This is bioethics bytes with me, David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.
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Suppose a genetic engineering breakthrough made it simple, safe and cheap to increase people's intelligence.
Nonetheless, if you ask the averagely intelligent person on the Clapham omnibus whether we should tamper with our genes to boost our brains,
he or she might recoil at the notion. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University,
suspects that this reaction may be a result of what he calls status quo bias.
Nick Bostrom, welcome to bioethics bytes. Good to be with you.
We're going to focus on the status quo bias. What is that?
A status quo bias is a preference for the status quo just because it is the status quo, a preference that is inappropriate or irrational.
So could you give an example of that? Well, cognitive psychologists have experimented in different settings with people's responses,
and they find that in many cases, just because an alternative is presented as the status quo, it makes it more attractive.
One experiment subjects were given either a decorated coffee cup or a large chocolate bar randomly.
And then now we're allowed to exchange the particular gift that had been given for the other gift just by holding up a card saying trade.
And it turns out that in this kind of experiment, 90% of the subjects prefer to stick with their original gift.
And this is known as the endowment effect.
As soon as something has become yours, you become unwilling to part with it, even for something that ex-ante would have been just as valuable.
And there are many,
many other cases where it doesn't seem that you can explain this away by postulating that people have formed some special emotional attachment to it.
But it just seems that at least in some of these cases, there is a kind of cognitive error.
That's really interesting you saying that this is generalisable effects across a wide
range of activities and situations where human beings just like to be a bit conservative.
Once they've got something, they stick with it. Yeah,
but one has to be careful to distinguish the cases where it's a genuine bias in the sense of an irrational or
inappropriate response from cases where it's just responding to a brute fact about how human emotions work.
So with a coffee cup, chocolate bar example, you might argue that if you actually find yourself, for whatever strange reason,
emotionally tied to the gift you have been given and it would hurt to give it up, then you are rational responding to that by not trading it in.
But there are other studies where this kind of explanation is implausible.
For example, it turns out that by just changing the wording in how alternatives are presented,
you can make people prefer one alternative or the other.
So if you change, you can save X number of lives to you can prevent x number of deaths, which mean exactly the same thing.
You can get people to reverse their preferences about two alternatives.
So you've already started suggesting how the status quo bias could have implications in bioethics.
Could you say a little bit more about that?
Well, in bioethics, at least insofar as we're interested in making a consequentialist judgement, we face a very difficult challenge,
which is to try to figure out whether the consequences of some intervention will, on balance, be good or bad.
In fact, we face a double epistemic predicament.
We first face the difficulty of predicting what the actual consequences would be.
And then, even if we knew what the consequences would be, it might still be difficult to tell whether, on balance, they would be positive.
And while we should, of course, collect all the relevant facts we can.
There will always be a reliance on subjective judgement in the end to try to weigh up to different arguments for either side.
If you are proposing to increase the tax rate or to reduce infant mortality,
there is no exact science that will tell you what will happen 40 years into the future if you do that.
And the same holds true, say,
if you're proposing to increase average human intelligence or do some other changes in bioethics that have wide ranging consequences.
So, you know, assuming the scientists weren't biased that there is this bias.
Status quo bias.
And you're saying that once we know that we're in a position to start intervening perhaps and removing this tendency in our judgements.
Yeah. So there's some prima facie reason at least for suspecting that in particular judgements in bioethics might be susceptible to status quo bias,
just as so many other human judgements are. So given that there is just reason to suspect that our bioethical judgements might be affected by.
That is called bias. It's interesting to see if we can find some way to reduce or to remove this potentially distorting bias.
And have you found one? Well, one thing you can try is the perhaps counterintuitive approach of trying to reverse your original perspective.
So suppose that somebody is suggesting that we should increase average human intelligence.
And in this thought experiment, let's say that there is a medical safe pill that you could take that will improve your IQ a little bit.
And the question now is, if we make this pill available to society at large,
will the long term overall consequences on balance be good or will they be bad?
What do you have most reason to believe? And so here is how you can test whether you might be infected by status quo bias.
Suppose that somebody had instead proposed that we should decrease average intelligence by a small amount.
So almost everybody would immediately say that that would be a horrible idea.
I mean, you can't be serious, like distributing a pill to make people slightly brain damaged crazy.
But if you hold both that it would be bad to slightly increase average
intelligence and that it would be bad to slightly decrease average intelligence.
You seem to be committed to a position that says that we are currently sitting in a local optimum.
Our intelligence is just at the right level.
It couldn't be improved by increasing or decreasing it, but in a generic curve only very few points will be local optimum for most points.
It will be the case either that you would get the higher value by moving up or by moving down.
And so if you hold this, you then face some burden of justification to explain why it is that we can't
make things better by either increasing or by decreasing average intelligence.
