Stanford scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will | Hacker News Reader

Stanford scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will

latimes.com

> This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.

> “The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over,” Sapolsky said. “We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.”

I don't how much the reporter has embellished things but this seems really, really, really silly.

"People have no free will" does not mean that "incentives don't matter." Obviously, or we could simply prove that free will exists by noting that incentives do, in fact, matter.

Would more people create Ponzi schemes if they didn't have examples like Madoff and SBF of it all crashing down? Absolutely. Would more people steal if they knew they couldn't face punishment? Yes. Would more people drink and drive if there were no consequences for doing so? Yes. If Company A offers me more money than Company B, am I more likely to take the offer from Company A? Yes.

Given that incentives matter, it is absolutely fair and reasonable to "reward people and reward people" for their actions.

Even though I think the premise that people don't have free will is likely correct!

(It's also quite odd that Sapolsky would ask people to change their behavior, given his apparent beliefs...)

I wouldn't call myself a Sapolsky fan but I do have enough interest in his work to follow a bit and have attended one of his lectures when he was in town. The above sounds like something he would say.

I dont think there is really a contradiction here if you dig into it.

Incentives very much do matter, but that doesn't say anything about free will. Conversely, the existence or lack of free will doesn't say anything about how we should implement incentives.

If you accept the premise that a mass shooter has no more control than a heart attack victim, what should that change? It certainly doesn't imply that we should make mass shooting legal or be incentivized.

Having read some of his books and watched his lectures, it seems like the only moral point he raises from this is that criminal justice should be guided by maximizing benefit to the greater population (which includes setting an example or incentive) but not simple revenge.

However, this is only loosely connected to the topic of free will. You can arrive at the same conclusion from a utilitarian perspective, or even from Christian ideals of forgiveness.

That's fair. The most egregious line, I thought, was: "it means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane." I took this to mean that we should essentially eliminate criminal justice entirely. But of course, that was the article author, not Sapolsky himself.

I realistically think that phrase is likely sloppy journalism, or just clickbait. The charitable judgement would be that "treating them the same" means approaching each case as a problem to be solved, with compassion for the offending party, and without hate.

Dont get me wrong, Sapolsky is very much on the side of rehabilitation and restorative justice.

I think he would argue that if we could go in and surgically fix the drunk driver so they never do it again, we should probably do it and then help them have a happy and productive life afterward.

I don't know if he thinks that setting an example isn't useful, or if that he just thinks the pendulum is so far in that direction that it is counter-productive.

My personal view is that modern punishments are way beyond the point have diminishing returns for prevention, but we also have to be careful about making perverse incentives/ rewards. You don't want someone to commit crime just so that they can get extra benefits and help afterwards.

It is a really questionable area that is being explored by some policymakers. For example, San francisco is paying criminals not to shoot people [1]. Does it save lives? probably in the short term? Does it incentivize people to become criminals so that they can get the benefit? Who knows? Does it sounds a lot like paying ransom? It does to me.

https://www.californiacitynews.org/2021/09/don%E2%80%99t-sho....

Free will or lack of it is a distinction without meaning. Outside of religious implications, it makes no difference if agents make specific actions as a result of the configuration of one's matter, or the configuration of a spirit.

Lack of free will does not remove accountability for one's actions. An individual is a good or bad actor by the nature of their actions and behavior.

Similarly, a lack of free will does not mean predetermination or predictability.

To build a 100% accurate predictive model, you would have to duplicate the world and play it forward in time. This mean the events would have to actually happen before you can predict them.

There can be no mechanical or materialistic explanation of free will. There are too many factors involved so it's just one of those things that everyone has to decide for themselves whether it is true or not. If you don't think that you have free will then you probably don't but I've never met anyone who would outright admit that all their choices have been post-hoc justifications for inevitable actions of a biological automaton. I'm willing to bet that even Sapolsky wouldn't admit that's the case.

> There can be no mechanical or materialistic explanation of free will.

Of course there is: Free will is the feeling you have when you become aware of a decision made by your subconscious mind, (which is deterministic).

Why did you order the salmon and not the steak? Sapolsky would identify all the factors, on various timescales, leading to the action that you took. You think that you chose freely, but you didn’t. You became aware of the subconscious decision, and that’s when you believe that you exercised free will and “decided”.

That would mean that free will is reducible to a mathematical structure and if that's the case then an existence proof of such a structure would be very useful for the development of artificial general intelligence. If that's not the case and there is no algorithm for free will then it is, by definition, irreducible to a deterministic computational implementation which means that no algorithm will ever have free will.

I'm sure Sapolsky can guess as to why some people are impulsive decision makers based on factors he has found in his research that correlate with impulsivity but I don't think that means such people have no free will. If you don't believe people can make free choices then that's equivalent to what I posted originally about biological automatons and admitting to being one.

Follow up to this is that I will probably write something about the general confusion around algorithms (special mathematical structures) and how these terms are used to make nonsensical arguments about intelligence, consciousness, and free will.

Seems like a religious argument that can never be proven or disproven.

Indeed. It's disappointing to see Sapolsky go down this route.

Sapolsky has always been a vocal critics of free will. It is discussed at length in his other books.

His entire career has been researching and publishing the biological basis of behavior

> Sapolsky has always been a vocal critics of free will. It is discussed at length in his other books.

Interesting; I only read one of his books and didn't pick this up.

I know there is a dedicated section on free will in the book Behave. I havent read every one, so maybe you are talking about what that I havent seen. From my understanding, his academic career and body of literature largely runs through the how genetic environmental factors impact neurochemistry, and uses this to explain why individual actors behave a certainty way.

Seems related to the question of what is consciousness, another issue that I think is more in the religious or philosophical realm rather than the scientific.

he had the free will to post his study? I think in some things we do such as what color car to buy or TV show to watch, others we don't like IQ, height, educational attainment, personality, etc.

Did he? Or did his subconscious engage in the act before inducing the sensation of choosing to do it.

Burger King coupons are built in to the laws of thermodynamics.

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