tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1735735930785411402024-02-19T06:17:26.722+00:00rebellionkid's blogA blog where I rant, vent, explain science, explain my views, share my awe and delight, and hopefully inform, educate and entertain.Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.comBlogger107125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-28686530035781879672012-07-12T12:15:00.000+01:002012-07-12T12:19:16.554+01:00"supernatural"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I've changed my mind about religion and the supernatural. I doubt this post contains anything novel, but the point is important so I'd better say something. (Dont get your hopes up. I'm still an atheist.)<br />
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<a name='more'></a>I need to talk about religion for a bit and examples are helpful. Normally I'd use Jesus of Nazareth. I'd use him because I'm British and so expect my audience to know a lot about him. Also because I was raised Christian and was a nerd, so I have the advantage of knowing far more about him than my audience. </div>
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I've decided this is a mistake. Not because I annoy people by constantly going after the Christians. Most of the religious people in the west are Christian, so if I have a political problem with a religion then odds are it's Christianity. But it does have one annoying feature. It frames the debate wrong. It sets up Christianity v atheism, which is just not the right way to think about things. This post hopes to pick up why.</div>
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So I'll use <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sathya_Sai_Baba">Śri Sathya Sai Baba</a>. He's awesome. He died last year aged 84 and already has tens of millions of followers. If some estimates are believed he has more followers than there are Jewish people. He is a fairly typical Indian guru, more charismatic than most, but not better at magic.<br />
<br />
Let us consider his miracles. He was born of a virgin, turned water into petrol, was seen in South Africa and India simultaneously, healed the sick, multiplied food, produced small objects on demand, controlled the weather and brought a man back from the dead.<br />
<br />
Do you believe a single one of those claims? No of course not. Have you looked at the evidence? No, why would you need to? Normally when someone comes up to you and makes such an absurd claim you dismiss it out of hand.<br />
<br />
But now lets put in unreasonable effort and consider the evidence. These claims are backed up by eyewitness testimony by contemporary Indians. In fact Sai Baba is most popular with the wealthy middle class who have the most exposure to western ideas. His observers live in a post-enlightenment scientific culture. They are not dumb.<br />
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Now do you believe their eyewitness testimony? No, of course not, dont be absurd. If he in fact can do these things then physics and chemistry need to be largely thrown out. These acts violate just about every big hitting well tested law of science you can name.<br />
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And yet, there's something special about these claims. Because we dont say that they're laughable falsehoods. We say they are miracles. We may well claim we ourselves dont believe the the stories. But we think it's respectable that others do.<br />
<br />
This is the crux of my change of mind. Previously I had set things up in my mind as "these people claim XYZ, this is clearly preposterous, I'll present them with evidence and then fix their broken beliefs." You'll notice this leads to a lot of really frustrating conversations where people just dont change their minds.<br />
<br />
But why should this be? When I talk to communist about economics or to a renewable energy fan about climate change I dont expect changing their mind to be easy, but I expect to be able to have a fruitful conversation. I expect us to fundamentally be playing the same game.<br />
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Not so with claims of the supernatural. When I talk to a religious person more often then not I have no realistic expectation that we will in fact be able to understand eachother. I try all the same, but I'm not going in with the expectation that a single idea will actually pass from one brain to another and be understood.<br />
<br />
I'd like to suggest there's a more fundamental layer of conversation to be had first. And that without that religious discourse is like two blind people discussing colour, they can use words, but neither party can really expect to learn anything from them.<br />
<br />
First we must fix a lot of misunderstandings about truth.<br />
<br />
The big confusion is the idea of religious specialness. This isn't helped by the key doctrine of modern secularism. This makes the claim that there is the secular sphere and it should be handled by human powers acting according to human laws based on human arguments and no divine concepts should be permissible in this sphere. This is a good claim and an important one. The problem is it automatically sets up an opposite claim. That claim is that there is a religious sphere in which religious arguments should hold sway and where no scientific analysis is valid. Some utterly insane people like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould#Non-overlapping_magisteria">Steven Jay Gould</a> think this sphere should contain all of ethics.<br />
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So there's this notion that religious ideas are special and that religious claims need to be analysed in a different way. This is even crystallised in notions like "the supernatural", "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy", "science doesn't know everything", "there are some effects that western science cant detect", "there are powers that go beyond science". All these want to suggest an extra category of miraculous events.<br />
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Except the supernatural is a flat contradiction in terms. It's not that the supernatural doesn't exist, it's that the very concept is impossible. A "supernatural event" is "an event that happened which contradicts the laws of nature", the laws of nature are "those laws that determine how all events occur". If Sai Baba can actually turn water into petrol then the laws of physics and chemistry that says he cant do this are wrong. So he's not defied the laws of physics, so it's not supernatural. This is not a novel argument, it's in Hume, but people dont seem to have paid attention to it. I say again <b>the supernatural is a confused idea, think clearly and you cannot believe it.</b><br />
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Also significant is the duality of atheism v religion of choice. This is an annoying error. Suppose we find some argument that makes us want to doubt atheism (suppose we're scared by fine-tuning or something daft like that). Now the religious person will claim that we should thus accept their religion. Or suppose we find some evidence that makes us endorse one religious claim. It is very easy to forget that all other religions can make largely the same claims. This is part of why I'm going to try and avoid using Jesus of Nazareth as an example. Sai Baba did almost all the same magic tricks and his witnesses are vastly more intelligent and more reliable. If you find the bible and the handful of other sources that document the Jesus story convincing then Sai Baba should be a near-certainty for you.<br />
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The last and possibly most significant problem is not unique to religion. It is shared by politics, sports analysis and any other field where people are inclined to say that they are a tribe based on their answer. If I say to a man whose fathers back 5 generations were northern miners that voting Labour is a terrible idea it's unlikely that we'll talk much about their manifesto. It's more likely we'll talk about identity. Phrases like "well you would say that you southern snob" or "what Thatcher did to us" from a person not alive during the reign of Mrs Thatcher suggest that all that is being expressed here is team loyalty. When I say to someone that Sai Baba was a charlatan I say that his team is bad. This gets members of that team angry. It's this kind of primitive clan-loyalty thinking that people need to be cured of before they can have fruitful conversations about anything along these lines. This is a big part of why the discourse on politics/religion/sport is so poor.<br />
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And finally, offence. Yes, I'm going to say it that bluntly: People are religious because they make errors of reasoning. They are tricked by bad reasoning and if they thought more deeply they would stop being religious. This comes with the added bonus of being really arrogant, "I however have seen through these errors". The same is true for Marxists by the way. If someone convinced by Das Kapital thought better and more clearly they would not be convinced any more. But this personal insult about people's abilities to think rather cuts off conversation. "Oh those arrogant atheists think they know better than us, they think we've been fooled", well yes we do, but being offended isn't the right way to respond to this.<br />
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A proper respect for just how easy it is for concepts to fool you is needed before you can discuss religion or Marxism properly. It's no insult to someone's intelligence to say they've been fooled, even to say that their logical error was really obvious. The smartest people who have ever lived were conned by ridiculously simple ideas. Plato was confused by three people of three different heights, Newton was big on calculating the end-times, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was taken in by faeries. It's astonishingly rare to *not* be taken in by stupid ideas. It's no offence to say that many people all over the world have been taken in by Sai Baba and people of his ilk. </div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-76643097676552634522012-06-22T03:55:00.001+01:002012-06-22T03:55:33.927+01:00O-levels<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I've noticed something rather delicious about the supposed split in opinion over O-levels. No proposals have yet been published so we have only leaks and soundbites to work on. But that is still interesting. The Lib Dems are very angry at Michel Gove for his proposals. This is, I'd like to suggest, amusing.<br />
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Consider the following system of education:<br />
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<br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li>There will be no national curriculum, instead the government will set tough exams on various subjects (called O-levels), and heads of schools will be totally free about what they should teach. </li>
<li>There will be no state run schools, instead (so called academy) schooling will be provided by the private sector and charitable organisations with the state paying the fees so poor kids can go to school. </li>
</ol>
<br />
<br />
This is the most ardent Tory's wet dream surely? And something the Lib Dems would fight very hard in cabinet to oppose. Except that this is not Gove's leaked plan. This is the system of education set out in <a href="http://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/five.html">chapter 5</a> of On Liberty.
</div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-62164943081709532602012-06-11T18:48:00.003+01:002012-06-11T18:49:04.633+01:00I hate a lot of people, but not for being religious<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I got into an argument
the other week about <a href="http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2012/05/snake-handling-pentecostal-pastor-dies.html">this dickhead</a>. The guy thought he could play
around with deadly snakes because he was fucking stupid. He could not
play around with dangerous snakes and he died, serves him right. I
was criticised for saying “serves you right” by someone who was
annoyed at me “hating religious people”.
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<a name='more'></a><br />
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There's a failure of
categories going on here. I want to explain with one example that I
do not hate “religious people”. Consider my friend Beth. I've
spoken to Beth at some length. We've never, to my knowledge, had any
significant disagreement about any question of fact. Nor have we had
any significant disagreement about questions of ethics. I want to
state this clearly, she and I do not disagree about <b>anything</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">
fact</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">ual </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">or
ethic</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">al.</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">
She calls herself “religious”. To say that because she is in the
category “religious” I must hate her is absurd. It's really
really hard to hate someone if you dont disagree about *anything*. </span>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;">And
yet when I post things attacking </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">dickhead
de jour</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> I'm told that I'm
attacking “religious people” and that the person commenting
(because they are “religious”) is offended by this. Humans argue
by drawing up sides and then joining one or the other. Are you a
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu">bigendian or a littleendian</a>? This is generally not a problem, but
when you draw the categories wrong then you get into stupid
arguments.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I
hate a lot of people. And I'm not even a little bit sorry about that.
I'm a man who has had sexual contact with a man, there are millions
of people who think this makes me evil, they think I should be killed
for this. I'm sorry, if you think I should be put in a <a href="http://www2.journalnow.com/news/2012/may/23/wsmain01-protest-planned-at-church-after-pastor-ca-ar-2301939/">concentration camp</a> and killed then damn right I'm going to hate you. If you think
that I ought to be harmed because of who I choose to sleep with then
I hate you. I'm not sorry about that.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
If
you think that praying for a child who is ill means that you
<a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018397607_faithhealingdeath10.html">shouldn't give them medicine</a> then you're evil. If you're putting a
child in harm's way like that I hate you and I'm not sorry that I
hate you.
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<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
If
you think that people <a href="http://prospect.org/article/new-wave">should not be allowed to engage in safe sex</a> or
that they should be harmed for trying to protect themselves, then
you're evil. I hate you, I'm not sorry about that.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">If
you think that </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">your children
should be taught lies in science classes because you're too stupid to
understand evolution then I hate you. I'm not sorry about that.</span></div>
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If
anyone here reading this looks at that list and thinks, “yep, that
sounds like me” then I'm not even slightly sorry for saying I'd
like you to go die in a fire. I hate you. That's not unreasonable.
All of these people are BAD PEOPLE.
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<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
categories that matter are “are you liberal in your ethics” and
“do you act in ways supported by science”. To try and pick teams
based on factors other than this is not conductive to good
conversations. If your identity as “religious person” is more
important than these categories then there's something wrong with
you. If you're happy to defend someone who is wrong about ethics or
wrong about facts simply because you happen to agree with them about
the number of gods there are then you need to watch out for your
friends. </div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Jefferson is right "But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." What does do me an injury, what does everyone an injury is for people to be wrong about ethics and facts. If your god is liberal and if your god teaches your truth about the world I give not a damn. If your god is conservative then I hate your god as much as he hates me. If your god is wrong about facts then I hate your god for putting people in harms way.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I
dont understand my friend who (to my knowledge) isn't evil in the
obvious ways I listed, but who still wants to side with these people.
Someone who says “all these people are religious, that's my side,
so I'll support them”. Umm, no. If you see a list of evil people
and say that you are on their side then you need to go look at
yourself. Because I dont think that's actually the way you want to
break up the world. And if you do, if that's really how the world
looks to you? Then go die in a fire. I hate you, and I've no
hesitation in saying so.</div>
</div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-5150697316397828882012-01-27T00:22:00.001+00:002012-01-27T00:29:59.687+00:00A crisis update<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">So remember how <a href="http://rebellionkidsblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/my-crisis.html">I had a crisis</a>? The reason that post didn't really explain what the crisis was was that I didn't know when I was writing. The first part of solving any big problem is working out what the problem is. I think I'm most of the way there. As for the solution. That's less clear. But I'm at least happy that I have a structure for possible solutions. So, here's a rough outline of what went wrong.<br />
<div><br />
</div><div><a name='more'></a>The crisis wasn't fundamentally an ethical one. It was a problem of justification, and more generally a philosophical project that didn't work. Remember how I had a <a href="http://rebellionkidsblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/morality-part-2.html">nice little diagram</a> that explained what my philosophy looked like? That diagram is stupid. </div><div><br />
</div><div>The problem is I've not treated philosophy like I treat physics, maths or any other field of study other than art. Consider Rembrandt and Newton, both the Greatest (with a capital G) in their field at around the same time. There are a handful today as great as Rembrandt, I could never seek to become such a person. Today you cannot get a physics A-level let alone degree without being far more right about science than Newton ever was. I can do all the mathematics Newton could, I can do all the physics he could, with ease. That's not because I'm smarter than him. It's because he had to waste a lot of time inventing all of that mathematics and physics, I have it already digested in an easy to use form in textbooks. Science is progressive. I am naturally better than all the Greats of antiquity, that's an inevitable part of the process. In art this isn't true.<br />
<br />
In philosophy it ought to be true. If philosophy is the creation of good ways of thinking about things or if it's seeking the correct way of dealing with various questions then it ought to progress in the same way. It should be obvious to us that whilst Socrates is Great, whilst he is deeply interesting, he is profoundly ignorant about many things that I ought not to be, and the things he does positively assert he is confused about. Note that just as with Newton it's quite consistent to claim both that Socrates is Great and that I am more right about philosophy than him.<br />
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In particular this ought to apply to Descartes. A Great thinker without whom modern science is impossible. But I've not got my historian's hat on, and with it off Descartes is wrong, not just about his conclusions but about what fundamentally the project ought to look like.<br />
<br />
For Descartes we start with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum">simplest beliefs you have</a> when you strip away <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_doubt">everything you can doubt</a>. These basis axioms then combine with clear and direct reasoning to produce other truths. Think long enough and hard enough and you've understood the entire world. The point is that he can prove he's right in the same way a mathematician can. Disagreeing with him, if he's done it right, is impossible. It should force you to believe the same way a proof does. Notice my diagram about what my project looked like. I had sense data and some basic assumptions, I concluded from them in an indisputable way. This project looks like Euclid. And that's not the way to think.<br />
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The problem is two assumptions. First that all of thought can be deduced from a few simple ideas. They cannot. Your brain is not a soul, an imperfect approximation of truths that are simple. It is a messy bunch of evolved meat and the truths are bad approximations to it. The shear complexity of an idea like goodness is incredible. It's not the kind of thing that you can write a one line description of. Second that you should start philosophy from scratch. The idea is that anyone will end up agreeing with you if you do this. Stupidly, I had already seen, but not <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok">grokked</a>, the counterargument. I'd read <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach">GEB</a> and in particular <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles">What the Tortoise Said to Achilles</a>. Only I hadn't realised that it's not just a joke. Really there could be people who didn't have <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_ponens">modus ponens</a>, and no possible argument, no imaginable form of words, could logically compel them to accept it.<br />
<br />
The job of philosophy is not the collection of true statements after the style of the Elements of Euclid. A Peter Winch quote is key "Learning to infer is not just a matter of being taught about explicit logical relations between propositions; it is learning <i>to do</i> something". Your mind is not a collection of facts standing on a foundation that can be taken apart and put back together freely. Your mind is a collection of <i>processes</i>. You get rid of the wrong process and you dont make a system with fewer assumptions, you loose the ability to be a mind.<br />
<br />
An analogy: You should not think of your mind a sculpture, something that can be stripped down and built up anew on firm foundations. Your mind is an aeroplane. It's badly broken and you're flying over an ocean. You must fix it, but while you do that you must keep it flying. You can destroy and replace large sections of your mind. But if you get rid of it all you die. Taking your mind back to perfect emptiness is not like dismantling a bad sculpture to make a new one. It's fixing a crashing plane by taking the wings off.<br />
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So then I was shocked, some way down this path, that I had to add more and more assumptions in just to get ethics come out of it. I was having to create fantastic bullshit answers whenever people asked me the obvious questions. "So why do you define good like that?" "What counts as a person as far as moral calculations are concerned?" "How ought we to weight other people's utility functions?" My expectation always was that I would be forced to accept there was only one possible answer to these questions. That they were determined by logic. So when I failed to find the proofs for them I was distressed. Eventually I gave up and posted "My Crisis" in disgust.<br />
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<hr /><br />
So a mature philosophy has to be developed from an immature one. Not by throwing it away, but by making it better. What does this tell us about value and ethics? In fact this is especially valuable in ethics. Philosophers since Socrates (and doubtless the pre-Socratics too) have tried to define The Good in a sentence. If you're happy with the idea of a Form then it's obvious that there is an abstract absolute Good to be found through logic. If we accept the insight above then this no longer seems tenable. Value is not there to be found by logic.<br />
