higgsblogon

Epistle to The Ninety-Nine Percent

2011-11-15T19:07:00.001-08:00

Epistle to the One Percent

2011-11-13T19:44:00.001-08:00

I am a member of the 99%. But in truth, I am much closer, in terms of raw dollars, to the One Percent than are 99% of those who eagerly refer to themselves as "the Ninety-Nine Percent." In real, big-picture statistical terms, I'm definitely not in the top 1%, but I'm probably in the top 15%, maybe 10%. This relative proximity to the One Percent has given me the opportunity to realize that, much as a diehard liberal like me might hate to admit it, there is precisely one respect in which I sympathize with the One Percent.

I sympathize with the One Percent because, at bottom, they all value the idea of meritocracy; so do I. Where we part company is on whether free-market capitalism is truly the engine of meritocracy that they insistently and ceaselessly trumpet it to be.

I'd like to think that the One Percent would join me in wholeheartedly endorsing the truth of the following statement: "Money is useful and desirable. There are many desirable things money can be used to obtain, and there are many undesirable things money can be used to avoid." But I'm starting to get concerned that the One Percent would not join me in wholeheartedly endorsing the logical corollary of the foregoing: "It is possible for other things to be valued more than money."

Notice how children are born valuing not money, but novelty. Children are born feeling an expectation of happiness, and if that's a thought whose naivete makes you guffaw, then consider the moral implications of such guffawing. There would be no valid moral argument against suicide, for instance. In order to be genuinely happy, people must have an emotionally sustainable way of obtaining the things they seek, and they must have an emotionally sustainable way of avoiding the things they seek to avoid. If this weren't declared true, we would be lending credence to the idea that it is morally acceptable for people to live out their entire lives without ever experiencing even a single instant of joy. What's the point of living, if you don't have some path to achievement of some semblance of some notion of the life you want to live? If we really all couldn't agree to that idea, then the notion of a social contract would never have caught on, even back in the day.

So, I agree with the One Percent about the sanctity of the idea that people need some sense of a meritocratic system in order to live a fulfilling life. They are absolutely right, for that and many other valid reasons (e.g. the free rider problem), that the overall system governing our lives must be a meritocracy. But they are wrong in their utter unquestioning acceptance of free-market capitalism as the only viable way to establish that meritocracy.

Whenever you notice the circulation of the "class warfare" meme through the media fishbowl, understand that this is the One Percent's way of trying to remind people, in the subtlest, least dickish way possible, of the moral imperative of perpetuating a stable class structure. I agree that capitalism is the best way thus far discovered to implement a functioning, scalable meritocracy, but I disagree that our civilization does not pay a large opportunity cost by investing such a concomitantly large amount of faith in it. Capitalism has proved to be only as scalable as the class structure of the culture into which it is installed (see China and India), so that creates a need to perpetuate ours. The metaphor that allows the One Percent to cloak this systemic/structural need in the moral language of human/personal admonition is "class warfare."

I admire that metaphor, but it has a bug in it. I'm a software engineer, which means I'm good at detecting design flaws in semantic spaces. And there is a big design flaw lurking at the heart of the "class warfare" metaphor, one whose existence fills me with hope for the possibility of real progress. The bug in "class warfare" is this: the term "class warfare" was coined during a period in history in which there was no concept of "war crimes" or "genocide" -- certainly many such acts occurred during those times, but those labels were applied to them only after the fact. Since then, we have learned the ugly truth that there are such things as "war crimes" and "genocide," and that they can and should be viewed from within the metaphor of global criminal justice. But we have not gone back and revisited the "class warfare" metaphor to see how its economic meaning might change when its geopolitical meaning is admixed with the newer "war crime" and "genocide" constructs.

The One Percent continue to invoke an older version of a meme that has since been upgraded, but upgraded with features they don't like. If the One Percent want to allow the phrase "class warfare" to continue to have any real meaning, any genuine cultural relevance, then they must, in order for their underlying metaphor to work correctly, acknowledge the possibility that phrases like "economic war crimes" and "class genocide" could also have real meaning, and genuine cultural relevance. I now invite you to join me in imagining what "class war crimes" could look like in the real world.

The international legal principles that emerged from the Nuremberg Trials divide the colloquial term "war crimes" into three categories: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. The first category encompasses things that pertain to the fates of specific individuals: "murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity." The latter two categories encompass things that pertain more to the fates of large, easily named groups, like "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds."

Bernie Madoff is a reasonable example of an economic war criminal, but only in the first sense outlined above: he violated large-scale fiduciary responsibilities -- moral obligations dictated by the underlying promise of meritocracy that theoretically underpins capitalism and made it attractive to everyone when Adam Smith first outlined it in the 1700s -- and in so doing financially devastated the lives of many. But those many had no prior factors in common except for the fact that they were all Bernie Madoff's clients; the victims who found themselves chained against a rock in Madoff's lair must have, at some point, chosen to walk into it. There is certainly no single religious, or ethnic, or racial, or even political, identity that would unify the demographic disparateness of his client list. This lack of any available group identity disqualifies Madoff, in my mind, from being charged with economic crimes against humanity.

Bernie Madoff's conviction represents America's first successful apprehension and punishment of an economic war criminal. From an ontological standpoint, this is good, because it legitimizes the term economic war criminal; and from an intentional standpoint, it is also good, because it represents the indictment of a large-scale economic actor whose intentions were clearly bad. But it seems to me that the real indictment we should be talking about is not of the man, but of the system within which he was allowed to operate for so long. The only reason Madoff was tried in a manner befitting an economic war criminal is that the victims of his economic war crimes were all members of the One Percent. So this proves two things: despite their obvious horror at the thought of openly discussing it, the One Percent do, on some level, acknowledge the validity of the concept of economic war crimes, of economic crimes against peace. And the only thing they find even more horrific is when it happens to them -- when "economic shock and awe" shatters their peace.

It turns out there is another precedent for economic war crimes: the book of Genesis, in which the moral depravities of Sodom and Gomorrah are harshly condemned by the God of Abraham. To most Christians, their intuitive sense of moral depravity is polarized in the sexual direction. But the Hebrew Bible makes clear that Yahweh was just as pissed off about economic moral depravity. Genesis describes wealthy Sodomites giving gold ingots to beggars, after inscribing their names on them, and then subsequently refusing to sell the beggars food. The unfortunate beggar would end up starving and after his death, the people who gave him the ingot would reclaim it. That sounds a lot like how credit card companies do business, doesn't it? The One Percent give ingots of plastic to the Ninety-Nine Percent, after inscribing their names on them, and then subsequently refuse to provide them economic sustenance (i.e. reasonable interest rates that promote actual saving behavior instead of speculative behavior). The unfortunate Ninety-Nine Percent end up economically starving (i.e. jobless with little or no unemployment available to draw, or bankrupt, or scraping by in the present with only a raided pension or cratering 401k waiting for them in the future), and after their economic (or, increasingly, literal) death, the people who gave them the money reclaim it through foreclosure auctions, liquidation sales, Chapter 11, debt collection agencies, repo men, insurance companies, and other unsavory economic constructs.

I just want churchgoing Jews and Christians who voluntarily participate in this system to understand something: the supreme being whose opinion you all claim to care about placed economic practices such as these on the same plane of moral repugnance as fucking children and homosexual gang rape.

I hereby declare the One Percent a global terrorist organization, waging a distributed, decentralized, but still coordinated, asymmetric campaign of economic terror against that ragtag band of economic rebels known as "the workforce." We, the Ninety-Nine Percent, have not forgotten what you, the One Percent, have: that free-market capitalism is only as valuable to a client civilization as the extent to which it makes good on its implicit promise to serve as an engine of genuine meritocracy.

I charge the One Percent with economic crimes against peace. I charge the One Percent with class genocide against the "ethnicity" of the Ninety-Nine Percent. And I call upon the International Court of Justice at The Hague to convene a panel to explore the precise legal meaning of terms like "economic war crime," "class genocide," and "economic crimes against peace," and how they might be applied to hypothetical international independent investigations of such large-scale economic actors as, say, Discover Financial Services, or Goldman Sachs, or the SEC, or General Motors, or Union Pacific, or Alcoa, or Boeing, or the Pentagon, or United Healthcare, or the New York Jets, or the House Appropriations Committee, or Iron Mountain, or the Federal Reserve. Or the Vatican.

Only 1% of the One Percent actually deserve, in terms of personal honor and merit, to be in the One Percent. There do exist people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, smart, dogged, energetic people who made themselves rich by thinking of nonobvious, valuable things to build. But they're the minority. The vast majority of the One Percent fall far short of this description. And they've crept into the hospital bedroom where American meritocracy lies feebly in ICU, and they're looking around for a suitable pillow with which to begin the smothering.

Consider this your upgrade notice, One Percent: you no longer get to keep running an old version of the "class warfare" metaphor. Either upgrade to the new version boasting support for war crimes, or uninstall it from your discourse completely.

Worthless Cunts

2011-09-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts.

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because they trumpet their own alleged patriotism, pounding their heaving, idiotic chests with their flailing, ignorant fists about the supremacy of self-sacrifice, common sense, and decisive action, while never once coming within 1000 miles of ever conducting their own lives in a way that can render such cuntitude anything other than rank hypocrisy.

As an example of a white, native English-speaking, female, true American patriot, read no further than the case of Heather "Lucky" Penney (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/11/heather-lucky-penney-flight-93_n_957326.html). Read her story and then tell me to my face that she isn't, in actuality, what those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann ceaselessly proclaim themselves to be. Read her story and then tell me to my face that the ideals she can readily prove to have actually structured her existence around aren't the same ideals that those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann ceaselessly proclaim themselves to honor.

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because they use exclusive language to talk about how best to solve complex large-scale problems. They invoke the tacit glorification of martyrdom that lies at the core of the entire Abrahamic tradition (smooth move, Yahweh/Allah) to position themselves as "the only ones tough/assertive/bold/brave/etc. enough" to step forward to take the decisive action needed to save this country. And they invoke it loudly over their shoulders while sprinting the fuck away from any political situation that could force them to actually exhibit any of these characteristics.

Contrast this with how Lucky Penney describes her conduct: "I was prepared to die for my country. It's something everyone else would have done if they were in my shoes. I didn't have time to feel fear. We had a mission, and there was a sense of urgency."

The active ingredient in this quote is "It's something everyone else would have done if they were in my shoes." And when she says it, every real patriot within earshot runs the little lightning-fast simulation in their minds and reaches the same conclusion. Like those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, she too uses plain English to talk about how to solve complex large-scale problems, but unlike those worthless cunts, she does so inclusively. Any other rational adult with equivalent skills would have acted the same as Lucky Penney, she says, and we all know it. But those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann caw and squawk the exact logical inverse, the contrapositive, of Lucky Penney's statement: there in fact exists a majority of rational adults with equivalent skills that would never once act the way they do, and they are the only ones who don't know it.

In fairness, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because their lives have presumably taught them that the only way to get and retain the political attentions of the average white male conservative voter in this formerly great country of ours is to become the physical instantiation of the two emotional concepts that mark the ends of the continuum of femininity that dwell within the minds of those average white male conservative voters. Those Nascar-fellating simpletons view all women they've ever known as occupying a point somewhere on a line that ends with Worthless at one end, and Cunt at the other. They're very shrewd, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. They know there's a vast market of voters who can't conceive of a real live woman as being something other than some alchemical fusion of the base elements Worthlessness and Cuntitude, so they have used Fox News -- the Philanderer's Stone, as it were -- to transmute themselves into flashy, smarmy nuggets of Worthless Cunt gold.

In other words, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because it takes one to know one. And there are an awful lot of worthless cunts among the white men who are either part of, or enjoy the benefits of a financially parasitic relationship with, the Republican party.

This might seem like an undue psychoanalytic generalization, but the social experiment required to back it up has already been conducted. Its results were published recently at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/01/adult-industry-2012-gop-convention_n_943906.html. (Go read it; I'll wait.) This article actually contains my favorite political parable of the modern age: a small business owner whose #1 customer base is the GOP brass condemning the economic policies of the GOP brass. This has to support the idea that the GOP aren't pro-business, they're pro-Worthless Cunt. The GOP brass exists to amass money mainly so they can ensure themselves a reliable supply of attractive female human beings that have no economic freedom to do anything other than accept the mantel of Worthless Cunt being handed to them.

Fuck you, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, you worthless cunts. And thank you, Heather "Lucky" Penney, for giving all of the average white male GOP hoarders of Worthless Cunt gold an irrefutable example of what real, genuine white female native-English-speaking American patriotism looks like. Thanks to your having been you, maybe enough of the male worthless cunts running the GOP will come around to a sensible world view, freeing the two female worthless cunts under discussion to finally gather up their balls and go home.

An Open Letter To Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonin Gregory Scalia

2011-09-24T22:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Justice Scalia,

It is with great pleasure that I imagine you deigning to read this letter. It is not lost on me what a legitimate honor that would be, seeing as how you are the longest-serving justice on the Court. After earning a Bachelor of Laws degree from Harvard, you built a successful private practice, but then heard the call of public service and failed to miss the opportunity to ride Ronald Reagan's disgraceful coattails to your current august position.

Before delving into the substance of our discussion, I want to acknowledge the caliber of your legal acumen. I want to recognize your mind as a direct lineal descendant of the Magna Carta. And then, I want to crumple that recognition into a ball, and wipe my ass with it, you warthog-faced buffoon.

It may have penetrated the dimly-lit sphere of your Cialis-fueled consciousness that there is a Constitutional battle brewing in the state of Mississippi, where the unfortunately named "Personhood Amendment" is being debated by a representative subset of that spineless species of asshole we continue beyond all reason to call "legislators." (If any so-called legislators happen to be listening in -- fuck you, assholes.) The citizens of the Mississippi Delta Nuclear Family Waste Containment Area, exhibiting a degree of thoughtful civic deliberation remeniscent of ancient Athens, have proposed that legal personhood be granted to human fetuses.

I have a hunch this case will make it to you at some point, and since you sat on the Court during the recent Citizens United case, you presumably have built up some experience navigating the tricky ontological waters of legal personhood. So, as repugnant as I find you personally, I must overcome this defect in my compassion and actively seek out your expertise.

If the Supreme Court holds that the status of legal personhood can be granted to both corporations and fetuses, then the Supreme Court will create an ontological crisis that will be as devastating to the practice of American law as the Greek debt crisis is turning out to be to the commerce of Europe.

By "ontological crisis" I mean, two things that are both (stipulated to be) real, but are in fact completely fucking different from each other, will be indistinguishable from the perspective of Constitutional protections. Corporations, as you may have heard between pig roasts and rounds of golf, are vast agglomerations of physical objects and human beings, distributed in potentially many geographic places at once, using technology to exchange information amongst each other. Fetuses, on the other hand, are lumps of tissue that are basically indistinguishable from your appendix except for the magical property that they will, left to their own devices, turn into human beings. These two objects, corporations and fetuses, are arranged in an ontological opposition best described as diametric.

Not only are the ontological essences of corporations and fetuses diametrically opposed to each other, but they are both diametrically opposed to the folk notions of personhood prevalent in the American electorate -- y'know, the John Q. Public commonsense notions of what the word "person" means. These notions are hosted in, and originate from, the minds of sentient beings (presumably somewhat like yourself) that our friends and our families have seen fit to call "persons" without a second thought, for generations and generations, long before anyone felt a burning need to give that term legal primacy.

By "ontological crisis" I mean, it will be impossible to contrive a reliable test for determining whether a given ontological entity that might be referenced in a legal proceeding does or does not constitute a person. Such basic ontological tests as "Is it alive?" will fail: this answer is "yes" for fetuses and for the folk notion of person, but is "no" for corporations. "Can I converse with it?" yields "yes" for the folk notion of person and for corporations, but will yield "no" for fetuses. "Is it capable of love?" yields yes for the folk notion of person and for fetuses, but will yield "no" for corporations. "Is it capable of being sued?" will yield "yes" for corporations and for the folk notion of person, but will yield "no" for fetuses. "Can I readily determine how much money it's worth?" yields "yes" for corporations and for the folk notion of person, but "no" for fetuses. "Can it be owned?" yields "yes" for corporations (and maybe fetuses, depending on how our hillbilly fucktard brethren in Mississippi want to play it) but "no" for fetuses and the folk notion of person.

The only ontological tests that can reliably succeed for all three flavors of legal person are so general as to be useless: "Can it die?" Yes in all cases. (Note how "Can its death be mourned?" yields "yes" only for fetuses and the folk notion of person.) "Is it made of matter?" Yes in all cases. "Can it experience the passage of time?" Yes in all cases. Surely a mind as keen as yours sees this Boschlike landscape of hellish ontological chaos. Words (which I understand are used heavily in law) would literally cease to convey meaning reliably, regardless of whose mouths they emerge from.

The way I see it, a strict constructionist like yourself has only one honest option: you get to pick one. Either corporations enjoy legal personhood, but not fetuses; or fetuses enjoy legal personhood, but not corporations. But hear me loud and clear, you bitch motherfucker: YOU DON'T GET BOTH. If you were to get both, that would mark the moment when the entire population of this country realizes that the law has become completely self-referential and untethered to the ontological realities that constrain us all. This isn't a political ax I'm trying to grind, either: I don't give a fuck which one you pick. Leave Citizens United intact, at the price of smacking down this dreadful "Personhood Amendment"; or give the Personhood Amendment the thumbs-up, at the price of overturning Citizens United. BUT YOU DON'T GET BOTH.

So my question is this: what ontological test, or set of tests, do you plan to rely on in this eventuality? What "strict constructions" will you use to express your strict proclivities while orienteering through these thorny wildernesses? What set of guiding principles will you use to map the abstractions of law back to the ontological catalog from which this world is populated with objects? Articulate for me, if you will, your underlying legal philosophy for approaching these questions in the future. Give me a glimpse of the heated conversations you have with yourself when these matters intrude on your CPAP-enabled sleep. Thrill me with your acumen.

Why I Got Euler's Identity Tattooed On My Back

2010-03-10T16:16:00.000-08:00

The majority of people in my life are uninterested in math, to put it mildly, but that has not prevented them from expressing curiosity about my Euler's Identity tattoo. "What's it mean?" they ask. "Why is it so important to you?" These questions are difficult to answer without invoking so much math as to make the questioners' eyes glaze over (at best; at worst they run screaming from the room). This post attempts to provide a non-mathematical metaphor that, I hope, will convey even to math-phobic readers the same kind of awe and beauty that I experience when contemplating Euler's Identity. I'm going to start with a totally un-mathy topic: literary characterization.

Readers of novels have slightly different ideas about what makes for good characterization than, say, readers of comic books. (I'm deliberately defying the growing pressure to call this benighted artform "graphic novels" by focusing specifically on comic books about superheroes, which is how it all got started, no matter how much the breathless fanboys may inform me that it's grown up since.) Readers of novels define their characters in terms of interiority: they talk about childhood memory, emotional nuance, mannerisms, depth. Readers of superhero comic books define their characters in terms of exteriority: they talk about costumes, superpowers, Achilles' heels, weapons, amulets, etc. It's the difference between viewing a character as a human being versus as a mere bundle of attributes.

Although I have little patience in general with the superhero comic book way of approaching character, it is useful in this context because it provides an interesting approach to numbers. Numbers, too, can be described merely as bundles of attributes. Of any number, there's a list of well-defined characteristics that it may or may not have: odd or even? Real or imaginary? Positive or negative? Whole or fractional? As long as we're willing to view the world through these glasses, then it's not such a stretch to reimagine the set of all numbers as literature's only infinite cast of characters.

Granted, some of these "characters" are a lot more interesting, compelling even, than others. Zero is a good example. We have yet to discover any other number that is as devoted a pacifist and yet simultaneously as rapacious a conqueror as zero. When it comes to addition, zero is a cuddly, harmless teddy bear: you can add anything to zero and that number will just emerge as itself, untouched. But when it comes to multiplication, zero is Genghis Khan, slaughtering all hapless comers, leaving only itself standing. (Don't even get zero started on division.)

In 2005, Roger Ebert popularized the term "hyperlink movie" (coined by Alissa Quart in that same year) in his review of Syriana, where he says it "describes movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another." Part of the power of this narrative structure, he explains, is that "the motives of one character may have to be reinterpreted after we meet another one." The TV show Lost, for instance, also has a "hyperlink narrative."

Euler's Identity is the best evidence thus far discovered that all of mathematics is one giant hyperlink narrative. Before Leonhard Euler discovered it in the sixteenth century, mathematics better resembled, say, the work of Stephen King -- a collection of largely unrelated narratives that occasionally overlap in character or location. There was the "number theory" narrative, whose heroes are 0 and 1; the "calculus" narrative, whose hero is e; the "complex analysis" narrative, whose hero is i; and the "trigonometry" narrative, whose hero is pi. Nobody had any idea that the arcs of these characters, which had been entirely separate up to that point, would directly intersect each other.

