An insult to sociopaths.

Good stuff, Will.

Second, revealed preference is a red herring. It is perfectly reasonable to have a research program which says “I don't really care what preferences are, all I care about is the accuracy of my model's predictions of observed behavior.”

Third, simulation is a good thing, not “tautological.” Once you can simulate humans you can predict the impact of various policies/actions. If you can simulate their happiness you can predict which policies or actions will make people happiest.

The name of the game is simulation and making good predictions. Enriching the “homo economicus” actor to create a higher-fidelity simulation can only be a good thing.

Of course sometimes you get good enough simulation with a low-fidelity homo-economicus. In such cases “simulation” degenerates into solving some simple linear equation (demand/supply, etc.).

So the goodness of different varieties of homo economicus is entirely a question of how appropriately they tradeoff between simplicity and accuracy, for the purposes of a particular analysis.

The give-and-take of a blog forum isn't the best place to ask someone for empirical proof of every single claim every time it is uttered. It's too quick of a moving forum for that. What, for example, is your proof that the “real work” of philsophy is arguing on ethical positions — particularly black and white manifestations of ethical positions (“alturism OR egoism” . . . “Coke OR Pepsi . . . why not neither?)

At this point, I think Will is exploring one of the premises that we base our ethics on. If another premise is true, then perhaps another intellectual direction, and thus another ehtical position might be justified.

'A lunatic is a man who has lost everything but his reason.'

D'oh!

In other words, we preserve the notion that Homo Economicus is solving an optimization problem, but now it is solving a less crude optimization problem.

There's something to this, and it seems useful to preserve the idea of optimization. In fact, I doubt there's any alternative. When you make a decision you weigh options, and you must reject some options as bad. That's optimization. Every model of a human must have this property.

Every action someone does they do for their own reasons. Even the person who wants to helps the poor does it because they get off on helping the poor (it makes them feel better or less guilty, or helps them get to heaven). Even the person who jumps on the grenade does it because they want to see their friends live (that provides greater joy, meaning, etc. than preserving his or her life).

The simplest answer is that norm-enforcement is a resistance to change, so we should set up a good world with good norms, and then norm-enforcement will help us by protecting that world against bad change.
But that's not really interesting, because we already know that we want a good world with good norms. It's not interesting that conformism could help stabilize that world.

A second answer would be that we could use this understanding of conformity to create a psychologically-aware theory of social change. If you put this theory together with the right vision for society, you get a blueprint for beneficial social change.

It would be worth mentioning that social change is a deeply-studied topic. Anyone who wants to change the world has to know something about conformity (and self-interest, and all sorts of other psychological phenomena). Is Will proposing to extend this field of study in a certain way? Maybe sic the economists on it? A quantitative (economics-style) approach can certainly be helpful, although I would guess some work has been done in this direction…

Finally, conformity and economics seem to intersect especially in the fields of advertising, innovation, and politics. It might be worth investigating the psychological or economic subfields relevant to these topics, to see whether the social scientists are using fuller models of humans when they study what happens here.

The thing is, my guess is that they already are. But it's possible they might not be.

This line: “The creature moved solely by instrumental, self-regarding rationality has a name: sociopath. ” reminded me of GK Chesterton's epigram:

'A lunatic is a man who has everything but his reason.'

This: “The stone heaved through the window of the suspicious gentlemen bachelors: this too is altruism. ” is brilliant, profound and unforgettable. It will be on my mind for weeks.

We all differ in our tastes, our convictions, our behavour, our virtues and vices, etc.
And that's just within one culture at one period in human history. If you widen your observations to take in different cultures and societies at different times and places you see an even greater array of human motivations and behaviours.

Which leads me to ask how anyone can take seriously this kind of pseudo-scientific reductionism? Especially when the real work of philosophy should be to argue for an ethical position (altruism versus egoism, say) and not assume that we are programmed to act irrespective of the norms our cultures accepts, or the values we choose to adopt.