-occur with that haptic stimulation. Also, I don't know quite how to say it, but, the stimuli which produce the specific quale I'm pinpointing are more textural, and do not extend as clearly to muscular stimulation such as in massage or the relieving one's bladder. (Edit: They're cutaneous sensations!)

One evolutionary domain giving rise to visceral fit qualia is close interpersonal contact, especially through grooming and sex. Elicitors from this domain include the sounds of head scratching, whispering, and various fluid sounds - produced not only by the movement of saliva in the mouth. Connoisseurs of abrasive and fluid sounds can be found at /r/asmr and /r/gonewildaudio, the latter of which is of course porn. Probably the prickly sound and feeling of hair clippers on one's neck falls here too.

Another domain for which the elusive textural stimulation quale pings is that of food. John Allen writes an opinion piece about the evolution of human preference for juicy, crunchy food, concluding that the preference was made adaptive by the prehistoric advent of cooking techniques, rather than finding fixation through the benefits of eating arthropods with chitinous exoskeletons. Some food consumption sounds will provoke disgust in the ordinary human audience, but certainly there are also sounds, perhaps relating to the consumption of crunchy and juicy food, that are pleasing, and which perhaps evoke tactile mental simulation. Maybe the pleasant crackling of fire falls here too.

Disgust does not fully inhibit tactile sensory pleasure, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the reddit community which delights in viewing ruptured cutaneous pathologies. This is the dark and forbidden side of grooming pleasure, and I will not provide a link.

Those are the more easily interpreted elicitors. /r/oddlysatisfying chronicles many other things which produce the quale: Things fitting tightly into receptacles or coming into synchronous alignment. Materials being cut and abraded from surfaces of objects. Changes throughout entire object volumes, such as by crushing, shattering, shredding, melting, and deformations to elastic solids, viscous fluids, and semi-solid mixtures.

There is a great diversity of things that produce tactile simulation pleasures, and the whole thing feels a little bit naughty. Someone with too much time or the right comparative advantage should write about it with a better informed and more cutting analysis than I have provided here, because brains are interesting, and shared aesthetics are kind of important, and naughty things are fun.

Edit: Q-tips in ears! Can't believe I didn't think to bring that up. When stimuli in other modalities trigger a tactile response, the cross-modal response is so very much like cotton swabs in the ear. As for other-modality stimuli that I failed to mention: Some people get gooseflesh when they listen to music and call it "frisson" (though most of the stuff on /r/frisson doesn't do it for me, so maybe there's wide variance in which music triggers which people?). I should look at what else produces gooseflesh. And let's not forget sparkles! Some people get ASMR from looking at sparkles. Like a visual-to-haptic synaesthesia. So now I'm looking into tactile hallucinations, goosebumps, and music-frisson generally (which has a much larger literature than ASMR for some reason). Did you know that there are different cutaneous receptors for different kinds of mechanical stimulation? Maybe I can distinguish elicitors of good feelings associated with each kind of cutaneous mechanoreceptor. If that categorization seems compelling, it would make for a pleasing correspondence between aesthetic concepts and aesthetic hardware. To the literature!

The English Texture Lexicon

Categories excerpted from (Bhushan, Rao, Lohse, 1997), with small modifications where I feel like it.

I. Structured?

• Well ordered, repetitive: faceted, crystalline, lattice, regular, repetitive, periodic, rhythmic, harmonious, well-ordered, cyclical, simple, uniform, fine, smooth,
• Random, disordered: complex, messy, random, disordered, jumbled, scrambled, discontinuous, indefinite, asymmetrical, nonuniform, irregular,
• Semi-ordered, irregular segmentation: marbled, veined, scaly,

II. Lines and edges:

• Linear orientation: pleated, corrugated, ribbed, grooved, ridged, furrowed, lined, striated, stratified,
• Local linear orientation: wizened, crows-feet, rumpled, wrinkled, crinkled, cracked, fractured,
• Global contours: flowing, whirly, swirly, winding, corkscrew, spiralled, coiled, twisted,
• Two linear orientations:  matted, fibrous, knitted, woven, meshed, net-like, cross-hatched, chequered, grid, honeycombed, waffled, zigzag,
• Multiple orientations, non-orthogonal, indistinct edges: gauzy, cobweb, webbed, interlaced, entwined, intertwined, braided, frilly, lace-like,