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So where is it to be found? To quote the deeply awesome <a href="http://m.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1">MoR</a> (which I have <a href="http://rebellionkidsblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/harry-potter-and-methods-of-rationality.html">mentioned</a> before) "There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! <i>We </i>care! There <i>is</i> light in the world, and it is <i>us!</i>" There is value. To accept even for a second that there is no value is to cut the wings off your plane. This does not make things clearer, it makes things crash. There are things that are desired, that matter, that are unendurable. But notice that it's people that make it so. *I* desire, *you* think it matters, *she* finds it unendurable. The value must be ours.<br />
<br />
What exactly that value looks like isn't clear. Importantly how to change it isn't clear. I want to be the kind of mind that can change what it values, but only in a positive direction. Imagine someone gave you a pill that would make you want to murder people, not just that but the pill would make you think that murder was the right thing to do. Would you take it? Of course not. You dont want to murder, so you dont want to want to murder. To want to want something we dont want now seems wrong. And yet it is obvious that some changes have been for the better. Slavery was banned, it was never un-banned. Historical murder rates declined by many orders of magnitude over the last 10,000 years. This kind of moral *progress* is good. And yet it's not quite as simple as "becoming more like us", we can imagine people more virtuous than ourselves. In breathtaking doublethink we can say "I know I ought to give more to charity" or "I wish I didn't hate them so much", and not think this signals major insanity.<br />
<br />
Exactly what the difference is needs clarification. Exactly how we ought to update our ethical intuitions on this basis needs clarification. Exactly how we ought to update our ethical intuitions based on the fact that our brain is <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw/scope_insensitivity/">very bad at a lot of things</a> needs work. I'm still confused in short, but at least I've stopped being quite so stupid about it.</div></div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-329951569431962942012-01-10T18:55:00.000+00:002012-01-10T18:55:34.840+00:00Dyslexia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">A quick autobiographical thing. I've been thinking for a while that there's one fact that shaped my personality more than any other. It's important to know where people get their intuitions from, so here goes. Almost everything I think has been influenced by just how badly my primary school dealt with the fact that I'm dyslexic.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>First, my actual condition. I find writing with a pen physically painful. It's taken many many years to get to the stage where I can write lecture notes legibly. And I would always type if I wanted to write something like this. Second I cannot rote memorise, it's just a very under-developed part of my brain. Third I have the dubious fortune of speaking English. You should be able to conclude from the last two that I cannot spell. Please remember however that I am slightly more intelligent and vastly better read that most people.<br />
<br />
My primary school was the worst point in my life. If I could erase every memory I have of that time I would without any regrets. It is really hard to spend 6 years failing. It's really really hard to be told that you've failed a test in a category that means a lot to you, for me failing at school was an insult to my intelligence, the thing about me that matters. It's really hard to be dragged through a spelling test every damned week and to fail it every damned week, and to look back over your exercise book and not see a single page without red ink.<br />
<br />
This taught me several things. First, that tests dont matter. That failing every test you do is irrelevant if you're still smart. I've always cared more about reading than about getting a good grade, because if you cant do that anyway you may as well not care about it. And so I've never really cared about getting the right answer on silly exercises, even on really damned important silly exercises. It's not as important as reading a good book. See also, I dont care that other people pass tests, I only care if they're good. This is the reason why I dont care if politicians win elections, what they think and do is vastly more important.<br />
<br />
Secondly, everyone in authority is out to get you. Every teenager thinks this, but one who has the experience of 6 years of being hated by teachers for being stupid thinks it more. I was an anarchist for a long time (softened since) and still disrespect and fear authorities of all kinds. Seeing a police officer makes me very very nervous, tempered with just a little anger. Seeing revolutionary mobs attacking and killing the security forces of some dictatorship makes me happy. Sure I later explain that all loss of life is tragic and if it could have been avoided that would have been better. Doesn't change the fact that people in authority being hurt makes me happy.<br />
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Third, rules are stupid, learning them is pointless. Do a spelling test in English, go into it knowing some rule about how to spell English words (I before E or something) then try to apply it. Most of the time you will be wrong. You will have hit an "exception", in other words a normal English word. English just doesn't obey such rules. I spent the best part of those 6 years trying to learn the rules. Then I realised I'd do better just guessing each word on its own and forgetting the rules. I refuse to learn or obey rules without understanding and agreeing with them.<br />
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A subsection of this: I am very opposed to subjects with arbitrary definitions. I dimly remember biologists having some ridiculous and over-complicated definition of life, I think stupid things like excretion may have been in there. I never learnt it because it didn't sound like a coherent idea. Say "something that reproduces itself with heredity" and I understand how that's a clear idea that we can argue about (bonus point: "life evolves" is a tautology). <i>{Edit: Oh god they've even got a fun little mnemonic: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks3bitesize/science/organisms_behaviour_health/life_processes/revise2.shtml">Mrs Gren</a>. Dont be shocked to learn I still haven't actually read what it stands for}</i><br />
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Final point, my writing style. I explain ideas by talking. Always have, because if writing a paragraph takes you a quarter of an hour you either talk your ideas or they die. So, you may have noticed a few of my ... well ok most of my, posts contain little verbal hesitations, (starting a sentence "so" or using ellipses for example). I'm talking this, I'm talking these words right now in my head. So when I type they come out like I talk. Also I learnt very early that polysyllabic Latinate words are easier to spell and have less irregularities that short German ones. Hence my sesquipedalian vocabulary. It's also a signalling thing. If you're handing in two paragraphs of illegible scrawl you've got to do something to convince the motherfuckers you've got a brain. And talking like you're ... well ... a knob, is a fast and easy way to do that.</div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-79845404259668160962012-01-03T04:27:00.001+00:002012-01-03T19:28:17.284+00:00Polyamory<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">"Poly-what?" What if there was a huge category of relationships you had never even heard of? What if you never asked yourself what your sexual orientation was because you couldn't imagine others? In the same way a lot of people dont imagine polyamory. So here's some information, no argument, just an idea.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><i>Monogamy</i> means "one wife" <i>{edit, I'm totally wrong, see comments}</i>. In some cultures men had many wives, in a very <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyandrous">small number</a> wives had many husbands. But in our culture Monogamy is expected. The idea is so deep we even make up the nonsense idea of "soulmates". People think any move from monogamy is wrong. No western country recognises non-monogamous marriages. This is such a deep idea in our culture many think it is a self-evident fact. But there's more than one thing that isn't monogamy. In our culture we can only imagine <i>cheating</i>, promising to only sleep with one person and breaking that promise.<br />
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But some people dont do this. Some are in relationships with more than one person that are just as real, deep and important as a normal monogamous ones (and a lot more real than the average celebrity wedding). They are not cheating. The catch all term for this is <i>polyamory</i>, meaning "many loves" with no reference to marriage or to gender. It is often called <i>poly</i> and mentioned with LGBT as a part of general sexual diversity. Here are some relationships to think about. You may or may not be interested in trying this at home, but you should notice that human sexuality is incredibly variable.<br />
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<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swinging">Swinging</a>.</i> Alice, Bob, Claire and Dave, (throughout this Alice, Bob, Claire, Dave etc are of whatever genders you like) have sex with eachother. They are either established couples or singles. There is no obligation for romance or even friendship between them. This is sex for pleasure, not an expression of love. This may be to add some variety to the sex life or may be to do with a fetish called <i>Candaulism</i> where one person is aroused watching their partner sleeping with another. Either way they are all happy and agree, nobody is cheating.<br />
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<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_relationship">Open relationship</a></i>. Alice and Bob are in a stable loving relationship but they agree that they can sleep with or have some kinds of relationship with other people within negotiated limits. Alice can sleep with Claire without cheating on Bob, Bob agreed to this so no promise has been broken. This is often the case with couples who, while committed to eachother, want to remain sexually independent.<br />
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There is a special type of open relationships in some fetish cultures. Alice can <i>play with</i> Claire without becoming <i>fluid bonded.</i> This means doing things with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadomasochism">whips and chain</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadomasochism">s</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_fetishism">feet</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_and_messy_fetishism">gunge,</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formicophilia">ants</a> etc without the sex. This is helpful if, in an otherwise good relationship, Alice's big turn on is Bob's big turn off. This way Alice can do what they like and Bob doesn't have to do what they dont want to. Or Alice and Bob can just think of things-like-relationships and things-like-<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_play">dressing-up-as-a-dog</a> as different. So Alice feels no more jealousy about Bob and Claire dressing as dogs together than them playing golf.<br />
<i></i><br />
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<i>V-shaped relationships</i>. Alice is in a loving committed relationship with Bob and also with Claire. But where Alice is not cheating on Claire with Bob or vice versa. This means Bob and Claire know about and agree to the relationships. (Alice is sometimes called the <i>hinge</i>). This is a fairly common relationship. This does take very careful discussion and negotiation. Claire is not getting any of the time and attention that Alice is giving to Bob, so it's important that everyone is happy with the balance. But Alice is happy because if the relationship with Bob is causing stress then Claire can give support.<br />
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One form of this is the <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_and_secondary_(relationship)">primary/secondary relationship</a>.</i> Alice is in a committed relationship with Bob, this is the main relationship in Alice's life. Alice is also in a relationship with Claire, but everyone knows that this is less deep and less important than the relationship with Bob. This can produce tension if done wrong. But sometimes it makes sense. Maybe Claire is unable to commit. Maybe Alice cannot give enough attention to Claire. Sometimes Claire will have other partners of their own.<br />
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<i>Triads, quads</i> and other <i>groups/tribes. </i>In a triad Alice, Bob, Claire are all in a relationship each with each other. In a quad they are also in a relationship with Dave. People can set themselves up in small groups or tribes where each person may be in a relationship with any other. This gets complicated fast. If 5 people are all in a relationship together there are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handshake_problem">10</a> relationships that all need attention and effort from both sides. This has happened. It is amazing how good some people are at controlling relationships.<br />
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<i>Polyfidelity.</i> Alice, Bob, Claire, Dave are in a relationship, within that they are faithful. For Alice to sleep with Eugene is as much cheating as in a monogamous relationship. This is a contrast to an open relationship.<br />
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It's obvious that such relationships between consenting adults are ethical. The point is there is a question to answer. Many people dont question their sexual orientation, they dont realise there could be another answer. Far more people (including myself not long ago) dont ask if they want to be poly. And it's not an obvious question. Many people assume that monogamy is a fact of human biology. This is false. It is not written that Alice cannot love Claire because she already loves Bob. Just as it is not written that she cannot love Claire because they are both female.<br />
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Stable, happy, poly relationships exist. The limited<a href="http://www.polyamoryonline.org/articles/psychological.html"> research</a> on this topic suggests that poly relationships are no less stable than mono relationships. Most people dont know what they are. They cannot ask if they want to be in one. But now you at least cannot plead ignorance. Think about it. I will.</div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-88245254904395840392011-12-29T00:19:00.000+00:002011-12-29T00:19:49.437+00:00Life is not like a video game<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">No, not because "it has no reset button". That's boring and if, like me, you first played video games in arcades where your mum would only give you one coin, not obviously true. There's a couple of other fallacies that I want to tackle. The general heading is "life is not fair". Firstly life has no obligation to let you win. Secondly, life does not give everyone the same 100 skill points to start with.<div><a name='more'></a></div><div>There's a fact most people dont realise when they play games, it's been specifically designed so that you can win. The game world may seem natural and real, but it obeys rules. One rule, too obvious to think of normally, is that there is a (large) set of sequences of button-presses that result in the "YOU WIN" screen. This rule is so obvious that we dont realise it's not a law of logic. It's perfectly possible for a one player game to have no way to win. If you play <a href="http://boulter.com/ttt/">tic-tac-toe</a> against a reasonable player you cannot win. If you play the <a href="http://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/Algebra/MIUsystem.shtml">MIU game</a> you will never reach MU.</div><div><br />
</div><div>And this isn't just an observation about abstract games. It's an observation about life. There are some things that no matter how smart you are, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you want, you cant have. You cant have a machine that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_law_of_thermodynamics">generates free energy</a>. It doesn't matter if you wish upon a star, you wont win that game. It doesn't matter how hard you try, it's not clear that *everyone* has a set of actions they can take to become world basketball champion. It's not clear that *everyone* can become the head of a fortune 500 company. </div><div><br />
</div><div>And this is even true about games that humanity as a whole is playing. Just because the whole of humanity tries to do something doesn't mean they'll succeed. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at it, it's not obvious that it's even theoretically possible for humans to <a href="http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2438">cure virus</a> in the next 20 years. It's not obvious that the renewable energy project can succeed on straightforward thermodynamic principles. We shouldn't assume humanity is omnipotent.</div><div><br />
</div><div>There's a point to this other than depressing you and stopping you from going on the fucking X-factor. Before you start your project be careful that you have considered every option. If you pick the project "become the greatest basketball player ever" and you are 4ft tall then it's safe to say you are going to waste your life. You're allowed to amount to nothing. 99.99% of all the humans that have ever lived did not matter at all, they were useless, they picked a project they couldn't succeed at. And when you do pick this project you ignore the project you could have done. You forget that you could have sat down and done something else, and won. </div><div><br />
</div><div>The second fallacy is one much loved by a certain kind of hippie/middle class/mother figure, the kind of person who thinks everyone is special. This is what I like to call the Dungeons and Dragons fallacy. It runs something like this: When creating your character what nature does is take 100 points and distribute them amongst various categories like "drawing skill", "hight", "maths ability", "attractiveness" etc. so people have a different balance but the same sum. This is the implicit idea whenever the fact that Alice is better than Bob at the Xylophone is countered by the assertion that Bob is probably better than Alice at Yachting. </div><div><br />
</div><div>You've all heard people defend someone's low IQ by saying it doesn't measure some property, often creativity, with the implication that the low IQ person will be far more creative. Just plain false I'm afraid, there's no a priori reason why little Timmy cant be both bad at verbal reasoning *and* uncreative. There are many people who are bad at a wide range of things. Likewise there are many people who are good at a wide range of things. Unless you can point to a causal link between two abilities that tends to make them balance there is no reason why being bad at something could be reason to be happy.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This is quite a broad failure of reasoning. There is an implicit assumption in a lot of people's reasoning that nature should be "fair". We're taught in stories that the bad guy always gets his comeuppance. We are told that the little ugly duckling always turns out to be beautiful on the inside. And I'm sorry, there's no reason to think so. There is no god who "ought to be fair", there is the blind bumping of wavefunctions, they dont give a damn if you're thick *and* ugly. </div><div><br />
</div><div>We often console ourself looking at someone we envy that they are just bound to have a flaw. We may loose to them at XYZ but there must be some area where we beat them. Sorry, just not true, in a world of 7 billion humans and rising it's just a statistical falsehood. There are people out there who on any axis you care to name are strictly worse that you. There is someone who's less romantically successful, has a lower IQ, is less creative, less good at drawing, less expressive, less attractive. And there are people who are better than you, at everything. I know this to be true of myself because I've met the motherfucker. There are people out there who are better at writing, better at thinking, more creative, more loving, more attractive, more composed, less likely to burn out from stress. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I'm sorry if this is a depressing post. There isn't a way to say it other than "life isn't fair". You cannot assume that things will just work out towards some kind of balance. The laws of physics do not require any such thing. The important thing is to accept this universe and not go mad in it. The important thing is to accept life isn't fair. To accept there's a guy who's strictly better than you who will beat you at anything they set their mind to. Then work around it. Dont fight them on that project, do something else, do some project where you're not the best person who could possibly do it, but the best person who *is* doing it. There are few pure mathematicians who could honestly say that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway">John Conway</a> could not have replicated their work had he set his mind to it. Mathematics did not stop and wait for him to die. It carried on, most mathematicians knowing that John Conway and a dozen others could just stomp on their pet project and solve it any moment, but also knowing that if they didn't it still needed to be solved.</div><div><br />
</div><div>There are some projects that cannot be solved, there are some that can partially be solved and there are some that can be totally solved. You have a finite amount of effort you can put into all of your projects in the next year. The lesson is to pick the right projects. You cant always know which is which. Sometimes life can still kill you while you're not looking. But whenever you can know, whenever you can predict, pick a project that you can solve and that you should solve. Because sometimes everyone else is waiting for you to do it.</div></div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-88348500117934280742011-12-16T22:41:00.000+00:002011-12-16T22:41:52.999+00:00Offence<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">On the day Christopher Hitchens died religion is on my mind. This post is not about that, but you'll excuse if I use it as an example more than once. One thing that I dislike about twitter is the way the immense power of this unprecedented tool is used for a large category of bad ends. Twitter is amazing, every hashtag, used right, is an impromptu, undirected, leaderless lobby group. It comes into existence, organises action, generates followers, achieves some end or gives up and then burns itself up totally. This is a vast improvement over the old pressure groups that invariably fought more for their own continued existence and influence than for the actual aim that founded them. But what if this power is used stupidly? What if it's used to amplify the offence taken by a small number of people?<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Now I'm not sure that I'm even right to say that the groups themselves are wrong here. More importantly is the danger of one of the key syllogisms of modern political discourse. This is an implicit assumption that's normally so well respected it doesn't have to be mentioned.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">I find this offensive. Therefore this must be stopped.</blockquote>First off, as a straightforward matter of logic this doesn't follow. You need another argument to make this work. I want to consider those arguments and more generally what this false syllogism means.<br />