If math is a hyperlink movie with numbers as its heroes, then Euler's Identity can be thought of as that mindfuck scene at the end that makes the viewer go "No way!" It is the first, and so far only, scene in Math: The Movie in which all five of these compelling number-characters, 0, 1, i, pi, and e, interact directly. (When Heat came out, much was made of the fact that Pacino and DeNiro, two Italian giants of crime noir, had a single six-minute scene together; imagine how much more of a publicity coup it would have been if they were joined by, say, Humphrey Bogart, Denzel Washington, and Laurence Olivier.)

But what are these mathemacting luminaries saying to each other? No one knows. After proving the Identity in a lecture, Benjamin Peirce said, "It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth." Euler's Scene is the mathematical equivalent of something out of a David Lynch film -- arresting, bizarre, inscrutable -- only, this David Lynch film is actually a documentary.

I Miss C-Style Switch Statements

2009-06-26T09:42:00.001-07:00

It took me about a year to fully warm up to C# after years of unmanaged C++ in the COM/Win32 world. Now I'm at a point where I love it. But there is one thing about it that drives me nuts: Microsoft no longer lets you have "fall-through" control transfer between case clauses inside a switch statement. You have to have every case paired with an explicit break, even if it doesn't make logical sense. This means that now I have to do a lot of if...else if...else if...else-type constructions to get the desired control flow, when a C-style switch statement would've been the most elegant thing. *sigh*

Blessings In Disguise?

2009-06-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

I suppose, in the long run, a net reduction in the population of Tennessee is probably a good thing.

Ruthless Reviews Gets It Right!

2009-06-03T10:11:00.000-07:00

This site used to be awesome. I discovered it in 2002, and it just blew my socks off with its combination of extreme left-wing political opinion (although paradoxically mixed with some unaccountable misogyny), high IQ, creativity, and lazy editing.

Starting around 2006 they experienced a slump, but it seems like they've been getting better over the last 6 months or so. But this bit, about the recent Tiller assassination, is the best bit of commentary they've done in years. Bravo.

David Frum Just Keeps Getting Better

2009-06-01T11:03:00.001-07:00

I became a David Frum fan last year, after not liking him very much initially. This recent article proves that, in the Civil Cold War (aka the post-election Republican Party infighting between the Southern wingnuts and everyone else), he's fighting for the North. Kudos.

Interesting View of Obama's Pragmatism

2009-05-27T08:43:00.000-07:00

The fact that I can't quite figure out what the editors of the Christian Science Monitor want, believe, or think is part of why I tend to like their pieces. This is a good guest editorial that, while structured as a criticism of Obama's M.O., illuminates for me exactly what I like about him. It's written well in any case.

My favorite line: [Obama] presumes that policies forged by reason, evidence, and "unbiased" expertise (Pragmatism 1) – those policies that "work" – will garner the support of all reasonable members of Congress and thus bridge partisan divides (Pragmatism 2).

What an unreasonable way to operate! Obama is a "evidence fundamentalist"!

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

2009-05-26T10:29:00.000-07:00

Reagan must be rolling over in his grave.

Obama-Era Pelosi = Pre-Obama-Era Clinton

2009-05-20T07:32:00.000-07:00

Apparently American reactionaries require there to be one highly visible white female in Washington on whom they can focus their irrational loathing. Before Obama got elected, that woman was Hillary Clinton. I was always amazed at how much the wingnuts despised Hillary, but more to the point, how transparently their hatred was simply an inversion of their sexist fear.

But things have changed -- Clinton is now part of Obama's cabinet, and by siding with Obama, she finally finds herself in America's good graces. All the non-Democrats who voted for Obama --moderates who have fled the Republican party since Limbaugh took over as RNC chairman, and independents* -- who, to their credit, just can't reconcile the cognitive dissonance resulting from the simultaneous claims that "Obama is doing a good job" and "Hillary is a shrill power-hungry feminazi crypto-lesbian bitch" -- feel an aching void where their cowering hatred of Hillary used to be.

But now there's Nancy Pelosi!

Granted, Pelosi was a Republican whipping-boy ("whipping-girl" just sounds too overtly S&M for its intended meaning to come through) ever since she assumed the Speakership, but this recent CIA torture bullshit has proved to be the spark igniting the powderkeg. All those disenfranchised Hillary haters finally have a new, competent, politician with a powerful office and a vagina, all at the same time, on whom they can unload their loathing.

I'm not a fan of Pelosi -- to be honest, I am utterly neutral toward Pelosi. There are plenty of folks on the left end of the political spectrum who would dispute my having called her "competent," and I can see why. But I can recognize when ostensibly neutral political maneuvering is being used to disguise misogynistic fear. Hang in there, Nance.

* There are two kinds of people who claim to be "independent" -- (a) informed people who have their own idiosyncratic set of principles that doesn't completely align with either party, and (b) clueless people who feel guilty about never having paid enough attention to politics to figure out what their principles are, but don't want to risk painting themselves into a conversational corner by arbitrarily claiming to agree with one party over the other.

How Will They Spin This One?

2009-05-20T07:23:00.000-07:00

More amazingly bad behavior on the part of the world's oldest multinational corporation. Even more amazing to think that they think they have the monopoly on human goodness. I've said it before and I'll say it again: fuck Catholicism and fuck the Pope. I concede that the Vatican served some valid purposes in the course of human development, but it has long since outlived that usefulness. I eagerly look forward to its eminently timely death.

Sheep In Wolves' Clothing

2009-05-13T07:15:00.000-07:00

I'd like to make a special shout-out to those of you who drive black or navy Crown Victorias or Dodge Chargers, yet aren't police officers:

FUCK YOU.

Get a civilian car, you Macdonald Triad bitches.

Kary Mullis, Global Warming, Deicide Bombing: A Parable of Inducing Opinion Reconsideration

2009-04-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

This post likened atheism to a product for sale in the marketplace of belief systems, and the analogy was helpful to a certain extent. But lately I've been thinking that "marketing" is the wrong approach. Marketing is the kind of thing that induces people to raise their guard. In the end, most people's purchasing decisions are guided by factors other than the products' marketing.

What I've really been searching for is a way to make people change their minds; I've been trying to understand the process by which people adopt beliefs. And I think I've figured out a way to reverse, or at least combat, the indoctrination tactics used by organized religion, thanks to a recent experience in which I was prompted to doubt one of my own beliefs.

One of my first posts on this blog was about global warming, and the philosophical meat of it was essentially that scientists as a whole have too much at stake to ever engage in a wilful conspiracy, which is what global warming skeptics accuse them of. But my faith in this belief was weakened recently by a TED video, Nobel Prize-winner Kary Mullis talking about the nature of science. Mullis was speaking extemporaneously, so be prepared for some false starts and improvisatory sentence structures; I've transcribed a large section of the talk here, but emphasized the important parts via italics and larger font size:

Naturally honest, and naturally inquisitive, and that sort of leads to that kind of science. All scientists aren't like that, you know? A lot's been going on since Isaac Newton and all that stuff happened. One of the things that happened right around World War II, government realized, look scientists aren't strange dudes that hide in ivory towers and do ridiculous things with test tubes, scientists made WWII as we know it quite possible. They made faster things, they made bigger guns to shoot 'em down with, they made drugs to give the pilots if they were broken up in the process, they made all kinds of ... one giant bomb to end the whole thing. And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know, we ought to invest in this shit. Because whoever has got the most of these people working in the best places is going to have a dominant position at least in the military and probably in all kind of economic ways and they got involved in it, and the scientific-industrial establishment was born, and out of that came a lot of scientists who were in there for the money, because it was suddenly available. And they weren't the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air, they were the same people that later went into medical school, yknow, because there was money in it, and then they all got into business. I mean, there're waves of going in to your high school [guidance] person [who] says "Wanna be rich? Be a scientist." Not anymore; you wanna be rich [now], you be a businessman. But a lot of people got in it for the money, and the power, and the travel. . . . Those people don't always tell you the truth. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage always to tell you the truth. The people I'm talking about are . . . . the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And they have these big meetings where they try to figure out, how are we gonna continually prove that the planet is getting warmer? When that's actually contrary to most people's sensations. If you actually measure the temperature over a period, i mean the temperature's been measured pretty carefully for about fifty sixty years longer than that but in really nice precise ways and records have been kept for fifty or sixty years and in fact the temperature hasn't really gone up. The average temperature has gone up a tiny little bit because the nighttime temperatures at weather stations have come up just a little bit. But there's a good explanation for that. The weather stations are all built outside of town where the airport was, and now the town's moved out there, there's concrete all around, and they call it the "skyline effect," and most responsible people who measure temperatures realize you have to shield your measuring device from that and even then -- you know, because the buildings get warm in the daytime and they keep it a little warmer at night. So the temperature has been sort of inching up, it should have been, but not a lot. Not like -- you know, the first guy who got the idea that we were gonna fry ourselves, he didn't think of it that way, his name was Svarnte Arhenius, he was Swedish, and he said, if you double the CO2 level in the atmosphere -- this was in 1900 -- the temperature ought to go up about 5.5 degrees. He was thinking the earth is kinda like a completely insulated thing with no stuff in it, just energy comin' down, energy leaving. He came up with this theory, and he said, this'll be cool, because it'll mean a longer growing season in Sweden. And the surfers thought it was a cool idea. But a lot of other people later on started thinking it would be bad. But nobody actually demonstrated it. The temperature as measured -- and you can find this on our wonderful internet, just look for all NASA's records and all the weather bureau's records, and to look at it yourself and see -- the temperature has just -- the nighttime temperature measured on the surface of the planet has gone up a tiny little bit, so if you just average that with the daytime temperature it looks like it went up about 0.7 degrees in this century, but in fact. . . the daytime temperatures DIDN'T go up. And Arhenius's theory, along with all the global warmers, they would say, yeah, it should go up in the daytime too, if it's a greenhouse effect. Now, people like things that have names that they can envision, but people don't... get all excited about things like the actual evidence: "Evidence for Strengthening of the Tropical Circulation in the 1990s" [or] a paper that came out in February, "Evidence for Large Decadal Variability In the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget." Those papers were published by NASA and some scientists at Columbia . . . and those two papers were published in Science magazine, February the 1st, and the conclusion in both of these papers. . . is that our theories about global warming are completely wrong. What these guys were doing, and NASA people have been saying this for a long time, that if you measure the temperature of the atmosphere, it isn't going up. It's not going up at all. We've been doing it very carefully for the last twenty years, from satellites, and it isn't going up. And, in this paper, they showed something much more striking. They did what they call a radiation -- I'm not gonna go into details of it, actually it's quite complicated, but it isn't as complicated as they might make you think it is by the words they use in those papers. If you really get down to it, they say, the sun puts out a certain amount of energy, we know how much that is, it falls on the earth, the earth gives back a certain amount, when it gets warm, it generates redder energy, like infrared. The whole business of the global warming trash, really, is that if there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere, the heat that's trying to escape wont be able to get out, but the heat that's coming from the sun, which is mostly down in the 350nm [range] is where it's centered, that goes right through CO2, so you still get heated but you don't dissipate any. Well these guys measured all those things. I mean, you can talk about that stuff and you can write these large reports and you can get government money to do it, but these guys actually measured it and it turns out that in the last ten years -- that's why [the paper] say[s] "decadal" there -- the level of what they call "imbalance" has been way the hell over what was expected. The amount of imabalance -- meaning heat's coming in and not going out -- that you would get from having double the CO2, which -- we're not anywhere near that, by the way, but if we did, in 2025 or something have double the CO2 we had in 1900 -- they say it would increase the energy budget by about -- in other words, one watt per square centimeter more would be coming in than going out, so the planet should get warmer. Well, they found out in this study -- these two studies, by two different teams -- that five and a half watts per square [centi]meter have been coming in, 1998, 1999, and the place didn't get warmer, so the theory's kaput. These papers should've been called "The End to the Global Warming Fiasco." But they're concerned, you can tell they have very guarded conclusions in these papers because they're talking about big laboratories that are funded by lots of money and by scared people. If they said, you know what, there isn't a problem with global warming any longer, so we can -- y'know, if you start a grant request with something like "global warming hadn't actually happened." They have to be very cautious, but what I'm saying is, YOU can be delighted, because the editor of "Science" who is no dummy, and both of these really professional teams, have come to the same conclusion and the bottom lines in their papers they have to say, what this means is, what we've been thinking, the global circulation model that would predict that the earth is going get overheated is all wrong. It's wrong by a large factor, not by a small one. There's obviously some mechanisms going on that nobody knew about, because the heat's coming in and it isn't getting warmer. . . . Some science is done for other reasons than just curiosity, and there's a lot of things like global warming and ozone hole and a whole bunch of scientific public issues that if you're interested in them, you have to get down into the details and read the papers called "Large Decadal Variability in the Tropic--" you have to figure out what all those words mean, and if you just listen to the guys who are hyping those issues and making a lot of money at it, you'll be misinformed.

When I listen to conservative pundits question the reality of anthropogenic global warming, it's easy for me to dismiss. But when I heard Kary Mullis do it, it was not possible for me to dismiss. Kary Mullis is at least something of an authority -- dude won the Nobel Prize for foundational biochemistry work -- who I also perceive as being in my "group" (TED). Conservative pundits lack authority on the subject and even if they didn't, I don't perceive them as being in my "group." That's just human nature; part of how we adopt ideas is by seeing whether people we look up to endorse them. Even though I know that scientific knowledge can be independently validated by anyone in principle, in practice it is much easier to simply take the word of an agreed-upon expert.

If another agreed-upon expert comes along and contradicts the first, that creates doubt. For beliefs in which the doubter has little invested (like whether one still needs to change a vehicle's oil every 3000 miles), the doubt alone can be enough to dislodge the belief from the doubter's mind. For beliefs in which the doubter has much invested, on the other hand, the doubt has a much longer climb ahead of it. The engines of denial will be working overtime to cope with it through various false strategies -- anger or righteous indignation or passive/aggressive philosophical rationalizing -- so the doubt must be the residue of some especially emotionally impressive event. In my experience there is no more emotionally impressive event than a trusted, even loved, benevolent authority figure flatly declaring, in public, "I was wrong."

At 6:36 in this video the following exchange takes place between Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris:

DAWKINS: Dan Barker's making a collection of clergymen who've lost their faith but don't dare say so because it's their only living -- it's the only thing they know how, what to do.

HARRIS: Yeah. I've heard from one of them, at least.

DAWKINS: Have you?

HARRIS: Yes.

According to a 2002 article in the UK's Telegraph, as many as one third of British clergy fall into this category. As far as I can tell, such figures are unavailable for American clergy. My guess is that the percentage is lower, but the raw number is higher.

I wonder what would happen if one of these clergymen "came out"? He would lose his job, certainly -- but what would the effects be on individual members of his flock? He is ideally positioned to influence their opinions on this subject: a designated authority on God and spirituality who they perceive as being "on their side" or "in their group." This is the kind of person who marries people, confirms their children, speaks at their parents' funerals, helps them get through dark times, or otherwise forms meaningful bonds with people. Imagine if such a figure were to lay it all on the line in front of 300 followers and say "Look, this is bullshit, wake up." Imagine if his sermon told the story of his own journey from religious believer to atheist, letting them know it's OK to leave it all behind.

That would be quite something. You could almost call it a "conceptual suicide bombing." But it would be even cooler to call it a "deicide bombing."

Al Qaeda and other organizations that rely on real suicide bombing set aside a sizeable portion of their budget to compensate the families of suicide bombers after their martyrdom.

Wouldn't it be great if atheists formed a non-profit that provided economic relief to deicide bombers in the same way Al Qaeda takes care of its suicide bombers' kin?

I'm looking to talk to people in three industries: (a) professional religious orators who have secretly lost their faith and are intimidated by the prospect of switching careers in midlife, (b) people with experience in educational finance, i.e. setting up and/or running scholarship/grant programs, and (c) people with experience in setting up and/or running nonprofits or charities. Eventually, after enough conversations, I'll have a clear idea of what it would take to create a nonprofit organization called Deicide Bombers, Inc. I already have the domain name reserved.

Here's how it would work, at a very high level: a closeted atheist clergyman publicly comes out as an atheist, before his flock, as his final sermon. Volunteers videotape this and upload it to YouTube. The clergyman gets fired, presumably without any kind of severance package. Deicide Bombers, Inc. works with various universities, scholarships, educational grant programs, and other collegiate funding sources to procure a free Ivy League education for this clergyman. Everything would be covered -- tuition, housing, books.

There would be a few details to work out. The clergyman would have to consent to having his tax records during the time he was employed by the church audited by an accountant retained by Deicide Bombers, Inc. This would be to ensure that total compensation is commensurate with the clergyman's original church salary: if there isn't parity here, it will lend the religious opposition credence when they argue that the only reason people are willingly engaging in deicide bombing is for the money.

The Deicide Bombers, Inc. organization would need to come up with some broad guidelines for the clergyman in preparing his coming-out sermon. The sermon must be authentically from the heart -- it must be written in the clergyman's own voice, sharing his or her own journey from "person of faith," through the beginnings of doubt, all the way to atheism. Once both parties sign off on the text of the sermon, a date is set.

The date would be disseminated to a sort of closed-circuit social network of volunteers who would have to be willing to, with at least one week's notice, drive to any random church or other religious building in their area at which one of these deicide bombings was scheduled to occur. These volunteers would converge on the site prior to the worship service and set up video or audio recording devices to make sure there is at least one video documenting the delivery of the coming-out sermon.

Once the "martyrdom" has taken place, the coming-out sermon, all recordings, and all supporting financial and contractual documentation are all uploaded to the web for the public to see -- and the martyr gets set up with a free shot at starting over. An intellectual get-out-of-jail-free card.

Total openness (after the fact) is the key to making this work. Religious authorities will immediately claim that the only reason anyone is agreeing to deicide bombing is for the money. Deicide Bombers, Inc. would need to be able to refute such a claim instantly. It would calibrate its stipend and scholarship packages so that it constitutes a purely lateral move, salary-wise, and publish all the documentation required to prove that. Essentially they would provide the severance package that the clergyman's own church will not, and maybe some scholarship money to help switch careers, but that's it.

So, is there anybody out there who has a clue how to actually get this going? I'd love to pick your brain.

Lost

2009-02-20T08:50:00.000-08:00

I am a huge fan of ABC's Lost. In certain respects, it is utterly conventional television: nearly every character is white (the only black or Latino cast members have been either killed or exiled from the island), every single female character is played by a stunning perfect-10 type, and the only female character without ludicrous pulchritude, Rose, is also the only non-white character who's still alive, although this is mostly a by-product of her being saddled with another American pop-culture trope, the Magical Negro. So it goes.

On one level, I think the writers are simply playing a game amongst themselves to see how much complexity can be revealed gradually over time. The X-Files broke new ground because it made clear from the outset that it was going to have a broad scope -- a story that affects the fate of the entire world. Lost is breaking new ground because, although it, too, tells a story that affects the fate of the entire world, that fact was not at all made clear from the outset. At the outset it looked like it was going to be a tropical version of Alive.

Around the end of the second season and the beginning of the third season (we are now about 7 or 8 episodes into the fifth season) I began to think about a possible explanation for what was going on in Lost. There are entire web sites devoted to fans presenting such theories and interactively critiquing them. I never published mine on one of these boards, but I did mention it to a few people.

I began to wonder if the point of the show was to put us, the American audience, in the role of reviled foreign terrorists. In this arrangement, "The Others" -- who live on "their island" with an orderly, courteous, regimented, productive social structure, yet at the same time seem perfectly content to be left alone on "their island" and exhibit no curiosity about anything off the island -- represent us, the American audience. And the substance of the plot consists of these "Others" systematically imprisoning, torturing, murdering, abducting, seducing, manipulating, and deceiving this ragtag band of protagonists. There were even shades of 9/11 in the fact that the way the Others are first made aware of the protagonists is by their arrival on a crashing plane. Over time we learn that the most frightening thing about the Others is their righteousness; their certainty that their cause is of such transcendentally greater purpose than you mere non-Others could ever imagine.

My confidence in this theory began to wane when the show introduced "the flash-forward of doom" at the end of Season 3, which established that some of the characters would in fact be able to leave the island. It seemed to me like the entirety of the action would have to play out on the island if my conjecture were to be strengthened.

Then the most recent episode aired, and my faith in the "we're the terrorists" hypothesis was renewed:

At this point in the story, a subset of the original plane crash's survivors -- the "Oceanic Six" -- have managed to get off the island, leaving some of their compatriots behind. They have been persuaded by "the Others" to return to the island. A mysterious woman somehow affiliated with "the Others" tells them that the only way to get back to the island is to get on another plane, this one going from L.A. to Guam, and for reasons having to do with "strong electromagnetic currents flowing throughout the earth" or something, this plane will also crash on the island. So they have to do the whole plane-crash thing over again, except this time they'll know what's going to happen.

