Reading L.A. Paul's Transformative Experience
Did you ever have to make up your mind?
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on how it is impossible to really know how a life would have gone if a different choice had been made at some point in the past, not just because all objective outcomes have at least some uncertainty attached to them, but because the big choices we make end up shaping our personalities, and in turn what in life we would most value. In response, John Quiggin suggested I really ought to read L.A. Paul. I had also seen Paul discussed by becca rothfeld in an essay in her collection All Things Are Too Small. And so here we are. I enjoyed the book, and am glad I read it.
Choosing to read this book, like the choice to try any new work of art, or food (Paul uses the example of trying a very smelly but, to some very tasty, fruit known as durian), is what Paul calls an epistemic transformative experience. I now know what the book was like, and I didn’t before. Before trying something new, we could just try to ask “what are the chances I will enjoy this?”, but sometimes the experience itself is what matters. I would try tasting durian fruit (I have not previously done so) even if there’s a good chance I wouldn’t like the taste, because I would then know what it’s like, which is valuable for its own sake.
But most of Paul’s attention is on personally transformative experiences - choices to take an action that would change who you are, and what you would value. The first line of the book is “Imagine that you have the chance to become a vampire.” It might seem silly, but the analysis of this question helps in understanding different actual possibilities in our lives: the decision for a deaf person to obtain a cochlear implant so that they have some sense of sound; the decision to have a child; or, as I talked about in my blog post, the choice of one career over another.
The point she wishes to press home is that the sorts of rules for decision-making that economists would consider rational - think about what you have learned from your own past experience, together with external scientific or anecdotal data, rank the options before you in terms of expected outcomes based upon what seem to be the relevant probabilities, and your own personality regarding what things are of most value to you, and choose the option with the best expected outcome - falls apart if we cannot know what our values will be after the transformation. For example, we can see how our friends are doing that have decided to have children, we can read statistics (based on population averages) about correlations between happiness and parenting, and we can consider what we value in our current, childless state and how our lives would be different if we had a child. But we cannot know as an individual how we would change. Paul writes (the emphasis is hers):
The lesson here is not that the decision to have a child can never be made rationally. The lesson is that, if you’ve never had a child, it is impossible to make an informed, rational decision by imaging outcomes based on what it would be like to have your child, assigning subjective values to these outcomes, and then modeling your preferences on this basis.
So, what can we do? After all, sometimes we need to make big decisions. And deciding never to take a chance on something new, for fear of being unable to do so with rational foresight, also changes us: someone who decides in their early twenties never to take a chance on a personally transformative experience will, in middle age, have become a different person as a result of that decision - even less willing to try anything new (my mother never learned how to swim as a child; as she aged, she became more afraid of any water of a depth higher than her knees).
Paul says that we can maintain our authenticity even if we have to forego perfect rationality:
Mistakes will be made. But a well-recognized feature of what it means to live an authentic, deliberative life is to learn how to live with the effects of one’s choices for oneself: authentic living partly involves the discovery of what it is like to choose and respond to the events in one’s life. Even if your choices bring about hardship or reduced well-being, they are not without revelation, for there is revelation involved in what it is like to experience the consequences and evolved preferences resulting from one’s acts, and there is revelation associated with living up to and managing those consequences.
Paul’s book was published in 2014, and, I think understandably, does not directly discuss what is currently one of the most politically and culturally salient transformative experiences: choosing to change one’s gender identity. But it certainly fits her framework. Anyone pondering this choice does so knowing that not only are objective outcomes uncertain - how will my life in the world change as a result of such a choice? - but subjective as well - how will I think and feel and care about things differently? And these subjective changes are unknowable, even with testimony from others who have transitioned. But, as Paul, says, that doesn’t mean one cannot make this choice authentically.