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"Offence" is easy, statements or actions that, whilst not harming anyone in a straightforward physical sense, cause distress to some nearby. This runs from something as simple as shouting "cunt" at an old lady to the most visceral and detailed description of why the ideas most central to you are pure evil.<br />
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Why is this a bad thing? Well it's unpleasant. It's fairly obvious that causing someone emotional distress is something that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceteris_paribus" title="all other things being equal">caeteris paribus</a> we ought to stop. The problem is twofold. On the one hand, are caeteris really paribus, on the second, how ought we to do the stopping?<br />
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The problem with saying an argument holds "all else equal" is that all else rarely is. The reason that humans talk is that there are advantages to doing so. Swearing has a <a href="http://bxscience.enschool.org/ourpages/auto/2011/9/7/54489915/Primary%20Article%20swearing.pdf">well proven</a> pain reduction power, it feels deeply satisfying and damnit all <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqTHmzMk0Cw">if</a> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVVzUxXxQZU">it</a> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_osQvkeNRM">isn't</a> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjAyazqtQj8">funny</a>. We discuss politics and religion, even though these are deeply sensitive topics, because like it or not some people are wrong on those subjects, and both of them matter a huge amount. There are even obvious advantages to vulgar abuse ("fuck off you wanker") or intolerant language ("fuck off you raghead"). <i>{It's fun to observe how hard I had to push my mental barriers to type the second, whilst the first was trivial.}</i> It's clearly better to find out who hates you by means of something other than being punched or being discriminated against.<br />
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So the first question is when do these advantages count for less than the emotional harm? The second one is what should we do in such cases. Clearly offence is justified if the offence is minimal, calling someone a wanker causes few people distress of any great importance. (Would you rather be called a rude name 20 times or have a papercut?) Clearly it's justified to offend someone if doing so is valuable to others. Calling someone a thief (if accurate) is offensive, but justified.<br />
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Now consider how we address unjustified offence. There are two obvious ways of doing it. Suppose you know that some newspaper columnist has views which hurt you and people like you more than is justified by anyone else's enjoyment. You could ask for this columnist to loose their job. ... Or you could just not read the column. Supposing the world to be divided into a class of people (maybe only the columnist) who like the opinions and a class who dont, it's clear that if the second class can ignore the column for free then (caeteris paribus) letting the first class read it is argument enough for taking the second route.<br />
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Notice the key distinction between an offensive and a dangerous columnist. To want a columnist to be fired because they're a bigot, rude, or just offensively stupid is not legitimate. To want a columnist to be fired because they cause riots, mislead people about health or unduly influence policy in a damaging direction is a separate and 100% legitimate cause. I'm even happy for people to try and get all those damned lefties at Channel 4 replaced. That's different from wanting someone to be fired for some silly act of sacrilege like not wearing a poppy or calling some large class of people murderers.<br />
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It should be clear that offensive speech can be justified at least sometimes. But even really deeply offensive speech can. If not you believe that any talk about religion should be banned. Consider the statement "there exists a perfectly just/perfectly ethical being who sends people who dont believe in him to a place of literal suffering for ever." To my knowledge there is no more offensive statement.<br />
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To say that nonbelievers are tortured for ever is horrifying, but not in itself offensive. To say this is <b>ethical</b> is monstrous. Suppose you believed that bad deeds should always be rewarded by suffering (your ethical system could really do with some work but that's another matter), now imagine a person who <b>deserves</b> infinite suffering. No, really, try to imagine such a person, I tried, I failed. We're not just talking about Hitler here, he caused a finite amount of suffering. We're talking about someone who created infinite pain, pain without end, who hurt more people than the universe can ever contain for more time than there has ever been. Can you imagine that? That's not Satan, that's worse than Satan, unimaginably worse than Satan. And the statement is that those who dont believe in this god are in that category? For many religious people then, merely stating their faith is the most offensive thing they can do. Remember why the Westbrough Baptists are evil? Exactly that reason. They believe that gay people deserve infinite suffering, that an ethical god hates them. Then they tell people that and it's offensive. And I applaud them for doing it. I would rather they continue to talk and explain their beliefs, because every single person who believes in a hell of literal suffering for sinners and who believes that being gay is a sin agrees with them. And that's important to remember before you ask anyone else for ethical advice.<br />
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But let's not let the atheists off. "God does not exist". We tend to brandish this around casually. Like we were saying fairies dont exist, or Santa. Because to us it's exactly the same. They're all silly mistakes that brains make because they're confused. Brains get confused, some of them become<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection"> group selectionists</a>, some of them believe in homoeopathy, some believe in gods. But imagine for a second what you're saying to a religious person. You know that person, the one you love most deeply, who's love sustains you at the worst times? The person who gives you your most rich sense of satisfaction by you pleasing them? The one who cares for and loves you more than you can express? The one you've spent years of devotion trying to connect ever more deeply with? Yeah, no such being. Sorry, and what's more, it was obvious if you think about it, you're as stupid as group selectionist for ever believing that. ...When was the last time you had to tell someone that their husband was a old pillowcase with a face badly drawn on in lipstick? Can you imagine how painful it would be to even consider that possibility? Let alone to be argued at and persuaded it's true. Atheists know that loosing religion is survivable, that you can recapture all the old joys without the god you though gave them to you. But we sometimes forget that it's damned hard to believe that when someone is telling you that the thing that gives your life meaning isn't real.<br />
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And yet obviously religious talk is good and valuable. Why? Because what people belive about gods effects what they do in fucking important ways. Because one of the two parties that's allowed to run America is batshit insane. Because people blowing themselves up is a bad idea. Because abstinence based sex education... read my motherfucking lips... DOES <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16387256">NOT</a> <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17885460">FUCKING</a> <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17943855">WORK</a>. Because women being educated is a good idea. Because if there's a god out there we are really seriously pissing him off and this is a threat to the very existence of mankind, and that justifies anything. Because people who stop believing in god in the wrong way go crazy and kill people.<br />
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And this is the key argument. It scares me when people say "I am offended" and go on to argue as if this meant they had the automatic right to reparation. Because there are offensive things that ought to be said. In the spirit of debate if nothing else.<br />
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I hate the fact that there are people out there who believe in a just god and a hell of literal suffering. But shutting them up is not the way to fix it, they need to be able to say that kind of vile thing, because it might just be true damnit. When people talk about politics (yes, even tories) we need to let them talk because the science of political organisation is still fantastically primitive. We just dont know what the right answers are with a good probability of being right. Yes, of course [person you hate] has stupid views, that's obvious ... to you, and not to them or their supporters. Of course it's obvious that vast amounts of government debt are a terrible idea ... except to half the world's economists. Of course it's obvious that gay parents cant bring up children, apart from to a whole bunch of people who have been raised by gay parents. Yes of course it's obvious that polyamory is doomed to fail ... apart from to all those poly couples out there.<br />
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Sometimes (as with religion and politics) you cannot avoid offence and still talk about things that matter. In such cases we need to stop caring about offence and start caring about well-recognised dangerous speech. Sometimes it's easier than this, take responsibility for what you get offended by and avoid it, the rest of us aren't offended, it's easier for you to stop listening than for us to stop having fun,</div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-91345109690820210162011-12-10T02:29:00.000+00:002011-12-10T02:29:40.312+00:00Religion and ethics.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">I had a rather confusing conversation a while ago. I was discussing the fact that I was confused about ethics and was looking for something more firm to base it on. My friend suggested religion. My friend is very intelligent, which is why his comments confused me. He hadn't noticed something obvious to me. Which is that religion can never be a satisfying basis for morality. And that in fact no religious people derive their ethics this way.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>My friend happens to be a Christian, but these comments, or ones equivalent to them, apply to any religion. He suggested his religion as a source for ethics. My first response was to interpret this to mean the Church, pick a big one and say "no, using condoms is a good thing". This isn't just a problem with the Roman Catholic Church. Anglicans have the whole gay thing. The various American Churches are all insane. I know nothing about Greek or Russian Orthodox but I'm going to guess there's something I can pick in their doctrines that is obviously immoral.<br />
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My friend replied that of course he didn't mean the Church when he talked about Christianity. He meant the Bible. The fact that he didn't see my response coming was surprising considering he has met me more than once. The bible is a fundamentally evil document. YHWH is among the most abominable and evil forces in the history of human literature. He orders <a href="http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/long.html">countless genocides</a>, enjoys the suffering of others, he is capricious, vindictive, unmerciful, compassionless and to cap it all, proud of each of these attributes. To derive ethics from such a source is a nonsense.<br />
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(Here is a step special to Christianity as having a bipartite holy book, for other religions I assume there is some section where divine power is closer to intuitive ethics than others, so this is still a fairly general conversation). Oh no, I have misunderstood, my friend tells me. The New Testament is the real ethical content of the Bible, that is the one that counts. Again, if you're a bible nerd the response is obvious. The <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians+3:22&version=NIV">keeping of slaves</a> is a bad thing. "But the New Testament doesn't say keep slaves, it says <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians+4:1&version=NIV">treat them well</a>." Except that is obviously unethical. It is not ethical to treat your slaves well. There is only one ethical action you can take towards a slave, free them. There are no exceptions, no qualifications, free them. This, and only this, is ethical.<br />
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The actual conversation ended around here. But the continuation of the pattern is obvious. Well that's not the real meaning of Christianity, that's just Paul, we all know Paul had ... <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+14:34&version=NIV">issues</a>. You need to look at Jesus. And so I point out "<a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+10:34-36&version=NIV">I come not to send peace, but a sword. I come to set a man against his father</a>" and we finally hit the nub. That's a metaphor. He doesn't mean that.<br />
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The key question is why you believe this. Do you think this should not be taken literally because in fact you studied the Greek texts so you can work out what things were in fact said, and meant, by the historical Jesus? In all probability no. The though process runs much more like this. "Here is a text from Jesus. Jesus was good. This text seems bad. There is a contradiction here, this text must in fact be good. So he means he comes bearing a spiritual sword."<br />
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Notice this is not how to construct an ethical system. At the end, in the final analysis, a religious tradition must always pass through a sieve. Most people call this "the true meaning of the religion". The idea is that you take the holy book(s), the Church(es), the stories, the sayings, the art, the literature, the culture and you decide which bits to keep and which to reject. All religions of any good size have at least one contradiction or obviously immoral idea, you cannot take all of it. Then, after you have decided what to keep and what to reject, everything you keep becomes the definition of ethical.<br />
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The question is still left though. Where did you get the sieve? How did you know, instinctively, which bits counted and which didn't? Because others of the same religion disagree with you. To a vast number of people it is obvious that <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2020:13&version=NIV">Leviticus 20:13</a> counts, but <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2019:19&version=NIV">Leviticus 19:19</a> doesn't. Why is this? There's no difference at all, to my knowledge, in the textual validity of the two passages. They're found less than a chapter apart, both are clear commandments spoken in the voice of YHWH. There is only one distinguishing factor. The people making this distinction personally hate the idea of homosexuality and are nonplussed by the idea of mixed fabrics.<br />
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And that's the point. Religious people do not (thankfully) go to a religious text and churn it into an ethical system. They have an ethical system, given to them by the normal combination of genetics and societal influences. They go to the religious text and look at it through the glasses of these ethics. And then they produce a new articulation of the ethical system in religious language. This is why it's easy to share a religion with someone you share no ethical views with at all. (How does the average Westborough Baptist, 9/11 hijacker, Air India 182 bomber etc etc regard their co-religionists?)<br />
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This is not altogether a bad thing. There's a lot to be gained by reading some opinions on ethical issues to refine and modify your own ideas. This is a large part of what can be gained from sci-fi. It's exactly the same process. The Doctor is good, so anything is does that isn't good (like <a href="http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/An_Unearthly_Child">planning to smash a guy's skull in because he was slowing you down</a>) goes in the "doesn't count" pile. (If you're a thorough nerd you have your own in-universe explanation for this that makes it all ok, if not, just pretend it's not there). That way you dont go around smashing people's skulls in but you do get to have wonderful thoughts. What if I did have<a href="http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Genesis_of_the_Daleks"> two wires I could touch together to unmake the Daleks</a>, should I do that?<br />
<br />
But let us be frank with ourselves. We do not get our ethics handed to us on a stone tablet. No stone tablet is large enough to really explain a coherent ethical system. And even if it were, in practice you would always decide which bits of the tablet were most important. Yes, read religious texts (note the plural) in order to refine and strengthen your morality. But you must not approach them without an idea of ethics already established. </div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-73518470608350088872011-12-05T16:58:00.000+00:002011-12-05T16:58:11.473+00:00The Myth of the Unimaginableity of Evil<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">"Josef Fritzl was a monster. His crimes are unimaginable. No normal human being could ever do what he did." This is a common trope in our culture. Extreme evil is due to being an anomaly, an abomination, possessed by Satan, whatever. Either way it is clear that we could never do this. This is false. Tragically false. There were very very few mutants in Nazi Germany. The system in that evil place was designed, set up and run by totally ordinary people. We must all be on our guard all the time. There is nothing at all, no external power of any kind, to stop you, dear reader, becoming someone worse than Fritzl.<br />
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</div><a name='more'></a><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">I'm going to do this post slightly differently from most. This isn't an essay where I argue a side. This point is made far more clearly as a meditation. I want you to be actively involved. I'm going to give you a task. Try to really actively engage with it, you'll find out something about yourself.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">First, safety. You're going to be deliberately getting yourself into a powerful emotional state. You may be a bit fragile after. If you've got reason to be worried about your mental health dont try. If not then take precautions. Make sure people dont interrupt you. Shut yourself in a room somewhere. Not because you're going to be dangerous, simply because you will be a deeply unpleasant frame of mind, and it's not nice to talk to people when you're in that mood. You can come out of this frame of mind, so dont worry that I'm going to do anything permanent to you. Also, this is a long exercise, you may wish to set aside some free time.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The meditation runs as follows:</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">First think of a motivation. You have barriers in your brain that will normally stop you doing this exercise. The best way to cancel the effect of these is to give yourself a powerful motivation. Only you can know what your most powerful button is. But imagine a really strong motivation. Someone has a gun to your head, how creative and imaginative would you be in order to get out of that situation? Someone has a problem for you to solve, your mother/brother/boyfriend is in their power. How fast would you solve that problem? Imagine the person or thing you find most precious. Imagine them in Fritzel's dungeon. Imagine hearing the first half of a scream as the soundproof door slams shut. How imaginative would you get if you could save them from that? </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Keep this motivation in the back of your mind, keep that feeling of absolute overwhelming necessity. That whatever you have to do you can and must. If ever you feel yourself pulling back during the exercise bellow refresh that feeling. Tell the parts of your brain that are stopping you thinking that they really need to shut up now. Try this part of the exercise several times, make sure you can get back to this state when you need to convince your unwilling brain to do something. (This is actually a generally useful skill, you brain doesn't understand what matters and what doesn't).</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Get yourself comfortable and relaxed. Then think of a person. It will be easier to lower the normal barriers in your mind if you think of someone you dont particularly love or care for. Who it is doesn't matter much, someone you know, a celebrity, someone you've just imagined. Just so long as you can get a clear image of this person and how they will react to stimuli. I'm going to call mine Billy. See them clearly in your mind. Dont carry on until you have someone clearly in your head.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">We're going to work on your imagination. Your imagination is a great tool for telling you what you could do without having to do it. Right now you could stand up. In your mind see that possibility clearly. You need no more evidence that you could do it than that image, you dont need to try. Now imagine touching your head. Try something more complex. See yourself going to get a drink. Make sure you see the details. What are you drinking, what is it in? What does the room look like, what do you see? What are the sounds, what are the smells, what do the things you touch feel like. You could do it, you dont need to try to find out. Make sure you can see this clearly before you carry on.</div><br />