This leads us to an extraordinary sequence in which, one by one, the "Oceanic Six" board this commercial airliner, and each gets this look on his or her face of rapturous anticipation, complete with lingering camera pans underscored with lush strings. These people are finally doing something they've thought about for a long time. They are united in purpose and conviction. They know they are going to crash, but are unafraid because they view the crash simply as a gateway to something wonderful beyond. A brief exchange of dialogue even makes it clear that they are aware, and simply don't care, that non-good things are going to happen to the other passengers on the plane.

These are the people that we have come to identify with over the last four seasons, yet they are shown boarding a commercial jet in the exact same emotional frame of mind that the nineteen Al Qaeda hijackers presumably were in on the morning of 9/11. The whole show has been leading up to a moment in which we are given a glimpse into what it must have felt like to be one of those suicide operatives. It's a profoundly creepy experience.

It's worth noting that, even if my conjecture is totally wrong, Lost could probably never have been made without 9/11 having happened first. Before 9/11, plane crashes were among the worst things people could think of. After 9/11, having a jet crash merely by accident into something that wasn't a crowded urban building seemed positively quaint. Before 9/11, pitching the Lost story would have been like pitching a prime-time sitcom about child molestation.

The other thing I'm loving about Lost is that the writers seem to have been profoundly influenced by one of my favorite books, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. The idea that the island can continuously move from one "pocket of strong electromagnetic energy" to another seems very similar to Eco's notion of "telluric currents" that, when properly harnessed and controlled, can remake the geography of the earth, and do in a few seconds what would take natural forces millions of years to do.

An Unusually Perceptive DailyKos Post

2009-02-05T09:46:00.000-08:00

This is the kind of political writing I like. Let's talk about the systemic flaws that prevent us from making good policy, as opposed to hurling canned arguments about specific issues at each other.

Movie Roundup

2009-02-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

In the last few months I've been very impressed by two psychological thrillers, each very different from the other but both quite excellent in their attention to character. Psychological thrillers used to rely on psychology to thrill us, but the James Wan generation of directors abuse the word "psychological" just as a way to put cardboard-cutout characters into bizarre and improbable situations. I love a good cinematic mindfuck as much as the next person, but if you don't have any insight into the minds on screen getting fucked, it all seems kind of pointless and contorted in the end. (This is the way a vocal minority felt about The Usual Suspects, although I loved it.)

2008's Transsiberian, written and directed by Brad Anderson and starring Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer among others, is set on the cross-continental railroad of the same name, and involves heroin traffickers, marital secrets, guilt, and Ben Kingsley with a kick-ass Russian accent. 3.5 out of 4 stars from Ebert, for those who care what he thinks.

2006's Bug, adapted from some play but directed on the screen by William Friedkin, starring Ashley Judd (!) and some dude I'd never heard of named Michael Shannon, was absolutely amazing. Just a vicious, devilish, perverse, but always believable ride. I haven't often been truly frightened or horrified by a movie, but this one did it. And there's very little violence (although what little there is disturbs). Also 3.5 out of 4 stars from Ebert.

Also, I had the opportunity to see The Golden Compass on pay-per-view. This was the so-called "atheist movie" that had the characteristically open-minded and well-informed Catholics up in arms. Not surprisingly, the fans of the British series of books on which the film was based were upset that not enough of author Philip Pullman's atheist message survived the translation from page to screen.

From my point of view, I thought the film was ideologically heavy-handed, but along much more environmental lines than atheistic ones. No explicit mention is ever made of God or belief or anything else, and the metaphorical attempt to depict mankind's better nature as a physical substance -- the mysterious Dust -- seemed less like a shot at God than a shot at people who don't believe global warming is real.

The large, oppressive bureaucratic villain -- the Magisterium -- presumably was a stand-in for the Catholic Church in the books, but in the film seems like a reasonable representative of multinational oil companies. When Daniel Craig ruffles the Magisterium's feathers early in the film by presenting concrete proof of Dust's existence, I took that as a metaphor for the eventual day of reckoning in which even the staunchest climate-change denier is confronted with irrefutable proof of anthropocentric global warming.

That, plus the fact that half the film takes place in the Arctic, with Scottish-brogued CGI polar bears in armor (don't ask) playing out the intrigues of their own moribund ursine kingdom, just left me with a very "environmentaly" vibe.

I'm tempted to read the books, but it takes a lot to get me to read fiction lately. We'll see. Ebert gave the movie 4 out of 4 stars, which seems a tad generous to me; 3 seems more reasonable. I also found it interesting that, while some saw The Golden Compass as the ideological antidote to the first installment of the Narnia Chronicles (with its thinly veiled retelling of the Christ story), both films essentially fetishize youthful innocence at the expense of adulthood, knowledge, and experience, which apparently Philip Pullman found very irritating and was one of the precise things his books were trying to stamp out.

Those damn atheists are never happy.

Vagus Vagaries

2009-01-17T07:54:00.000-08:00

I must refer you to a recent post on Roger Ebert's blog. I absolutely love it because I'm a huge fan of Ebert, and in this piece he writes (in part) about Jonathan Haidt, another person I'm a huge fan of. (Just ignore the horrific photo of Oprah Winfrey that, for some unfathomable reason, he chose to include.)

It's debatable whether film criticism is a form of journalism, but if it is, then Roger Ebert has succeeded Edward R. Murrow as the most eloquent journalist in America.

Admittedly Irrational Vitriol Directed At Macintosh

2008-12-23T19:54:00.000-08:00

(This post assumes computer literacy -- if your familiarity with computers extends to "the Yahoo" and "the Google," you probably won't get much out of it.)

I've always been a Microsoft guy. Sure, I was an early adopter of OS/2 back in the day, and over the years I've had some Unix experience, and nearly everyone I love is a Mac user, but it's always been DOS and then Windows for me. Ultimately, it comes down to thoroughness of documentation.

Macintosh has historically been a completely closed platform. Growing up, I never understood how it was possible for someone who wasn't an Apple employee to become a Mac developer; it seemed like there was 1 Mac programming book on the market for every 200 Windows programming books, and that 1 Mac book was always out of print. This was prior to mass adoption of the Internet, too, so newsgroups and wikis weren't available to help. From the perspective of a young coder looking for a place to hang out, MacOS was a boarded-up storefront guarded by smelly homeless dudes, and Windows was a rockin' nightclub full of hot chicks and no bouncers.

To add insult to injury, Mac users tended to have this bizarre chip on their shoulder about the technical inferiority of Windows. "Everything good about Windows was ripped off from the Mac," they would sneer. The fact that there was some truth to this claim made it sting even worse.

Now that the last two years have seen an unprecedented explosion in Macintosh popularity, it's time to hoist those bastards on their own petard.

Imagine what the reaction from the Mac community (and the Linux community -- if Windows were black, Slashdot's logo would be an animated GIF of a burning cross) would be if Microsoft released their next-generation operating system, and it was just their own GUI shell running over Linux. Sure, there would be a few proprietary libraries and API shims to ensure backward compatibility with existing Windows apps, but the "next generation" was just their own frosting applied to someone else's cake. It would be like the end of the Cold War. Open source had finally torn down the Berlin Wall, and the evil empire of Capitalist Coding had finally collapsed under the weight of its own technical inferiority. Goateed graphic designers would be dancing in the streets.

Make no mistake, this is exactly what Apple did with Mac OS X. They scrapped decades of intellectual property (in both hardware and software!) in favor of becoming a game company, which is essentially what they are now. They produce one game, called "Figure out how the fuck to make Linux usable, with maybe some neat translucence effects." They finally wrote that Flight Simulator interface for the Mach kernel that the prepubescent blond girl was navigating at the end of Jurassic Park.

And yet, all this has only increased the Mac cachet. "Everything just runs so smoothly on Mac OS X," people marvel. Yeah -- because somebody else besides Apple wrote the operating system! It's a lot easier to use an existing threading model to write a responsive GUI than it is to implement your own preemptive thread scheduler.

Apple's decision to take this route should provide some insight into what a clusterfuck of spaghetti code the real MacOS kernel must have been. When it costs more money to simply document and improve your existing product than it does to throw it away entirely and prettify someone else's, you know you have an absolute cesspool of technical inferiority on your hands -- a coding abortion clinic.

The one consequence of the increase in Mac popularity that I absolutely can't wait for is the corresponding proliferation of Mac-only malware. Another historical shoulder-chip with the Mac crowd has been, "At least with my Mac, I don't have to worry about all the viruses and Trojan horses and spyware that you Windows guys do." Yeah, that's because malware authors tend to target platforms with more than eight users. Nobody's ever written a virus for IBM mainframes, either, but it's not because OS/390 is such a great operating system -- it's because there are only a few thousand IBM mainframes in the entire world. As soon as Mac OS X hits the 10% mark of consumer OS market share (which I agree they probably will), we'll see an explosion in Mac-only viruses, and it'll be as devastating to that market as tuberculosis was to the Aztecs. Merry Christmas, Symantec!

Atheism Essay: "Revitalizing the Betamax of the Soul"

2008-12-09T07:35:00.001-08:00

People have been wondering where I've been for the last month. I've been working on the following essay, now published in nine parts.

Revitalizing the Betamax of the Soul

Part 1: Introduction and the First Three Points
Part 2: Atheist Soup Kitchens
Part 3: The Faithful Atheist and the Rationalist Credo
Part 4: A Spiritual Selsun Blue
Part 5: Epissedemology
Part 6: Voices In Your Head Are Generally Less Reliable Than Voices Outside Your Head
Part 7: Worship, Communism, Stop Signs, Dinesh D'Souza, and Mike
Part 8: Consciousness and the Spirit Hypothesis
Part 9: What's Your Question, Caller?

Enjoy.

RtBotS, Part 9 of 9: What’s Your Question, Caller?

2008-12-09T07:28:00.000-08:00

[Previous]

In the course of this essay I have strayed a few times from my stated goal. I started out criticizing the Four Horsemen for thinking that debating is the same as marketing, but I ended up making a number of points that would be much more at home in a debate than in a sales flyer. Indeed, there are a lot more points I’d love to make, but they are so explicitly debate-style that I can’t justify including them in this ostensibly market-focused essay. But my own struggle with trying to avoid debate points has actually helped me clarify my thinking about the core lessons that atheists need to learn to improve their marketing.

Although it seems strange to say, atheists can’t help but feel a certain intellectual kinship with the most extreme religious fundamentalists. This is because the one quality they both share is an inability to look at the world in more than one way. For religious fundamentalists, their holy book of choice is the only perspective from which they willingly view the world; all others are automatically suspect. For atheists, the Rationalist Credo is the only perspective from which they willingly view the world; all others are automatically suspect. Does this make atheists guilty of dogmatic thinking? Maybe, but only in a very technical, unuseful way: any dogma explicitly mandating unyielding skepticism of dogma is less harmful than a dogma that doesn’t.

This is the basic problem that atheists run up against when trying to convert religious moderates. Religious moderates do not suffer from the same cognitive disease that atheists and their fundamentalist “brethren” do – moderates are capable of effortlessly switching from one worldview to another, depending on which part of the world is being viewed at the time. Religious moderates are not only capable of thinking dualistically, but capable of doing so without effort or conscious awareness.

It seems to me that atheists spend so much time debating because, according to their world view, that’s how people arrive at the truth. I think a moment’s thought should vindicate the notion that if a fervent religious believer also accepted rational argument as the only way to arrive at truth, they would eventually arrive at atheism under their own power, without any help from us. Debates are only marginally successful at converting religious believers to atheism because only a marginal proportion of religious believers are predisposed to treat the debating process with the same respect that atheists do.

Part of the reason for this is that, for most people, their concept of debating and rational argument is anchored in their understanding of law and the justice system. In legal circles, two parties debate as a way of arriving at a winner and a loser. In intellectual circles, two parties debate as a way of arriving at the truth. It is a truism that the legal system is flawed – that guilty people with sufficiently skilled lawyers can go free, and innocent people saddled with incompetent public defenders can find themselves on death row. Our legal system’s reliance upon and publicizing of the debate format has drilled into most people’s heads the idea that debates are anything but a foolproof avenue to truth. A dualistic religious believer who is presented with many otherwise convincing atheist arguments in a debate could easily invoke this truism to justify their gut-level rejection of those arguments.

Another example of how dualistic thinking poses a hurdle for atheism is the word “science.” To most atheists, and all scientists, “science” is just a process – it’s a reliable process for how to find things out. (Just as free-market advocates define capitalism as simply the best way thus far discovered to efficiently distribute wealth, science is defined as simply the best way thus far discovered to convert unknown things into known things.) To the general public, though, “science” isn’t a process, it’s a subject they had to study in school. People with the proper understanding of science know that its methods can be applied to find out about many subjects – meteorology, anatomy, economics, history, grammar, business, even drama – but the popular impression is that science is somehow different from all those other subjects. When a person with such a dualistic understanding is told that the choice is between “God and science,” they cannot be blamed for thinking, “Oh really? Why not God versus geometry? Why not God versus criminal justice? Where do these scientists get off?” Conversely, when dualists say things like “God and science are not mutually exclusive,” the implicit assumption is that “science” will stay confined to the same buckets as they learned in school – cells and magnets and igneous rocks – and will leave alone their understanding of more immediate, practical matters like comparison shopping, automotive maintenance, politics, or romantic love.

Richard Dawkins has stated that his preferred approach to spread atheism is to convince people of the truth of evolution, which does not require God, and then use their acceptance of evolution as a stepping stone to dismissing God. The problem with this is that dualist religious moderates are perfectly capable of compartmentalizing their acceptance of evolution in the “science” category, without bothering to apply any of its insights to what they’ve compartmentalized in their “spirituality” category. Dualistic thinkers do indeed seek consistency and coherence in their beliefs, but only within the various mental buckets they’ve designated – they don’t seem to reliably take the next step and require consistency and coherence across all those buckets.

What this tells me is that the most effective approach to dealing with religious moderates must take dualism into account. It is not enough for atheists to structure their arguments to point out inconsistencies and incoherences across mental buckets, since dualists are essentially immune to such an attack. They must structure their arguments to find inconsistencies and incoherences within individual mental buckets, since those are the kinds of flaws that even dualists are capable of detecting. I’d like to think that the better parts of this essay are better because they adhere more closely to this principle.

The other central message I’d like atheists to extract from this piece is the importance of making a distinction between religious belief and the urge to worship. If the mindset we are up against can be defined entirely in epistemological terms, “faith,” “belief,” “knowledge,” “reason,” “rational,” “truth,” and so forth, then I think atheism has a fighting chance. But if the mindset we are up against is based on some kind of primal urge to worship, we’re in trouble. Don’t underestimate the power of such an urge; it’s the only thing that reconciles certain otherwise irreconcilable positions held by religious believers. (Which is a greater insult to the dignity of humanity: that our selves are nothing more than spiritless, worldly by-products of the large-scale computations performed by the hundreds of billions of neurons in our brains, or that we are intrinsically flawed spirits cursed at conception by an original sin we did not commit, doomed to seek redemption if we wish to achieve lasting happiness? I would say the latter is the greater insult, but since it is embedded in a belief system that offers religious believers someone to worship, they accept it without a problem.) I think more energy needs to be put into studying the relationship between worship and religion, and more time needs to be spent by atheists honing their approaches based on what that study yields.

If there is a God, isn’t His least appealing attribute His incessant hunger for worship? Isn’t that the one character flaw that essentially disqualifies Him from being worthy of worship? I would find an utterly indifferent God more compelling and awe-inspiring than one who cheerfully admits to being maniacally jealous on the first date. Jealousy makes His nature much closer to those of His intrinsically flawed, constantly sinning children than cosmic indifference would.

RtBotS, Part 8 of 9: Consciousness and the Spirit Hypothesis

2008-12-09T07:18:00.000-08:00

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(10) I want to revisit (1) because I fear I may have inadvertently violated one of my own rules, specifically (5e). By saying that the major reason religion is popular is that it purports to solve the problem of death (which I think everyone can agree is true), and by elsewhere implying that religion is a human invention (whose truth is debatable), I may have implied that a causal relationship exists there: that primitive man woke up 10,000 years ago and said, "Holy shit, the irrefutability of death is scary. Let's make up God!" I don't think that's how it went; to say that it was would be reaching the right conclusion for the wrong reason.

As evidenced by the tribal embrace of animism and shamanism, the idea of an afterlife, a spirit world, seems to have arisen first in human history, to be followed only later by the formalization of religious doctrines to help make sense of that spirit world (and its relationship to this one). This is an important clue to why religious believers have such a hard time entertaining the idea of a godless universe.

At first blush the idea of an afterlife seems natural and reasonable, because it lines up so cleanly with our own intuitive sense of existence. Even in day-to-day life, we feel a distinction between ourselves and our bodies. It seems self-evident that we must somehow be different from our bodies, since we feel, to a certain extent, encased inside them. We accept with barely a shrug that our bodies are made of cells and molecules and atoms, but we don't feel like we are made of anything. And it is this powerful feeling that leads to the idea of a soul, or a spirit, or a divine spark -- or, as scientists and philosophers prefer to call it, consciousness.

I am open to the possibility that consciousness really is a thing in its own right, a substance of some kind, for lack of a better word. There are plenty of unambiguously real things in nature that are unseen but whose effects can be observed -- gravity and X-rays, for instance. And if it turns out that consciousness could be found in pure form, it's not unreasonable to explore the possibility that it survives death. After all, the other substances that make up our bodies continue to exist even after we die.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that consciousness is its own thing -- that it, we, are our spirits, dwelling in our brains and driving our bodies around the way we drive our cars. This "spirit hypothesis" suggests that our motions and emotions, behaviors and thoughts, all originate from the spirit. Neuroscientists have used imaging technologies like fMRI to determine that different regions of the brain are actively involved in thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, speaking, and moving. So this would suggest that the brain, while not the entity actually performing these tasks, is still intimately involved in them -- the brain is a conduit between the spirit and the rest of the body. It's the one physical organ that's capable of interacting directly with the spirit.

Under the spirit hypothesis, if neuroscientists say "the hippocampus is active during the formation of new long-term memories" or "the neocortex is involved in logical reasoning" or other similar claims about different regions of the brain, then this must mean that the hippocampus, neocortex, etc. are the knobs, dials, levers, and switches that the spirit manipulates in order to instruct the brain what to do. The spirit decides it wants to remember something, so it activates our hippocampus for us, and the memory is created. We can't directly observe the spirit, but we can infer its presence by watching the brain jump into action in response to its commands.

This hypothesis is not contradicted by neurological disorders like Parkinson's disease or cerebral palsy. The spirit knows what levers and switches in the brain to activate, but those levers and switches produce distorted or unintended outcomes due to the disease. The same goes for input limiters like blindness or deafness; the spirit would be capable of receiving visual or auditory stimulation, but the biological wiring required to pass that stimulation into the spirit is damaged.

However, a number of problems begin to arise with the spirit hypothesis as we delve deeper in. A major one is memory. We know memories accumulate in the brain (a process we can observe, but don't yet understand). The spirit hypothesis would suggest that memories also accumulate in the spirit; otherwise, we'd forget our entire lives the moment we die (which would make Judgment Day the celestial equivalent of Kafka's Trial). But if memories do accumulate in the spirit, why are they wiped out by Alzheimer's disease? We can see brain tissue dessicate and shrivel under the effects of Alzheimer's -- changes that would certainly explain why memories would be destroyed if they were stored only in the brain. But a fundamentally different type of substance, which is exactly what our hypothesis asserts "spirit" to be, should be totally untouched by such a merely biological problem, with its earthly viruses, cells, and molecules.

Mood disorders present another major challenge to the spirit hypothesis. If a clinically depressed man dies, is his spirit freed from the shackles of his depressed brain, or does his spirit continue to be depressed? I'm bipolar -- when I die, will my spirit continue being bipolar, or will it "revert to normal"? If depression and mania are intrinsic in the spirit, then why do so many pharmaceuticals effectively curb them? If depression and mania are external constraints imposed by an ailing brain on the spirit it contains, that indicates that much more of who we are resides in our brains than in our spirits; it violates the model proposed above in which the spirit is in control and the brain subservient to it. The machinery that supports the subjective experience of being conscious is split between the "master" and the "slave," making them peers, equal collaborators, in actual fact.

Does a mentally retarded person have a retarded spirit? Most people would say no -- their behavior is retarded because of deficiencies in the brain that limit the functions available for the spirit to manipulate. An analogy would be the difference between the same person switching from a vehicle with power steering and anti-lock brakes to one without those features. The capabilities of the driver/spirit are the same, but the quality of the driving differs due to the difference in vehicle/brain structure.