I have people in my life who are trans and whom I love. I cannot imagine the choice, since the feeling of gender dysphoria is beyond my ken. But a free society that respects people’s ability to choose who they want to be and how they want to live means loving and supporting people even if their minds and hearts are beyond our personal understanding. Anti-trans people will often bring up cases of people who later came to regret transitioning. But of course that will happen sometimes. I don’t know of anyone who can proudly sing “je ne regrette rien” and really mean it. Making authentic choices means taking chances. This applies to all manner of things: this career or that, moving or staying put, being open to falling in love and engaging in a committed relationship, having children. It doesn’t always work out. But that’s what it is to live a life.
Coda: I had posted this wonderful scene on Notes. In the movie Wings of Desire (directed by Wim Wenders, 1987), there are immortal angels, unseen by humans, who help guide people in their last living moments into the next world. One such angel, played by Bruno Ganz, falls in love with a mortal woman. In this scene, Peter Falk, though he cannot see the angel, talks to him about what it would be like for the angel if he made the personally transformative choice to give up his immortality and become human.
It is interesting to see economists like yourself and John Quiggan pick up on LA Paul. My own take is that while it is an interesting it is not really a new insight. The origins of rational choice theory as expected utility calculus, in both analytic philosophy and economics is Frank Ramsey. However, Keynes, who knew Ramsey well, developed a different approach which emphasized uncertainty as distinct from risk. Instead of an investment decision in the face of uncertainty the problem for Paul is one of a life choice in the face of uncertainty of outcomes.
But before Keynes, Frank Knight had developed this concept of uncertainty. And if you look at his Knight's more philosophical essays like Ethics and the Economics Interpretation, you can see clear anticipations of something like Paul's view. or at least the framework for it. Ironically, Stigler did his dissertation with Knight.
Sen's Rational Fools is going in the same direction, as is Harry Frankfurt's distinction between first and second order desires -- and LA Paul must certainly be aware of Frankfurt. Albert Hirschman does a nice job of opposing these Sen/Frankfurt insights to Becker/Stigler in "Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating Some Categories Of Economic Discourse."(1984)
So I think we should see LA Paul's relevance for economics as simply an addition to a long-standing, if unorthodox, line in economic/philosophical thought.
Very interesting post! I haven't read Paul but the framing of the issues in this post alone is engaging. I think the basic point that every considered decision concerning a largely novel experience is, in a meaningful way, deeply unable to be well informed because of self-transformations entailed in any decision seems to me philosophically inarguable. But I'm not sure this is not something we don't already factor into such decisions. I think "rational" deliberation in actual practice is simply modeling a procedure that we know how to execute in order to do "due diligence," with an understanding that due diligence is about process, not outcomes, though we expect some degree of relation (which is why we prize due diligence). I suppose this is what Paul means by "authentic living": alertly engaged (cognitively and emotionally) decision making, deploying both rational and emotive intelligence.
I think this is actually quite different than the case of first tasting durian. Durian, like cilantro, is well known for producing dramatically divergent qualia in people based on genetic factors. It is certainly true that only by tasting durian will you know what it is like, but even if you're well informed about the science, what it will taste like to you is a complete mystery until the moment you taste (or smell) the meat of the fruit. Very few decisions are boxes as black as novel smells and tastes; our imaginations can normally do meaningful exploration in advance.
Because this comment isn't long enough I want to describe my own encounter with durian. It took place in a formal setting at a buffet banquet overseas. I mistook the mashed durian for vanilla pudding, which I would happily live on exclusively, and I scooped a large pile onto my plate. When I returned to my table, aware of an awful smell in the dining room, one Singaporean host said, “Look how he loves durian!” and I received a round of approving smiles from other hosts. My first taste revealed to me that the smell that had repelled me was the durian. Apparently, my genes are dialed to the durian-is-vomit setting. Given the situation, my durian-decision was framed in terms of disappointing and offending my hosts or making my masquerade intentional. I chose the latter in the expectation that I could suppress the urge to throw up, build character, and then re-weaken my character by turning this into a story that I would repeat in order to make myself appear heroically stoic, while actually wallowing in self-indulgence. As you can see, that is how it has worked out.