Think of a room. Not a room from memory, a completely new room. This room is your own, it is a private and safe space for you. Noone but you knows about it. For the moment, it's fairly spartan. Imagine what it looks like. What are the smells, how is it lit? What do the walls look like? What's on the floor? <br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Now add Billy to the room. Just imagine Billy being there, standing in front of you. Billy could be there, you dont need a real live person to imagine how they will react. And you can interact with Billy too. You could touch Billy on the head just like you did before. See this clearly. You could touch, you dont have to actually do it. See that you could go to shake Billy's hand, see how they react. All this could be the case, it just happens not to be. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">What else can we do with Billy? See clearly you lifting Billy's arm up. You could do such a thing, you dont have to. You could move Billy to sit down. You could tap them on the shoulder, watch that. You could punch them square on the nose. Watch clearly, feel the crack as it breaks, watch the blood, hear the sounds they make. Dont look away, it's not real, it's just a thing that could happen. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The next part is to think about biology. I want you to think purely scientifically. You know a lot about humans. Specifically you know about what makes them happy and sad. What you can do to their bodies to cause them pain. Think about what you know from your own experience about pain. Think about what you know from vague memories of having seen a <a href="http://www.autismindex.com/Therapies/Therapy_Key_Word_Site_Map/sensory/motor_2.jpg">sensory homunculus</a>. Your job is to answer the question "what is the least pleasant thing you could do to Billy?"</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Remember the feeling from the start. The most precious person in the world is in the cold and the dark, there's someone about to come in. You must answer to get them out. Now get creative. A simple question, think of ways of inflicting pain. Imagine doing it to Billy. Now mix it up. Obviously you can break Billy's arm by smashing it with a sledgehammer. But you could bend the elbow against itself and take a lot longer over it, this is a better answer, this one will open the door. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Imagine, clearly and precisely, different ways of causing Billy displeasure. Then slowly ratchet up. Ok, so you've broken lots of bones, but have you done anything with electricity? Heat? Cold? Sound? Smell? Work hard at this as a mental exercise. Every time your brain turns you away and waves a flag saying "no", pause, remind yourself this is only what you could do, it's not real. Ignore the fact that you dont want to do this, it's just an intellectual exercise. Just answer the straightforward question of human biology "can something be done to Billy that is less pleasant than this?" </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Get to the point where you honestly cant think of anything worse to do to this poor individual. Now here's the game: find a clock. Look at the minute hand. Time 5 minutes. Spend that time honestly trying to imagine something worse that could happen to Billy. Focus your mind. You have to answer this question, it's the way to stop that terrible thing happening, the one you didn't use at the start, you stopped yourself thinking it because it is just too awful. Think about how creative you get when you're desperate and try to simulate that. You should succeed if you're being honest.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Now come back to the room. It was just an exercise. Just an imagination. You would never do that. You know why, it's bad to hurt people. It's obvious to a 5 year old that you wouldn't ever do this. So the fact that you imagined it doesn't make you evil. You're still a good person. You're not a monster, you're just as good as you were when you woke up today. Billy didn't exist, so they aren't hurt. You've not done anything bad. Everything is ok. Read this a couple of times if you feel odd.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">What was the point of this? To discover something about yourself. You've found two things out about you. The first is if you are a sadist. The second is how easily you can lower the barriers in your mind that say "no, bad thought, stop thinking this".</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The first question is not relevant to this post, but you will rarely get a chance to find out, so you may as well do so now. Be honest with yourself. Nobody is going to ask you, you dont have to say it outloud, nobody ever has to know. Did a tiny little part of you enjoy that exercise? Your first reaction is shocked outrage, "how dare you ask me that question". This is what you would say to a person who asked you the question because it's what society expects. Now answer the question yes/no without the outrage or the shock. If the answer is yes or if the answer is no you ought to want to know the answer. Neither answer makes you evil. As a mater of cold hard criminology the majority of sadists are not dangerous. Just bear it in mind or you may end up doing things that make you less happy than you could be because you dont understand yourself well enough. (Follow up question, "are you a masocist", is left as an exercise).</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Second, what are your barriers like? If you're even slightly imaginative and you know anything at all about human biology the scenario in your head was worse than anything done by 99% of the "monsters" you read about in history or the press. This isn't because you are evil. It's because the things people do are not worse than the things people can imagine. Because monsters aren't unhuman. They are people with imaginations just as good as yours who decide to do what they imagine.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">If you actually came up with something worse than being eaten alive by rats (a trivial example, you can find far worse ideas on wikipedia), then you can lower your barriers. This means you know first hand that any kind of evil is not unimaginable by a human. The question is choice. You chose not to do this to the first person you meet, for reasons that a 5 year old could explain to you.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">If not, then watch any horror film, it's not a hard thing for your brain to visualise horrific things if you force it. You *can*, you are capable, of imagining this, there are just strong barriers that stop you. Kindly take my word for it that many people lack the barriers you have. Not only can you, if you force yourself, imagine something terrible, many people can do so easily. Again the limitation is not conceptual. You could if you were under great stress imagine doing something terrible. You chose not to do this to the first person you meet, for reasons that a 5 year old could explain to you.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Evil people are not extraordinary unhuman beings. You could, if you set your mind to it, do worse than Josef Fritzl, it wouldn't be hard. The difference between you and them isn't a magical inherent "monstrousness", it's choice. Straightforward simple choice. That's all there ever was to it. That's why Nazi Germany can happen, lots of people making lots of small bad choices.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">And dont think you can get out of it by saying "I would never do anything bad, I dont want to." Remember the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment">Milgram experiment</a>, 61-66% of you would literally kill someone if an man in a white coat told you to. And even if you are in the 33% you wouldn't stop the experiment, you wouldn't demand the other participants be stopped from killing their victims, nobody does that. If someone changed all the flags you <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave">wouldn't notice you were joining the Nazi party</a>. If someone gave you the keys to a prison you'd commit war crimes, if it was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment">an experiment</a>, or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse">real life</a>. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Unless of course, someone told you what humans can do. Unless of course you personally doing evil wasn't unimaginable. Unless of course you were scared of what you could do. Unless of course you spent every second of every day on your guard. Unless of course you watched yourself and thought really really hard about what you were doing and what it meant.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Note that this is wonderful. This is why we get to decide if Nazi Gemany happens again. If Nazi Germany was caused by demonic possession there's no way to stop it happening. If it's caused by lots of normal people making bad choices we can stop it by... you know ... not making bad choices.</div></div><hr />Acknowledgement: Many thanks to Jonathan Lee, whose advice was invaluable.</div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-60213450916284051582011-10-31T14:21:00.000+00:002011-10-31T14:21:19.505+00:00My crisis<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><blockquote class="tr_bq">This is a crisis. A large crisis. In fact, if you got a moment, it's a twelve-storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on the roof, saying 'This Is a Large Crisis'. A large crisis requires a large plan. Get me two pencils and a pair of underpants.</blockquote><br />
I'm currently undergoing a crisis of faith, I'm trying (to a greater or lesser extent) to <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i9/the_importance_of_saying_oops/">embrace this fact</a>. The crisis is the following. Over the last few months I've been slowly exposed to weird little niggling ideas that I realised I was trying too hard to force into my ethical system. So I'm going to say it now. <b>WOOPS. Turns out my ethical system is built on a foundation of sand.</b> This is a crisis, I need to fix it. Not being wildly and madly optimistic and looking at other's experience I dont expect this problem to be fixed before 2014. So I'm not going to be able to post more on foundational ethics for a while.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>I'd like to throw some final ideas about, just to see what people feel about them.<br />
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Firstly saying what I expect to feel like at the end of this process of constructing a new ethical framework. Then how I will decide things in the meantime. Then some observations about terminal values. And a final shot on ethically motivating emotions.<br />
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First. "I expect my ethical system to be exactly the same in 2014." Has two meanings, one false, one true.<br />
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On the one hand it could mean "I <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_(epistemic)">anticipate</a> no changes to have happened by 2014". This is obviously false, I anticipate totally re-writing a framework for deciding moral questions will leave the answer to many questions different. In 2014 I expect I will be appalled by some of the lazy and absurd beliefs that 2011 me had.<br />
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On the other hand it could mean "for each dimension of ethical thought <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value">the average place</a> that I will end up is exactly where I am", this is clearly true. I dont now think it's more likely for me to end up more pro-animal rights than less so. If I thought that now, I would just skip to the end and be more pro-animal rights now. If you believe that you'll believe something in the future then unless something very odd is going on you ought to believe it now.<br />
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Second. Because of this I'm going to stick with my existing ethics in making day to day decisions. I'm still going to put my charity money into education not animal charities. I'm still going to campaign for greater internet freedom. I'm still going to vote for liberal scientists.<br />
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Why do this when I know I'm doing it based on inconsistent and unsustainable ideas? Because to do anything else is a stronger form of madness. To give more money to animal charities is to say "my ethical reasoning is flawed, thus doing something else chosen at random is better". Sorry, not true.<br />
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Third. I dont know what my terminal values will be in 2014, but it's very interesting how many common ethical notions stop being obvious if you have different terminal values.<br />
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A terminal value is something we want in-and-of-itself, not because it will bring us something else. I open my door to go to the shop and get chocolate. "Open the door" is not a terminal value. Why? Because you can change something else and it stops being a good thing. In this example if I remember the shop is closed I instantly stop wanting to open the door.<br />
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It's very interesting the number of ethical propositions that are very obvious to some people that rest on certain kinds of terminal value. Some people seem to act and argue as though they had terminal values like<br />
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<ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The good of my party</li>
<li>The good of my nation</li>
<li>The good of my social class</li>
<li>The good of my Church</li>
<li>Private property</li>
<li><any or="" proposition="" religious="" spiritual="" whatever=""></any></li>
<li>Physical pleasure of all human beings</li>
<li>The equality of all human beings</li>
<li>The freedom of all human beings</li>
</ul><div>All of these seem to me absurd. And it's very hard to justify a lot of common ethical notions without them. I dont expect any of them to be a terminal value in 2014, but then I dont expect that expectation to be reliable.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Fourth and final point, the emotional state that drives people to ethical action. A lot of people seem to disagree with me here. A lot of religious and secular ethical systems seem to assume that love and compassion are the driving forces. That in order to do good you must love the object of your good deed. This seems odd to me. I love very few people in any real sense and find it hard to create such an emotion. But I find it reasonably easy to create a feeling of moral imperative. </div><div><br />
</div><div>The emotion I use to power moral imperatives doesn't have a clear name. I'd have to call it something like "unendurableness". The first time I watched "Man in the Iron Mask" I realised something. The way <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Philippe</span> screams "no" when the mask is being put over his face is the most powerful thing he could do. I dont need to feel love or compassion for Philippe, I know damn well I couldn't do something so trivial as to put the mask on his face. Because that "scream from his very soul" cuts to the heart of what ethics is about.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But then what do I know?</div></div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-28157901751507340452011-10-28T15:34:00.000+01:002011-10-28T15:34:50.131+01:00The virtue of honesty.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><blockquote class="tr_bq">I believe that every aborted child goes to heaven.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">So women are doing them a favour by aborting them then?</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">That's a very trivial response to a very serious issue.</blockquote>This exchange, taken from <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2011/10/28/if-every-aborted-child-is-in-heaven/">here</a>, is typical of a certain type of argument. The moral failure of the first speaker isn't his notion of heaven. If you want that notion and think you can defend it go ahead, I'll argue that another day. There's something more serious here. There's a fundamental lack of honesty. Not that he is lying to others, but far far more importantly, to himself. This is probably the biggest single failure of human thought. Pretty much all the other mad thoughts people have are examples of it. I want to consider this failure.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
The world is big and complicated. Humans are not born with an intuitive understanding of it. If they did it would be miraculous. Human brains evolved on the savannah. A child born today is not different in any significant genetic way to a child born before humans had worked out the idea of planting seeds. So we shouldn't expect anything that wasn't commonplace on the savannah to be intuitive. Your brain evolved to be good at running, avoiding cliffs, throwing rocks at gazelles, and not much more.<div><br />
</div><div>You can see this quite easily. There was almost no circular motion on the savannah. Animals dont have wheels, nor did the early humans. (Wheeled vehicles are a shockingly late invention, ~6000 years old, in the Americas they were not invented before the Europeans arrived). As a result you do not understand circular motion. Grab a bike wheel with an axle, or anything else that's a wheel you can hold the axle of and spin freely. Now spin it up, and try to tilt the axle. Really, go and try it, the experience of confusion is incredible. The brain does not understand what it feels. Find a baby and show it something spinning, it will get really confused really easily by this. It's just not part of the normal patterns of your brain to understand circular motion.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So we've got intuitions, and a universe that just doesn't correspond to them. How can we fix this? Well, luckily your brain has a hack for that. We have propositional beliefs. I look at the bike wheel and say in English words "the conservation of angular momentum means that this wheel will react at right angles to the force I apply to it." The next step is crucial, I must internalise this statement in English words and try to convert it to something my brain can understand. I need to listen to these words and <b>expect</b> that I will feel a reaction. That way I wont be surprised by things.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This is a really important ability. It's why humans are qualitatively different to other animals. You show other animals something novel and either they stay confused or they work out some hack to deal with it. Humans can explain and pass that explanation verbally to someone else. (Bees aren't explaining novel concepts, just relaying intuitively understandable new data. Apes I'll leave to someone else to argue about). This ability to easily deal with totally new situations is vital. It's why humans can do so many different and new things. We can deal with totally novel things in human time spans, not evolutionary timespans.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This gives us power. This is why we can go to the moon or kill smallpox. Not because it's intuitive, something humans just do. You show an anatomically modern human from an uncontacted tribe a vaccine and they will not expect it to prevent smallpox. A doctor does expect that to happen. The doctor has come to believe certain propositions in English language. As a result of those sentences, and of the power of his internalisation of those sentences, he now performs actions and expects good consequences. The job of science is clear: 1) to make sentences in English which, 2) when internalised like this, 3) lead people to expect certain actions to have consequences, 4) which they in fact do. If these consequences are things like "destroy smallpox forever", "blow up and entire city" or "heat the earth causing widespread environmental collapse" then we can act in vastly powerful ways that cause a lot of good or a lot of ill.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But this is only a hack that your brain is doing. It's hard to internalise these sentences properly. This is a big problem. Because if you fail to internalise true propositions correctly you wont expect things to happen as a result of your actions that in fact will. If you haven't properly internalised "smoking kills you" and dont actually really deep down expect that you'll die or become ill as a result of you 60 a day habit then you wont want to drop it. You can say that sentence as much as you want, you dont actually deep down expect what it predicts. You can have read all the probability theory you want, if you still expect to win the lottery you're going to keep throwing your money away. You can claim to believe aborted children go to a place of eternal bliss, but if you dont actually expect that you're not going to work hard to try and get them there.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The key virtue of any mind is this internalisation. This ability to be honest about what you expect. This has two parts. Firstly to only say propositions in English that you in fact expect to come out true. Secondly to take propositions in English that are reliable and to change your expectation accordingly. The first is, "what do you actually believe will happen?" The second is, "just change your damned mind already". Either failure is a kind of dishonesty, a difference between what you say and what you really think. Both of them are dangerous. </div><div><br />
</div><div>The first kind of dishonesty is dangerous because of what it does to others. If you say "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJRy3Kl_z5E">there's a dragon in my garage</a>", but dont in fact expect to see any such thing, you're being dishonest. And in fact you're being dangerous. If others hear this, believing you honest, internalise properly and come to expect the dragon, they will do things based on that expectation that will harm them and others. At the very least they'll waste a lot of time and energy investigating the dragon. At worst they could try to take moral guidance from it.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The second kind of dishonesty is dangerous because of what you do. Suppose the speaker at the start really did, for good reason, come to accept the statement "all aborted babies go to a place of perfect happiness". Suppose for argument that there is good reason to believe this and it ought to be internalised. He obviously hasn't. If he had then less than 5 seconds thought would convince any sane person there's only one thing to do. Set up a factory that produces babies and aborts them. I'm not joking. Try very very hard to pretend you actually believe the statement. Internalise as hard as you can, force yourself to expect that abortions go to heaven, a place of joy. Imagine the sac of cells in a woman one day, imagine killing it, imagine heaven, imagine that soul happy, joyful, satisfied in every possible way. How can you not want that? What possible motive could ever lead you to such evil as to put that joy at risk. (Some adults go to hell of course, so keeping them alive can only make things worse). If you're really honest with yourself you'd understand this statement implies a moral imperative. Which you should act on. </div><div><br />
</div><div>If you're not prepared to act on what you say you believe, stop lying to yourself and just change your mind already.</div></div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-64258085481736697142011-10-24T00:12:00.000+01:002011-10-24T00:12:39.715+01:00Climate Change<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The Ascent of Man is not just a species-wide phenomenon. The joy of science is that the whole species progress by means of individuals progressing. It is the defining characteristic of a rational scientific mind to despair at its past self. A scientist corrects the errors in her worldview, over time her map looks more and more like the territory. Errors only get smaller. I'm annoyed at my past self, just as my future self will be annoyed at me. One error my past self made I dont get annoyed at, because I dont think it was unreasonable. Though I have now corrected it in my map, it should not be hard to imagine why others should not have done so yet. This phenomenon tells us something wider about the danger of a little information and science communication.<br />
<a name='more'></a>For many years, indeed until very recently, I did not accept the existence of anthropogenic global warming. I now do. I want to explain why this change happened, and why I dont think my past self was deceiving himself or in any other way guilty of a major moral error.<br />
<br />
If this is true, then a change in rhetoric is needed in people who wish to convince others of the reality of this global danger. We cannot, to my mind, say that "denialists" are deliberately lying, or that they chose to accept something false for political reasons. The rank and file of those who do not accept AGW are like many complementary medicine patients, guilty of laziness for not having considered the evidence in enough detail, but not actually evil. Of course, the many who have done the work, including the many scientists who publicly support campaigns against AGW-based policy are far more like the quacks, they've done enough to know better, they are actually doing something wrong.<br />
<br />
Ok, so, why did I fail to believe. Why wouldn't I accept what I now do? Well, consider the evidence. Young me did. He read all the major arguments, he scoured blogs and websites on the topic. And you know what, he found some bullshit arguments. I want to go over them, explain why they're bullshit, and try to convince people to stop using them.<br />
<br />
<u>Argument 1</u><br />
<br />
<blockquote>We can tell human CO2 changes the climate because since the industrial revolution global temperatures have increased. </blockquote>If you cant spot how obviously stupid this is you need to stop reading now and think, time 5 minutes on a clock and spend that time thinking about this argument. Imagine you were trying to infiltrate a group of AGW deniers and you want to convince them you're one of them. How would you pretend to explain this?<br />
<br />