An interesting consequence of this argument is that it forces us to regard all animals as occupying the same moral plane as humans. Under the spirit hypothesis, how is a mentally retarded person different from a healthy rhinoceros? Both are alive, both are animals, but the structure of both their brains has deprived them both of the power of coherent speech. If popular spiritual morality leads us to think of a mentally retarded person as a fully healthy, intact, and capable spirit trapped inside an underpowered brain, on what basis can we not reach the same conclusion for a healthy rhinoceros? (Aside from arguing for pervasive animal rights, this also echoes the ethos of reincarnation.) If we decide to declare a priori that human brains host spirits but animal brains don't, then what are we to make of the fact that the differences between human and other brains are primarily of size, and not structure? Indeed, doesn't this violate one of the basic principles of the spirit hypothesis, that the brain's function is to enable interaction with the spirit? If the spirit hypothesis is valid, but we refuse to ascribe spirits to animals, then how do we explain the fact that animals also have brains? In that case, what are animals’ brains for?

Enough of this. I will stop pretending to advocate for the spirit hypothesis. There is plenty we don't know about how brains work, about what consciousness is, about the relationship between the two -- certainly enough that it would be churlish and closed-minded of me to flatly assert that the spirit hypothesis cannot be true. But as you can see, it has some major problems; it leads to conclusions that conflict strongly with both our scientific and intuitive understandings of the world. Fortunately, enough is known about the mind-body problem to suggest that there is a more likely explanation of consciousness than the spirit hypothesis: the computational theory of mind.

The computational theory of mind can be thought of as a sort of compromise between the spirit hypothesis and the biological realities mentioned in its preceding critique. It agrees with the spirit hypothesis that consciousness is in a fundamentally different category from other life processes. It disagrees with the spirit hypothesis that consciousness can exist without those other life processes.

To illustrate, think of walking. Don't think about any particular person walking; just think about the act of walking itself. In your mind, try to divorce the concept of "walking" from the concept of the "body" doing the walking. Is such "walking" real? Does such "walking" take place in the mundane world of cells and molecules and atoms? Of course it does. Yet no actual manifestation of "walking" can be found in the real world that does not depend on a body to do it. The same thing goes for the planet Earth, busily rotating around its axis. Rotation in general is real; the rotation of the Earth in particular is real. Yet it would occur to no one to wonder "Will the Earth's rotation continue to exist after the Earth no longer does?" Internal combustion is the same way; internal combustion exists, but specific instances of it will never be found outside of the engines that perform it. Motion and behavior are just as real as the people, planets, and engines that engage in them -- yet motion and behavior are not the same as the physical entities that engage in them, nor are their lifetimes independent of their engaging entities' lifetimes.

This almost gets at the essence of what I'm reaching for, but it still falls a tad short. A better example might be "the economy." No one has ever seen the economy, but no one doubts it exists. The economy is an epiphenomenon, a form of large-scale motion/behavior that arises spontaneously from the interaction of massive numbers of individual actors. Even though the state of the economy depends entirely on the billions of interactions among those millions of actors, we are still able to measure, monitor, and (occasionally, crudely) predict the economy's behavior based on its own characteristics, without having to examine the bank statements and credit card records of all the millions of people and businesses that constitute it. Consciousness has exactly the same relationship to the neurons in the brain. Would anyone suggest that the economy is actually a spirit that will live on after its constituents disappear?

The computational theory of mind makes two claims: first, that the purpose of the brain is to allow its host organism to make predictions about the future, and second, that the most reliable way nature has found to do that is through computation. (Humans stumbled across this principle of nature when they invented electronic digital computers.) The first claim does not necessarily mean "predicting the future" in the sense of prophecy or meteorology -- it means it in the sense of weighing behaviors against their possible outcomes. If I hear roaring on the savannah, I predict that a hunting expedition could get me eaten, so I'll spend the morning in my cave. If I tell my boss what I really think of him, I predict that my honesty could get me fired, so I'll keep my mouth shut. If I hear the sound of hundreds of small medium-density objects clanking rapidly against metal, I predict that my owner has just filled my bowl with puppy chow, so I'll get off my dog bed and go into the kitchen. Prediction is what brains are for, and computation is how the individual components of the brain have evolved to do it.

What we call "reasoning" is essentially recursive prediction: making predictions about how successful various methods of prediction will be. This self-reference is something that neuroscientistific evidence points to being a largely unintended consequence of increased brain size. This is why humans speak, write novels, produce films and television shows, exchange currency for goods and services, compose poetry, perform music, dance, and do calculus, while animals don't.

I was going to include "wage war" in that list, but strangely enough, it turns out that hive-based insects are our only cousins in the animal kingdom who do this as well. (That should show you where war falls on the ranked list of human achievements, no matter what Patton might have said.)

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RtBotS, Part 7 of 9: Worship, Communism, Stop Signs, Dinesh D'Souza, and Mike

2008-12-09T07:02:00.000-08:00

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(9) The other major benefit of (5) above is that it provides an answer to the question posed (often sneeringly) by religious believers: "Don't you believe in anything?" Yes, we do: the Rationalist Credo. This effectively nullifies one of the more easily scored (although, paradoxically, less logically substantive) points against atheism, i.e. that atheism is a negative proposition rather than a positive one. "You aren't proposing an alternative belief; you're just proposing lack of belief." Wrong, for the reasons articulated above.

However, this does open up a new potential objection to atheism. I described the spiritual libido as a limitless wellspring of mental energy that can be expended solely through faith. This "urge to believe" is not quite the same thing as an "urge to worship." Belief and worship are different; the former can exist without the latter, but the reverse is not true. The object of belief does not have to be personified in any way, even in the abstract, but the object of worship does. While the Rationalist Credo can serve as a satisfactory object of belief, it would be silly to worship it. But if one of the reasons people purchase religion over atheism is to satisfy some innate drive to actually worship, and not merely believe, then (5) doesn't really advance our position at all.

The only thing that gives me hope in the face of this possibility is that there are already well-established religions that are based on belief without worship; one could argue this is the defining distinction between Eastern and Western religions. The Abrahamic faiths all revolve around a single anthropomorphic, personified, intentional God; Eastern religions revolve around disembodied philosophies. (Animism is an interesting hybrid, in which worship does indeed take place, but the objects of worship are the essences of natural objects and phenomena, like trees, rocks, weather, celestial objects, earthquakes, animals, and the like, many of which are not even animate, never mind anthropomorphic.)

I take this as evidence that the drive to worship someone arose more recently, and is therefore less potent, than the spiritual libido proposed in (5) above. I even have a conjecture about how it came about.

Imagine that there were a real flesh-and-blood person -- let's call him Mike -- who is good friends with every single human being on earth. Whatever your native tongue, he speaks it fluently. You and he go way back; sort of a childhood friend, college roommate, and next-door neighbor all rolled into one. If you were awakened at 2:30 on a Tuesday morning by frantic banging on your front door, and you opened it to find Mike standing there wondering if he could crash on your couch for a few days, you'd welcome him with open arms and spend the next six hours catching up with him (screw going back to bed, you can call in sick). And Mike has that exact same kind of relationship with Thai middle managers, Vietnamese rice farmers, Mexican truck drivers, Russian billionaires, Australian construction foremen, Yanomamo tribesmen, French Catholic priests, Alaskan fishermen, Dutch day-traders, Scottish university professors, Moroccan cab drivers, Samoan soccer players, Venezuelan factory workers, Italian barbers, Czech rock musicians, Iranian soldiers, Indonesian bellhops, and even Andy Dick.

Mike, if he existed, would have a very powerful effect on the social dynamics of the world. Strangers always warm up to each other more quickly if it turns out that they both have an acquaintance in common (assuming the common acquaintance is not an enemy to either). Mike would guarantee that any two people picked at random on the planet would have at least one person in common; not just a casual acquaintance, either, but a good friend. Enmity would have a much harder time developing in such a social dynamic (although I'm sure it would still manage occasionally). Mike's existence would essentially be a very useful mechanism for helping the world cohere.

The sociologist Robin Dunbar has proposed that there is an upper limit on the human mind's ability to keep track of stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Dunbar's number, as it's known, has several proposed values, but the most widely accepted is 150. More colloquially, Dunbar's number is thought of as the size of one's "monkeysphere."

The monkeysphere is the set of people in whose lives you have some emotional investment. If someone beyond your monkeysphere dies, you might still end up at their funeral, but only at a monkeyspheric funeral are you guaranteed to cry. This is different from normal human compassion. Reading about a tornado that decimated the homes of a dozen people in Arkansas might elicit strong sympathy, but you won't hop on the next flight to Little Rock to help them rebuild unless they're in your monkeysphere.

A monkeysphere of 150 was probably fine for early humans, because structures of tribe and kin, coupled with high infant mortality and low life expectancy, meant that they could conceivably live out their entire lives without ever meeting more than 150 other people. But when people started settling in villages and then cities (thanks to agriculture and animal husbandry), the monkeysphere was potentially very small compared to the size of the groups in which people found themselves living.

Enter Mike. Or, since Mike can't ever really exist, God. It's my conjecture that worship of an anthropomorphic, personified, intentional God must have been a very useful mechanism for helping larger groups cohere -- just like Mike -- because God could serve as a unifying placeholder in the monkeyspheres of everyone in the group. Mike and God alike would occupy a single slot in everyone's monkeysphere, creating an automatic icebreaker between two strangers. This function is especially noticeable when listening to fundamentalist Christians talk about Jesus as if they're all on a first-name basis with him. "Yeah, Jesus and I go way back." "Oh, you know Jesus too?" Another potential enmity avoided, another group's unity reinforced.

This is not so hard to accept. Consider all those overweight, depressed, lower-income folks in Middle America who obsessively read gossip rags like People magazine, Us Weekly, etc. Those people, due to a paucity of satisfying relationships with people they actually know, have allocated monkeysphere slots to celebrities. (The monkeysphere-placeholder idea figures into politics, too: when pollsters ask "Which candidate would you rather have a beer with?" they're really asking "Which candidate would you willingly allocate a monkeysphere slot to?") The monkeysphere developed because of the need to track personal relationships, but with today's technology and social structures, it can be inhabited by people who, in a sense not literal but still very significant, are not real. (Oprah!)

So what, if anything, does this tell us about how we should improve atheism's marketing? Does it mean that we should try to elect some Atheist Mike to trot the globe, befriend everyone, live a good life, and happen to be an atheist? I think this would be a very bad idea, for the following reason.

One of the attacks that religious believers like to mount against atheism is that "atheistic regimes have done just as much, if not more, evil than have religious ones." One of Dinesh D'Souza's favorite rhetorical flourishes is to point out that the Salem witch trials and the Spanish Inquisition, so often held up as paragons of evil done in religion's name, had a total body count of 2,018, hundreds of years ago, whereas the Holocaust, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and Kim Jong-Il's North Korea have, in our own lifetimes, killed tens of millions. If atheists insist on the genuinely pious among religious believers to be held responsible for the deaths committed in the name of religion, D'Souza says, then surely they cannot absolve themselves of the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Jong-Il.

(This has inspired an exchange in several debates that I'd like to comment on, but first I want to circle back to the whole Atheist Mike/monkeysphere thing and make my main point.)

Every corporate CEO will tell you that there is a big difference between firing someone and merely laying him off. In one case, the position still exists, to be given to someone else; in the other, it is eliminated altogether. With atheism, either way God is out of a job. The key distinction is that it's ethically harmless when this is done by eliminating the position entirely, but I concede that it does have the potential to be quite ethically harmful when it is done by merely firing God and replacing him with some earthbound figure. Stalin, Pol Pot, and Kim Jong-Il militated not for the layoff, but for the firing, to pave the way for their own ascension to God's old job. That's what allowed those evils to take place. (In Jong-Il's case that is literally true; as Christopher Hitchens enjoys pointing out, North Korea is a "necrocracy," in which the head of state is Kim Jong-Il's long-dead father; the son is merely the head of the country's only political party and the leader of its military.)

So, for this reason, suggesting that atheists exploit the monkeysphere-placeholder trick that lies at the core of worship-oriented religion, by coming up with some actual human to fill the atheists' monkeysphere slot, is a terrible idea.

(I can think of one exception to this conclusion, and it ties back to point (2). If atheism were to someday suffer a martyr, that deceased personage might be a suitable monkeysphere placeholder for atheism -- but only if he or she dies childless. Leaving behind a bloodline makes the prospect of another repressive regime, one whose evils are indisputably and explicitly done in atheism's name, much too likely to risk.)

Let's revisit Dinesh D'Souza's claim. The Four Horsemen have rebutted it by saying that it evidences a confusion of correlation with causality; there is a difference between people who happen to be atheists doing vile things versus people doing vile things in the name of atheism. Rabbi David Wolpe has thoughtfully responded that, although this may be true of the Holocaust (Hitler professed Christianity, although there is dissonance between his public and private writings on the subject), the other instances of mass murder under discussion were undertaken in the name of Communism, an ideology that explicitly embraces atheism as part of its underlying principles. So, by transitivity, says Wolpe, they were, in fact, undertaken in atheism's name.

This is an excellent point that deserves a serious response. It raises two questions that must be explored. The first is, is the kind of atheism that comes as a free side dish with one's purchase of Communism the same kind of atheism being proposed here? The second is, has Wolpe effectively deprived atheists of the ability to condemn the doctrines of religion for the evils of certain of its adherents?

Sam Harris thinks he has effectively dispatched the first question by asking, "Is too much skeptical inquiry really what's wrong with North Korea?" But the glibness-to-insight ratio of this rejoinder is just a little too high for it not to feel like an artful dodge. I think a clearer approach is to seize upon the distinction made in (5): "Note that atheism appears nowhere in [the Rationalist Credo]. My atheism is not a part of my belief system; it is a consequence of it."This matters because there is more than one way that one can arrive at being an atheist. To illustrate this, consider the "no-values voters" imagined by The Onion. (Follow the link; it's funny.) These are voters who cheerfully reject morality and whose top issues are death, suffering, engulfing things in flames, poisoning wells, molesting infants, etc. (Their political action committee is named "Citizens For A Bleaker America.") This no-values voting bloc could easily arrive at atheism through the following reasoning:

(i) God is the source of humanity's moral compass.
(ii) We reject humanity's moral compass.
(iii) Therefore we reject God.

This is an utterly different type of atheism from that which flows from the Rationalist Credo; in fact, the Rationalist Credo has a prohibition against just this kind of reasoning in item (5e). Atheism may be the correct conclusion, but it is possible to arrive at it for the wrong reasons. Although a believer in the Rationlist Credo might find (ii) personally objectionable, it is item (i) that suffers from faulty reasoning.

Because the Rationalist Credo includes the Golden Rule, I hope it is apparent that the kind of atheism arrived at through its reasoning would never tolerate actions that would be tolerated by the "no-values voter" type of atheism. The no-values voter arrives at atheism through flawed reasoning, but Communism arrives at it through no reasoning at all; it simply assumes the lack of God as a postulate, with no further exploration. (5e) forces us to treat lack of reasoning the same as faulty reasoning; hence, Communistic atheism is just as different from, and reprehensible to, the kind of atheism based on the Rationalist Credo as is the "no-values voter" kind.

So that answers Wolpe's first question with a resounding "no." The second question, i.e. have atheists been deprived of the ability to condemn religious doctrine for the evils of certain of its adherents, is a variation of the old "ideology versus practitioner problem." This problem asks, can we blame an abstract ideology for the concrete evils of its individual practitioners? The question presupposes that the concrete evils in question were explicitly done in the name of the ideology in question, which I think Wolpe has reasonably established in this case. The thought experiment that I use to think about this problem is something I call "the parable of the stop sign."

Imagine a four-way intersection with a stop sign facing each incoming road. Visualize one of the stop signs in your mind. Now imagine that, instead of being red with the word “stop” on it, it is purple and has a big exclamation point, and that’s it. Obviously the sign-maker’s intent would be the same: cars should stop when they encounter the sign. A cursory inspection of the surroundings makes it clear that anything other than stopping could have bad results. But, it’s open to interpretation. Some people could interpret the purple to mean slowing down, not stopping. Some people could interpret the exclamation point to mean speeding up, not stopping. The goal of the sign is to modify our behavior a certain way, but its openness to interpretation prevents that from happening reliably.

It seems to me that the key factor in whether a belief system can be abused, can be put to uses its originators did not intend, is its openness to interpretation. Now, as any postmodern literature professor will tell you, everything is open to interpretation (although, unfortunately, that's really the only thing a postmodern literature professor can tell you). Be that as it may, I think it's possible that some belief systems are more open to interpretation than others.

The unfortunate thing about "openness to interpretation" is that it is, itself, open to interpretation. How does one define or quantify it? I propose a fairly unambiguous measurement: length. The longer a text, the greater its openness to interpretation. This proposal flows out of the following observation. Suppose that any two sentences are chosen at random out of a given text. Without even knowing what they are, we can say that there is a chance -- low, but nonzero -- that those sentences will contradict each other to some extent. As the number of statements in a document increases, the chance that it will evidence some degree of self-contradiction increases.

Of course there exist counterexamples on both sides. Haiku poems and Zen koans are extremely short, yet inspire a multitude of different interpretations. Russell's and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica is 460 pages long, yet is entirely internally consistent. But these documents are counterexamples precisely because they aren't representative samples of most writing. In their cases, self-contradiction was the authors' paramount concern; Principia's authors went to extraordinary lengths to avoid it, and the Eastern philosophers went to extraordinary lengths to embrace it (as part of their effort to, as Douglas Hofstadter puts it, "break the back of logic"). Most documents are somewhere in the middle. And it is in this vast middle that the correlation between length and likelihood of self-contradiction applies.

If we graph the correlation between (a) number of statements in a document and (b) the chances of that document contradicting itself, we'll find that it (like the brain size-to-cognitive power graph discussed in Part 5 above) follows an exponential curve. The tipping point of this curve represents the interpretability threshold: ideological documents that sit below it are like a normal stop sign, and those that sit above it are like the purple-exclamation-point stop sign.

The reason atheists are able to score easy debate points by pointing out the Crusades, the Inquisition, etc. is that the Abrahamic holy books are thousands of pages long, well above the interpretability threshold. Wolpe was able to score his equivalent debate points because the "holy book" of Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto, is 58 pages long -- much closer to, but still, apparently, above, the interpretability threshold.

The Rationalist Credo, by contrast, clocks in at one page -- well below the interpretability threshold. It is hard to envision a tyrant ruling his dictatorship with an iron fist in the name of the scientific method and the Golden Rule. (Indeed, for an example of a society governed by beliefs essentially identical to the Rationalist Credo, see Sweden.)

I have characteristically resorted to nerdy, quasi-mathematical arguments to refute Rabbi Wolpe's point, but there are several other angles from which to view these issues. The remainder of this section deals with them.

To explore the first of these alternative angles, I must first introduce the central reason why I harbor such antipathy for religion: it artificially and inappropriately conjoins two questions that are best considered independently. The first question is, "What is the nature of existence?" The second question is, "How should we act?" It is my conviction that the first question can be answered by science and science alone; answering that question is why science exists at all. As for the second question, I readily agree with critics of atheism that science has little to offer in grappling with it (although Sam Harris has intriguingly wondered if those magisteria are completely nonoverlapping). Religion conflates the two by answering the first -- "An omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent God created us and all that surrounds us" -- and then answers the second by continuing -- "and He has laid down the following rules, which we should all follow." Religious believers insist that morality flows from God primarily because that is how religion has structured its co-answers to these two otherwise unrelated questions.

I bring this up now to point out that, while the answer Communism provides to the first question is the same one that atheism does, its answer to the second question is a virtual mirror image of the content of Jesus Christ's ethical teachings. Jesus preached the ethical nobility of severing one's emotional ties to worldly goods, exhorting the haves to give everything they own to the have-nots. What is Communism if not the translation of Christ's message into the secular language of post-Adam Smith economics? Communism may not think Jesus was the son of God, but it certainly seems to think his answers to "How should we act?" were on the right track. At minimum, this is good evidence that one can reach moral conclusions through reasoning that makes no appeal to a higher power. Communism echoes Christ because he said it first, not because he was divine.

There is another angle from which to view this. Let us side with D'Souza and Wolpe that Stalin et al. inflicted their evil upon the world explicitly because of their atheism. Then suppose that, later in life, they had crises of conscience, saw the error of their ways, and accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. (We will pause to let Rabbi Wolpe descend from this train of thought, since he obviously does not share D'Souza's Roman Catholicism.) Wouldn't the massive burden of their sins be transferred, at that point, from their own shoulders to those of the Lord? Wouldn't all their transgressions be forgiven, washed away in the blood of Christ? Is that really the kind of moral dynamic that Christians willingly embrace? No harm no foul?