What you're saying is then that it's statistically highly unlikely that we are at that optimum points.
So the chances are that if you're saying that we are at that point, that you're subject to this status quo bias.
Well, unless you can give a good reason for thinking that we are sitting in a local optimum.
Well, one reason might be that evolution has over many thousands and perhaps millions of years taking us to that optimal point.
Right. So this is one broad category of answers to this challenge posed by the reversal test.
And for many parameters, this will yield a very good response.
So if, for example, somebody had proposed that we should increase the ratio of the heart size to the body size of humans,
make our hearts larger, I would say it sounds like a pretty bad idea.
And if somebody had suggested, well, let's make our heart smaller,
let's try to shrink our hearts, I'd say that's probably a pretty dumb thing to do also.
And here I could find a good evolutionary argument that we have adapted probably
to have a size of the heart that's appropriate relative to the size of the body.
The question then is if we try to use this kind of argument, in the case of cognitive enhancement, will it work?
And there are several premises needed for this evolutionary argument to get off the ground.
For a start, we have to think about whether the environment in which we evolved is in relevant respects,
identical to the environment in which we now live. So with regard to heart size, arguably there is no relevant difference with regard to intelligence.
There might be a number of factors that have changed.
On the one hand, you can imagine different trade offs that evolution struck between, say, head size,
which we know correlate with intelligence and metabolic energy costs, a huge proportion of the body's total energy body.
It goes to just running the brain and having a larger brain would be metabolically expensive.
And you could see that in the Pleistocene where food was often scarce.
That would be one point where this trade-off would be optimal. And now we're on Mars forests never far away.
We don't suffer from a calorie deficit, but rather the opposite.
We kind of would rather fancy burning more calories. And if we get more intelligent, that's a bonus.
Other things like the size of the head again at birth, limited by the size of the birth canal.
Now we have caesarean sections, a long period of maturation stretching over a decade or two, dangerous and costly if you are living in the jungle.
But now we could afford to be maturing for a longer period of time.
So there are many of these recent studies suggest that the resources available to us are very different on the demand side.
Similarly, the situation has changed radically. When we were living as hunter gatherers,
there was no need for literacy or advanced numeracy or the ability to stay focussed on some abstract topic for hours at an end.
But in today's society, these cognitive skills are at a premium,
so we have no reason to think that what was maximally adaptive in the evolutionary past would still be adaptive to us today.
So much for the evolutionary argument against the idea that we've reached optimum level.
You could believe that we haven't actually reached an optimum level, but there would be tremendous costs involved in making that.
Or nudge towards the optimal level and that it will actually be better to stay where we are than invest so much in making such a small change.
Yes. So one has to consider transition costs and in some cases this will be a fairly good response to the challenge presented by the reversal test.
If, say, somebody in America propose to switch to the metric system of measurement units, which looks superior.
That might be somebody else countering, saying that even though the metric system would be better,
simpler, more elegant, it just wouldn't be worth it. The transition costs would be too big.
In the case of cognitive enhancement, it seems that this argument from transition cost is impossible.
For a start, the transition cost would be a one off price we would pay, and then we could delay the benefits for an indefinite period of time after.
And although it is true that there would be these transition costs, you know, maybe textbooks would have to be rewritten for more intelligent kids.
Maybe some kids would. If we made a network through, say,
germline genetic enhancement would grow up in families where the parents are not the smartest and maybe they would be bored.
Maybe some games would no longer be interesting. This would be cost to be paid, but they seem utterly trivial in comparison to the benefits.
I mean, school books are constantly rewritten for all kinds of trivial reasons.
Smart kids sometimes are born into dumber families, and although that might cause problems in some cases,
it's not something that would make us think that on balance, it would have been better if all these kids had just been dumber.
Well, what about the risks involved in making a transition, a sort of step into the dark, as it were?
We know where we are now, but we don't really know what's going to happen if we start trying to meddle with genes,
as some people would say, to increase intelligence. Yeah.
So in some cases it would be wise for us to stick where we are,
even if we are pretty sure it's not the optimum because we are so worried about a change making things radically worse.
If you are sitting on the cliff in the dark, you might be well advised to just stay put, even if you think that one direction would lead to safety.
Because if you're walking in the wrong direction, you'll fall off the cliff and die.
And in principle, this this is a valid type of response to the reversal test.
In the case of cognitive enhancement, it's not clear that it works.
However, even if our sole focus was to reduce risk as much as possible.
Increased cognitive capability might also enable us to be better at avoiding many kinds of risk.
More intelligent people, on average, tend to live longer, for example, and avoid many kinds of social mishaps on a social level.
It's at least arguable that we need more intelligent foresight and wiser decision making to meet many of the great challenges of the 21st century.
And although there might be new risks introduced by changing average intelligence,
that might also be many new means of reducing risk that would be made available to us if we were smarter.