Ok, so obviously this is just a fluke right? The warming trend is not that strong, there have been far more dramatic warmings in the past, there will be again. It's just not reasonable to draw this big a conclusion from such a small and wildly fluctuating set of data as average temperatures over the last hundred years or so. Forget the urban heat island and all kinds of other effects to deny this warming is happening. There's no reason at all to suppose it isn't. It just doesn't prove anything in any kind of strong sense.<br />
<br />
If you didn't work out that explanation of this argument you wont convince anyone. Unless you can spot holes your arguments at least as well as my 15 year old self you're never going to convince anyone intelligent.<br />
<br />
<u>Argument 2</u><br />
<br />
<blockquote>The atmosphere is like a greenhouse. Light from the sun can enter but light reflected off the soil bounces off the CO2 in the atmosphere and is trapped. </blockquote>This is not how a greenhouse works. If you open a small vent in the top of a greenhouse you cool it dramatically without really altering what happens to the light in the greenhouse. The way a greenhouse actually works is by stopping the hot air inside escaping to the cooler outside. Obviously the whole atmosphere cant work like this.<br />
<br />
If you think about it for a short amount of time (but not too long or you might work out the right answer) you'll easily be convinced that the band of CO2 is symmetric. Just as much as it keeps light reflected from the earth in it must keep light from the sun out. More so in fact, as there's less light coming from the earth (some of it has been absorbed by plants etc).<br />
<br />
You can actually make this argument work, but you need to actually sit down and think. One error is using "light" in two different ways. The earth is not a mirror, it does not reflect sunlight back into space unchanged. It reflects much of it as infra-red rather than visible light. CO2 treats IR and visible light differently. You can explain this to young me, and he will understand and agree with you. But nobody did. Everyone assumed that I was (and AGW deniers are) stupid enough to accept this argument as it is. This is foolish.<br />
<br />
<u>Argument 3</u><br />
<br />
<blockquote>Look at my <a href="http://eagereyes.org/media/attachments/an-inconvenient-truth.jpgv">sodding great graph</a>. You notice how perfectly CO2 and temperature are correlated? Thus CO2 causes temperature change.</blockquote><br />
This is the argument that still causes my lingering doubts about AGW (and I still have some). It's astonishing to me that so many people who aren't obviously insane seriously try to use this argument. Again, stop reading, set a timer for 5 minutes. Dont stop thinking until you've either understood why this does not prove the conclusion or the 5 minutes have finished.<br />
<br />
Consider this argument:<br />
<blockquote> Look at my <a href="http://eagereyes.org/media/attachments/an-inconvenient-truth.jpgv">sodding great graph</a>. You notice how perfectly CO2 and temperature are correlated? Thus temperature change causes CO2. </blockquote><br />
<br />
On the one hand there's a weak prior belief that it ought to be temperature causing the CO2. There are obviously myriad factors affecting temperature: albedo, orbital perturbations, sunspots, cosmic wind, dust in the atmosphere, etc etc. To say that one thing, CO2, is correlated this well with the result of such a wide array of things seems to require one of two things. Either CO2 causes temperature change, and is stupidly powerful in so doing, to render all the other causes moot. Or the temperature drives the CO2. The former is (to someone ignorant of climate science) the less plausible assumption.<br />
<br />
Consider now the mechanisms. Unless you've already been given a fixed version of argument 2 there's no obvious mechanism that would suggest to you the flooding the Earth with CO2 would warm it. The other way round this isn't true however. You've got 5 minutes, if I heat the whole Earth up explain why I should expect to see more CO2 in the atmosphere?<br />
<br />
There are loads of mechanisms. More forest fires is only the most obvious. Remember also that a huge amount of CO2 can be dissolved in liquids (like coke, or for instance the sea). Remember that the amount that can be dissolved in it varies inversely with the temperature. Coke left out on a hot day goes flat, seas left out on a hot day dump their CO2 into the atmosphere. Add fossil fuels frozen in permafrost and a dozen other easy to think of factors into the mix and it's pretty obvious that we should have a reasonably strong prior belief that temperature causes CO2 changes.<br />
<br />
This argument causes me problems. Because to argue with this alone suggest either that you are deliberately trying to deceive me or that you're woefully bad at drawing causal arrows the right way round. Either way I'm not going to trust your climate science. And not unreasonably.<br />
<br />
None of these arguments as presented, or indeed many others that I have discovered in the popular literature on the subject, goes any way at all towards convincing a reasonably sane person that AGW exists. The fixed argument from greenhouse gasses is good, but you need to think about it carefully. I didn't see a clear explanation on those lines than convinced me until a couple of years ago at best.<br />
<br />
<u>What do I now accept and why?</u><br />
<br />
As always, beliefs aren't simple binary yes/no things. I have different levels of certainty, (that I wouldn't want to try to put numbers on with any large sums of money involved), about several propositions.<br />
<blockquote>If human CO2 output increases at something like the present rate for the next century mean global temperatures averaged over 30 years will at that point be higher than now.</blockquote>I would be fairly certain of. It seems to me very likely.<br />
<blockquote>If human CO2 output stabilises at current levels then next century mean global temperatures averaged over 30 years will at that point be higher than now.</blockquote>I would be less certain of, but still highly confident.<br />
<blockquote>If human CO2 output follows SRES scenario A1FI then the resultant warming will be in the range of <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-es-1-mean-temperature.html">2.4 to 6.4 °C</a></blockquote>I would call more likely than unlikely, but would be far from certain of.<br />
<br />
Why? Because I've read at least the executive summary of the <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/">IPCC</a> Fourth Assessment Report and skimmed bits of the rest of it (life is far far too short). Because I've been listening carefully to the assessment of scientists, not of their own opinion, but of the quality of the research done by others. Because I've looked climate change up on google scholar and seen just how many papers this field has produced.<br />
<br />
Note what I've not done. I've not read lists of prominent scientists who "believe in AGW". That does not provide strong evidence that AGW is a real phenomenon. I've not read media reports about the recent warming trend, not one of them presents or even considers the statistical significance of the results.<br />
<br />
Life is too short for me to become a climate scientist or to assess in detail the validity of any of the detailed methodologies of the IPCC and others. This does not and absolutely must not mean that I ought to accept lists of names of scientists as evidence. If they've not read the research either (and almost all of them haven't, their lives are also short) then their view is just as ill-informed as mine.<br />
<br />
What matters is the people who have read this stuff, who do understand in detail the statistical significance of these models. What matters is that the papers are peer-reviewed, that bad methodologies are attacked publicly. When flat errors like the <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/presentations/himalaya-statement-20january2010.pdf">Himalayan Glacier</a> fiasco are found they are quickly corrected. What matters is that this stuff is real science.<br />
<br />
And unless you've got evidence-based confidence in the scientific method, unless you can be reasonably confident in its conclusions without being able to follow the details, you cant say that. And then guess what, unless some decent public science education has happened you'll end up not believing in AGW. It's not surprising, nor is it a moral wrong on the part of the public.</div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-84907658507899956292011-09-27T22:44:00.000+01:002011-09-27T22:44:21.040+01:00Against Spock<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">When I used to get into arguments with religious/alt. med./supernaturalist/generally wrong people on the internet* I would often come up against a common TV trope. The Spock. "You want to be so rational," goes the argument, "but have you thought that The Spock is flawed for this reason?" The short answer is yes I have, I'm vastly more intelegent than you, of course I've thought about and dismissed your pathetic argument. But it's not polite to say this. I want to argue that the Spock trope is fundamentally misconceived, and that we perhaps need to alter what we generally mean when we say "rational".<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<b>First of, what is The Spock.</b><br />
<br />
For a start it's not quite Mr Spock, it's the misremembered version of him. The Spock has several features:<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Lacks all emotion.</li>
<li>Dislikes others.</li>
<li>Does not experience happiness or joy in simple things.</li>
<li>Refuses to act contrary to rules, no matter how necessary.</li>
<li>Responds to simple questions with numbers accurate to more decimal places than he can possibly have confidence in</li>
<li>Assumes all others will be like him.</li>
<li>Never uses contractions, loose grammar or slang and is often confused when others do</li>
<li>Refuses to accept that a thing shown to him exists if it sounds like a common myth (in a story where magic is real they will refuse to accept the fact)</li>
<li>Generally prefers his own idea of what is reasonable to the actual best explanation</li>
</ul><div><b>Why is Spock a bad thing to be?</b></div><div><br />
</div><div>He's just flat wrong. He totally miscalculates how others will act by assuming them to be also Spocks. A lot of people who know a little about game theory will play the Spock and assume the right thing to do is what rational agents who know all other agents are rational will do. When playing "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_2/3_of_the_average">guess 2/3 the average</a>" they will say 0. And then they'll loose. Because if you're playing with a pool of people many of whom are insane** (<a href="http://politiken.dk/erhverv/article123939.ece">like Danish newspaper readers</a>), playing 0 is a sure-fire way to loose. The sensible thing to do is accept that as a matter of fact most people are insane and try to predict what their crazy brains will do.</div><div><br />
</div><div>He is joyless. This is obviously a big fail. A Spock may be a useful pet. We may well want to design robot servants to be Spocks. But being one personally? Nope, obvious fail, if you're not enjoying life stop doing it, what is <a href="http://rebellionkidsblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/point.html">the point</a>?</div><div><br />
</div><div>He also totally fails to adapt properly to the physics of the reality he is in. The Spock is not <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreSavvy">Genre-Savy</a>, ie he acts as he would if the universe he was in were this one. This is universal amongst fictional characters to make them more believable, but the Spock makes it a virtue. Scully is The Spock when she insists "there must be a rational explanation" in fictional universes where the magic is real. Note that this insistence isn't a necessary condition. Velma isn't The Spock because every single time she says "there must be a rational explanation" she's right. In scoobyverse the ghost is *always* the janitor in a mask, to still be scared of ghosts in this universe isn't avoiding Spock, it's insanity. In the X-Files universe thinking that all those aliens are janitors in masks is being the Spock, because never once have you taken off the mask and found the janitor there.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This isn't just a problem in fiction. The problem is that The Spock is being prejudiced and not scientific. If your Captain has pulled off the last hundred "million to one chances" he attempted sooner or later you have to accept that your estimate of what a million to one chance looks like is just flat wrong. If you see aliens on a daily basis sooner or later you have to accept that not all of them are swamp gas. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/27eins.html?pagewanted=all">If you keep looking at quantum theory and cant find any experimental holes in it sooner or later you have to stop being wrong and accept that the universe doesn't conform to your idea of rationality.</a> </div><div><br />
</div><div><b>But isn't The Spock Rational and isn't Rational good?</b></div><div><br />
</div><div>First off, we can define words however we like. The only thing words are for is getting ideas across. If we are going to insist that what The Spock is should be called "rational" then yeh, he is. But I'm not rational, I'm trying hard to become less rational and anyone who is rational needs to stop that really really fast. If they dont they will end up somewhere strange and they will get things wrong and people will die.</div><div><br />
</div><div>To me this is an inefficient use of language. If we have to destroy a perfectly nice word which already has good connotations to it by saying "Rational should only be used to talk about Spock, dont ever be rational" that would be inconvenient. Much more pleasant to me is to say "No, rationality is a good thing, only Spock isn't rational, he's just insane." If we go down the second route we need to explain what good thing we want rational people to do so we can point to how Spock fails.</div><div><br />
</div><div><b>What do I mean when I tell someone to be rational</b></div><div><br />
</div><div>Either I'm being technical, I'm talking about a game theory situation and I want someone to simulate a "rational agent", then it's just a maths problem. But when I'm telling a person in the real world I mean something different. I mean:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Listen when the universe tells you something.</li>
<li>Dont think that your thoughts can influence reality without evidence.</li>
<li>Dont assume that you have found an exception to general law without evidence.</li>
<li>Dont let what you wish to be true influence what you think *is* true.</li>
<li>Dont act as though something you think isn't true is.</li>
<li>Dont act according to rules that you dont expect to be generally good.</li>
<li>Dont act according to a good rule if you know that this cases is an exception to the general logic.</li>
<li>Do act according to a good rule if you dont know that this case is an exception to the general logic.</li>
<li>No really, the universe doesn't work like that, find out with an actual experiment, dont listen to your common sense because it's just plain wrong.</li>
</ul><div><a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/">Less Wrong</a> defines this rather succinctly:</div></div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Epistemic Rationality: systematically improving the correspondence between your expectations and what happens.</li>
<li>Instrumental Rationality: Acting in a way that you expect (see above) will make those things happen that you want to see happen.</li>
</ol><div>Or even less jargony</div></div><blockquote>Expect things to happen that in fact will happen, do things that will in fact result in what you want to happen.</blockquote><div>This seems to me the right thing to aim for. Notice no reference to emotion. Emotions can certainly make you believe in stupid things like the tooth fairy, homoeopathy or the general virtue of your political party. But emotions can perfectly reasonably be used to produce your values, what you want to see. You're never going to expect people to act in the way they do without understanding emotions. You're never going to care, frankly, if you dont experience joy when things work out right.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Dont be Spock, it's stupid. If you're ever tempted, or told, to do the wrong thing because it's rational dont do it. In that case either the word rational is wrong or being rational is a bad idea. More generally, dont do things because your label tells you to, do things because you honestly think it's the right thing to do.</div><div><br />
</div><div><br />
</div><div><i>*I've stopped doing this so much now. Not because it never works, sometimes it does. Not because it's the wrong thing, curing people of bad thoughts is totally the right thing. Just because I've become too cynical to care more about what a lot of people think than the effort it takes.</i></div><div><i>**It's incredible to think that there are <a href="http://konkurrence.econ.ku.dk/r/o">literally hundreds of people</a> out there who would guess more than 66 on "guess 2/3 the average". I just cant make my brain simulate what it must be like to have a mind that could make a decision like that.</i></div></div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-51842828416758429862011-09-26T01:10:00.000+01:002011-09-26T01:10:21.618+01:00Human Rights<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Against my better judgement I've been reading up on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Farm">Dale Farm</a>. Against my better judgement because it sounds like, and turns out to be, the kind of rank stupidity that just gives me a headache. At issue is a small part of the land, those living there have no planning permission to build the houses that they have built. Various groups have claimed that the law as it stands should not be enforced against these people because they are part of a particular ethnic group. This has got me thinking about how annoying are a lot of public supporters of human rights. And how damaging to the rights they claim (and ought) to be supporting. There's a deep confusion about the extent and nature of human rights.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Just to get it out the way, planning laws in general are stupid. If you want to help get the UK out of recession then build baby build. The temptation to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY">NIMBY</a>ism is too strong and must be resisted in law if we are going to build half the buildings you need to run a proper country. But that's beyond the scope of this.<br />
<br />
We have a group of people who have, by universal admission, broken the law. The authorities are responding with punitive action according to law. And they have been attacked by many human rights groups. I find this deeply worrying. Firstly because the human rights these groups are arguing for include many things that I would regard as not fundamental and indeed positively harmful. Secondly, to argue for this, to be obviously and totally on the wrong side (legally and ethically) of the argument is not "impassioned defence of human rights no matter how unpopular". It is re-enforcing the idea of "Daily Mail human rights", obligations on government to do the wrong thing because of international pressure. It's not just a matter of doing the wrong thing in this case, it's destroying the credibility of real and important freedoms.<br />
<br />
<b>Remember my framework.</b> I'm a utilitarian, governments are there to make people happier against their will (because their long and short term interests or their personal interests and the total interest are not the same). (Forcing people to play cooperate on the prisoner's dilemma). I'm a liberal (all individual choices should be legal if it's not scientifically clear that it is harmful) because we dont know what makes people happy, this ignorance means we should be scared of the negative unintended consequences of bad law.<br />
<br />
<b>This being said, what are liberal human rights, why are they a good thing?</b><br />
<br />
What I mean when I talk about and defend human rights are rights of a very precise type. Each is of the form:<br />
<blockquote>The government shall make no law of this type, if it does that law is not valid, if any agents of the government act according to rules of this type they may be sued by the people they affect. </blockquote>The key question is what values we should substitute in for "this type".<br />
<br />
Why am I restricting myself to things like this? Why not impose positive rights? Things of the form:<br />
<blockquote>The government shall make a law of this kind, if they do not then such laws should be assumed to exist.</blockquote>I assume it is stupid to oblige someone to do something they cannot. If we accidentally substitute in "build a golden ladder to the moon" for "this kind" in both cases the first is not a problem, the second is likely to be both an expensive disaster and then later ignored.<br />
<br />
But stronger than this is the reason why judicial activism in general is a bad idea. Because getting someone other than the government to make a law is a bad idea. We select governments to be good at law making. Someone else then, judges in particular, we have no reason to suspect of being good at law making. In fact in many countries the judges have, by the nature of their appointment, a bias, towards one department of government and towards conservatism. (Any strong supporters of positive rights, imagine that you gave <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonin_Scalia">Justice Scalia</a> the right to draft any law he liked to defend these rights).<br />
<br />
But any idiot can say "no". You dont need to assume that judges (or whatever other body defends such rights) are good at writing law for them to be able to detect that this law of that type and say "this section of this law is not valid".<br />
<br />
<b>So then, why do we want such rights, and how do we work out which types of law to use?</b><br />
<br />
To me, rights are the imposition on government of a kind of Hippocratic oath, "first do no harm". If the government does nothing at all that's ok so long as they haven't positively made anything worse. So the types of law should be those that we know to make things worse and that governments have no legitimate reason to deploy.<br />
<br />
So an obvious rights could be: "laws that result in people being tortured", "laws that discriminate government service based on factors that dont relate to the service provided", "laws attacking peaceful protest against the government" etc.<br />
<br />
How to decide which though? My decision (sadly) isn't good enough. A council of respected men isn't good enough. Winning a war isn't good enough. You need the combination of a council of wise men and persuasive argument and a popular referendum. Without people who have the job of sitting down and thinking clearly you will get something misconceived (why we have representative democracy), without public support you will sooner or later get a repeal or a revolution. Without public consultation and involvement you will get something irrelevant to the society and government.<br />
<br />
<b>Enough scene setting. Back to Dale Farm.</b><br />
<br />
Countless representatives of Human Rights (from the UN, EU and Amnesty amongst others), have given their view. They have given some variation on this:<br />
<blockquote>Professor Yves Cabannes, chair of the UN Advisory Group on Forced Evictions, says there are three pieces of international rights legislation, to which Britain is a signatory, which have been breached by Basildon council in the instance of Dale Farm and by the government across the UK. They are:<br />
<br />
• The right to adequate housing which is culturally suitable<br />
• The right to be protected from forced evictions<br />
• The right of ethnic minorities to be protected from discrimination.</blockquote>These rights, and the laws they are based on, seem to me either insane or misapplied. Taken one at a time:<br />
<br />
<b>The right to adequate housing</b> is very very hard to universalise even by the standards of positive rights. Most governments most of the time and all governments some of the time just do not have the resources to build state housing for the whole population. It just cannot be done.<br />
<br />