Yet another angle from which to view this: D'Souza says that orders of magnitude separate the death tolls of older religious episodes of mass murder versus modern atheistic ones. Subtracting motive from the equation, leaving only means, it's worth pointing out that man's technical capacity to inflict death is much greater in modernity than antiquity. Imagine how many more would have perished in the Spanish Inquisition, or for that matter the Crusades, if the Vatican had had gas chambers, tanks, rifles, machine guns, artillery, bombers, and so on at its disposal. Does anyone really doubt that popes Urban II or Innocent III would have nuked Mecca if they'd had the means?

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RtBotS, Part 6 of 9: Voices In Your Head Are Generally Less Reliable Than Voices Outside Your Head

2008-12-08T19:05:00.000-08:00

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(8) The last section dealt with point (5a) in the Rationalist Credo; I described it as "the most theologically radical notion of the whole Credo," but the majority of religious moderates don't have a particularly strong interest in theology (at least not in the context of American Christians). Of those Americans who attend weekly church services, only a small percentage have actually read their holy book of choice from cover to cover. In practical terms, this is the main job of clergy: to become "doctrinal lawyers" capable of filtering out the boring, irrelevant bits so the good stuff can be passed on to the flock.

Among the flock, the most radical notion of the Rationalist Credo is probably point (5b); not so much the scientific method itself, which is a tad too boring to generate much controversy, but the idea that the scientific method is the only reliable method for acquiring knowledge. As I said toward the end of (5), "I cannot irreproachably prove anyone wrong when they say that there are paths to knowledge other than the scientific method. I simply believe that there aren't."

Many people find this troubling, even offensive, because they interpret it as a denial of transcendent experience. I do not deny that people have transcendent experiences; I merely deny that those experiences are valid sources of information about the world. People can and do have experiences in which they are spontaneously filled with extraordinarily powerful feelings of joy, love, peace, connectedness, wonder, and the like. I don't think this is bad or wrong or incorrect or undesirable in any way. I think such experiences are wonderful when they occur and can give us new insights into who we are as individuals. Indeed, I have had such experiences myself. The only downside is that, when I was having them, I was clinically insane.

The stories of unbelievers coming to God through a religious experience are legion, but the ultimate consequence of my religious experience was to push me the other way. In early 2007 I was committed to a mental hospital and spent nine days there. The prior three months had seen a slow ascent of my psyche into clinical mania, during which my family and coworkers became increasingly concerned; and in the last week of 2006 the mania became "acute," meaning I had a full-on psychotic break from reality. During the acute phase, I was completely convinced (among other things) of the reality of God. I spontaneously renounced atheism and laughed at it for the same purely intuitive reasons that religious believers do -- how could such a sensorily rich and vibrantly beautiful world, seemingly alive in every respect, be anything other than God's creation?

It is mildly unpleasant for me to remember that time, primarily because, after I came back to reality, I heard stories of the bizarre and ridiculous (and occasionally harrowing) things I had said and done, and was acutely embarrassed. But if I make an effort to ignore those post-associations and instead summon to mind the experience itself, a very different picture emerges. Being acutely manic is a wonderful feeling. It brings a profound sense of brotherhood -- you love everyone you meet, and think that everyone you meet loves you. You feel as though you completely understand everything that you see and encounter. Most important of all, you lose the ability to think in the subjunctive; if you imagine something, you don't think of it as a projection of what could be. You think of it as a projection of what will be. Fantasy becomes prediction.

In (5) I mentioned that everyone thinks they're rational. I would even go so far as to say that, in fact, everyone is rational, at least in the sense that they act rationally based on what they believe to be true. The word "irrational" enters the discussion when there are disagreements about what is true. Having been insane, I'm convinced that insane people act just as rationally as sane people; the only reason their behavior is so bewildering and inscrutable is that it's impossible to know what they believe is true, since their beliefs are being continuously manipulated by spontaneous powerful feelings being tossed about by their own mental machinery.

I remember, during the height of my psychotic break, driving north on I-81, somewhere in Pennsylvania, and deciding that I didn't need my radar detector anymore, so I pulled it off its windshield-mounted suction cups and threw it out the window. The reason I decided I didn't need it was that I thought that I could see, with my eyes, the radar and laser pulses that the police might be using to gauge my speed. The reasoning was fine; the information being fed into the reasoning was the problem.

Can anyone prove to me that I was not witness to a bona fide miracle? Could anyone prove me wrong if I were to assert that the Holy Spirit had descended upon me and given me sight beyond sight at that moment? It felt utterly real to me; I was absolutely convinced of the reality of my radar-and-laser vision. If I had had a traveling partner with me in the truck, and found myself in a conversation with him about what was happening to me, I would have scoffed at his skepticism and written him off as someone whose sense of wonder, whose openness to nonscientific avenues of knowledge, was woefully blunted. I could have accused him, with utter conviction, of wilfully diminishing himself, closing himself off from what it means to be human.

I remember another incident during the psychotic break in which I was driving aimlessly through Nevada. That night I stayed in a cheap motel, but did not sleep at all. I worked on a screenplay. I wrote it out longhand on a legal pad. I wrote the whole thing in one sitting. (I ended up scrapping its characters and plot, but the ending was salvaged into another screenplay that I did ultimately finish, Zero State.) That night I felt gripped in an absolute white heat of creation. I felt not like the words were pouring out of me, but like they were being poured through me, like I had hooked up my brain and eyes and hands to some sort of linguistic fire hydrant whose source was far below any place I could probe or even imagine. It was exhilirating and unprecedented. It felt like a visitation from God.

Yet, looking back, I can see now that I was fucking nuts.

This explains why my "religious experience" drove me to atheism. It taught me that those sensations, intuitions, and transcendent experiences, while wonderful, are not reliable sources of information. The scientific method is epistemologically limited, but it is reliable. I would rather know what science lets me know and then admit ignorance of what remains than claim to know things that come only from inner, unreliable sources.

Even if there were an interventionist God – one capable of filling us with the Holy Spirit – He did not provide us with any reliable way to tell the difference between transcendent experience caused by divinity versus transcendent experience caused by insanity. I refuse to ever again run the risk of mistaking insanity for divinity, so, I must choose to distrust information that flows into my mind through transcendent channels. That leaves only the scientific method.

I think there is even a way to base this decision on purely moral grounds. Although I admit up front that it is a bit of a stretch, it nevertheless seems worth presenting.

Jonathan Haidt has done extensive research into the psychological underpinnings of human morality. His founding assumption is, forget about where morality "comes from" -- given that it exists, what does it look like? Does morality have a structure? He and his colleagues set about investigating that question by putting up a survey on the web, which so far 50,000 people from the majority of world's countries have taken. He presents these conclusions in an excellent TED lecture that I strongly urge you to watch.

His main conclusion is that there are five pillars of moral thinking, five considerations that can be taken into account in the determination of whether a given action is or is not moral:

(a) Harm/care. The idea that harming others is bad, and caring for others who need it is good.
(b) Justice/fairness. The idea that people should experience the consequences of their actions.
(c) Ingroup/loyalty. The idea that people should seek to act not just in their own interests but in the interests of the groups to which they belong.
(d) Authority/deference. The idea that people should respect authority, seek its counsel, and obey its pronouncements.
(e) Purity/sanctity. The idea that people can achieve virtue by tightly controlling what they do with (or put into) their bodies.

Haidt likens these five pillars to five channels in a stereo equalizer. An individual's moral sensibility is shaped by how loud or quiet each of those five channels is set. (Politically, he notes that while self-described conservatives rank all five channels in the middle, self-described liberals turn the first two channels all the way up, and the last three channels all the way down, which explains a lot about "the culture wars.")

For purposes of this discussion I want to focus on the fifth channel, purity/sanctity. Haidt notes that while the political right tends to express their valuation of this channel in the context of sex, the political left has a vocal minority that expresses their valuation of it in the context of food; this is why there are more vegan hippies than vegan hedge fund managers. The emphasis placed by Eastern religions on meditation is another manifestation of this; what could be purer than a mind emptied of thoughts and desires?

Making the decision to accept only information obtained through the scientific method could be viewed as an appeal to intellectual purity. It is the striving for virtue by tightly controlling what one puts into one's mind. It is the avoidance of potential psychological toxins and contaminants.

One last point remains to be made, and that is that the numinous and the intuitive can still play a role in the scientific world view. One of the steps of the scientific method is "construct a hypothesis to explain the observed phenomenon." Constructing a hypothesis is an activity that relies largely on gut feel. People are being amateur scientists when they begin sentences like "I think the reason McCain lost the election is..." or "It seems clear that the Phillies won this year's Series because...." Such statements draw on one's experience and intuition. Intuition is extraordinarily valuable in science. The only difference between the scientific use of intuition and the everyday use of intuition is that the scientific use prohibits the hypothesis from being openly advocated until after it has been subjected to testing in the real world. Science treats intuition as a raw material; the everyday treats it as a finished product.

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RtBotS, Part 5 of 9: Epissedemology

2008-12-08T18:54:00.000-08:00

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(7) Some religious believers accuse atheists of being not just interpersonally arrogant, but intellectually arrogant, and it's usually because of the very first point in the Rationalist Credo: the idea that everything can eventually be known and understood. At the end of the day, this is the most theologically radical notion of the whole Credo, which is why it appears first in the list. Religion not only takes it for granted that there are some truths that are forever beyond the grasp of man, it exalts it as an explicit doctrine. "The Lord works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform" is a baroquely constructed admission that humanity should, in principle, find ignorance satisfying.

The reason I gave (5a) first place in the Rationalist Credo is that it requires the nakedest of leaps of faith; the only way to arrive at a position about it is to appeal to one's own intuition and personality. The final sentence of the previous paragraph either leaves one filled with revulsion and distaste, or it doesn't molest one's mood at all. I personally find the idea abhorrent, but I must concede that there is some evidence for it, however uncompelling I may find it. The fact is that brains are like penises: size matters. A concept simple enough for an 8-year-old human to grasp could well be beyond the cognitive reach of a dog, or a bear, or a walrus, simply because an 8-year-old human has a bigger brain than those other mammals. Chimpanzees and dolphins are comparatively much closer to our level because the size difference between their brains and ours is smaller. So, presumably, an animal with a brain twice the size of ours could be vastly more sophisticated, and find it trivial to understand things that would forever remain as beyond us as calculus will forever remain beyond a platypus.

Having said that, I must point out that there is a significant difference between saying that there are things we'll never understand because we fail to cross a certain threshold in neocortex size versus saying that we'll never understand them because they are divine. The religious assertion that some things are eternally unknowable can be interpreted in one of two ways: it could simply be an allusion to the aforementioned cognitive limits imposed on us by our brain size, or it could be a claim that there are really two kinds of knowledge, divine and mundane. At the core of point (5a) is the assertion that there is only one kind of knowledge; knowledge is knowledge. On that basis, I reluctantly accept the possibility of the first interpretation, but flatly reject the second.

Allow me to make a technical detour to explain why I find the brain-size problem uncompelling evidence for a human cognitive barrier.

While it is true that cognitive capacity is proportional to brain size, that proportionality is exponential, not linear. Doubling brain size doesn't double cognitive capacity, it squares it, at minimum; we don't have a precise way to measure "cognitive capacity," so we can't work out what the exponent in that equation would actually be, but we know it would indeed be an exponent. (Think of the Richter scale: a 7.0 earthquake isn't twice as bad as a 6.0 earthquake, it's 10 times as bad. The decibel scale of auditory volume works the same way.) If you look at graphs of exponential curves, you'll find that they start out with a very gradual slope upward, and then hit a point of explosive growth; that "elbow" is the inflection point, or "tipping point" to put it in Malcolm Gladwellese.

The reason this matters is that, ultimately, one's position on whether there are things we can never understand depends on what we mean by "understanding." At root, understanding is synonymous with functional decomposition: we understand something when we know what components make up that thing, and how those components interrelate with each other (which usually involves enumerating the components of the components, and so on). The "and so on" is the hint to what is really going on here; it is code for recursion. Understanding relies on functional decomposition, and functional decomposition relies on recursion. One way to evaluate where brains sit on the exponential size/capacity curve -- whether they are on the low side or the high side of the tipping point -- is to see whether they are capable of recursion.

According to Steven Pinker, language is what you get when you harness ears and vocal cords and put them in the service of recursion. Language is the simplest possible form of behavior that can prove recursive cognition. The capacity to think recursively is at the heart of what he calls "the language instinct" -- recursion is the cognitive technology through which Noam Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device does its job, and converts pidgins into languages through the injection of recursive grammars.

There is lots of auditory communication in the animal world -- the barking of dogs, the eerie singing of whales, the clicking and squealing of dolphins, the chirping of birds -- but there is no evidence that any of it is structured according to a recursive grammar. That seems to be the province of humans alone.

This gives me hope in the face of the brain-size problem. We can't say for sure whether there is a human cognitive barrier, but we can say for sure that there is a universal cognitive barrier, i.e. the tipping point on the exponential size/capacity curve. Recursion is what a brain has to be capable of to pass through that barrier. Since language requires recursion, and since humans have language, our brains can support recursion, so we must be on the far side of that barrier already. The prospect of yet another barrier beyond that, one we have yet to encounter, is unlikely, since exponential curves have only one tipping point.

Since we're on the subject of science and human understanding, in the larger context of atheism, we might as well pay a brief visit to quantum theory, which is something that shows up often in YouTube debates between atheists and religious believers. Many famous scholars of quantum theory have gone on the record to lament how little they've learned about it. "Quantum mechanics is magic," said Daniel Greenberger. "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real," said Niels Bohr, who also said, "Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it." John Wheeler echoed this with, "If you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it." Richard Feynman -- one of the few physicists, along with Hawking and Einstein, to be not only universally respected but universally liked -- summed it up: "It is safe to say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

Some religious believers gleefully present these admissions of bewilderment as proof that there is indeed a human cognitive barrier, and that quantum theory rests on the far side of it. But this conclusion belies a corrupt understanding of what it means to understand. I fear now that I may have furthered that corruption with my recursion discussion above.

I stand by the idea that recursion is the universal cognitive barrier, but by using the universality of human language to prove that we're beyond it, I may have implied that this makes recursive thinking easy. Children are born wanting to learn languages and invent them when there aren't any nearby, but just because that application of recursion is subconscious and effortless doesn't mean that recursion can be subconsciously and effortlessly applied to other cognitive domains. Nothing proves that more than everybody's favorite subject, math.

We seem to be born with a "number instinct," too, but it is far less powerful than our language instinct. It allows us to conceive of the idea of "number" and to apply that concept to the problem of counting, but anything else, even basic arithmetic, has to be taught and practiced. This is far from subconscious and effortless; indeed, most people find it painful, humiliating even, especially when they get beyond arithmetic into algebra and calculus.

Mathematics is often poetically described as "the universal language," but if that's true, it's the only language in human history not to have a concept of time built into its structure. (Notice that even music, the other candidate for a universal language, has an innate dependence upon time built into its structure.) Mathematics does share with other human languages a reliance on symbols and recursion, but it differs from them in its timelessness. In language, useful statements are always narrative; they start at one point in time and end in another, and something happens in between. In mathematics, useful statements are equations, which don't start or end, but simply are. Mathematical statements have no relationship to time unless time is explicitly referenced as one of the variables. Linguistic statements are inextricably embedded in time, whether they explicitly reference it or not.

Fluent speakers of multiple languages occasionally run into trouble when they encounter a word in one tongue that has no direct equivalent in the other; they have to rely on some kind of "linguistic intuition" to convert the word into a roughly equivalent phrase in the other tongue. Douglas Hofstadter has written quite a bit about how thorny such problems of language translation can be, but they are merely potholes in the road compared to the difficulty of translating from mathematical statements into narrative statements or vice versa. Such a translation requires a "mathematical intuition" that can not only compensate for mismatches in vocabulary, but mismatches in structural assumptions. It's a cognitive problem that requires an effort just shy of, as the saying goes, "dancing about architecture."

But it turns out that, in the real world, math-to-language translation is much more useful than architecture-to-dancing translation, so there is an incentive to forge ahead and develop one's mathematical intuition. This is the rationale behind word problems (and also the reason why so many people hate them) -- you have to take a narrative representation of a problem, translate it into a mathematical representation, solve it, and translate it back. The point of word problems is not so much to get the right answers as to provide a workout for your mathematical intuition. This is also why so many math teachers suck; they get the math fine, but don't have a sufficiently well developed mathematical intuition to translate that understanding into a narrative form that their students can easily digest.

The relevance of all this to the mysteriousness of quantum theory is that, when Feynman said "nobody understands quantum mechanics," what he meant is, "there are many people who have a thorough mathematical understanding of quantum mechanics, but we have yet to find someone with a sufficiently well developed mathematical intuition to translate that understanding into a narrative form that others can easily digest." The ultimate goal of science is to make accurate predictions about real-world phenomena, and by that standard, physicists in fact have quite a formidable understanding of quantum theory. But the mathematical statements that express it are so strange that they defy translation into sensible narratives.

That's why I don't view the mysteriousness of quantum theory as proof, or even evidence, of a human cognitive barrier. There is a big difference between saying "we have yet to find someone with a sufficiently well developed mathematical intuition" and saying "we know in principle that there cannot be a sufficiently well developed mathematical intuition." Mathematical intuition is a skill, like playing a musical instrument or piloting an airplane. It can be improved through effort and dedication. To concede that there are things that cannot, in principle, be known or understood would eliminate our motivation to keep practicing.

Ultimately, it comes down to optimism versus pessimism. Only the pessimist claims there is no point in even trying. Only the pessimist would be satisfied with eternal unknowability.

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RtBotS, Part 4 of 9: A Spiritual Selsun Blue

2008-12-08T18:52:00.000-08:00

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(6) One of the benefits of the previous point is that it introduces the vocabulary needed to clearly express one of atheism's oft-forgotten selling points over religion. If atheism and religion are products available for sale in the marketplace of belief systems, and if faith is the currency human beings use to make purchases from this market, it's worth pointing out that the frequency of "buyer's remorse" is orders of magnitude lower for atheism than for religion. I draw this conclusion not from anecdotes, but from the fact that religion seems to have developed (to mix metaphors) an "immune system," one that atheism completely lacks.

There is an entire body of theological literature that has accrued over the centuries dedicated to the sanctification of the crisis of faith. Religious believers -- clergy and laity alike -- approach their religious superiors and say, "I've really been troubled lately. I feel like my faith is slipping away. I have to struggle to keep in touch with the Lord, and even then I feel so distant from Him." Only a belief system that has been down this road many, many times before would respond the way religion does: "That's wonderful. I know it's hard to believe, but this is actually proof that your faith is strong. You may feel like despairing now, but you will get through this dark time, and you will be renewed, your faith more robust than ever." According to religion, doubt in one's faith is like one's scalp tingling while using Selsun Blue: that means it's working!

(Interesting that the converse is never the subject of exhortation on the part of religious authorities. When was the last time you heard a rabbi or an imam or a priest or reverend delivering sermons castigating those whose faith is utter and complete, with all trace of doubt safely dispatched beyond the horizon? Where are the Baptist preachers warning their flock not to rest on their laurels with the complacency of certainty, to hurry up and start doubting, to plunge headfirst into that dark night of the soul, to embrace the benefits that such spiritual suffering brings?)

Contrast this with science. There are comparatively very few cases of a biologist approaching his physicist friend and saying, "Bob, I gotta tell you, lately, I've been wrestling with my belief in the scientific method. It just doesn't speak to me the way it used to. Sometimes I doubt it can live up to the promises it's made." Science has never needed to develop such a vast body of apologia, such an immune system, because it's never experienced such a widespread infection.

I readily concede that religions are not the only products in the marketplace of belief systems to have been "returned for a refund"; certainly there have been high-profile atheists who have converted to Christianity or other religions. But they are few and far between compared to the number of religious believers who experience buyer's remorse every day.

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RtBotS, Part 3 of 9: The Faithful Atheist and the Rationalist Credo

2008-12-08T18:43:00.000-08:00

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(5) There are four words that have become entangled in the battle between atheism and its religious competitors, invested with so much emotional energy by both sides that their original meanings are all but lost. They are rational, irrational, belief, and faith, and each side has claimed two: the atheists seem to think they own the exclusive rights to "rational" and "irrational," and the religious believers seem to feel similar exclusive entitlement to "belief" and "faith." This strikes me as profoundly wrong. Both sides of the debate have an equal right to all four words.

The most common complaint leveled against the Four Horsemen by religious believers is that they're arrogant and condescending. And indeed they are. They get up in front of audiences of religious believers and tell them, in essence, "We're atheists because we're rational; you're religious because you're irrational." Such a statement may adequately preach to the choir, but it's a monumentally shitty sales pitch. Everyone thinks they're rational; even schizophrenics consigned to live out their lives in mental hospitals feel rational. Given that, "irrational" is simply a dirty word, an insult that no one wants to hear, one that is guaranteed to kill off any courteous receptiveness the listener might otherwise have been willing to extend.

But there is an even deeper problem. Suppose that everyone's skin were much thicker, and being called irrational weren't automatically a turnoff. The atheist claim to complete and total rationality is simply false, for reasons into which I will soon delve.