III. Random placement of small convex regions:

• Two dimensional, indistinct edges: mottled, blemished, blotchy, smeared, smudged, stained,
• Two dimensional, sharp edges: spattered, sprinkled, freckled, speckled, flecked, spotted, polka-dot, dotted,
• Three dimensional (raised, depressed): bubbly, bumpy, studded, porous, potholed, pitted, holey, perforated, gouged,

Cue Integration and Sensory Fusion

One paradigm in psychology for modelling perception is that of cue integration, where a few sensory cues are presented to a subject, and researchers elicit judgements of some parameter value of the subject's model of the data generating process. This method is a bit primitive, making no use of modern neural imaging technology or statistical learning theory, so we expect that the cue integration paradigm must fail to shed light on many aspects perception and reasoning, such as the formation of structured conceptual categories and intuitive theories of, say, classical dynamics, natural language grammar, or social interactions. Still we have learned some things from cue integration studies, and this post will engage with some of the ideas of the sub-field.

Some signals (or our distributions for them) are mutually informative: learning testable information about one signal reduces the entropy of our distribution on the other signal. We know intuitively to look for relations and correspondences between cues which are coincident (co-occurring or source co-located). When percepts are higher dimensional, they can often be summarized with spatiotemporal coordinates, and correspondences between the coordinates often take the form of alignments, which might be produced by transforming signals to a common frame of reference. For example, neuronal columns originating in our retinas follow their initial retinal organization (their eccentricity (central vs. peripheral location) and their polar angle) surprisingly far into the brain, but their data are eventually transformed into a common coordinate frame through depth estimation, which is largely done by inverting the parallax disparity of the two visual streams. More abstract percepts with coordinates, like scene maps, are also fit objects for alignment.

The correspondences mentioned so far (signal co-occurrence supporting an inference to a common signal source, and alignment of spatio-temporal coordinates when high dimensional percepts are gained through different perspectives of a common referent) are sort of, like, workable inferences from immediately present data. If we leverage prior information, then we might get more "semantic" data correspondences, like the inference that small people have higher voices (or that deeper heard voices probably originate in larger vocal tracts). That inference is sort of supported by an intuitive theory of acoustic resonance, and other semantic correspondences often have interpretations as relying on intuitive modelling of domain structure. For example, cultures intuitively cluster animals by a hierarchy of types, with degrees of similarities described through familial relations ("chimps are cousins to humans"), which is like an intuitive theory of phylogenetic origin of species through natural selection on individuals with mutated phenotypes in a breeding population.

Whatever the source of structure, perceptual cues are often mutually informative, and brains leverage this in estimation of world states. One simple way to combine cues is to take a weighted average of measured values (for example, estimates of a thing's position based on visual sense vs. haptic sense). If our state of knowledge about the signal modality is normal (like if we just know the first two moments of our received data over past observations and we expect that these statistics will hold for future observations), then we are licensed by our information to model the data sources with normal distributions - and if we take each signal's averaging weight according to the reliability of the distribution (the inverse of its covariance), then we're probably doing something like maximum likelihood estimation with a Kalman filter, and our end estimate will be an improved Gaussian (because the reliabilities of the measurements sum, maybe) over the thing's position.

That kind of combination of signal evidence in estimation is the thing that's most often meant by "cue integration". Another thing you could kind of call cue integration, or better yet "sensory fusion", concerns how things get efficiently represented in the brain, and is more related to the domain structure learning (like of concepts and theories), which then support those simpler cue integration parameter estimations.

Short of bayesian nonparametric structure learning or whatever the hell you're doing when you throw a neural net at a problem, we could just model the relation between two recurrent sensory cues in isolation. One way to examine how the brain relates two mutually informative sensory cues is to experimentally introduce systematic bias in one of the cues, and observe the learning times before subjects recalibrate their estimates. For example, psychologists going back to Helmholtz have enjoyed placing prismatic goggles on subjects and watching them stumble around. In addition to manipulating mean values of sensory cues, you could probably introduce changes in signal covariance, with interesting results (I guess it would be like gain modulation, if averaging weights are based on reliabilities).

I feel like I should have more to say confidently about sensory fusion, but I'm mostly drawing a blank for anything motivated by even a hint of mathematical understanding. How about some wild speculation?

Speculation on reliable coupling vs. efficient coding: the more reliable is the relation between two recurrent sensory cues, the more likely the brain is to produce a sensory fusion, i.e. to consider or remember only the final combined estimate. This reduction of redundant information to sparse signals is why we think intuitively of vision and taste-smell as being roughly two and half sense modalities, rather than because of the differential presence of receptive organelles at the periphery of those senses. Also, something something short codes for things of common importance, degrees of neural representation as a determinant of estimate dominance in addition to distribution reliability.

