A High Decoupling Failure

By Maxwell Tabarrok @ 2024-04-14T19:47 (+23)

High-decoupling vs low-decoupling or decoupling vs contextualizing refers to two different cultural norms, cognitive skills, or personal dispositions that change the way people approach ideas.

High-decouplers isolate ideas from each other and the surrounding context. This is a necessary practice in science which works by isolating variables, teasing out causality and formalizing claims into carefully delineated hypotheses.

Low-decouplers, or contextualizers, do not separate ideas from their connotation. They treat an idea or claim as inseparable from the narratives that the idea might support, the types of people who usually make similar claims, and the history of the idea and the people who support it.

Decoupling is uncorrelated with the left-right political divide. Electoral politics is the ultimate low-decoupler arena. All messages are narratives, associations, and vibes, with little care paid to arguments or evidence. High decouplers are usually in the “gray tribe” since they adopt policy ideas based on metrics that are essentially unrelated to what the major parties are optimizing for.

My community prizes high decoupling and for good reason. It is extremely important for science, mathematics, and causal inference, but it is not an infallible strategy.

Should Legality and Cultural Support be Decoupled?

Debates between high and low decouplers are often marooned by a conflation of legality and cultural support. Conservatives, for example, may oppose drug legalization because their moral disgust response is activated by open self-harm through drug use and they do not want to offer cultural support for such behavior. Woke liberals are suspicious of free speech defenses for rhetoric they find hateful because they see the claims of neutral legal protection as a way to conceal cultural support for that rhetoric.

High-decouplers are exasperated by both of these responses. When they consider the costs and benefits of drug legalization or free speech they explicitly or implicitly model a controlled experiment where only the law is changed and everything else is held constant. Hate speech having legal protection does not imply anyone agrees with it, and drug legalization does not necessitate cultural encouragement of drug use. The constraints and outcomes to changes in law vs culture are completely different so objecting to one when you really mean the other is a big mistake.

This decoupling is useful for evaluating the causal effect of a policy change but it underrates the importance of feedback between legality and cultural approval. The vast majority of voters are low decouplers who conflate the two questions. So campaigning for one side or the other means spinning narratives which argue for both legality and cultural support. Legal changes also affect cultural norms.

For example, consider debates over medically assistance in dying (MAID). High decouplers will notice that, holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off. People will only take the choice if its better than any of their current options. We should take revealed preferences seriously, if someone would rather die than continue living with a painful or terminal condition then that is a reliable signal of what would make them better off. So world A, with legal medically assisted death compared to world B, without it, is a better world all else held equal.

Low decouplers on the left and right see the campaign for MAID as either a way to push those in poverty towards suicide or as a further infection of the minds of young people.

I agree with the high decouplers within their hypothetical controlled experiment, but I am also confident that attitudes towards suicide, drug use, etc are culturally formed. Only high decouplers even attempt to separate the concept of giving something legal protection from giving it cultural support and they often don’t succeed. Politicians and voters almost never try.

In this sense, the low decoupling combination of the two is more rational. It’s close to an empirical law that political campaigns intertwine legal and cultural prescriptions. So in the context of highly politicized flashpoints, it’s not crazy for low decouplers to assume that a factual claim, legal proposal, or idea is dragging its associated cultural values, vibes, and history along with it, even if there is no explicit mention.

This doesn’t invalidate the arguments from choice and revealed preference made by the high-decoupler before, but it does point out something that is missing from their comparison of world A to world B: how did the law change between those two worlds? Campaigning to legalize MAID in a democracy inevitably means changing cultural attitudes towards it, even if the change is just from ignorance. This doesn’t clearly favor one position on MAID over the other, but the effect of cultural change could easily swamp the legal one.

High decoupling is still correct far more often than not, but democratic politics unavoidably attaches ideas to their associated narratives, groups, and histories. High-decouplers, among each other, can sometimes convince based purely on evidence, but low-decouplers know that pitches made to them always come in pairs. The cultural impact of campaigning to change a law should not always be separated from evaluation of the law’s impact.