There is an additional consideration in this context that is relevant, which is that we need to look not just at the risks,
but also the potential upsides that could be surprising and unanticipated benefits, as well as surprising and unanticipated negative consequences.
With regard to cognitive enhancement, it's possible that these potential upside risks, as it were, are quite enormous.
You could imagine if a few hundred thousand years ago some Australopithecus were sitting around the campfire and pondering this question
whether they should sort of try to enhance their intelligence and the risks involved in that and the benefits that they could foresee.
You know, we would be better able to to hunt some meat and maybe to pick more bananas more efficiently.
This might be the benefits they could foresee.
What they wouldn't have foreseen would be all of mill's higher pressure that we now think constitute perhaps the main good of the human condition art,
literature, music, complex games, cultural achievements, language, all of these things.
It would seem kind of presumptuous for us to think that that our current outlook, we are able to anticipate all the important benefits.
So the response to the risk argument would be that, A, there might be these very important benefits,
some of which are not foreseeable, and that might outweigh the risks.
And B that even if we were only focussed on risks, it's still not clear that it wouldn't be a bad idea to increase intolerance.
I've listened to your responses to the arguments that I gave that about why somebody
might believe that they had reached the optimal point in terms of human intelligence,
for instance. What if I'm still not convinced? Have you got any other argument that might persuade me?
Well, there is one thing we could try, which is the double reversal test.
Maybe it's best explained by considering the following thought experiment.
Disaster poison is leaking into the water system.
This will result in widespread brain damage. An average intelligence will decline.
Fortunately, at just the same time, scientists have made a breakthrough in genetic engineering,
and they've come up with a somatic gene therapy that will slightly boost intelligence.
And it turns out that this intelligence boost for gene therapy would just about offset the intelligence decrease that would arise from the poisoning.
So now the question is, do you think under these special circumstances that it would be on balance,
good to introduced a gene therapy to offset the intelligence decrease that would otherwise occur, assuming there weren't huge risks associated?
Yes, definitely. Excellent. Now, let's suppose that this is what this idea does.
So intelligence stays the same. Now it's ten years later, and it turns out that the poison is gradually being removed from the water system.
And scientists predict that if we do nothing, then people's brains will gradually start to heal.
And that will result in an increase in average intelligence, because the gene therapy enhancement is still in effect.
It's permanent, and if the brain damage is removed, that will result in an increase in average intelligence.
So now the question is, would you say it would be all things considered good to go and pump poison into the
tap water to give people brain damage to prevent their intelligence from increasing?
That would be bizarre. That would be bizarre, I think.
And that then seems to suggest that from a consequentialist point of view, you think it would be better, all things considered,
if we end up in the stage where average intelligence is increased and this double
reversal test works by contrasting two different kinds of perception of the status quo.
So on the one hand, status quo can mean the current state of affairs, and we preserve the status quo by making sure that things don't change.
Another understanding of status quo is that which will happen by default if one doesn't intervene to change it.
And in this thought experiment, of course, these two different status quo concepts conflict.
And so by interpolating between them, we can sort of pinpoint the effect that the fact that something is the status quo has in your judgement,
and then extract out your status quo bias. It's interesting that we still do have a status quo bias and it presumably has some evolutionary origin.
But why on earth would we have it if it leads us to make judgements which are not reliable?
This I don't know, and this is indeed one of the main remaining question marks surrounding these issues.
I would be much more confident about all of these arguments if I knew what exactly the reason is that we have status quo bias in the first place.
There are some partial explanations. So in some situations, status quo bias might be related to this endowment effect,
where as soon as something is yours, you really don't want to lose it.
Now, perhaps in our evolutionary past, being the kind of person that people could often take things from would be bad for your reputation.
Not having the things in the first place might not be as embarrassing as if somebody could trick you out of something that was already yours.
You would look like a fool. So maybe we evolved to become very averse to these situations where something was kind of taken away from us.
But whether that's a true part of the story or all of the story, I'm not sure.
Suppose we could completely eliminate the status quo bias?
What would be the implications for bioethics? It might make us favour cognitive enhancement more.
That's the case we've been focusing on here.
For example, more funding for developing pharmaceutical means of enhancing memory and cognition would be seen more favourably or in genetic means,
for the same reason that we think it would be better if the education system worked better.
One then has to go through on a case by case basis other proposed interventions to see whether our intuitive
judgements do in fact change when they are put through the reversal test or the double reversal test.
In some cases our judgements will not change and that mightn't mean simply that they were not infected by status quo bias.
Certainly the conclusion is not that we always have reason to want to change either up or down.
In many cases, sticking with the status quo is rational.
But in so far as we judge that the status quo is best just because of this bias, then removing the bias will enable us to make better judgements.
Nick Bostrom, thank you very much. My pleasure.
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