Speculation on reliable coupling vs. learning plasticity: if the relation between two recurrent sensory cues is important but unreliable (where "importance" as an experimental construct might come from, like, introducing a loss function in a decision problem), then recalibration occurs faster than if the relation were reliable. If a relation is expected to change only slowly, then beliefs will be revised only slowly (or by small revisions).

Further, if cue coupling reliably occurs in one of a few parameter regimes, then learning will be fast in changing between those regimes as representations, but slow in calibrating to new ones. For example, your eyes are basically a fixed width apart, but there's a tiny bit of variation because they can swivel in their orbits; thus wild speculation predicts that the brain will have dedicated machinery for quickly adapting its interpretation of binocular signals over a small range of monocular swivels, but that perceptions will be screwed up if eyes are swivelled a lot, or if parallax disparity between monocular signals doesn't match what you would see for eye sockets situated a fixed distance apart within your skull. Or, instead of continuous variation in the parameter regime, maybe you're just used to having psychologists put prismatic goggles on you, and so you can switch your motor coordination pretty quickly with altered context.

The end?

Virtue and Vice

Content: some rambling thoughts on the particulars of a vast psychological construct; dense with lists.

A lot of virtues/vices concern treatment of others. General distinctions of treatment toward others include praising vs. blaming, complimenting vs. insulting, welcoming vs. shunning, helping vs. interfering with, caring for vs. hurting, giving to vs. taking from, expressing gratitude vs. contempt toward, and forgiving vs. remembering transgressions.

Depending on your social roles/titles, others will think that you have a duty to treat certain people/groups well, and depending on whether you do a supererogatory or insufficient job of this, they may designate you with corresponding virtues/vices, like respectful/disrespectful, loyal/disloyal, reciprocating/exploitative, trustworthy/manipulative, and scrupulous/prejudiced.

I don't have a good grasp on what sort of standard relationships exist in human societies. There are some more reciprocal/bidirectional relations like kin, partners, friends, fellows, members, citizens (with nouns for the corresponding standards of behaviour generated by adding the suffix "-ship"), and then there are more asymmetric relationships like between (omitting the second party of the relationship for brevity) designers, producers, lessors, rulers, judges, guardians, caretakers, representatives, mediators, advisers, teachers, managers, investors, patrons, and employers. Maybe these relationships are all like vendor/customer pairs, and they each detail a different set of social goods provided - tangible goods, information goods, designs, advice, transferable resource access rights, domain expertise, services, loans, insurance, stable trade opportunities under the employer's conditions, persuasive/prestigious/impartial decision making, protection, repairs, improvements, customization, et cetera.

Ownership and stewardship are commonly thought of as relations between a person and an inanimate object or resource, but these relations also have normative consequences for other parties - just as much as the other relations detailed so far¹, and the presence of these relations in a community/society also contributes to communal/institutional judgements of what preferential treatment an actor should perform toward which parties.

That sketches some conceptual content surrounded virtues/vices which are based on interpersonal treatment viewed through role obligations derived from established social relations. Another large swath of virtue and vice falls under the heading of willpower: patience and caution vs. recklessness, diligence and high standards vs. carelessness and neglect, abstinence and moderation vs. desire and indulgence, and regulated emotional stability vs. unregulated emotional volatility.

One commonly finds words with positive connotations on both sides of the pairs in this section, but largely the trend in moral rhetoric is to endorse more self-control.

Also, people can get virtue/vice credit through the abstinence/indulgence facet based on whether they engage in or avoid acts that evoke disgust or indignation in an ordinary human observer, regardless of whether the actor feels tempted or resists temptation. Standard elicitors of disgust are things associated with pathogens (bodily effluvia, symptoms of transmissible disease, body envelope violations, corpses, spoiled food, vermin), some sex acts (often based on the partner, and often having an interpretations as being costly to the one's reproductive fitness), and some atypical/abnormal physical/psychological conditions (where the emotive force probably comes from a mix of the disease-avoidance and costly-mate avoidance heuristics).

The largest remaining part of virtue/vice construct as it appears to my introspection at this late hour is competence/incompetence. When there is no large harm or temptation or indecency surrounding an act, then we apply somewhat less morally charged labels for judging conduct, like elegant/inexpert, productive/wasteful, clever/hackneyed, versatile/limited.