"Faith," meanwhile, has been co-opted by religious believers to mean "belief in some type of God"; talk to them long enough and it will become clear which type of God they mean. "People of faith" has become synonymous with "religious believers," and both sides of the debate seem content with that usage. But, if they are honest, even atheists must confess to being people of faith. This is because the definition of faith hinges not upon what people believe, but upon their reasons for believing it.

It is evident that human beings -- whether you think they were created by God or shaped by evolution -- are born with a libido, a limitless wellspring of mental energy that is expended solely through sex. What people really find pleasurable about sex is not so much the onslaught of physical sensations as the psychological release afforded by that discharge of libidinal energy. (If you find that hard to swallow, consider the old saying "When sex is good, it's great, and even when it's bad, it's still pretty good"; or, in a more extreme manifestation, think of Joe Pantoliano's character from The Sopranos, who found sex fulfilling only if it involved his partner taking a cheese grater to his dick.)

It is my thesis that human beings are born with another limitless wellspring of mental energy, one that is expended solely through faith. This "spiritual libido" exists because the world is, and has always been, so complex, confusing, threatening, and inscrutable that human beings find it profoundly pleasurable to simply accept some notions just because they feel right. Despite the obvious benefits of acting rationally, ya gotta admit that it takes some work. It feels good to deliberately take a break from that work by accepting some things through intuition rather than evidence, through the heart rather than the mind. Just as sex is the act through which people derive the pleasure of discharging their sexual libido, so is taking something on faith the act through which people derive the pleasure of discharging their spiritual libido.

When Sam Harris writes a book with a title like The End of Faith I cringe, because he might as well have titled the book The End of Humanity. Right or wrong, the spiritual libido is an innate part of what it means to be human, and the Four Horsemen ignore that fact at their peril. To denigrate and marginalize faith is to denigrate and (more importantly, from a marketing standpoint) marginalize oneself.

This does not mean that all belief systems are on an equal footing; we still have a right to debate and discuss which vessels are more or less suited to receiving the faith that our spiritual libido drives us to pour out. It simply means that, in the marketplace of belief systems, faith is the currency with which we make our purchases.

I, an atheist, am just as much a "person of faith" as any pious Christian or Muslim or Jew you care to name. We all have a core set of beliefs that we are unwilling to doubt, reconsider, or abandon. Our decision to adopt our core set of beliefs was made with the heart and not the mind; was made through intuition and not reason; was made simply because it felt right on some numinous level, and not because it was shown to be right through evidence or argument. Indeed, none of us can provide an irreproachable proof of why our core set of beliefs is "right"/"true," or this debate would not rage in the first place.

The big thing that separates my faith from that of the Christian or Muslim or Jew is that the object of my faith -- the core set of beliefs I used my faith to purchase -- is very simple. The major religions of the world have core sets of beliefs that are so vast, complex, and intricate that they can be expressed only in thousand-page-long books like the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Book of Mormon, the Veda, and their ilk. My core set of beliefs takes up about three paragraphs; certainly no more than one typed single-spaced 8.5" x 11" page. (This compactness carries an important benefit that we'll revisit later.) That page bears the following five things:

(a) A statement that, in principle, human beings can eventually know and understand all things, even if they are not known or understood at present.
(b) A description of the scientific method.
(c) Occam's Razor.
(d) The Golden Rule.
(e) A statement that it is a greater evil to arrive at a sound conclusion through faulty reasoning than to arrive at a faulty conclusion through sound reasoning.

Since it doesn't have a name, let's christen this one-page document the Rationalist Credo. Note that atheism appears nowhere in it. My atheism is not a part of my belief system; it is a consequence of it. (This is a distinction that will play an important role in the discussion of Communism below.) My faith in the scientific method doesn't mean that I'll insist that I'm right and you're wrong about any particular aspect of the world; it means that what I will insist on is that there is a single correct way for us to find out about any particular aspect of the world. It is an object of faith precisely because I cannot irreproachably prove anyone wrong when they say that there are paths to knowledge other than the scientific method. I simply believe that there aren't. (This will be revisited in Part 6.)

This is why the Four Horsemen are not being honest when they claim to be completely rational. It is true that they are mostly rational -- but their decision to embrace rationality was made through irrational means. They aspire to rationality because doing so simply feels right to them. The atheist chooses to focus his doubt on everything he encounters, except his own decision to focus doubt on everything he encounters. His atheism is like a pearl; the milky white part, the part revered for its beauty, the part that makes up 99% of its bulk, is composed of rationality; but it would never have formed had it not been for the tiny, ugly grain of irrational faith at its core.

Compared to the alternatives currently being used to market atheism, I think this is a much better sales pitch. The main reason is that it depersonalizes the attack -- it acknowledges that we're all in the same boat, trying to figure out how best to spend our faith in the marketplace of belief systems, rather than trying to artificially divide humanity into "rationals" and "nonrationals." It shifts the emphasis to where it should be, i.e. the relative merits of the belief-products themselves. In religious terms, it allows us to love the sinner while hating the sin.

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RtBotS, Part 2 of 9: Atheist Soup Kitchens

2008-12-08T18:40:00.001-08:00

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(4) One of the things atheists like to say is "Imagine a world without religion." Their goal is to conjure images of a world in which the Twin Towers still stand, in which the Spanish Inquisition never occurred, in which the Crusades never occurred, in which World War II came and went without a Holocaust. To a religious moderate, though, an entirely different set of images gets conjured. The religious moderate thinks, "Last summer I sent my daughter on a mission trip to New York City where she spent a week working in a soup kitchen. Every year our church does a nonperishables drive to contribute to the local food bank. And the church is a major donor to that homeless shelter downtown. Why would I want all that to end?" The religious moderate is justifiably filled with revulsion at the thought of these good works vanishing.

Now, it's easy for an atheist to counter that by saying, "Yes, but in a world without religion, secular charities would fill the gap." But that kind of statement is arguably just as faith-based (i.e. speculative and unreliant on evidence) as the statements we routinely get worked up about religious believers making.

I'm an aspiring screenwriter, and one of the themes that comes up again and again in that industry -- from seminars, books, interviews with successful professionals -- is "show, don't tell." The way to create a convincing narrative is not merely to tell the viewer about the hero, but to actually show them something about him through his actions. When atheists claim that charitable good works don't have to be done in the name of God -- or indeed, more generally, that one can live a good and moral life without having to believe in God -- we're telling, not showing.

To start showing, we need to organize ourselves to do charitable good works. It is true that there are already many secular charities (Oxfam International, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, etc.), but there is a difference between doing good works in the name of nothing in particular versus doing good works in the name of atheism. There are already lots of atheist organizations, but they persist in thinking that merely telling the public about atheism will be good enough. They need to branch out and become the atheist Knights of Columbus, the atheist Shriners, the atheist Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.

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Revitalizing the Betamax of the Soul: Part 1 of 9

2008-12-08T18:32:00.000-08:00

I think of atheism as simply one product available for purchase in a vast marketplace of belief systems. Its competition is every religion in the world. Some of these religions are manufactured and marketed by formal organizations; for instance, Roman Catholicism is a product sold by the Vatican. There is also a cottage industry of smaller-scale belief systems, pushed by single entrepreneurs; these are called cults. And there are also many would-be consumers who simply use their own homemade belief systems. These are the people who hasten to point out their lack of affiliation with any organized religion, but still harbor a vague, nebulous, unspecific belief in some kind of creator or higher power.

The position that atheism occupies in this marketplace seems to me to be identical to the position occupied by the Betamax VCR in the late '70s home video market. The market was just beginning to take off and was projected to be huge, but the movie studios weren't willing to jump in until the VCR manufacturers agreed on a standard format. Sony backed Betamax, and JVC backed VHS. Independent observers generally agreed that Betamax was technically superior; yet, VHS emerged as the victorious standard.

The most prominent public advocates of atheism today -- Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, collectively known as "the Four Horsemen" (your view of them is evidenced by whether your tongue is planted in cheek when you utter the phrase) -- could be viewed, in purposes of the marketplace analogy, as the "vendor" pushing atheism. Yet they are making exactly the same mistake Sony did in pushing Betamax. At that time, Sony was a company run entirely by engineers, from the CEO down. Their view of how to dominate the market was to pour all their resources into engineering the best possible product, under the assumption that, in a rational marketplace, such a product would essentially market itself. The VHS guys weren't so charmingly naive. They knew the importance of marketing.

The Four Horsemen, by writing their books and publicly debating their more intellectual opponents, are not actually marketing atheism -- they're just continuing to improve the engineering of the product. While that is certainly necessary and valuable, it's not sufficient. Someone needs to take the lead on actually marketing it.

The rest of this essay attempts to explore the big marketing problems that atheism faces. Most, but not all, of these hurdles can be overcome; but until those that can be are, atheism will never attract a customer base rivaling those of the world's major religions.

(1) Let's start with the forever insurmountable: the irrefutability of death. While no one enjoys the prospect of death, many people are absolutely terrified of it. The single biggest selling point enjoyed by all of atheism's competitors is that they offer a solution to the problem of death. By claiming that death isn't really the end of existence, they ease their purchasers' fears and impart comfort and solace. There is simply no way that atheism can ever purport to solve that problem.

What's slightly less obvious than this is that people tend to fear their own death less than the death of their immediate loved ones. Every out-of-the-closet atheist knows that, of all the possible interactions they can have with religious believers, the most dreadful is to encounter a recently bereaved religious believer. "How dare you tell me there's no God? What right do you have to tell me that my son/daughter/husband/wife/brother/sister isn't with Him in heaven?" It's impossible to be perceived as a good salesman when forced to reply, "What right do you have to tell yourself that he/she is?"

(2) All of atheism's competitors with large market share have suffered martyrs, which helps legitimize them in the eyes of certain prospective buyers. In terms of surmountability, this falls somewhere between the irrefutability of death and most of the other hurdles described below. It's certainly possible for atheism to someday suffer martyrs, but I doubt it will ever be the consequence of a deliberate campaign mounted by atheists. We can't do anything here except wait and see.

(3) Targeting religious extremists and fundamentalists is an unhelpful distraction. They're great targets for the Four Horsemen, since (a) they're easy; even religious moderates think they're crazy, and (b) they're inexhaustible; you'll never convert them, thereby guaranteeing that debating them will provide decent job security. But more to the point, even if you could convert them, the net increase to atheism's customer base would still be dwarfed by the number of untapped moderates. The religious moderates are where atheists need to concentrate their efforts. If you're Apple, trying to market the iPhone, you don't waste your time trying to sell to the "landline fundamentalists" -- you target the folks who already own cellphones. It may be more fun to pick on the snake-handlers, but the real action is in trying to convince those people who pray over dinner every night, but would never consider driving their sick child past a hospital on the way to a faith healer.

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A Theological Argument In Favor of Gay Marriage

2008-12-08T10:43:00.001-08:00

So in the evangelical Christian worldview, there are no such thing as gay people: there are straight people who succumb to the temptation to engage in gay sex, and there are straight people who either are never tempted in such a way or (bear with me) those who are but managed to withstand it. Let's ignore the fact that this is obvious bullshit and accept it on its own terms, for sake of argument.

My understanding of evangelical theology is that we, the children of God, are put on this earth to live in mortal bodies. We will be subject to many temptations from many sources, but should strive to reject the wicked ways of the world in favor of the righteous ways of the Lord. We will be judged in the afterlife for how well we achieve this goal.

It's worth considering what perspective the Lord will do the judging from. Presumably the relevant metric will be the number of temptations we didn't successfully withstand. As in golf, the lower our score, the better. But there are two ways this number could be minimized:

(1) The number of temptations could be high, but the number of times one succumbed could be low (indicating strong performance in a challenging environment)

(2) The number of temptations could be low, and the number of times one succumbed could be only slightly lower (indicating weak performance in an unchallenging environment)

It would seem to me that (1) would be more impressive to the Celestial Magistrate than (2). The earthly equivalent of (2) are the kids who graduate high school at the third-grade reading level because their school system would rather keep them in their peer group than actually educate them. (1) seems like the kind of thing that would appeal to a real conservative.

Given this, wouldn't it be in the evangelicals' long-term spiritual best interest to ensure that the ways of the world remain wicked, so that their own spiritual mettle can be proven as in case (1)? By fighting against the homosexuals (and the pornographers, and the prostitutes, and the liberal Hollywood elites -- this line of reasoning works for a whole bunch of evangelical targets), aren't the evangelicals essentially childproofing the house of God, and removing all moral challenge? Doesn't this subvert God's very purpose in having put us here, to prove that we are worthy of being saved?

Open-Source Political Discourse

2008-11-06T13:27:00.000-08:00

Allow me to pour some political lemon juice on our current collective papercut of electoral anticlimax. That's right, after a three-week hiatus from blogging, during which time the most noteworthy presidential campaign in at least the last forty years came to a head, I want to talk about... Michael Moore?

Regardless of how you feel about his politics or his personality (I'm a lefty, but I find him annoying too), you must concede that he has done something very important in the history of popular political discourse. He has done something so obvious it's unthinkable. He has become the Radiohead of American politics:

He released a feature-length political documentary on the internet for free.

Slacker Uprising, as it's known, is something that I probably won't ever see, simply because, unlike Moore himself, I see little value in preaching to the choir. But by releasing it for free, he has completely eliminated the number-one reason that his ideological opponents would otherwise have used to avoid seeing it.

Think back to 2004:

You: Dude, have you seen "Fahrenheit 9/11" yet? It's awesome!
Joe the Plumber: That's the new Michael Moore movie, right?
You: Yeah, it's about how the Bush administration led us to war in Iraq on false pretenses, and --
Joe the Plumber: I hate Michael Moore.
You: I can definitely see why you'd say that -- he has an insufferable, whiny voice and kind of a nebbishy, loserish persona, like if Woody Allen and Roseanne Barr had a love child.
Joe the Plumber: Good one!
You: Thanks. But anyway, yeah, Moore made the film, but it's still really good. It has a lot of good information in it.
Joe the Plumber: Maybe so, but there's no way I'm going to help make that fat Commie fuck rich.

Now that Moore has taken personal enrichment out of the equation, Joe the Plumber will have to rack his walnut-sized brain for weeks to find a replacement excuse not to watch it.

Now, the market for political documentaries is pretty small, and the overall effect they have on people's political opinions is arguable. So even if this trend catches on in that market, it won't revolutionize the exchange of political ideas much. But I'm hoping that it could trickle into the world of book publishing.

Remember when Scott McClellan wrote What Happened, his tell-all book about the Bush White House? The Bush team made it sound like McClellan was writing the book simply to make a quick buck, and not to vindicate his own name in the eyes of the majority of Americans who realized that Bush is the world's only nuclear-armed special needs baby. And presumably a portion of the conservative electorate bought that argument. "He's just a liberal turncoat! I don't want my $30 going into his pocket!" And so they missed out on important information.

I keep using anti-conservative examples, but it cuts both ways. If Jim Inhofe, for instance, wrote a memoir, a certain sick fascination would make me want to read it, but I would balk at having to pay the man money to read the story of his evil, deranged life. I would play the liberal Joe the Plumber to his conservative Michael Moore.

Wouldn't it be great if America's political discourse simply stopped involving retail sales? If you publish the exact same manuscript as a PDF on your website, you could genuinely be viewed as making contributions to the marketplace of ideas, instead of just trying to make a buck. Your ideological opponents would have no reason other than closed-mindedness not to read you. Ideas would be exchanged more widely. And -- best of all -- it would drive the true profiteers out of business. Would Bill O'Reilly really write a sequel to Culture Warrior if there weren't any money in it?

So thank you, Michael Moore, for nudging us in the direction of open-source political discourse. Perhaps you should reward yourself by watching another funny yet insightful documentary, Morgan Spurlock's Super-Size Me.

Why We All -- Not Just ACORN -- Are Nuts

2008-10-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

I've been reading about ACORN and voter fraud. The right demonizes ACORN for tampering with voter registration records, while the left points out that such tampering matters only when real voters are being purged, not bogus voters being added. This is just one of several incidents (like the Ohio Supreme Court's ruling against the state Republican party last week) that are causing people on both sides to wonder if this year will be another Florida 2000.

What cracks me up about all this is that both sides of the debate accept as a given that we need to register voters in the first place.

I understand the need to regulate elections -- I agree there needs to be a list of eligible voters that the poll workers can authenticate human beings against. But it's 2008 -- why does that list have to be generated through a process as archaic and error-prone as a dedicated paper form?

Can't states just hook up to the IRS or Social Security master database and run a query that says "give me all the legal adults that reside in this state," bounce it off of VICAP or whatever other criminal database can be used to disqualify felons, and boom, done?

You would still need a registrar of voters, because someone would have to have legal responsibility for vetting the list to weed out people not eligible to vote. But that's a much simpler process when the raw list of all possible voters can be generated automatically.

We're obviously still growing into democracy, but "voter registration" as a distinct public-facing process is something we should have outgrown by now.

Why Atheism Will Never Be A Major Belief System

2008-10-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

I'm an atheist, and although I try to be restrained in my day-to-day personal interactions, I do dream of a world in which this belief system eventually dominates its competition. I'm not very hopeful, though. There is one threshold that any up-and-coming belief system must cross before it can hope to be embraced by a statistically significant percentage of the world's population, and atheism alone, not Islam or Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism (or even Enlightenment values or free-market capitalism or Communism or civil rights or gay rights), has yet to cross it. Atheism will never be a major belief system until it does.

(As an aside, a lot of notable atheists like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris would probably take issue with me calling atheism a belief system, probably because they're afraid that it will afford enemies the rhetorical trick of equating spiritual faith in God with intellectual faith in the power of science. I can appreciate that concern, but at bottom, their enemies are simply correct on that point. Epistemology has pretty much established that we can't know anything for certain -- the only thing we have to go on in shaping our behavior is our belief system. The fact that we believe in gravity for excellent reasons does not change the fact that we believe in it.)

Anyhoo, here's the critical threshold: No one has ever died for atheism.

People have died for no reason other than their belief in Christ. People have died for no reason other than their belief in homosexual equality. People have died for no reason other than their belief in Communism. But there has yet to be a case where even one person, never mind a large number of people, has been put to death for no reason other than their disbelief in God or any other supernatural creator.

Nothing impresses people more than ideological death. It gives other believers something concrete to rally around, to whip the base into action. It generates public sympathy for the believers (not so much in the case of deliberate martyrdom, but certainly in the case of hate crimes, which are nearly as good). In economic terms, it allows a belief system to accumulate emotional capital through public and private investment. Like it or not, it is a non-negotiable precondition for ideological maturity and large-scale market penetration.

This presents a problem, because atheism is the one belief system that explicitly discredits martyrdom as one of its tenets. Those who believe it are the least likely of all people to be enticed by rewards in the afterlife. ("72 copies of Religulous and The Selfish Gene await you in heaven!")

This puts me in an awkward position, because while I certainly hope no atheist ever dies solely because of his atheism, I also can't help but acknowledge how helpful such an occurrence would be to the movement as a whole.

On some level human beings recognize that if an idea is worth repressing, there must be something to it. Despite how some atheists may feel about prevailing social attitudes toward them (and there is a sizeable body of literature out there that can be reduced to "I'm an atheist, woe is me"), what we experience is merely mild distaste or faint bewilderment -- nothing that remotely approaches repression.

The closest thing to repression that atheists experience in this country is the realization that no honest one among them will ever win public office. Unfortunately, humanity doesn't measure repression in political opportunity cost -- we measure it in blood.

Healthcare and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

2008-10-11T13:37:00.000-07:00

I used to be in favor of universal healthcare. Now I'm for it in principle (i.e. I am in favor of making changes that would drastically expand the availability of healthcare), but against how most of its supporters propose going about it.

The solution requiring the least thought is to simply mandate that everyone have health insurance. But this presupposes that insurance is the best model for financing healthcare. It isn't. To see why it's not, look at car insurance.

Cars are similar to human bodies in several ways, yet the insurance industries that govern their care react to those shared characteristics very differently. Cars and human bodies both require maintenance for the duration of their operational lives. Cars and human bodies are both vulnerable to accidents and other infrequent, expensive, unforseen sources of damage.

Insurance is a mechanism for blunting the impact of infrequent, expensive, unforseen events. Maintenance is not infrequent, not unforseen, and usually not expensive (at least not in comparison to accidents). Insurance is not a sensible means to finance maintenance.

Car insurance has the correct relationship to automotive care, because it handles only the accidental half -- the infrequent, expensive, unforseen half. It leaves the maintenance half in the hands of the free market. (Imagine if it were otherwise: To get an oil change, you'd have to visit your Primary Care Mechanic, chosen from an insurance-approved directory of mechanics, and hand him your insurance card and a $15 copay. And your car insurance premiums would be at least three times what they are now.)