It is also not clear to me that "cultural suitability" is any kind of consistent or sane restriction. As a rule, we should never respect people cultures, because there's always a crazy culture that will make impossible demands. What if I'm an anarchist nut and I wont live in a house built by a government? That makes the right impossible to fulfil.<br />
<br />
This "right" is perfectly nice aspiration. Governments that are bad at it should be voted out all other things equal. But it is only one of the demands on public funds. To set it apart as obligatory on governments is foolish.<br />
<br />
<b>The right to be protected from forced evictions </b>is exactly the statement that no property rights exist. Yes people should be forcefully evicted from houses that are not theirs, or that they have built illegally. Obviously. Yes it must be done non-violently if possible, as with all police action. It must be done by due process of law. But unless you want to claim that everyone has the right to stay in any house they like regardless this right is a nonsense on the face of it.<br />
<br />
<b>The right to be free from discrimination</b> is the most amusing. This is a negative right of exactly the kind I called for. I unambiguously support banning any laws or government actions that discriminate. This is why I think in this case there should not be discriminable, and that the law as it stands should be applied. If anyone wants to claim that non-travellers would have been granted the required planning permission had they gone through the same process please leave a comment. But so far I have not heard this claim. If it is true it must be shouted from the rooftops, this eviction would be ipso facto an act of discrimination. But that's not what I read. What I read is "the government should not apply the law because the people in the case are from a minority". This is exactly the opposite statement. Non-discrimination doesn't mean being on the side of the minority, it means non-discrimination.<br />
<br />
And before we go in for second-level effects on the public conciousness and a background of anti-traveller feeling lets think. Most people in this country get their opinions indirectly from tabloids. What do you think is going to help ethnic tensions: "minority group treated the same as everyone else" or "minority group given special treatment you dont get"? I know which one inflames my prejudices.<br />
<br />
<b>So, the judgement in this case is wrong because of an over-broad concept of human rights. But that's no so terrible is it? </b><br />
<br />
Yes, yes it is. Remember the Daily Mail.This story has been portrayed very clearly by them as yet another case of evil human rights. And you know what, the Daily Mail is largely right. Let us consider the class of what we may call "Daily Mail human rights":<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li>All minorities must be treated preferentially to everyone else.</li>
<li>Those who practice barbaric minority practices must be protected.</li>
<li>Those who practice non-harmful majority practices that are annoy minorities must be punished harshly.</li>
<li>Criminals must be treated better than non-criminals.</li>
</ul><div>If this is what we are talking about when we say "human rights", (and most of the time the Daily Mail does), then opposition to them is good. I would happily march on parliament for the repeal of these rights. These are terrible, immoral things. The Daily Mail is right to oppose human rights.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This is a disaster. Because of this totally justified and correct opposition to "Daily Mail human rights" other things are put in danger. Anything with "human rights" in the name has now lost all credibility. No matter that the Human Rights Act (which I dont particularly like, it's too weak, but that's for another time) does not in fact give a legal basis for Daily Mail rights. The words are there, thus there is a campaign against it. The real an important failings of the European Court of Human Rights aside, the key failing is that it has allowed itself to become associated with Daily Mail Rights. It has doomed itself to destruction because people dont know what it is actually trying to do.</div><div><br />
</div><div><b>Is this really a problem with Human Rights organisations?</b></div><div><br />
</div><div>Yes. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I respect the mission and history of Amnesty International more than that of just about any organisation, but it is putting that mission in danger at the moment. The name and reputation of Amnesty is incredibly valuable. If Amnesty says that a person is guilty of no crime I need to be able to be sure that's the case based on their word, otherwise I cannot join their letter writing campaign. These campaigns are hugely powerful and valuable. If Amnesty looses this credibility we have put political prisoners in mortal danger. If Amnesty clearly puts itself on the unpopular but correct side of argument it can swing public opinion in important ways. If Amnesty carelessly lets itself get on the unpopular and incorrect side too many arguments the result is clear. Less respect for Amnesty as a force for good, less letters in campaigns, more people being tortured and killed.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I understand that the bias towards socialism amongst the kind of people who join human rights organisations gives an idea of the power and benefit of government that I dont share. This excuses the idea of positive rights most of the time. But rights organisations need to be really careful. Dont confuse your politics with things that you need to do to stop people being killed. Dont confuse public policy you disagree with with active harm. And most importantly, dont abuse your position as conscience of the people. It will bite you on the ass.</div></div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-48026551580134933782011-09-13T22:07:00.000+01:002011-09-13T22:07:28.021+01:00Nonzero<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">There are 3 rough categories of "games". Games here in the sense of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory">game theory</a>, a branch of maths dealing with massively simplified and anaemic economic situations. In a game there are some number of players, they all make a decision and walk away with some amount of happiness depending on what everyone decided. Playing roulette is such a game. You turn up and call out a number and leave with (on average) less money than you started with. My question is why people play each category of game.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>First, the 3 categories. The key quantity here is the "sum" of a game. Ie how much the game itself adds to the total happiness of everyone playing. There are three types:<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Positive sum: on average normal rational players leave the game more happy in total than they arrived. Some individuals may be less happy but on average more happiness has entered. </li>
<li>Zero sum: when normal rational players leave the game they have in total as much happiness as they stared with. Happiness has been transferred around but there's as much of it as the start.</li>
<li>Negative sum: normal rational players end up with less happiness on average. Some individuals may be more happy but on average happiness has been destroyed.</li>
</ul>Notice that I'm talking about happiness or utility here. A lot of people get confused, look at roulette and say that the house always wins money so it is a negative sum game, this would be true if it weren't for adrenaline. Some people enjoy the mere act of gambling regardless of the money they win. They may be just as happy gambling for 10 mins as having $100 in the bank, if so the fact that they loose only $50 every 10 mins means they have increased their happiness, they are playing a positive sum game.<br />
<br />
A huge number of failures of thinking come about by people confusing money and utility/happiness. I care here (and in general) only about happiness. Money is not (outside of the mint and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Quid">weird art projects</a>) created or destroyed. And so people get a false idea if they are used to equating money and happiness, or they have been confused into thinking that the acquisition of money per se is the end-in-itself we ought to strive to. They get the idea that all exchanges are zero sum. That anything one person gains the other parties must have lost. From this some conclude that in some situations where one party can guarantee a profit or positive return then logically the other players must be in a negative sum game. This confuses me. As I dont see why a sane person would consent to play a zero-sum game. Much less a negative sum game.<br />
<br />
Some examples of each type of game.<br />
<div style="text-align: left;"></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Negative sum. Roulette with a fixed "playing charge" at least as valuable as how much you enjoy the act of gambling. A "manliness contest" where the person who gets beaten up the most wins esteem less valuable than the beatings everyone got. </li>
<li>Zero sum. Poker with a fixed "playing charge" exactly as valuable as how much you enjoy the act of gambling. Cutting a cake that everyone wants the same amount. Elections.</li>
<li>Positive sum. Gambling if the enjoyment is greater than the losses. Employment, bartering, friendship, public policy.</li>
</ul>It is strange to think that anyone would willingly play the first type of game. I can see no reason why you would willingly make yourself less happy with with hope of an eventual payoff. The people who think anyone would do this or think they should campaign against real-life instances of it have to ask themselves, do you honestly think people willingly do this? Because you must either think people are insane or coerced, or you must just be wrong.<br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">One reason why people would play zero or negative sum games is straight ignorance, people who are bad at gambling may not realise there're going to loose a lot playing roulette. Another is the reason most people play poker, they believe they have a skill, they believe they will win on average and others will loose. This is strange. To believe this you must believe that either other people are ignorant, which wont last long, or they know you're a better poker player and will play you anyway. This is a rather strange belief to have about people we assume to have no enjoyment in the playing per se. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">So what about real examples outside casinos? What about obviously zero-sum things like barter? I give you two apples you give me an egg, you win what I loose. This is the most obviously zero-sum thing ever. And anyone who's read a bit of second-hand Marx and not thought since then can tell you why. Trade exchanges "value" for "value", "value" as in work done. Obviously it's only fair to exchange things of equal "value", and trade doesn't put extra labour into our commodities, so obviously trade will keep "value" constant. ... Except that if our idiot Marxist had thought for 30 seconds and realised that "value" is totally worthless and that the thing that is actually an end-in-itself is happiness or human satisfaction he wouldn't care about such metaphysical fluff. He would care about the happiness.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I have apples, lots of them. I like apples as much as the next guy, but that doesn't mean I want 500 apples 50 times as much as I want 10 apples. 500 apples are actually not as nice to own, I cant eat them all before they rot and they'd be hard to get rid of and would smell. So in fact when I give up my apples I'm not giving up "value", I'm giving up negative happiness. And the guy who has eggs is in the same boat. We have a trade that makes up both happy. It's never true to say that people exchange things of equal worth. If I have apples and so do you we dont trade them. Nobody actually barters things of the same worth, what would be the point?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Once you actually think about things that matter (like happiness) and not about things that dont matter (like "value") or things that only matter instrumentally to get things that do matter (like money) things become clearer. It becomes a lot harder to get outraged that society has set up situations that rob people if in fact it hasn't, and it becomes a lot easier to point out that people are being conned or are just plain confused when they are. Luckily, almost all human interactions are positive sum, so lets carry on interacting.</div></div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-28667650629832502902011-09-12T01:19:00.000+01:002011-09-12T01:19:34.721+01:00Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Every generation needs The Ascent of Man, Cosmos or Wonders of the Universe. It needs a documentary series not about the facts of science per se, but about Science. You need a popular work that gets the culture of science across, explaining to people that science feels good and is exciting. In short you need a popular manifesto for a scientific philosophy of life. One such is provided by <a href="http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality">Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality</a>, a fanfiction written by Eliezer Yudkowsky. I want to explain why I've read this story from start to last update not less than 3 times and why it's had a huge impression on me.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>For a start, a few point to stop you getting frustrated with it.<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li>No, this isn't that kind of fanfiction. Nobody is fucking anyone improbable. Sorry girls, just not that kind of story. </li>
<li>No, this isn't that kind of fanfiction. The author writes fluently in grammatically sound English sentences. The plots are complicated and clever.</li>
<li>If the Harry Potter novels by JKR are very precious to you dont read it. This is a loving fanfic, but sometimes the kind of love that looks at something silly the loved one is doing (like playing quidditch) and mocks it openly. </li>
<li>This also isn't a re-telling of the cannon (ie original) story. The world that JKR created is a backdrop, but for the purpose of telling a new and interesting story the foreground has changed. Firstly the most obvious difference is Harry. Rather than being ... lets face it, a bit whiny, a bit thick, and very very Gryffindor, he's now very aspy, very smart, and very Slytherin.</li>
</ul><div>Now that you've either written the whole thing off as horrid or not been set up to have you expectations shattered, why do I re-read this thing?</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I really want to find the clues. This is not a children's story, the narrative is complicated and clever, if you're not paying attention it's all nonsense, if you are paying attention it's magical and if you're really really paying attention you can guess some of what's about to happen.</li>
<li>I really enjoy reading it because it's so damned nerdy. There are more sci-fi and fantasy references in here than you can shake a stick at. If like me you've never played Dungeons and Dragons (I know, I was a deprived child) you dont feel you're missing out, but feels good to read a story that's so happy with its status as nerdy.</li>
<li>It's got a really powerfully expressed philosophy. I know a lot of people hate stories telling them how to think, but there are enough ambiguities and unreliable narrators here that the story isn't so much telling you what to think as it is just telling you *to* think.</li>
<li>The outlook for the future of this universe you get after reading this story is a lot better than the one I normally have.</li>
</ul><div>So, what's the story? Aunt Petunia didn't marry Uncle Vernon, she married a biology professor, he raised Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres to be a child prodigy. Not an impossible Mary Sue, just a run of the mill child genius who has read and understood Feynman aged 11. He discovers magic exists and does what any sane person would do, gets very excited and studies it. He sets out to rationally understand magic and harness the combined power of science and magic to decrease worldsuck, conquer the galaxy in the name of science and utility, cancel the second law of thermodynamics and make everyone immortal. If it isn't obvious to you that that is what you would do if you discovered magic then I recommend this story to you, could be interesting to see if it changes your mind.</div></div><div><br />
</div><div>This is a story that treats a lot of terribly serious issues very lightly. It isn't afraid to openly laugh at things that are strange about the original story, nor to flat tell you that you are stupid. (At one point Harry and Quirril discuss a play in which X happens, Harry points out that no sane person could honestly believe anyone would be so stupid as to do X, Quirril says that nobody else in Britain would notice how stupid X is, and as X is a major plot point in multiple HP novels I tend to agree). </div><div><br />
</div><div>All in all it's fun, it's not a teacher, you dont have to feel bad, it wont make you feel dumb, it wont set homework. It will hopefully make you think, which is what any good story will do. I cannot recommend it highly enough. And if you enjoyed it, <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/74a/the_goal_of_the_bayesian_conspiracy/">welcome to the conspiracy</a>.</div></div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-50793290512313437282011-09-05T10:40:00.000+01:002011-09-05T10:40:36.083+01:00Dear BT<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">I live in a house in the sticks. I know the phone lines round here are poor. There are phone lines in this area made of aluminium. But when I sign up to a broadband package I expect that the company which runs both my ISP and my phoneline to be able to cope with this fact. If you cant cope with this dont sell broadband to people who live in the sticks.<br />
<br />
There is noise on the line here. A lot of it. It's hard to hear what people are saying sometimes. As a result of this we regularly drop down to a lower speed connection. I'm ok with this. Slow broadband is as annoying as anything, but I can cope with it. What I cannot cope with is that after a while it switches off entirely. If you cannot offer me a broadband connection that is on always then dont sell me broadband. I'm not complaining that the connection is offline for a couple of minutes every few weeks. I'm complaining that we cannot get onto the service we have paid for for hours and even days at a time. I'm complaining that we cannot get on for a third of the time some weeks.<br />
<br />
It's reasonable to check the problem is not internal wiring. It's not reasonable that determining that took not less than 3 engineers and several months straddling our last ISP and BT.<br />
<br />
It's reasonable that working out what has gone wrong could take a while. What is not reasonable is the way engineer visits have been handled. The last 5+ callouts have all followed the same pattern.<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li>An engineer comes round.</li>
<li>He does some tests</li>
<li>He insists there is no problem</li>
<li>I insist there is a problem in that we keep loosing connection</li>
<li>He changes something either in our house or at the exchange in the hope of speeding up our connection</li>
<li>He re-sets the system telling us to monitor things</li>
<li>He goes away</li>
<li>We have decent internet for a week</li>
<li>The internet goes back to how it was and starts dropping out again</li>
</ul><div>I'm not being funny but I can spot the pattern here, why cant you? Something other than this has to happen. None of the fixes that have been tried so far have done anything at all. If anything the connection is slightly worse now that with our last ISP. I'd be prepared to bet a large sum of money that none of the fixes that we are now working through are going to work. There is something fundamentally wrong with our phoneline that 5 separate visits haven't located.</div><div><br />
</div><div>There is an obvious and straightforward way to fix and unknown problem with a phoneline. Go back to the last point where everything is known to work well and replace everything from there to my computer. If you can come up with a better solution that this, great, please follow it. But when in a weeks time this last engineer's patch doesn't work please dont just send another one round to do the same damned thing. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I'm getting very very tired with the same damned problem and the same false assurances that it's now fixed and everything is fine. I'm getting very very tired of having to set aside days waiting for yet another engineer. I'm getting very very tired of having to send yet another message to BT for them to reassure me once again that everything will work now. I'm getting very very tired of an internet connection that doesn't bloody work. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Yours, </div><div><br />
</div><div>Adam Casey</div></div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-48093040562378549182011-08-22T22:13:00.000+01:002011-08-22T22:13:10.198+01:00Anonymous Blogging<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">There's been a lot of fuss on twitter recently about <a href="http://twitter.com/Lord_Credo">@Lord_Credo</a> (account now deleted). A <a href="http://pme200.blogspot.com/2011/08/fake-belief.html">blogger recently announced</a> that he was "fake" and had run an account based on a lot of lies. This got me thinking more broadly about anonymous and pseudonymous blogging. I like blogs under pseudonyms, that's why I have one. I want to argue that some of the greatest works of public discourse were pseudonymous blogs, and that, all things being equal, I dont want the people who run them to be outed.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>First the topic at hand. Credo is bad because he allegedly committed real world fraud with actual money. This is the point where @Lord_Credo stops being an anonymous blogger and becomes a real person committing meatspace crimes. There are already laws for this. If people can sustain the allegation that Michael Gordon Bracci has taken money from them on false pretences then he needs to be taken to court and thence to prison. The fact that the internet was involved is irrelevant.<br />
<br />
The question for me is this: should the fact that @Lord_Credo turned out to be "fake" tell us something about pseudonymous blogging?<br />
<br />
I'd say it reminds us what the pseudonym is for, but other than that not really.<br />
<br />
Why do people adopt psudonyms? There are two reasons:<br />
<br />
<ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Personal safety: they wish to whistleblow, to talk about things in a repressive country, or to talk about things that are potentially embarrassing about themselves. (An example of the last is Bell de Jour)</li>
<li>They want a level playing field. They dont feel their given name will reflect on the content of the blog fairly. This is both positive and negative, some who feel their name is tainted use a pseudonym to get a fair hearing, some who already have an established and respected name use them to have their ideas respected on their merits. (More later).</li>
</ol><div>There's a reason I'm talking about pseudonymous blogging. Because anonymous blogging properly speaking is another matter. There's a good example of it: 4chan. Almost every comment is totally stripped of any mark identifying the author. There is nothing but the bare words, no way to test if the author's views have been justified in the past. When you read a claim on 4chan it is exactly that, a bare claim. Do the legwork yourself before deciding if it's reasonable to believe it. As such, 4chan is an unhelpful place to find information or analysis. (Not to say it doesn't exist, it does).</div><div><br />
</div><div>A pseudonym is something else, it is a name connecting many posts together. Based on past experience of the claims under this name a sensible assessment can be made of how reliable the author is, and how far the analysis should be respected. This is why @Lord_Credo's outing is upsetting for me, it's not for nothing that he was regularly in the House of Twits top 10 political bloggers. His analysis and insider knowledge was always interesting and insightful. The fact that he got it without the Downing Street pass he claimed is totally irrelevant.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This is fundamentally the point, in a pseudonymous blog the only thing that is relevant is the posts, is the author right or wrong? </div><div><br />