I  don't have any good idea of why some personality descriptors seem (to me tonight) like virtues/vices, while some others have positive/negative connotations, but do not seem like virtues/vices. I should probably check these ideas against my rambling notes on the topic from previous years. Maybe that will be a future post.

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1. For example, full owners can manage the access and use that others make of a resource, can revocably transfer rights for trustees to manage others' use and access of the resource, and can irrevocably alienate their title of ownership to another party. In the absence of these acts or in the other party's absence of particular knowledge as to how the owner has parcelled out jural rights to other parties, then parties usually have in rem duties to respect the owner's reasonably-assumed exclusive access, use, and management of the resource without term limit.

Valuing Names and Learning to Care

I intended to put these ideas in a post called "Living in Your Name" (which I might finish writing someday for all you know!), but they stand alone pretty well, so I'm posting early.

I. Valuing names 

Consider a type of impression management, where you select your conduct with regard to descriptions and designations that people might plausibly apply to that conduct. This might be termed "acting with regard to names-in-general."

You might concern yourself determining the applicability of conduct labels because:

1. Terminal: Your preferences over conduct label applications are fairly terminal, ex. you want to hear compliments, or you want others to think well of you (perhaps even if their beliefs are mistaken). If you had no other terminal preferences but these, it would perhaps be desirable to intervene directly on (to force the value of) your beliefs, or others' speech, or others' beliefs about your conduct, at any given time.
2. Evidential-Terminal: Your preferences over conduct label applications are based on the evidence they give about your conduct, about which you have relatively terminal preferences. If you had no other terminal preferences in this case, hearing a person apply some preferred label to your conduct would generally be good news, but you would be indifferent about it if you learned that the person was uninformed/misinformed about your conduct, or that they were being dishonest, or even if you realized that you'd already accounted for their information about your conduct by conditioning on other indicators. Likewise you would be indifferent about label application if you were certain about the character of your conduct. Unless you (the rhetorical subject, momentarily assumed to have evidential preferences over label applications) also had terminal preferences over label applications, you would probably be indifferent to making, or would want not to make, a direct intervention on others' speech or on your beliefs in regard to labels, unless you had good reason to believe that doing so would improve your conduct, or unless you were sure that your conduct would not suffer but that you could receive some other gain.
3. Evidential-Instrumental-Terminal: Here again, the contours of your preferences over applied labels come from how those labels inform/constrain your beliefs about the desirable character of your conduct, but then those desirabilities in turn are derived from how you expect your conduct to achieve terminally desirable conditions (which, in full generality, might include preferences over your conduct beliefs, others' beliefs about you, your actual conduct, et cetera ad infinitum). Psychologically, many of our more-terminal-seeming preferences seem not to make reference to manners of conduct, and instead focus on ....momentary, local material conditions of individual experience? Those words aren't quite right, but some kind of temporal independence gets close to the issue. I dunno. Here's a dumb example of a solely instrumental preference over conduct: you want to be good at chess because you're playing Death for your soul, but external conditions held equal, you don't care about your chess competence, and absent the causal contingencies which make the manner of conduct useful, you wouldn't trade desirable external conditions for greater chess competence.

I don't know if these are exhaustive in any interesting sense, but it seems like the terminal / instrumental value distinction is commonly established, while (non-instrumental) evidential preference is somewhat neglected in rationality rhetoric, while being of comparable status. Perhaps notably, I'm missing Instrumental-Terminal and Instrumental-Instrumental-Terminal categories, where learning that a conduct label reasonably applies to you helps you to perform more effectively, according to the standards associated with the conduct label (I hope to extensively detail ways that this happens in the full post on Living in Your Name). And then, of course there's {evidential preference over conduct label applications derived from evidential preferences over actual conduct derived from terminal preferences over outcomes}, whose behavioural incidents should be obvious.

Learning to care:

Preferences are often not easily categorized into just one of these three templates, especially not in the presence of stable causal contingencies. For example, if an indicator (like a person's verbal judgement) is reliably informative about something that you care about (your conduct), then, as you become accustomed to that contingency, you may find yourself caring about the indicator value even when it's not informative about the value of the indicated thing. Likewise, if good chess performance reliably protects your soul (or is exhilarating, or trains your rationality, or whatever), then the desire to be (more) competent at chess at any moment will start to feel more terminal, and perhaps it does in fact become a more terminal preference. If so, then the establishment and extinction of stable causal contingencies is a potent source of value drift in humans, but in a totally uninteresting way.