Insurance works by pooling risk. In order for it to work, the risk must be low enough that most members of the pool will not actually suffer the fruition of that risk. But the "risk" of maintenance is high -- it's guaranteed that every member will suffer from its fruition. Therefore pooling the maintenance risk doesn't help anyone except the insurance company; in theory, the premiums required to finance such pooling are guaranteed to at least equal, if not exceed, the cost that pool member would pay to obtain the same maintenance on the open market.

Here is where the analogy between cars and human bodies breaks down. If the maintenance of human bodies were handled by the free market in the same way as the maintenance of cars, the prices would be extraordinarily higher. This is the only reason the square peg of the insurance model has been pounded into the round hole of healthcare maintenance: the free-market costs of the maintenance are so high that, despite the theory, even exorbitant premiums still end up being cheaper. Releasing health care maintenance to the free market would essentially eliminate that market, as providers priced themselves beyond their prospective consumers' reach.

I believe the correct implementation of universal healthcare is not to expand the inefficient and ill-fitting pooling of "risk" (risk whose likelihood is much closer to 100% than to 0%) offered by insurance, but rather to lower cost to the point that healthcare maintenance can actually survive on the open market.

So, why is the maintenance cost for human bodies so much higher than for cars? Supply and demand. The supply of maintenance expertise is much more plentiful for cars than it is for human bodies. This is because there is no stratification of knowledge for medicine the way there is for car care. Certainly it requires highly paid, highly educated engineers to design cars, but you don't need one of them to rotate your tires or check an air filter. There exists an entire stratum of providers of medium-to-low automotive expertise that suffices for the vast majority of maintenance needs. In medicine, by contrast, even the lowliest neighborhood general practitioner has a college education that was at least as extensive and costly as the education received by the car-designing engineer. The costs of medical education are so high that they must necessarily (a) heighten the medical barrier-to-entry, constricting the flow of new doctors into the market, and (b) be passed on to the patients so the doctors who do make it into the market can hope to make a profit despite the vicious monkey of student loans perched menacingly and omnipresently on their backs.

Not only is medical expertise in shorter supply than automotive expertise, but it is also in higher demand. The owner of a car always has a choice before paying for maintenance. Frequently owners would rather let their car die and purchase another one than undertake some expensive maintenance operation. Such a choice rarely exists for the owners of human bodies. We each get only one body; the decision of whether to seek maintenance for it at all has already been made, in the affirmative, from the getgo. And no one can decide to eschew the whole owning-a-body nonsense by always riding a bike or taking the subway.

In order for healthcare to be made market-ready, steps must be taken to increase the supply of medical expertise and lower its demand.

Insurance companies must be given credit for recognizing the second half of that statement. Many insurance companies now operate incentive plans that attach financial reward (in the form of premium reductions or rebates) to habits that promote good health, like walking more, joining a gym, or quitting smoking. These are a good idea, but they don't go far enough. I believe that the Surgeon General, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Health, the American Medical Association, and the Center for Disease Control should collaborate to produce a measurable definition of what it means to be healthy, sufficiently rigorous and concise that it can be used as a legal standard. Anyone who wants to can submit to a test administered by their doctor that determines whether they meet this standard, and if they do, the doctor issues them a legal certificate that can be redeemed for a nontrivial income tax break.

Unfortunately, the insurance companies do not seem interested in tackling the other side of the problem, increasing the supply of medical expertise. This is because the insurance companies currently find themselves in a position analogous to the Department of Defense. Both use the legitimate importance of their missions to accumulate way more wealth than even those missions deserve, and inject that money into a tiny market of high-expertise vendors. Doctors and hospitals are the high-priced defense contractors of healthcare, and insurance companies are the bureaucratic, insular Pentagons that pay their exorbitant fees.

I believe the solution to increasing the supply of medical expertise is simple: someone should completely subsidize the cost of all medical education. Tuition, books, housing, everything. Anyone who wants to pursue an M.D. should be able to do so 100% free of charge.

I say "someone" not because I'm a whackjob liberal who likes it when mysterious fairies wave wands that magically take care of real-world concerns. I say it because it wouldn't necessarily have to be the government that does the subsidizing. Even large corporate employers are getting tired of the insurance model of healthcare finance. It might well prove cheaper for them in the long run to jettison their insurance fees in favor of voluntarily contributing to a private nonprofit consortium (that, for tax purposes, would count as a charitable donation) that subsidizes medical education without any government involvement.

It would be hard to maintain the current high price of healthcare if there were ten times as many doctors available as there are now, all equally as competent and qualified as the current population of doctors (and none with student loans). This proliferation of private medical practices would also force down the cost of niche pieces of high-tech medical equipment. MRI machines cost $2 million each not because they run on plutonium or need to withstand atmospheric reentry from space, but because their manufacturers know in advance that they'll have only 1,000 prospective buyers per year. If that market expanded to tens or even hundreds of thousands, manufacturers would gladly lower their prices to ensure dominance of the newly expanded market.

None of this is to say that the insurance model should be dismantled for healthcare "accidents" -- cancer, Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's disease, multiple sclerosis, etc. These are all infrequent, expensive, unforseen things that fit well with the pooling of risk. But if those were the only things covered by health insurance, premiums would necessarily go down.

Government intervention is bad for healthy markets, but the healthcare market is anything but healthy. The way to make it well again is by throwing more doctors -- not bureaucrats, either government or corporate -- at the problem.

The Defense of Traditional Marriage

2008-10-11T10:26:00.000-07:00

I live in Connecticut, which just became the third state in the Union to legalize gay marriage. Already the homophobes are mobilizing to amend the state constitution to ban such marriages, as they have already done in 27 other states.

The opponents of gay marriage don't like to be called homophobes. They insist they aren't, that theirs is a more nuanced position derived from their concerns that marriage, the fundamental building block of civilization, is being dismantled and marginalized.

I'm not an entirely unreasonable person. I too think it is cause for concern if a fundamental building block of civilization is dismantled and marginalized. So, let's take the "defense of traditional marriage" crowd at face value for a moment.

Here's a quote from an article about Traditional Marriage Defense (TMD) on the website of James Dobson's Focus on the Family:

Family is the fundamental building block of all human civilizations, and marriage is the foundation of the family. The institution of marriage is unquestionably good for individuals and society, and the health of our culture is intimately linked to the health and well-being of marriage. Unfortunately, the standard of lifelong, traditional marriage as the foundation of family life in our nation is under attack.

Battered by high rates of divorce and cohabitation, unwed child-bearing and the push for so-called same-sex "marriage" and civil unions, marriage is in a state of crisis. Recent cultural changes without historical precedent have influenced an increasing number of Americans to view this fundamental institution as optional, disposable and open to redefinition. In this context of marital decline, political and ideological battles rage between those who view marriage as a transient human invention –- ready for updating and revision -– and those who regard marriage as natural and fundamental to humanity – essential to a flourishing civilization. [emphasis mine]

This doesn't seem so unreasonable to me. At least it acknowledges that there are other threats to traditional marriage besides just gay marriage. However, this quote came from the "Overview" section of the article. Check out this line from the "Talking Points" section of the same article:

Only a federal amendment to the U.S. Constitution can fully defend the institution of marriage: protecting states from having same-sex marriage imposed upon them by the federal judiciary. [emphasis mine]

Purely from a Constitutional perspective, this violates one of the ostensible precepts of conservatism, i.e. sovereignty of the states. They claim the threat comes from "the federal judiciary," yet all three of the states that have allowed gay marriage have done so by exercising their own sovereign right to govern themselves, which is exactly what a careless reading of the above sentence will lead one to believe they are arguing for. It was Connecticut's own Supreme Court, not the federal Supreme Court, that rendered this ruling.

But putting that aside for a moment, the more revealing lapse of logic is in the bolded portion: marriage will be fully defended by banning gay marriage. What about the more even-handed list of threats outlined in the overview?

The funny thing is that if you were to produce a ranked list of legitimate threats to the sanctity of traditional marriage, the #1 entry would be something that receives no mention in the entirety of Focus on the Family's whitepaper: marital infidelity. I can see how some could interpret, say, premarital cohabitation as an affront to the tradition of marriage, but even the most ardent anti-gay-marriage activist would have to concede that marital infidelity is a far more serious impugning of that institution's sanctity. Also, it's ubiquitous: for every gay couple that wants to marry, there are dozens of straight husbands and wives who are already busy cheating on their spouses.

So to me, this is proof that despite their claims of noble intentions, despite their professed concern for the perpetuation of civilization as we know it, the TMD crowd really are just a bunch of homophobes. If they were legitimately concerned with TMD, they would be pushing for a federal constitutional amendment to outlaw infidelity within existing marriages, since that is demonstrably the largest threat to the sanctity of traditional marriage. But instead they just keep up their incoherent yodeling about Adam and Steve.

P.S. Bonus Trivia Question: I wonder how many straight married people who are against gay marriage are also involved in an extramarital affair?

Do We Really Need Balance?

2008-10-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

So first there was my favorite Jonathan Haidt video, which argued that liberals and conservatives are equally necessary for the perpetuation of civilization. Then there's an L. A. Times article that says political attitudes are largely determined through genetics, and that "for the species to survive, you need both" liberals and conservatives.

The research seems to point in the direction of balance -- you need to balance risk-taking and new ideas against caution and a desire for order and stability. As long as the two stay in balance, civilization flourishes.

At first this sounded great. But then it occurred to me: what exactly are the consequences of this balance disappearing? I can think of several civilizations that descended into ruin when the balance tipped too far in favor of conservatism, but I can't think of any that have done so when the balance tipped too far in favor of liberalism. (And before you start mentioning failed communist states, remember, we're talking about social issues here, not economic -- the USSR may have been communist, but they were just as repressive on social issues as our own Sarah Palin.)

I don't doubt the research that is leading scientists to reach these conclusions, but I do wonder about the conclusions themselves. They seem to invest almost too much wisdom into natural selection; "this balance exists because it confers an evolutionary benefit to the species as a whole." Perhaps.

But what if the original natural state of humanity was conservatism, and liberalism was a mutation that has taken a comparatively long time to reach its current level of penetration into the species? Another recent scientific study has shown that conservatives reproduce at much higher rates, on average, than do liberals. Since the research seems to demonstrate that the very concepts of liberalism and conservatism have been baked into our innate makeup for nearly as long as we've been on the planet, it is not unreasonable to extrapolate that disparity in breeding rates back to near the beginning of our species' history. If that's the case, it would explain why reaching a global mindshare roughly equal to that of conservatism has taken an amount of time so utterly disproportionate to the benefit and utility that liberalism conveys to the civilizations it inhabits.

I realize I just lost all (two) of my conservative readers with that conjecture, but remember, it's only conjecture; I'm not sure I believe it either. I'm just trying to do good science and propose an alternate hypothesis that explains the observed results. But why am I defending myself to you? You conservatives now have a homework assignment: produce a single nation, tribe, culture, empire, or other unit of civilization that descended into ruin because its pendulum of social attitude swung too far to the left. If I pass out holding my breath, someone please call an ambulance.

Whither PMI?

2008-10-10T08:39:00.000-07:00

The favorite talking point on right-wing radio has been that this whole financial mess is the fault of Democrats. It is true that Democrats have been staunch defenders of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae compared to Republicans. It is also true that the Clinton Administration's passage of the Community Reinvestment Act in 1992 forced mortgage lenders to issue loans to higher-risk, lower-income borrowers than they would otherwise prefer. Both of these set the economy up for a run of defaulted loans.

If this were the only side of the story worth telling, then the current crisis would have manifested solely as an insurance collapse, not an investment banking collapse. The other side of the story worth telling is how this event disrupted the investment banking market so quickly and effectively.

(There may still be an insurance collapse, but it will take longer to become visible than the investment banking collapse, because of the reinsurance shell game -- insurance companies taking out policies from other insurance companies to cover their losses in the event that some external circumstance forces them to pay out more claims against their own policies than their actuaries predicted would occur. AIG was the first domino to fall, but I'm sure its shockwaves are invisibly propagating through the reinsurance community as we speak.)

Why all this focus on insurance? Because I have yet to hear a single pundit, politician, or self-proclaimed economic expert mention PMI. It is standard banking practice to attach mortgage insurance to any loan for which the borrower hasn't put down 20% or more of the purchase price. The borrower pays the premium (factored into his amortized payment schedule) for a policy that indemnifies the lender in the event that the borrower defaults on the loan. The Community Reinvestment Act may have artificially expanded the mortgage lending market into brackets of lower income and higher risk, but it did not preclude those lenders from continuing their established practice of insuring those risky loans with PMI.

A spike in loan defaults from low-income, high-risk borrowers shouldn't hurt the lenders -- because by definition, those are the loans for which they would have required PMI from the getgo. It would just translate into a spike in mortgage insurance claims. But barely anybody is talking about insurance in this mess; it's all about the investment banks.

I view this as proof that CDOs really are the problem. If a CDO is based on 10 underlying mortgages, all of which go bad, but all of which are covered with PMI, then the underlying lenders will recoup their loss, but none of that insurance payout will go to the holders of the CDO. Banks are failing not because their mortgages went bad, but because they invested en masse in CDOs that were not entitled to the PMI payouts of those bad mortgages.

The legislation that allowed CDOs to be created was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a Republican-championed bill that was passed seven years after Clinton's Community Reinvestment Act. (For those irrational Clinton-haters among you, yes, Clinton did sign both bills -- ironically, a decision he continues to defend even in light of the subprime mess.)

So here's what I want to know. I want some statistics:

(a) percentage of defaulted loans that would not have been made had the Community Reinvestment Act never been passed
(b) percentage of defaulted loans that had PMI
(c) percentage of defaulted loans that had been repackaged into CDOs
(d) percentage of overlap between groups (a), (b), and (c)

If it turns out that the overlap between (b) and (c) is low, that would disprove my conjecture, as would (c) being any lower than 90%. If (b) is anything less than 90%, then the banks have fucked up on an even more fundamental level than we've been led to believe up to this point.

Everybody has been making the general prediction that the economy is going to continue getting worse over the next year or two. I'm going to make a specific sub-prediction: that, just when it seems like the investment banks are finally getting their shit together, we'll see the same thing happen with the insurance business. The reinsurance market is the other shell game that will prove unsustainable under these conditions.

The NRA... Remember Them?

2008-10-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite issues that has fallen very far out of favor from the public discourse is gun control. I was a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association for a year, although it was more a statement of principle than a sign of a fervent love for firearms, which I've used several times before, but never actually owned. I support the Second Amendment and think it's just as important (although not more important) as the First Amendment, but I'm much more reliant on the protections of the First in my day-to-day life.

In this election, if people were to make a ranked list of the issues that matter most to them, gun control would be at, or very near, the bottom of the list. (Think about it: people talk about affirmative action and the privatization of Social Security more than gun control these days.)

A lone voice in the wilderness, Richard Feldman has published a piece about the NRA and Obama.

If I Ran the Debates...

2008-09-30T17:43:00.000-07:00

...Alongside Jim Lehrer would be a small panel of folks sitting in front of computers with connections to LexisNexis, the Congressional Quarterly, and Google.

Whenever one candidate says something like "My opponent said X," or "My opponent voted against Y," or whatever, and then his opponent objects that this is not true, Lehrer would cut both their mikes and hand it over to the panel. They would look up the relevant records and find out who is right.

Whichever candidate turns out to be lying would be instructed that, if he repeats or references that lie again, he forfeits the remainder of his time to answer questions.

I also think they should be strapped to polygraphs.

In Defense of Big Government

2008-09-27T15:23:00.000-07:00

Most of the conservative discourse in which anti-government sentiment arises is economic, not social. The government is despised by conservatives mainly when it is placed in opposition to the free market.

There are several perspectives from which to critique the free market, and they've been explored far more ably by others. There is just one point that I'd like to make about it.

An article of faith among the free-marketeers is that the public sector is always inefficient, slow, incompetent, corrupt, and wasteful when compared to the private sector. I firmly believe that was true when Adam Smith first wrote about the invisible hand, but at this stage of capitalism's development, I don't think it is true any longer.

The notion of government bloat and waste versus private industriousness and efficiency was conceived centuries ago, when it used to be the case. It was the case then because it was when the private sector used to be made up of nothing but family businesses and local merchants -– what we now call “small business.” The advent of the multinational corporation has not just changed that, it has left it behind.

Billion-dollar multinational corporations didn't exist when The Wealth of Nations was written (except maybe the Vatican -- anyone dare to hold them up as a nimble, efficient, transparent organization?). Adam Smith could never have imagined that a single business, a single merchant, a single vendor could grow to the size that modern technology has allowed.

The only way to organize a human enterprise above a certain size is to make it a bureaucracy. Three or four generations ago the government was the only easily visible domain of bureaucracy. Now the corporate bureaucracy is at least as substantial.

It is bureaucracy that is the source of inefficiency and waste. It is bureaucracy that rewards incompetence and fosters corruption. These are innate characteristics of bureaucracy, regardless of which sector it occupies. To ascribe these characteristics to public bureaucracies, but exempt from them private bureaucracies, is a logical leap not supported by the facts. Doing so is the result of an attempt to apply notions of capitalism to a market that only passingly resembles the markets that existed when those notions were conceived.

If both private and public sector are just a pair of distinct arenas within which the Nerf-and-PVC gladiators of bureaucracy battle for surrogate glory, then what makes one innately better than the other? They are both structured identically, so why would one be orders of magnitude more or less lean or nimble? It’s like watching two champion sumo wrestlers running the hundred-yard dash with the expectation that whichever one wins will do so by a wide margin.

I would argue that if our lives must be shaped by enormous, bureaucratic concentrations of wealth and power, it is better for those concentrations to be democratically accountable to us. Corporate boardrooms make just as many decisions that affect our lives as do the White House and the halls of Congress, but none of those corporate bureaucrats can ever be voted out of power when they fuck things up. At least the government bureaucrats can.

It's time for conservatives to stop basing their economic judgments solely on a Scottish polemic written in 1776. Times have changed. No one doubts the invisible hand still exists, but with the advent of the multinational corporation, it spends more time than ever clenched into a bludgeoning fist.

Conservatives and Government

2008-09-27T15:20:00.000-07:00

I was watching this talk again (if you haven't watched it yet, please, please do), and noticed that Haidt says something about conservatism that seems at odds with my understanding of it.
He says "Liberals speak for the weak and oppressed; they want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. Conservatives speak for institutions and traditions; they want order even at some cost to those on the bottom."

At first blush, this makes sense. But it highlights a contradiction: if conservatives honor institutions that promote order, then why is there such widespread loathing and disdain for government in conservative circles? Why aren't conservatives staunch defenders of government, given that it is the ultimate order-promoting institution we have?

Haidt seems to be saying that, at root, the distinction between liberals and conservatives isn't so much that they have different morals per se; it's that they have opposite polarities with respect to order and chaos. So how come it's the pro-chaos group that respects government, and the pro-order group that wishes it would just go away?

The word "institution" has multiple meanings:

2a: a signficant practice, relationship, or organization in a society or culture
2b: an established organization or corporation (as a bank or university) especially of a public character

So there is a more concrete, organizational interpretation, and a more abstract, behavioral interpretation. People who speak of marriage, for instance, as an institution, are relying on the abstract interpretation.

Perhaps conservatives do honor and respect the idea of government, as an institution in the abstract, but dislike the concrete organization that currently fills that role?

That's possible, but it's a perspective not unique to conservatives. There are plenty of liberals who also honor government in the abstract, but dislike, say, the Bush administration, or whatever other concrete incarnation of that abstraction currently exists.

The conservative attitude seems to go deeper. They don't seem to honor or respect even the idea of government. "That government is best which governs least" doesn't discriminate -- it's a statement of principle that applies equally well to representative democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorship, whatever.

So we're back where we started: government is vital to stability and order, yet it's also the favorite whipping boy of those whose morality is wired to value order and stability over fairness. How can this be?

Check the Comments!

2008-09-27T10:50:00.001-07:00

Although I haven't put up any new posts since Friday the 19th, the last week has seen a flurry of activity in the comments section. Check out "The Masculinity of Taxes" and "McCain" for some interesting back-and-forth in the comments.

P.S. Another actual post is on the way.

The Masculinity of Taxes

2008-09-19T13:22:00.003-07:00

Although it is only seldom explicitly mentioned by conservatives, it does seem to be a pretty well-established theme on the right -- call it a broad-based subconscious belief -- that liberals are effeminate and weak. From Schwarzenegger's "girlie-men" quip to the neocons' relentless warrior-worship, the unstated message of the right's rhetoric seems to be: real men are conservatives, and liberals are a bunch of pussies.

At the same time, by far the most popular plank of the Republican party is a call for minimal taxation. Liberals often get so caught up in the debate over social issues that they forget that 50% of Republicans have no particular ideology or belief system at all, other than "I don't like taxes."