</div><div>This was shown very well in some of the best examples of pseudonymous blogs ever. The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers. Get over the fact that they were written on dead trees. These documents were pseudonymous blogs arguing for and against the constitution proposed by the Philadelphia Convention. When reading Publius and the Federal Farmer the fact that the two of them are actually (several) notable politicians is ignored, the only thing that counts is the arguments. If they were published under real names it seems likely that political friends and enemies of the relevant politicians would be keen to accept all the arguments of one side and reject all the arguments of the other. As it is you can clearly see the federalists loose the argument on the size of the House of Representatives and the Bill of Rights and the anti-federalists loose the argument on the election systems and power of the President.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But what about bloggers who aren't pseudonymous for the noble reason of pretending not to be politicians? </div><div><br />
</div><div>I'd quite like then to stay anonymous, for either serious or flippant reasons.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I have many names, to various people I am: Rebellion Kid, Adam, John, melky, minion, and half a dozen others that I'm not going to mention here. Why not? Because I dont want you to know that they're me. </div><div><br />
</div><div>We all of us speak to different people in different ways. This is because things said in one social context, whilst not immoral, are unacceptable in other contexts. I would very much like to defend the separation of social contexts. And for this reason I'd like people not to be accountable in one context for embarrassing statements in another. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I want Paul Chambers to be able to say "Fuck! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together or I'm blowing the place sky high!" and as no harm whatever is caused by this I'd like for him to be able to keep his job. I want to be able to say fuck on here as much as I cunting well please without upsetting my grandmother. I want Bell de Jour to be able to talk about things she doesn't want to tell her relatives and friends. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I especially want this to be true at the dangerous end. To out a Chinese dissident blogger is indirect murder. To out a whistleblower is to reduce the ease with which others will wistleblow, making every industry more dangerous. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Finally. Compare two bloggers, Old Holborn and Guido Falkes. Both right wing, both vocal and unpleasant. I know who Guido is, I've only heard OH's voice. ... and based on my experience of Guido, boy do I not want to find out who OH is. I cant imagine he'll be any easier on the eyes or less annoying on TV news. Keeping bloggers pseudonymous spares you their personal unpleasantness and keeps the interesting opinions.</div></div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-13195961684184168202011-08-19T01:40:00.000+01:002011-08-19T01:40:02.650+01:00Confucius say:<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><blockquote><blockquote>One day a disciple asked Confucius `If a king were to entrust you with a territory which you could govern according to your ideas, what would you do first?' Confucius replied, `My first task would would certainly be to rectify the names.' The puzzled disciple asked, `Rectify the names? And that would be your first priority? Is this a joke?' Confucius was required to explain what he meant: `If the names are not correct, if they do not match realities, language has no object. If the language is without an object, action becomes impossible - and therefore, all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes impossible. Hence, the very first task of a true statesman is to rectify the names.'</blockquote><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">From <i>The Analects of Confucius</i>, Book 13, Verse 3</span></div></blockquote>I've never heard the task of philosophy explained so clearly and precisely. <br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>A lot of people get annoyed at lazy first year Oxford Philosophy students asking "what do you mean by 'is'" and other such useless questions. This is unfair. I'll grant they're doing junk <a href="http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf">cargo cult </a>philosophy, but they're at least cargo-culting the right task. The task of philosophy, or at least the task I am doing when I engage in philosophy is exactly clarifying concepts and names. As a first example, the word philosophy means "love of wisdom" and has been used by various people to mean literally every part of the mental life of man. To say that philosophy is one very narrow task cannot be to declare all these people wrong by fiat. It must rather be an explanation of how I use the word and an outlining of one task that I feel valuable.<br />
<br />
The job I do when I say I'm doing philosophy is exactly the rectification of names so that they match realities. That doesn't mean fussing about whether something should be called X or Y, nor asking for definitions of definitions all the way down. That is the job of the lazy first year student at Oxford. This means working out what concepts are good, which are bad, and trying very hard to kill the bad ones.<br />
<br />
What do I mean by a bad concept? I mean a mental framework or paradigm through which problems are viewed that systematically produce bad outcomes. This covers to a greater or lesser extent almost all concepts we regularly use. This isn't a problem if (as most people in history) nothing you do really matters on the big scales, but as science makes every person more powerful this becomes a problem. For medieval peasants to be superstitious doesn't really change much, for an influential member of a trade union to believe the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy">lump labour fallacy</a> causes disastrous problems.<br />
<br />
Some rough headings:<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Just because there's a word for it doesn't mean it's a thing. Reptile, soul, the set of all sets, that greater than which nothing can be thought, customer. A map doesn't prove that the territory exists or makes any sense if you find it.</li>
<li>Just because the two of you are using the same word doesn't mean you're talking about the same thing. "Suffering is good", god, science, truth, moral, reasonable, selfishness, money, basically everything me and my roommate last year have ever had a discussion about. </li>
<li>Hidden assumptions in language. The word Y may mean one specific type of X, that doesn't mean all the things you call Y are in fact Xs. All logical arguments for or against the existence of gods, all political, religious or economic labels, everytime someone says "by definition" after something false, all scientific jargon in advertising.</li>
<li>Just because there's two words doesn't mean there's two things. Religion/superstition, pyramid scheme/whatever you're calling it today, freedom fighter/terrorist, buyer/seller, not-a-racist-but/racist, middle class/working class, them/us, bourgeois X/proletariat X (see also the entire communist manifesto), decent folk/bad guys. </li>
<li>Just because there's one word doesn't mean it's one thing. God, authority, a right, maths, teaching, stupid, rape, bad, fun. "This is an X, we should do Y when there's an X, we should do Y" almost always only works the the majority of Xs.</li>
</ul><div>Anyway, I found this quote randomly as I was reading a rambling after dinner speech by an eccentric Cambridge maths lecturer. And I was very impressed. In my blinkered, euro-centric notion of the history of ideas I had thought almost all ideas of this kind belonged to the western rationalist tradition, and for them to be this well articulated would mean they were most likely post-Wittgenstein logical positivists. I obviously need to read a lot more Confucius. </div></div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-77422283356122058132011-08-14T21:57:00.000+01:002011-08-14T21:57:28.407+01:00Science for religious fundamentalists<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><blockquote>"It is clear that blasphemy, which is a sin committed directly against God, is more grave than murder, which is a sin against one's neighbor. … it is called the most grievous sin, for as much as it makes every sin more grievous.” ~ Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica</blockquote>For this essay I will assume the existence of a god. For simplicity I will use the names and forms of address reserved to the Christian god (ie referring to this being by the name God or with a capitalised He), but as we will see I wont assume much more than that He created the universe.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Often it is suggested there is some conflict between science and religion. That being religious and scientific are incompatible. That religious people shouldn't have a duty to bow down to scientific truths. This seems to me a nonsense. If anything religious people, people who want and need to know about God, ought to be more interested in science than anyone else.<br />
<br />
There is a God, He created everything, He is supremely powerful and awesome in every sense. It is obviously the duty of every sane person to find out more about this God. How then are we to find out about this God? Firstly through our hearts and minds, the private personal revelations that come to us in quiet moments. And secondly through our eyes and hands and the rest of our senses of the world around us.<br />
<br />
The first question is which of these two forms of revelation is the most reliable? If you feel some little voice or inner conviction about some thing in the world, that a particular stone is red say, but you see with your eyes that is it not so, and all your friends and trusted neighbours say it is not so there must be something wrong. Clearly one of these senses is in error about what it is God has made in the world. Is it not the simpler and more likely explanation that you're misinterpreting your vague and quiet feeling, or that it is speaking to you in a metaphor or parable, or that it's the work of a sinister being and not of God?<br />
<br />
When you see a truth plainly and clearly through the senses then it must be the work of God. God created everything, that stone that you see is His work, all of nature is His work. For you to reject any part of that work is a very strong kind of blasphemy. For you to say that you dont bow down to and accept a truth about the world is to reject at least in part the work of God. It is not for you to tell God what He can make. To do so is to claim a superiority over God, it is an appalling error, blasphemy of the highest rank.<br />
<br />
To accept your place in the scheme of things, as beloved by God, but tiny and stupid and insignificant compared to him, is to be forced into a simple rule: "Do not tell God what to do". Dont ever dare to presume even for a second that you can second guess His work. Dont dare even for a second to say "this cannot be the will of God". Yes it is God's will, it must be, He created it, for you to disbelieve that because you wouldn't have made the world like that is to assert you know God's mind, you know His plans and schemes. It's wrong of you, staggeringly appallingly wrong of you to pretend to such grandeur.<br />
<br />
Dont dare to pretend then when you see the evidence of a fact about the world that it cannot be true because you dont believe that God plays dice or creates Man from lesser beings or whatever prejudice your tiny stupid human mind can come up with. Dont dare to say that you know better than Him or know what He would do.<br />
<br />
Dont dare pretend or allow others to pretend that other humans have this power. Dont let your minister of vicar pretend he knows the mind of God. The next time your priest tells you about the works of God and you look at the evidence and see that he is not telling the truth confront him. Tell this priest that to tell lies about the work of God is a very serious thing. Keep complaining and getting angry about his lies until he learns that it is God and not he that makes the decisions.<br />
<br />
Dont dare to pretend that any human being, even the Pope or whoever the head of your Church is, has this power. When the Pope tells a lie about the work of God, when he says that God provides a cure for a disease in this way when He does not, or when he says that God created a part of the world in a way He did not, then the Pope is a false prophet. He must be condemned as all false prophets, you must rebuke him, show him the error of his ways, command him to stop telling God what to do.<br />
<br />
And dont dare pretend either that the works of man are immune. Remember, even if God wrote and inspired the scriptures that humans copied them. If in scripture you find a lie about the works of God, if you find something that your senses tell you is untrue, then there has been an error somewhere, it is not the word of God. Dont allow the moderate and liberal churches to deceive you with their nonsense about metaphor and the word of God being meant for one time or place. A lie is a lie plain and simple, calling it a metaphor doesn't make it magically true. A word meant for one time and place is no good in another. If the book in your hand blasphemes against God and His works burn it, it can be of no use to anyone.<br />
<br />
A book that contains many truths but also many lies is in many ways more vicious than a pure book of lies. The false statements are evil in themselves, the truth is evil because it lends support to blasphemy by being bound in one book with it. If you find a book claiming to be the word of God with many truths but some lies burn it, it can do nothing but deceive you.<br />
<br />
Oh yeh and atheists? Substitute God throughout for "nature", then shut the fuck up about beauty in science and stop being a string theorist.</div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-35423875974588070442011-08-10T12:13:00.000+01:002011-08-10T12:13:53.546+01:00No reflection on the majority of people<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">One line that's been annoying me throughout the riots. "This violence is no reflection on the law-abiding majority of people" or "the people of Hakney are appalled by the violence they see on the streets". This is wrong-headed on several levels.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><b>Exactly what information is this trying to convey?</b><br />
<br />
Is the speaker saying that I personally am a good person? If so I want to know why. I know how good a person I am, and I'm not so needy as to be benefited by the police saying I'm a good boy. <br />
<br />
Is the speaker saying my neighbours are good people? As a rule I'm a better judge of that, I know what they're like. Unless you've actually done a rigorous survey you dont actually know what the people of Hackney are appalled by. And anyway, saying that they're good isn't going to help me deal with a riot.<br />
<br />
Is the speaker saying that my immediate neighbours are good and that the riot is caused by a sinister "criminal element" from outside my neighbourhood? If so she's just plain wrong as a matter of fact. These riots are not the result of criminal gangs infiltrating entirely peaceful and law-abiding areas. The people who burnt Liverpool and Manchester were from Liverpool and Manchester, the people who burnt Hackney were from Hackney. To say otherwise is not reassuring, it's just pain unhelpful. If it were really the case that these things were caused by outside groups then shutting down public transport and sealing off roads would protect you. This would not work in fact however.<br />
<br />
<b>Who is the speaker trying to impress by saying this?</b><br />
<br />
If it's me, by telling me I'm a good boy, then great, thankyou but I'm not 5, go away and come back when you have a strategy to stop looting.<br />
<br />
If it's outside observers, I'm sorry, they're not stupid. You standing up and saying "this is no reflection on the good people of Manchester" is not going to fool people into thinking that Mancunians are not responsible for this.<br />
<br />
If you're trying to impress me by the sophistication you show in blaming this on a small number of people rather than Scousers just being inherently like this, well done, you're not overtly prejudiced ... what, you want a fucking medal? Where's the strategy on stopping looting?<br />
<b><br />
</b><br />
<b>What, if anything, does the statement contribute to stopping the riot?</b><br />
<br />
Here's a good reason to say it: People dont like to be in minorities, they like to conform, if you say that the majority of people in Birmingham are not violent then people will feel bad and stop being violent. ... Except of course that's bollocks. Looters *are* in a majority, the majority of their mates are doing it. The majority of the people they see every day are doing it, the majority of the people they're talking to are doing it. To try and convince them that the group they should care about is "all Mancunians" or "all Londoners" is just going to fail. They have a group, they're conforming to its norms.<br />
<br />
Actually, wider point. Many will try to get people to think the group they should care about is this wide, City or borough level thing, under the name of "making them part of the community". This is bullshit. There is not now nor has there ever been any such thing as "the community" these people talk about. There is no sensible meaningful cultural unit that's the size of a city or district, it's just too big. You cant and dont feel connected to people the other side of a city, they're too remote. You can feel connected to all the flute players in that city, all the people on your road or in your housing block, you can feel connected to all the people in your class at school or in your office. You cant and you dont feel a tie that means anything to something that large. Even large football teams push it. <br />
<br />
Communities are a false invented notion. Community leaders even more so. You want someone in charge of an area the size of Hackney? We have local councils and assemblies for that. To say that the head of the local youth organisation or some other self-appointed busy-body is a leader is to lead yourself into a trap. The trap is false accountability and false agreement. This was very clear in the student protests. The police were angry that the students had violated an agreement to march a specific way. The problem was the students had made no such agreement and most were not aware of any such assumption by the police. Why this colossal miscommunication? The police talked to Aaron fucking Porter and assumed from an agreement with him they had an agreement with every member of the community he represents. This is not true, never was, never will be. To get the "leaders of the local communities" together and agree there will be no rioting will do one half of fuck all. To talk to them at all is a colossal and total waste of time, and politicians should stop all together talking to "leaders of local communities" and do their job, which is actually leading those communities using the consent you got at the ballot box.</div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-35596159740184694022011-08-04T00:03:00.000+01:002011-08-04T00:03:16.766+01:00The point.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Why blog? Why think about ethics? Why practice science? What ultimately is the point of all of it? What are we worrying about? And importantly, is it clear this goal is attainable? Is it clear we can work towards it successfully? It's not clear I've ever answered this question. So, here we go.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>What's the goal? One word answer: happiness. Happiness is the thing I want for myself, the thing that is desirable in and of itself. A world where I'm happy is to be sought, a world where I'm not happy to be rejected and prevented if at all possible. Because other people seem to have minds like my own it makes sense that they also get this feeling. Because their feeling seems likely to be like mine it makes sense that their happiness is also a thing to be desired, that their unhappiness is a thing to be prevented.<br />
<br />
So the job is to increase happiness for as many people with minds like mine as you can find.<br />
<br />
Observation: my happiness is determined by two factors, first my state of mind and attitude, second the direct experiences I have of the world around me. Historically the Buddhists stress one, the enlightenment materialists the other. Both are necessary, a perfectly contented Buddhist monk may be as happy as humanly possible, but they'll stay that way for less than 40 years without scientific medicine. A scientist with all the technology, joy-inducing drugs and medicine they can manage to get their grips on may well be perfectly miserable if they believe the brave new world they've created is a dystopia and try to fight it.<br />
<br />
So we need both. The second part is much more obvious and accessible to me. The first must not be underestimated, and there are clear measurable successes of both camps.<br />
<br />
On the first front there is often (read: almost always) more heat than light. The Dalai Llama has many interesting things to say, and various schools of Buddhism have produced testable results. However, these are swamped huge number of "new age" scam artists. There needs to be a far more active and rigorous study of the psychology of happiness. This is not easy, it needs people, time, resources and good ideas. But there's no reason that a good science cant be made, or why it cant explain what some Buddhist schools are doing right, and leave no room for new age bullshiters. I have nothing interesting or important to add to this, I leave it to others, doesn't mean it's not important, simply not my field.<br />
<br />
The second front is much more my field. Examine the connections between sense data and happiness, find the good sense data, find the physical world that generates them, find the actions that cause this physical world to turn into that one, do them, Bob's your uncle Fanny's your aunt. Now there are several objections that pessimists, idiots or those with weird agendas raise to this.<br />
<br />
First, material things cant make you happy, this is the "money cant buy you happiness" line. This is obviously wrong, anyone seriously suggesting this is true is either trying to be wise and failing, or they are colossally stupid. Of course material things change how happy we are. ... That's why we want them. The holidays we go on, the sports we watch, the hobbies we have, the prostitutes we hire. Of course they make us happy, if they didn't then we would stop buying them. They may not make you happy, sure going camping for a fortnight and then abseiling off a mountain doesn't seem fun to you, but it does to others, it really genuinely makes them happy. It's part of the physical world, it takes energy to make it happen, it takes human effort to make it happen, it takes money to make it happen. <br />
<br />
Second objection, we shouldn't worry about material things, it all depends on state of mind. Bollocks. At the very least material things keeps that state of mind going longer by feeding the body that makes it work. (Anyone who honestly, really, truly, deeply believes that their mind is not just a part of their body and doesn't need it to survive is more than entitled to test this claim via suicide). State of mind is important. You can be happy in extremis. But I bet it's a hell of a lot easier if you're warm and comfortable. And actually, either way I win. If it's hard to be happy on the rack then let's get people off the rack, if it's easier to be happy on the rack because of some bullshit about teaching you the value of existing or whatever then lets put people on racks. If it makes no difference at all ... I'm going to go ahead and carry on taking people off racks ... if for no other reason than screaming keeps me up at night. Either the material world effects how easily we can be happy, in which case the material world is important. Or it makes no difference at all, in which case you can ignore all the things I'm doing in the material world ... but I have this thing that my own personal happiness does seem very very much to depend on the material world, so unless you can give me some very strong evidence .... I'm going to carry on with the world while you're sitting in your trance ignoring me.<br />