Edit: If phenomena like the endowment effect and sour grapes are not merely instrumental or performative - if we learn through habit of motivated focus to more strongly and terminally prefer those world conditions (outcomes, experiences, stable attributes of moral character, ...) that reliably hold, and to more strongly and terminally dislike conditions that we reliably can not easily achieve - that suggests there are a few more kinds of adaptive preference formation worth including in a rich classification of issues that prevent a clean factoring of preferences over applicability of conduct labels according to paths of derivation from stable terminal preferences. Maybe? Hmm.

A Condensed Pile of Sacred Persuasive Tactics

While starting to read Sister Sarah's recent essay, "What is Ritual?" I became predictably sidetracked, by the second sentence. It's such a good sentence! She references six pages of hopeless confusions about what rituals are; how can I resist the temptation to engage with that implicit challenge? In particular, here, I want to see, prior to reading the rest of her essay, if I can synthesize a good description of Ritual by combining the better points from those six pages of hopelessly confused definitions.

The short version, consisting of the things that seem especially important to me after having done that synthesis, is this: Rituals are theatrical productions wherein participant actors are made to suspend their disbelief in their stylized narrative interactions, so that they will feel strong emotions, the perception of which leads them to revise their concepts of their communal relations in non-ritual contexts, and to more strongly adopt traditional cultural values and ideology.

Here's the very long version, which doesn't add much (now is a good time to stop reading):

A ritual is a certain formal, customary, traditional event. It is distinguished as extraordinary from mundane, quotidian affairs. It is scheduled to occur at a specific time (an occasion of cultural significance) and at a dedicated place. The event is an extended episode, having a prior-specified and commonly known sequence. The beginning and end of the ritual are distinguished and clearly recognizable to the ritual's audience.

The ritual consists of standard, pre-specified, scripted and rehearsed coordinated acts of a group of people who normally interact as a community. Individual participants will suppress the salience of their daily interests, and temporarily adopt-as-play some indicated role-identities, with associated ritual acts.

"Play identities" is meant to point in the direction of assumptions which are commonly understood as false, but which the group temporarily acts toward as-through-true. This sense of play as common-understanding pragmatic dishonesty, in other contexts often serving the purpose of entertainment, does not require gaiety of the participants, and is to be distinguished from insincerity: ritual participants, suppressing their mundane daily interests, will often feel serious and intense emotions aligned with their false, adopted role-interests.

The role-acts of rituals are often stylized, animated, rhythmic gestures. Spoken dialogue may imitate the speech of iconic (historical or mythic) figures. Acts may form a narrative, presenting interactions between participants having culture-specific symbolism. Strong emotions are evoked by narratives involving vivid perception of past remembered or imagined experience, and by other topics of far-mode value significance, such as personal human connection to primordial and cosmic order.

The actors of the ritual are also its audience. There is a cycle of anticipation and satisfying confirmation of the rituals's continuation that the audience finds in the multi-modal stimulation of their senses by the ritual acts, which is achieved by rehearsed familiarity with the ritual and by within-ritual repetition.

The audience's deep emotional involvement, far-mode orientation, suspension of disbelief, and shared focus make them commonly receptive and suggestible to far-mode narrative messages, which the ritual provides by highlighting the importance of cultural values, concerns, ideology, and norms. The narrative may frame traditional values as solutions to narrative dilemmas, or scripted dialogue may directly call for participants to assert their regard for cultural values, or participants may implicitly affirm ideology which is implicit in the concepts of their dialogue, as when one's lines include an appeal to gods for miraculous intercession.  These messages might be called morally persuasive or Meaningful with a capital M, in the that they prioritize communal values over mundane personal interests, and they are presented through narratives with stirring far-mode cultural icons and symbolism. These messages are often framed as the result of communication with the Sacred and Supernatural.

Another function of ritual is to use the colour of authority of the Sacred or Supernatural to make legitimate in the minds of the community some newly established (negotiated or imposed) social roles and relationships, which will be recognized outside of the ritual context. These involve whether the person will be ostracised or allowed present, and what the conditions of their participation will be, or what normative conditions will apply to people interacting with the subject, as summarized in the subject's duties, liberties, claim-rights, authorities, et cetera.

Of course the first function of ritual, the motive-internalization of communal values, concerns, ideology, and norms, will be a factor influencing the negotiation of roles, along with more mundane things like whether the person has adequate skills to receive some specific status upgrade.

Pragmatic Meanings of Tautologies

In this post, I fail to spend even twenty seconds searching google scholar for linguistics articles about tautologies. What a waste of time, recapitulating a trivial subject.

When people say "It is what it is," they're halting their negative affective valuations of the status quo, for lack of a foreseen exit ("I am what I am," and "Boys will be boys (regardless of your interventions)," have much the same character). There is a fair argument for the short-term instrumental value of this epistemic practice. An argument against the long-term rationality of using fatalistic arguments to trivialize the attentional import of present setbacks lies in the existence of slow learning rates affecting some instrumental motives and habits of behavior. Non-plastic motives and habits may become maladaptive in changed causal contexts, such as when an organism unlearns its natural agency to avoid aversive stimuli.

As with most issues of epistemic practice, this was put most eloquently by Steven Kaas:

Many acquire the serenity to accept what they cannot change, only to find the "cannot change" is temporary and the serenity is permanent.
— Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) October 16, 2010

Similar tautologies have similar fatalistic power to halt trains of thought: "What's done is done," seems to conflate our (usual) (in)ability to change the past with our ability to recognize the causes of a catastrophe and, armed with that understanding, to mitigate the potential re-occurrence of similar harms. "What will be will be," has some of the stopping-power of "It is what it is" to inhibit one's attempts to positively alter undesirable aspects of present courses of affairs, while also trivializing motives to seek information aiding prediction of future states.

There is another class of literal tautologies that people make common use of, exemplified by "Corn is corn." The pragmatic meaning of this utterance is that there is little variation across products-recognized-as-corn with respect to the functions one wishes to make of it, such that one quantity of corn can usually substitute for an equal quantity. Recognizing the fungibility of a good is, among other things, a way to trivialize the consideration one gives to the causal origin of the good (kind of like an assertion of path independence, saying your preferences are indifferent w.r.t. changes in the production of corn). If someone forcefully tells you that a class of things is itself, maybe it becomes prudent to investigate which variation in the attributes or origins of the things they are implicitly claiming you should be indifferent toward.

Here's another set of tautologies I think form a natural category; see if you can identify the commonalities of pragmatic meaning:  "It's not over till it's over," "Enough is enough," "I'll see you when I see you."

The literal-but-pragmatically-informative tautologies I most want to talk about, and the ones that motivated this post, are "No means No" and "Yes means Yes", common political slogans of feminism. (It's kind of wondrous to me, from a emotionally-detached primatologist perspective, that humans can effectively rally around slogans that are tautologies.)

"No means No," endorses a social maxim of taking people's statements of preference at face value, or of setting a low bar for judging when demands of omission of performance are reasonable and deserving of compliance in the domain of sexuality, in order to reduce the expected harms of sexual assault from present levels.

"Yes means Yes" has much the same content, but it emphasizes and prescribes adherence to a social maxim of presuming-by-default the non-consent of other people to involvement in sexual acts, absent their verbal utterance to the contrary.

My understanding of the slogan since I first heard it had been roughly that. But it was only today that I read the phrase "presumed non-consent", and was able to articulate its actual pragmatic message. Unfortunately, I read the phrase "presumed non-consent" in a discussion about markets trading in human organs, and not in (direct) connection with feminism. Maybe tautologies aren't the best possible marketing scheme for clear transmission of ideas.

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Edit: ValueOfType on twitter mentions the case of "rules are rules", and attempts to give an explanation.

The first pragmatic interpretation that springs to my mind is this: There is some piece of advice whose value the audience is considering in their present situation. The speaker categorizes the advice as a rule - a category of advice whose central characteristic is that such advice is reliably and generally worth following, even in cases where the actor has salient doubts about the unconditional application of the advice. (Ideally the speaker judges the worth of the advice by a mature, informed extrapolation of the volition of the audience, but more realistically they will judge by their own preference (or by typical human preferences in cases where the speaker knows that their own preferences are non-representative)). The speaker, having made this categorization for themselves, does not consider the particulars of the situation facing the audience (since rules are applied unconditionally), and they pass without comment on the calculation justifying their categorization of the advice as a rule (which may not be persuasive given the salience of the situation facing the audience).

Instead of asserting, "This advice is a central example of a rule, meriting general compliance," they effectively assert, "Rules merit general compliance", and thus assume the categorization (and assume away issues of categorization) as part of the context or background assumptions of the conversation going forward.

(Framing a disagreement in this way, as depending on the audience's failure to consider an issue of common understanding, might make a good entry for an ArgumentTropes wiki, perhaps under the title Friendly Reminder Conceit).