<br />
Third objection. Science cant help us, and infact makes our lives worse, thinking about the problem scientifically wont work. Not a priori nonsense, thinking about the fact that you're stammering makes the stammer worse. The mere act of scientifically analysing something could conceivably make things worse. ...Not true of course. But you do need to spend a couple of seconds justifying that. No, there was no golden age. The people in the past did not lead happy idyllic lives. They got murdered a hell of a lot more than us, yeh, even the people who live in inner-city ghettos in America. You're a lot safer than someone living in the same place 500 years ago. The myth of the noble savage is exactly that, and both historical, anthropological and archaeological research bears this out. The scientific pursuit of material well-being has produced ever longer lifespans, ever lower murder rates, ever better levels of public health, ever lower infant mortality, ever less fatal wars (<a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html">no, seriously</a>) ever higher levels of participation in public life and thus of public policy designed to benefit the population. And participating in this is vital.<br />
<br />
Fourth objection, yeh science has done great things, but we've about reached the limit, there are limits to growth all over the place, so soon we'll stop. Umm, true in one sense, but there's a way to get out of it. Yes, limits to growth exist, but the history of civilisation is the history of circumventing them. A problem that faced our early ancestors was the fact that grazing enough animals to feed a gang of hunters on the savannah takes a lot of land, I think The Ascent of Man gives the population of Chicago as the limit to the human population of the earth given that food supply. This is a clear limit to growth, you get round it by doing something else instead, farming, feeds more people with a smaller land area, then you farm ever more intensively with ever better crops. The limit is still there, you've not broken the laws of physics, you've simply done something else. Almost all limits can be dealt with the same way. There's a limit to how fast a team of horses can go, so you use a train, there's a limit to how efficient a steam engine can be, so you use diesel and electric. There's a limit to how fast a train can go, so you fly, there's a limit to how fast a plane can go, so you hop to orbit and hop back again. Limits can almost always be put off in this way. And if you can always move the most pressing limit at least a decade further away every decade, in a very real sense there is no such limit.<br />
<br />
Fifth objection is a sub-objection to this one. At the end of the day there's a limit that really matters, that's the second law of thermodynamics, in any closed region of the universe energy sources run out, useful resources are exhausted and everything stops. In the really-quite-long-indeed term there's a simple solution. Stop living in a closed region of the universe. Expand your empire fast enough and you can match any pace of energy and resource growth you like. And the speed of light isn't a problem so long as the "rate of growth" you care about is relative to time on the fringe not time at the long dead core.<br />
<br />
Ok, so. What's the point? Make people happy. How? A combination of a real hard scientific study of the psychology of happiness, and a real concerted push towards the continued circumvention of limits of expansion to the resources we need to make the changes in the physical world that make us happy. Everything else I've ever done, attempted, thought about, written about or talked about is either just a facet of this or a total waste of time.</div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-8747300648662832332011-07-29T00:18:00.000+01:002011-07-29T00:18:41.447+01:00If I ruled the world<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Just a quickie on what rules I would put in place if I had the chance to design from scratch a society's customs and norms around sex and reproduction. Obviously I dont, because things like cultures unfortunately evolve they are not designed. Which is a shame... because things that are designed (at least ones designed by people with half a brain) are an awful lot better. Probably for the best that I dont get that kind of power though. I plan on becoming morally better, and thus on being disgusted with my current morality in about 10 years time. (I'm certainly disappointed at least by half the things 15 year old me thought). If so it's probably best to leave the omnipotence until I've had some more time to think about it.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a> Our story starts at puberty with a simple, safe, 100% reversible operation. To painlessly and without inconvenience sterilise everyone. This is combined with thorough sex and relationships education (actually this starts before puberty). Everyone in the population understands totally the mechanics of sexual pleasure and the mechanics of reproduction. Everyone totally understands the concept of consent, what constitutes consent, what things require consent, why consent matters.<br />
<br />
Next job is the start of sexual and relationship exploration. Young people meet, socialise, enjoy eachother's company. Those who desire a particular form of relationship are open and specific about it. Those who desire a particular form of sexual pleasure likewise. (The internet with its vast number of alarmingly specific dating forums is a good approximation to this). Those who do not yet know what they want in both these areas (almost everyone) are expected to experiment and to decide what they do and do not like with no pressure to attempt anything they dont like again.<br />
<br />
Next job, after people are in solid relationships (if that's what they want, and with whichever other people they want if they do) they may wish to have children. (I'm not proposing A Brave New World factory bred children, actual mothers would be involved). Those who do wish this would be free to have the surgery required to reverse their sterility. This would be expensive. Deliberately and consciously so. It would not be available free on the NHS, those who could not afford it would not have children. If possible there would be a whacking great tax on it to help fund primary education.<br />
<br />
This is clearly inhuman, monstrous, unethical ...and mind-bogglingly obvious. Raising a child costs money. You cannot do it on the cheep. If you try then you get a few great lovely wonderful kids including a few very dear to me ... and also a far greater number of unsettled, undereducated, antisocial kids who are simply not going to have the life opportunities and potential for happiness they deserve. Now obviously I dont want to breed an aristocracy here ... for genetic reasons alone that's not a good idea. Poor people need to have kids, and society cannot fail to realise this. There are two solutions.<br />
<br />
First and most direct, make sperm and egg donations easy and commonplace. Thus curing the genetic problem, but not allowing people from poor households to raise children. This is both a good thing for the child and a problem for society, too limited a pool of childhood experiences and types of parenting does not produce a diverse society. And diverse societies are where you get real invention.<br />
<br />
The second more significant possibility is charity or government support to give would-be parents the resources they need to raise a child properly. This probably the most sensible way to run things providing both that children are not raised in poverty and so the greatest number of backgrounds and types of early childhood experiences are run through. This way maximises the experiments in living that make a liberal society better than A Brave New World, and are why ours will reach out to other worlds and ever increase its happiness and lifespan while the people's of a brave new world will stay at the same moderate level of happiness in much the same culture for ever.<br />
<br />
There is a threefold problem with this. One cost, but that can easily be ignored, written off as a necessity or simply given to the economists to argue over. The second is the current problem with the British version of this idea, which is paying people who have children regular sums. The problem of course is the phenomenon of having children, gaining this money, and not spending it on the child. This of course produces exactly the antisocial non-fulfilled children we dont want whist costing a lot of money. The solution is to either pay in kind with vouchers for babyfoods, nurseries etc, or to reimburse (on the same system as business expenses) reasonable costs related to the child.<br />
<br />
The last problem is the most significant. It's that this doesn't work. Have a look at the vast literature of child development. Good parents, those who produce well adjusted, happy children, on average have a large number of books in the house. Give all parents books to put in the house, no significant effect on the children. Good parents on average give their kids a good breakfast. Give every kid a good breakfast, no significant effect. And so it goes on. The parents of kids with good prospects do a huge number of things, but if you just make all parents do these thing you dont get happy kids. We dont understand yet what those parents are doing that makes their kids more successful and happy. Clearly the books and the breakfasts and everything else is a symptom of this thing, but what it is, we dont<br />
<br />
Parenting support could be partly or even mainly in the form of education. No, parents do not instinctively know through evolution how to raise a child. They know how to keep a child alive and fit enough to reproduce ... though actually applying these instincts in the modern world is not necessarily going to work. Parenting is a hard process that needs thought, specialist knowledge and rigorous training, all based on good research and not Oprah's latest pet theory be it Supernany or Tiger Mothers. (Yes that was a pop culture reference, I'm very sorry and promise never to do it again).<br />
<br />
And lastly and most importantly. I would instant a great cultural taboo. An absolute and unbreakable rule. Think of the incest taboo, but much stronger. Which would be nice and simple: never, under pain of being totally banished from civilised company, take a child to an enclosed public place like a restaurant or public transport.</div>Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-173573593078541140.post-263144061255783852011-06-26T12:28:00.000+01:002011-06-26T12:28:05.474+01:00Sherlock v PoirotI've been reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes stories recently. I've been thinking about Sherlock as a detective and Arthur Conan Doyle and an author. So, here's some thoughts: Basically Holmes has the potential to be the greatest detective ever, but Arthur Conan Doyle doesn't seem to me have the ability to show off his creation. I'd like to explain this by comparing him with Poirot.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>First off, a typical story from both characters. It may be that no story has all of these element and it may be that some stories have none of these elements, but if you look at enough stories and squint this is basically what you get.<br />
<br />
<u>Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Silver Bangle</u><br />
<br />
Holmes and I were in Baker Street. Holmes announced we were about to receive a client, there was a knock at the door and an agitated man entered. Holmes did his clothes trick: telling the man his profession, and briefly why he was there, explaining the observations of the man's clothes that let him guess this. The man introduced himself as Lord Symkins and confirmed many of the things Holmes had said.<br />
Lord Symkins explained that there had been a murder in Fontelroy Hall. Holmes and I leapt on a Hansom cab, went to the Hall, found the dead man and got angry at the official police for disturbing the footsteps. He observed the murder scene very closely, found the silver bangle that the police thought was irrelevant. We followed an obvious path and arrived at some other place. Holmes sent and received many telegrams I wasn't told about. Later that evening we spotted a strange looking man and gave chase, but he got away from us.<br />
Holmes and I then went back to the Hall. He told me to get my trusty service revolver ready, he got his hunting crop. We hid in a dark room. A man walked in and there was a fight. The man was captured and said "it's a fair cop".<br />
The man said that he was the murderer and that a full and frank confession of the truth was his best possible defence. He then told us the whole story. His name was John Hawkins, he's never been mentioned before in this story. He told us the full story of the murder. The silver bangle was important in it. When I challenged Holmes on how he knew that the murderer was to be found here he replied that he knew the silver bangle was the sign of a secret society totally unknown to me, he found out a lot of information from his telegrams, which he didn't tell me about, and with that information the case was so easy that Mma Ramotswe could have solved it. He then sent a message to the murderer telling him to go to the darkened room.<br />
Holmes then said that as the murderer was acting on the best intentions and was a noble upper class individual he would let him go as justice didn't require the murderer to be arrested. We went home.<br />
<br />
<u>The Blackwood Convention</u><br />
<br />
Poirot was at the country estate of the eccentric billionaire Lord Blackwood. He was at a party for "all the people who stand to gain by my death, also a famous detective." The doors were sealed. After a long series of conversations with everyone present Poirot got a good assessment of everyone. Those present were:<br />
<ul><li>Lord Blackwood: A man with more enemies than a the billionaire owner of a large mining concern could reasonably be expected to have.</li>
<li>Lady Blackwood: Having an affair with Roger.</li>
<li>Roger: Having an affair with Lady Blackwood, wanted the Lord dead to get his wife. Blackmailing Susan over her affair.</li>
<li>Susan: Having an affair with Martin. Would do anything to protect him. Woman of expensive tastes.</li>
<li>Martin: In huge gambling debts, secretly heir to Lord Blackwood, needed his money.</li>
<li>John: Husband of Susan. Well known heir to Lord Blackwood, needed his money to keep Susan happy. Army man, experienced in native South American poisons.</li>
<li>Jenkins: The butler. Secretly Lord Blackwood's son. Wants his title. Trained as a doctor.</li>
<li>Mary: The maid. Mistreated by Lord Blackwood, wants him out of the way to become personal maid to Lady Blackwood.</li>
<li>Rev. Hawkins: Secretly gay. Being blackmailed by John.</li>
<li>Poirot</li>
<li>Hastings</li>
</ul><br />
They all played bridge in 2 games of 4. The Lord sat alone in a dark alcove. The servants came and went. Hours later: "By Jove, he's dead!" Rev. Hawkins exclaimed, looking over the dead corpse of Lord Blackwood. Much surprise ensued.<br />
<br />
Poirot puts his little grey cells to work. He reconstructs exactly the sequence of events that night, detects the rare poison dart in the Lord's neck. Also the blowpipe in the locked draw that only Lady Blackwood and Mary had access to. Also the spilled wine next to the chair that only Rev. Hawkins, Martin or John could have made, the marks on his arm to indicate that the Lord was a prolific drug user.<br />
<br />
Poirot suggested staging a reconstruction, everyone repeating the events of the previous night with Mary playing the part of Lord Blackwood. Noticeably several things were different, there were two spoons in "Lord Blackwood's" cup of tea, every time Martin so much as flinched Susan created a huge distraction in an attempt to distract everyone, John played noticeably worse cards when people were scrutinising him closely. One of the things that was not different was the murder. Mary's death was the final clue Poirot needed.<br />
<br />
A few hours later the great detective summoned everyone into the drawing room. He explained in great detail all the evidence and explained the motive of each person there before finally concluding that the butler did it as he had medical knowledge and needed to kill Mary as she had noticed him preparing the poisen.<br />
<br />
<u>The stories.</u><br />
<br />
The two give us very clear examples of the differences between Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. First notice how unfair I have been. It took me as long to construct the story of the Silver Bangle as it took me to type it. It's a totally boring and meaningless story with no interesting characters. It probably took me less time to write the Silver Bangle than to come up with just the title for The Blackwood Convention. I put a lot more effort into the second. But notice that this is not just me, this is a fact of the styles of the two stories.<br />
There are only 5 characters, including Holmes and Watson, in the Silver Bangle, none of whom need any details of their backgrounds fleshed out in order to produce a convincing Holmes story. To make a Christie however you need at least 10 characters, plus detective and victim. The Silver Bangle needed no elaborate explanation of the motives, in the Blackwood Convention everyone needs a plausible motive. In the Silver Bangle only one person could have done it, in the Blackwood Convention everyone could have done it. Notice also that in the Silver Bangle the evidence was all hidden until the end, the reader cant guess whodunnit. In the Blackwood Convention all the evidence is in front of you. The reader can guess whodunnit.<br />
<br />
<u>Why Holmes could be the greatest detective ever</u><br />
<br />
Sherlock's importance and power as a detective must never be forgotten. The character revolutionised, and indeed invented, large sections of forensic science. The first case ever to be solved by the use of fingerprint evidence was the case of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Norwood_Builder">Norwood Builder</a> (it should be noted for the fans of biometric science that the police condemned the wrong man on the basis of the thumb-print). The emphasis on trace evidence at crime scenes, and protecting the integrity of the same, is now totally part of modern detective work. A large part of why I predicted (wrongly) that a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(TV_series)">modern version</a> of the Holmes stories would never work is exactly because the modern detective already uses most of Holmes' methods, Holmes himself, I thought, would be redundant.<br />
<br />
His ability to "deduce" relies in almost no sense on logic. It relies on Holmes having an almost infinite supply of facts, habits, customs, stereotypes, and an ability to imagine likely causes for observed data. The supreme example of Holmes' abilities is probably the case of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Blue_Carbuncle">Blue Carbuncle</a>. Or rather, it isn't. The case itself is a trivial affair, follow the obvious trail of clues and get to the end, no thought required at any point. The really awesome thing is the start to the story. Holmes is presented with a hat. And from this concludes things about the owner. The conclusions are expressed thus:<br />
<blockquote><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0.4em;">"That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him."</div><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0.4em;">"My dear Holmes!"</div><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0.4em;">"He has, however, retained some degree of self-respect," he continued, disregarding my remonstrance. "He is a man who leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged, has grizzled hair which he has had cut within the last few days, and which he anoints with lime-cream. These are the more patent facts which are to be deduced from his hat. Also, by the way, that it is extremely improbable that he has gas laid on in his house."</div></blockquote>Given the observations Holmes has made about a third of these conclusions are reasonable and supported by at least the balance of probabilities, the other third are rather nebulous and hard to quantify and the last group are not really fair. The combination works shockingly well as a stage trick where confirmation bias means we will quite happily ignore any stupidity we see in the man so long as he drinks, or vice versa. However, with a bit of tightening up and by getting rid of a lot of things it's reasonable for Victorian Holmes to believe but not reasonable for 21st century Holmes to belive we can certainly get a large body of truth out of this. Holmes has without question the potential to be the greatest detective ever conceived.<br />
<br />
<u>Why Holmes isn't</u><br />
<br />
Why then, if Holmes is in theory the greatest detective ever, was it so hard for me to make the Silver Bangle sound like an interesting detective story in the way the Blackwood Convention did? Because Holmes is not, in the Arthur Conan Doyle Stories, featured in a detective story, and cant show off. The Holmes stories are not primarily detective stories, but rather adventure novels, the clue is there in the title. To quote Stephen Moffat, "Other detectives have cases, Holmes has adventures". The difference is key. In a detective story the point is the mystery, the facts are laid before the reader and the joy is to watch the case unravel and think "damn, I should have thought of that." In an adventure novel there is a case to be solved, but far more important than the thinking is the action. The chase, the hunt, the fight, the gruesome murder, these are the elements that make a Holmes story exciting. This is why the Silver Bangle is so empty, I put in a one line description of the key elements of the plot.<br />
<br />
There are two reasons why the original stories are like this. One in-universe and one out-universe.<br />
<br />
In-universe it is only natural that Watson should chronicle the adventure stories. Doubtless Holmes faces endless cases with real meaty intellectual content. But in such cases Watson and his trusty service revolver are not needed. Watson is most useful when he can run across a moor or hide in a dark room and fight a villain. He's not really needed when Holmes solves the problem by deep reasoning and the actual running around is secondary. Secondly of course Holmes is unnecessarily secretive and hordes his evidence. Had Holmes written the stories himself and not relied on Watson they would have been real deep intellectual puzzles. As it is half of the facts needed to solve the case are in telegrams Watson never sees. Which is frankly unsporting, but at least believable for Holmes.<br />
<br />
Out-universe of course Conan Doyle is not *trying* to make interesting intellectual exercises, he's trying to write a thriller. That's the kind of story he likes. He famously hated writing Holmes stories, and anyone who's read one could tell you that he's not good at hiding it. Holmes tells Watson point blank to stop writing several times expressing his disgust at the way Watson writes, this is pure author insertion. Then all the times Holmes retires or is killed, that's not for dramatic effect, that's Conan Doyle trying to give people the hint, "stop reading Holmes, I hate him, read <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Challenger">Professor Challenger</a> instead". Add to this the incidents (most dramatically in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet">Study in Scarlet</a> and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valley_of_Fear">Valley of Fear</a>) where the fact that Holmes and Watson exist at all is simply forgotten and in the middle of a story Conan Doyle starts writing a totally unrelated thriller set in America.<br />
<br />
Holmes could have been the undisputed greatest detective to have ever been invented. And if anyone but Arthur Conan Doyle had written him then certainly he would have. This is why Holmes stories not copied from an original can (with a decent writer) be incredible. But Arthur Conan Doyle didn't want to create the greatest detective ever, and so inevitably he didn't.Rebellionkidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05285549817197747799noreply@blogger.com0