This perspective unifies at least two of the previously analyzed classes of tautologies: "X is X," often means, "It is a firm assumption of mine that the case you are contemplating is a central example of the category X (with respect to my preferences and the uses I have for X), having the static and central characteristics of that category - which categorization does not merit further consideration of present particulars."

A Duty To Investigate?

Do we have a moral duty to investigate moral issues?  In what sense, if any, are we morally required to contemplate the consequences of our decisions, or the issues we prioritize? When are we obligated to determine particulars of our environment, such as the social norms that our culture enforces or the mental character of creatures that may sometimes deserve treatment as moral patients? Which unintuitive arguments or concepts, with potentially broad consequences for our decisions, must we give consideration?

I. Grounding terms.

We say that an act is necessary for achieving of a goal when the ways of achieving the goal without performing the act are difficult, costly,  or expected non-existent. When one's goal is to suppress certain intrusive thoughts associated with emotive evaluations (especially shame and sympathy), then cached strategies by which one has learned to suppress those thoughts might be called necessities or obligations of conscience. Obligations of conscience on a common topic, especially serving to promote the interests of another person or cause, might be called in collection a "natural duty" (to that person or cause)  (in contrast with negotiated duties of contract). Specific natural duties and obligations of conscience are often associated with established social roles.

Asking if you have a natural duty of interest (hereafter, duty) or an obligation of conscience (hereafter, obligation) can be asking whether the interest is moral (respectively, whether the act is justified with respect to the interest, or with respect to morality). On the other hand, asking if you have a duty or obligation can also be asking whether you your mind should motivate you (w.r.t the cause or the act) by intrusive thoughts and pangs of conscience. It is a remarkable feature of cognitive executive function (or a remarkable delusion of introspection) that one can sometimes decide whether an emotion is useful in a context of experience, and that the emotion will then happen or not in that context accordingly. The purpose of this text is to begin identifying issues determining whether certain duties to investigate are useful, on which basis relevant pangs of conscience may arise or be extinguished.

Pangs of conscience, being intrusive to the normal course of our thoughts, and often serving to promote the interests of others, have much in common with demands of performance (or omission) made to us by other people. Thus a moral duty (cf. obligation) is a type of morally justified motive (cf. act) that people will often frame as compliance with the demands of the moral authority of conscience (or the demands of law, or of one's social role, or other sources of normative advice which people internalize by pangs of conscience). Isn't that a cool perspective? Far out.

I'm not going to stick strictly to the duty/obligation distinction, because humans don't really stick to a strict hierarchy of instrumental and terminal intents, and also because I suck.

II. Negligence, Liability, and, Standards of Preventative Care.

This section was motivated by my reading some tort law, which is why it's all about harm. There are probably often symmetric moral motives relating to the production of Good through means other than harm prevention (though these motives are a little different from duties in that understanding them might not result in pangs of conscience). 

Often, we expect that magnitudes of expected future harms will decrease with preventative effort. When this is the case, we may have moral duties to invest effort into harm reduction.  For example, you may have some of the following duties:

A) Duty to investigate which expected harms may occur in foreseeable futures: This duty is especially likely to apply to you if 1) you have a comparative advantage in reducing or preventing those harms, or if 2) others expect you to make such efforts as part of your assumed social roles, or if 3) you yourself may have enabled those harms through your unconsidered action (for example, by hiring and giving resources and colour of authority to someone who can not safely perform their job). A strongly related duty is to contemplate unintended consequences of acts that you are contemplating or committed to performing, including speech acts, and perhaps acts of cognition.

B) The Duty to investigate ways to reduce magnitudes of expected harm. This may include obligations such as a) identifying guiding principles of behaviour (such as ethical theories, or established "good practices" of  a field or enterprise), or b) examining new applications of technology or academic theory to identified potential future harms (E.g. physical barriers to limit accidental contact with dangerous objects, social and economic theory to reduce undesirable market inefficiencies). Strongly associated is the duty to find acts which are forward compatible with your plans and priorities in different foreseeable futures (including ways to manage harms if you become incapacitated).

C) The duty to contemplate moral and normative principles: You may do this indirectly, by teasing out a naturalistic meta-ethics that accords with your moral intuitions in regard to the functioning of goal-directed agents in general, or directly, such as by a) inferring important concepts and evaluative principles that can be used to explain and interpret observed judgements of culture and conscience, (especially concepts which address present conceptual confusions) or b) extending these concepts and principles to judge unfamiliar cases as they arise or are foreseen, or c) reflectively applying aspects of your evaluative cognition, such as emotions and persuasive arguments, to understanding your evaluative cognition, in order to produce coherent preferences commanding your endorsement, or d) identifying cases where your behaviour does not accord with your endorsed values or their joint implications.  Closely related is the duty to infer possible judgements and intents motivating another person's actions, and use them as moral evidence informing your own behaviour (E.g. before you remove Chesterton's fence), especially if the person has better information or better philosophical authority in issues of the domain where they're acting.

Those are some possible investigative duties relating to the prevention of harm. In the case where expected future harm reduction is an increasing function of invested effort, how much effort are we obligated to give?

One answer with deontological character might say, "If you are in a position to discover whether X is the case, and the case of X is grave matter, then you have a duty to investigate X." 

A more utilitarian answer considers costs of preventative (investigative) effort vs. expected returns on harm reduction, and strikes a balance. A modification of this answer considers comparative advantages of different people in reducing a common notion of harm, and suggests a socially optimal joint assignment of preventative labour, maximizing the production of social welfare with respect to the common notion of harm. Another modification considers liabilities that society imposes on people for failing to meet certain "reasonable standards of care" with respect to harms of a specific domain. Someone interested in mechanism design might consider how these liabilities and standards of care are effectively formulated, and what outcomes they serve, and what moral consideration one should give to them (or to the outcomes that they would serve in some limit of strategic social coordination better representing society's "revealed preference"). 

One consideration society gives in the per-case formulation of standards of care is the culpability of the state of mind of the actor. As Larry Alexander writes in "Insufficient Concern: A Unified Conception of Criminal Culpability", "Even very tiny risk-impositions can be reckless if imposed for insufficient or misanthropic reasons, just as very large risk-impositions can be nonculpable if supported by weighty reasons." The decision whether to impose liabilities on an actor for recklessness or insufficient care (made by individuals operating under colour of society's authority to judge) will often depend ultimately on whether the actor's conduct "can be understood in terms that arouse sympathy in the ordinary citizen". Thus your own sympathy towards your self or toward others may be an effective tool for establishing personal standards of requisite care, in cases where harm prevention increases with invested effort.

III. Duties not to investigate.

There may be cases where the balance of invested effort, expected returns of utility from investigating, and the external imposition of liabilities may proscribe contemplation or investigation, in part or whole.

For example, I think some Islamic traditions, as part of maintaining the church's claim to moral authority, will proscribe laity from independent reasoning on moral issues (ijtihad) until the one has gained a title as a legal scholar.

As much as there are role-dystonic social thoughts, we expect that there are role-dystonic investigations (E.g., "Finding the most self-serving acts consistent with one's altruistic self image" as an investigative act inconsistent with an altruistic self image).

A more familiar example might be hyper-consciousness sometimes found in OCD, where intrusive thoughts are not easily suppressed, and one's brain consequently devotes excessive serial resources to analyzing some unproductive topic, like imaging harms befalling one's family members. In this case, one might be justified in using decision-bundling cognitive reappraisal to try to ignore a topic of contemplation entirely.

Other templates of hazardous information fit here. For example, you might not want to seek out information that would arouse the suspicion or wrath of powerful people.

I have two other examples here, not covered by the standard list of hazardous information templates, but I don't like to talk about them, because I think I might have a duty to not contemplate, and this duty might extend to other people.

IV. Conclusions, some of them related to the preceding text.
Do we have duties to investigate? Probably, a lot of the time, investigation and contemplation produce valuable results, and we are justified in investing investigative efforts at moderate personal cost, especially when we feel responsible for preventing possible harms, such as when others expect it of our social role or when we have comparative advantage in harm prevention. Should we be motivated in general by pangs of conscience? I don't know. Thoughts promoting attention to issues of high moral value makes a lot of sense as part of a mind architecture, but it also seems like our consciences could be more sensibly built. Given that we do have consciences, and that we sometimes don't do the right thing without their pangs, how much effort should our consciences demand of us in cases where production of Good increases with effort? Whatever level of effort evokes sympathy in the ordinary citizen, enough that they wouldn't impose liabilities on you for tortious reckless ignorance, the correct level is probably higher than that. Maybe we need a praiseworthy Schelling point, like "10% of your income". Finally, in cases where you expect that investigating or contemplating a topic would not lead to good consequences, maybe don't investigate.  Pretty controversial stuff, I know.