Granted, taxes are a pain. In the financial world, taxes are pain. In terms of this metaphor, 50% of Republicans have dedicated their lives to the avoidance of pain.

Imagine a person whose only concern in life was the avoidance of physical pain. At best, this would create a very stressful, brittle way of living; at worst, it would be a form of retardation. Such fear of the inevitable, such a desperate unwillingness to reconcile oneself with the existence of a such a simple, albeit admittedly unpleasant, fact of life, is the ultimate in abject weakness.

Pain can be good. It plays a vital role in maintaining our health. You can feel pain even when doing things that are good for you, like growing or exercising. Pain is a reliable indicator that something noteworthy is happening.

If such paralyzing fear of the slightest pain weren't a pathological condition, a form of OCD, then I would be uncharitable enough to say: those people are the ones who really sound like a bunch of pussies to me.

So, die-hard fiscal conservatives, it's time to man up. We obviously can't leave control of the markets to a bunch of girlie-men like you.

Psychology of Conservative-Liberal Continuum

2008-09-19T13:22:00.002-07:00

Norbert Ohlenbusch alerted me to the existence of an extraordinary talk by psychologist Jonathan Haidt. It's less than 20 minutes long; I highly recommend it. It provides a very useful vocabulary that both ends of the political spectrum can use to understand why people can hold positions other than theirs and still claim the moral high ground.

The first few minutes can be rough going if you're a conservative; the live audience is mostly liberal, and so Haidt caters to that with a few cheap shots. But once he gets going, the substance of the talk is extremely valuable to thinkers on both sides.

The fact that people are doing research on this sort of thing gives me hope that we might someday be able to push the competitive mindset out of politics and replace it with something better.

Muslim In Moderation

2008-09-19T13:22:00.001-07:00

One of Charles Johnson's repeated talking points goes something like this:

We keep hearing that not all Muslims are terrorists, that there are many more moderate Muslims than radicals, that we shouldn't judge the moderates on the basis of the radicals. That's fine in theory, but how come we never hear anything from the moderates? Where are the news conferences and opinion polls and press releases from Muslim moderate organizations condemning the acts of the radicals?

I've always thought it was a valid point; I've been on the lookout for such dissension in the Muslim ranks as well. And it looks like we finally got some.

Charles Johnson will probably think this is too little, too late, but there is one aspect of it that greatly reassures me that we have a lot more in common with Arab Muslims than we might think: the one issue that roused them from their slumber and sparked genuine outrage was an authority figure trying to interfere with their ability to watch TV.

Take away rights and freedoms, we won't blink. But fuck with our TV, and we'll take to the streets.

Don't Just Regulate -- Reward Self-Regulation

2008-09-19T13:22:00.000-07:00

Few things flood the streets of American punditry with disclaimers like a good financial crisis. The economy is just so technical and esoteric that nobody gets it all. Of course, that doesn't stop the pundits from rendering opinions. I heard an interesting combination of exaggerated disclaimer followed by ridiculous claim on Jay Severin's WTKK talk show the other day.

(Aside: Why do I keep listening to Severin? Every once in a while, he makes a good point, but more importantly, he knows how to enunciate. Is there an unwritten rule that 90% of the broadcasting industry has to have some sort of speech impediment?)

He said that the overall financial crisis is rooted in the collapsing mortgage market. So far, so good. Then he says that the bad mortgages were allowed because of changes in lending policy introduced by Democrats years ago. This doesn't sound right to me.

My understanding was that a spike in loan defaults wasn't itself anything out of the ordinary -- it was the fact that Wall Street had figured out a way to repackage mortgages as a new type of investment vehicle, the CDO or collateralized debt obligation, that created the ripple effect. That repackaging technique flooded the market with CDOs which were then snapped up by all kinds of banks and other financial services firms.

Without CDOs, I'm sure the housing collapse would still have had serious repercussions, but I'm guessing they would have been confined strictly to banks, not investment houses and other financial institutions.

(Another Severin point: government bailouts are bad because they'll force us to either raise taxes or engage in further deficit spending. "$85 billion to bail out AIG!" Well guess what, Jay: $85 billion is the price tag of only 34 weeks in Iraq. At this point in the war's progress, we've bailed out AIG 7.6 times already. In this way, I feel fiscal conservatives' pain: they don't get to bang their usual drums, because the single most fiscally irresponsible thing we've done in
the last decade was on their own party's watch. If fiscal conservatives vote their conscience this year, Bob Barr will get at least as many votes as Ross Perot did.)

Back to CDOs. Reading Wikipedia's article about them, I learned they are a type of synthetic
security: "Any combination of financial instruments producing a market instrument with different characteristics than could otherwise be achieved, for example, higher yield, better liquidity, or interest rate protection."

A "natural security" would be a stock or a bond -- investment vehicles that have been around for centuries and are understood well. A synthetic security is made up -- an artificial construct that had to be designed by some financial genius, composed of more basic parts.

This strikes me as being very similar to computer programming. In programming, you're given a few basic operations, and expected to put them together in ingenious ways to create software whose overall behavior exhibits the desired characteristics. A synthetic security is to the rules of finance what a software program is to the rules of computer science.

Now, as we've learned through years of painful experience, software can be good or bad. It can be reliable or buggy. It can be deliberately installed or contracted like a virus. It can follow the paths of least resistance in networks to propagate itself throughout an entire system.

The computer security guru Bruce Schneier has described in several of his essays an "arms race" between the "black-hats" who write malicious software and the "white-hats" who write software that defends against it. The black-hats are constantly inspecting and examining the technology landscape, looking for loopholes and vulnerabilities that they can exploit. Once they develop and popularize an exploit, the white-hats figure out how to detect it, motivating the black-hats to just look elsewhere for new holes.

Or as Schneier puts it: "improvements in detection technologies lead to improvements in...detection evasion, which in turn spur the development of better detection capabilities." And so on.

The advent of synthetic securities has brought that arms race to the financial world. People can argue about whether increased government regulation is (part of) the answer to our current problems, but one thing that everyone has to agree on is that the capabilities of regulation -- any amount of regulation -- are constrained by the knowledge of the regulators. You can't regulate what isn't yet known to be a threat.

S&Ls, junk bonds, CDOs -- these are all exploits that were developed by financial black-hats who spent years scrutinizing the workings of financial markets looking for loopholes and vulnerabilities. Those black-hats were strongly motivated, because if they could find just one working exploit, they could make themselves mega-rich. So what if it had disastrous downstream consequences for everyone else?

After each of those exploits became popular and caused a problem, regulations were changed to prevent them from working. In other words, the vulnerabilities that enabled the exploit were patched. But this patching is simply another change to the system -- and every change has the potential to introduce a new vulnerability. Fix one bug, introduce another. The black-hats will never stop looking for them, and never stop coming up with new exploits.

David Brooks recognized this and declared: "We’re going to need regulators who can anticipate what the next Wall Street business model is going to look like, and how the next crisis will be different than the current one."

That might work. But it's just a continuation of the arms race. There is one technique, one dynamic, that could be borrowed from the computer security world and implemented in the financial world, that could potentially bring the arms race under control.

Instead of having "squads of low-paid regulators who can stay ahead of the highly paid bankers, auditors and analysts who pace this industry," why not grant one-time amnesty to whichever black-hat notifies the regulators of a new exploit?

Think about CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University. CERT is a neutral clearinghouse for computer security information. Software makers who find security vulnerabilities in their own products can notify CERT so that its users can protect themselves. But the majority of information that flows into CERT comes from black-hats
who have actually developed an exploit for whatever vulnerability they've found.

Imagine this dynamic in finance. A black-hat financial genius scrutinizes the market and discovers some vulnerability. He cooks up a synthetic security that exploits that vulnerability. The exploit makes him shitloads of money. But instead of allowing other financial folks to notice this and quietly pile on, creating a new bubble based on that synthetic security, the black-hat notifies the regulators. The regulators immediately outlaw or otherwise restrict the new synthetic security -- and as a thank-you to the black-hat for doing the responsible thing, he's allowed to keep all the money it earned him.

This harnesses the behavior of the blackhats and allows them to satisfy their primary goal -- to get wildly rich through insidiously clever means -- while shielding the overall market from the unintended consequences of their cleverness. It's introducing a new set of incentives that motivates the market to police itself.

We still need traditional regulation to take care of the practices that are known to be disruptive. But until we introduce a channel through which regulators can be alerted to new, unknown practices, those regulators will remain blind to them until they explode in another crisis like the one we're dealing with now.

Terminological Inconsistency

2008-09-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

If born-again Christians believe that life begins at conception, why don't they refer to themselves as "conceived-again" Christians?

Sweeney Responds

2008-09-17T15:40:00.000-07:00

After I wrote the last post, I included it in a comment I left on Dan Sweeney's post at The Huffington Post, primarily as a shameless grab for more readers. It ended up sparking a rebuttal from Sweeney. It's interesting that the shape of discussion arising from the article so closely mirrors the article's actual content.

Sweeney said:

I'm afraid you've misread the article. The WaPo article states that there is some tendency in liberals to get their backs up in the face of refutation, but that the percentage still falls. For example, this paragraph:

"Bullock then showed volunteers a refutation of the ad by abortion-rights supporters. He also told the volunteers that the advocacy group had withdrawn the ad. Although 56 percent of Democrats had originally disapproved of Roberts before hearing the misinformation, 80 percent of Democrats disapproved of the Supreme Court nominee afterward. Upon hearing the refutation, Democratic disapproval of Roberts dropped only to 72 percent."

So, there is a drop in the percentage of Democratic disapproval after hearing the refutation. But with conservatives, there is actually an increase in the percentage of people buying into lies after they hear the refutation -- indeed the percentages almost doubled. It is not the same thing.

anyway, thanks for the feedback, and I hope that clears things up.

And I replied:

Well, it certainly would be the ultimate irony for me, a liberal, NOT to recant my outrage after being presented with a rebuttal on THIS, of all issues!

I do stand by my assertion that your post was somewhat biased, although not as badly as I originally thought. The way I read the article, there are really TWO unfortunate phenomena being observed: (1) being presented with a rebuttal does not completely erase the damage done by the misinformation, and (2) being presented with a rebuttal enhances the damage done by the misinformation. To focus on (2) regarding conservatives, without mentioning (1) regarding liberals, makes conservatives seem even weaker-minded than the facts would seem to support.

In general, I try to be about fairness first, political points second, so you can see why my original misreading so aroused my ire.

Having waxed philosophic about fairness, I will say that I'm the first to believe that there are psychological differences between the most common breeds of liberal and conservative. Given that neither side seems to fully respect rebuttals, why does one seem to treat them like further evidence of the rebutted proposition?

I think it comes down to a person's comfort level with self-doubt. For instance, someone with complete intolerance for self-doubt would undoubtedly have rephrased the previous sentence as "I think it comes down to whether a person is strong or weak." When people challenge our positions, it causes doubt, instinctively -- our brains can't help that they're wired that way. Our response to that doubt is programmable, though. People who can overcome their fear of doubt and face its unpleasantness head-on will seek to end it through further research and reflection.

People who can't overcome that fear get angry at whatever caused the doubt.
The first kind of person, when presented with convincing evidence that they are wrong about something, will say "Thank you." The second kind of person will say "Fuck you."

The statistics in the original Washington Post article seem to support this. Obviously the fearful people exist on both sides (indeed, they are the reason we speak in terms of "sides"), but the numbers do indicate a greater proportion of them on the conservative side. I suppose this makes sense -- "conservative" is supposed to mean "cautious," and caution is a practice best informed by fear.

This is an interesting twist on the liberal mantra that the Republican Party is "the party of fear." Usually this is meant to imply that the Republican Party leaders themselves, while not being fearful of anything, are masters of instilling in voters the fears of their choosing. I agree that Republican leaders are masters of instilling in voters the fears of their choosing, but I also legitimately think the leaders are scared of those things, too.

I take them at their word. No one can have such precise mastery over fear without having experienced a lot of it.

Dan Sweeney Should Be Ashamed of Himself

2008-09-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

So liberal playground Huffington Post has an article by Dan Sweeney titled "There's No Arguing With Conservatives... No, Seriously, Scientific Studies Prove It." The first paragraph:

A new study out of Yale University confirms what argumentative liberals have long-known: Offering reality-based rebuttals to conservative lies only makes conservatives cling to those lies even harder. In essence, schooling conservatives makes them more stupid.

He then cites a Washington Post article that describes the study. If you read the entire article, you'll see that the psychological effect of misinformation cuts both ways equally. Yet Sweeney omits the entire first half of the article, which exhibits liberal susceptibility to the very tendency he's decrying:

In experiments conducted by political scientist John Bullock at Yale University, volunteers were given various items of political misinformation from real life. One group of volunteers was shown a transcript of an ad created by NARAL Pro-Choice America that accused John G. Roberts Jr., President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court at the time, of "supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber."

A variety of psychological experiments have shown that political misinformation primarily works by feeding into people's preexisting views. People who did not like Roberts to begin with, then, ought to have been most receptive to the damaging allegation, and this is exactly what Bullock found. Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to disapprove of Roberts after hearing the allegation.

Bullock then showed volunteers a refutation of the ad by abortion-rights supporters. He also told the volunteers that the advocacy group had withdrawn the ad. Although 56 percent of Democrats had originally disapproved of Roberts before hearing the misinformation, 80 percent of Democrats disapproved of the Supreme Court nominee afterward. Upon hearing the refutation, Democratic disapproval of Roberts dropped only to 72 percent.

Republican disapproval of Roberts rose after hearing the misinformation but vanished upon hearing the correct information. The damaging charge, in other words, continued to have an effect even after it was debunked among precisely those people predisposed to buy the bad information in the first place.

Bullock found a similar effect when it came to misinformation about abuses at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Volunteers were shown a Newsweek report that suggested a Koran had been flushed down a toilet, followed by a retraction by the magazine. Where 56 percent of Democrats had disapproved of detainee treatment before they were misinformed about the Koran incident, 78 percent disapproved afterward. Upon hearing the refutation, Democratic disapproval dropped back only to 68 percent -- showing that misinformation continued to affect the attitudes of Democrats even after they knew the information was false.

But of course Sweeney includes the two corresponding experimental procedures in which Republicans were first given misinformation, and then a rebuttal (about the WMDs in Iraq issue and the Bush tax cuts). He seizes upon their continuing to believe the misinformation as evidence of conservative "rigidity," even though the conservatives were exhibiting exactly the same behavior observed in liberals.

This study is valuable because it sheds some light on the psychological processes that make rational argument difficult for everyone. But to try to paint it as something that affects only conservatives, and leaves liberals unscathed, is false, immature, and counterproductive.

The Athleticization of Politics

2008-09-14T12:12:00.000-07:00

A common liberal talking point is that religion exerts undue influence over modern politics. While I certainly don't disagree, I do recognize that the influence religion can have is limited strictly to the content of political discourse; it does not seem to shape the form or structure of political discourse. Religious belief may cause one to take a particular side on a given issue, but the fact that the issue is equipped with "sides" in the first place is traceable not to the hand of God, but to the juggernaut that is modern professional and collegiate sports.

The ubiquity of televised competitive athletics is the single most pernicious and destructive force ever unleashed on American civic life.

In this country, people are generally introduced to pro sports before they are introduced to politics. This naturally causes them to try to fit politics into the pro sports worldview. The problem is that there are two fundamental mismatches between the athletic and democratic mindsets: (1) competition versus cooperation, and (2) self-containedness versus integration.

Sports are competitive. They require winners and losers. Representative democracy was intended to be cooperative, not competitive. The founding fathers realized that the system could not afford to designate losers, because even the losers would still be part of the nation; the promise of the nation was that it would include, as much as it could, everyone within its borders. (The only political system explicitly based on the notion of winners and losers is totalitarianism.)

Applying the competitive mindset of athletics to a system intended to be cooperative totally perverts that system's dynamic. The ultimate goal of political discourse is to make policy, not score points for your team. Take the debates, for instance. A debate is supposed to be a collaborative search for common ground. It is supposed to be an exercise in compromise that answers the question, "Given that we have differences, what should we do?" Thanks to sports, though, debates have degenerated into mere opportunities for both sides to trade zingers and witty one-line putdowns. They are showcases for each side to emphasize how different they are from the other -- something that we already fucking knew! At the end of the debates, everybody argues about "who won the debate" instead of focusing on the fact that, in reality, everybody lost the debate, because the debate didn't resolve anything -- it didn't result in any actual compromises being made.

Sports teaches people that compromise is synonymous with losing, but in a representative democracy, compromise should be synonymous with winning. Failure to compromise is the losing outcome. If people didn't come to politics with their worldview already irreparably warped by pro sports, they would be capable of recognizing this.

This brings me to the second mismatch. Sports are self-contained, while politics is integrative. The consequences of winning or losing an athletic competition are confined mainly to the record books; the outcome of a game does not dictate how the players are henceforth allowed to live their lives. (Imagine if, after losing a game, a team were exiled from its home city, or its members imprisoned or fined; conversely, imagine if, after winning a game, teammates were given special tax breaks, or granted immunity from prosecution for crimes they haven't yet committed.) If the Yankees win the World Series, New York City doesn't suddenly qualify for additional federal funding; if the Cowboys lose the Super Bowl, Dallas doesn't suddenly see a decline in its sanitation. (The amount of money athletes earn is the only real-world variable directly correlated to their win/lose ratio.) The lack of real-world consequences trains people to think the strife is valuable in itself.

Politics is not self-contained. The "game" is played, but its outcome has a direct bearing on how not only the players, but indeed every person in the entire nation, are henceforth allowed to live their lives. There is a larger point to the interaction; the interaction itself is not the point.

In a previous post I mentioned Daily Kos and Little Green Footballs. These sites basically ignore each other except when one says something so offensive to the sensibilities of the other that the other is obliged to ridicule it. Daily Kos will say something intended simply to rabble-rouse within its base, and LGF will single it out for ridicule. Meanwhile, another liberal site, LGFWatch, exists simply to engage in this exact same process with Little Green Footballs. This chest-thumping juvenilia is what passes for contemporary political debate.

Imagine how this dynamic would be transformed if both sides were the true patriots they claim to be. Instead of constantly being on the lookout for the fuckups of an opponent, they would be constantly on the lookout for the valid points of a partner. This would be in keeping with the mindset of a true democratic republic. But because it conflicts with the mindset of pro sports, it will never actually occur.

Until this nation grows up and realizes that pro sports are a vapid triviality, with no bearing on the realities of life, our political discourse is doomed to vacuous, knee-jerk, back-and-forth "point scoring." Which is a polite way of saying, as long as sports are popular, we're fucked.

McCain

2008-09-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

Of course I'm voting for Obama, and I hope he wins, but to be honest I don't think the country will be too terribly off if he loses. There are things about John McCain that I like, and even as a liberal, I'm not ashamed to admit it. (But note how I don't go so far as to say I'm proud to admit it.)

Many claim that McCain, at age 72, is too old to be President. That may be true. On the other hand, nobody is claiming that John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg (all of whom are at least McCain's age if not older) are too old to continue serving on the Supreme Court. If the founding fathers had concerns about the influence of age on public service, they wouldn't have allowed those to be lifetime appointments.

A decade ago, liberals loved McCain. We're the ones responsible for creating his much-ballyhooed "maverick" image, not him, and certainly not the Republican Party (who probably spent his entire Senate career prefacing any mention of his name with the honorific "that cocksucker"). He earned that reputation through real bipartisan efforts -- McCain-Feingold, siding with the Clinton Administration in taking on Big Tobacco (to Republican chagrin), voting against the Bush tax cuts in May 2001, being the first high-profile Republican to check himself into rehab for his addiction to global warming denial. He's not perfect, but he's done good things, and he's exhibited willingness to break from his party to do what he thinks is right.

Now that he's earned the nomination of his party, though, liberals are demonizing him full-force. I find this unfortunate, but understandable. It is true that he has changed his position on a number of issues with apparently purely political motives. He suddenly claims to care strongly about things that there was little evidence he gave a shit about before, like abortion, nuclear energy, continuation of the Bush tax cuts, etc.

This could indicate one of two things:
(1) He fought the machine and lost. The Republican establishment crushed his mavericky spirit and transformed him into just another Bible-thumping, bombing-brown-people-is-fun, free-market-uber-alles fuckwit.
(2) He's swindling the machine. He has his own ideas about how to govern, a portfolio of positions that lines up 100% with neither party, and he's recognized the need to pander to certain voting blocs just to get himself elected. Once he's in office, he'll tell those blocs to go fuck themselves (postmaritally, of course) and set about governing his own way.

Many on the left have dubbed a McCain presidency "Bush's third term," and if option (1) above turns out to be true, then they'll be right. That would suck. The fact that I'm not willing to risk that outcome is why, despite my overall positive impression of the man, I just can't bring myself to vote for him.

However, there is one good indication that option (2) could occur -- one critical factor separating McCain from Bush. It has nothing to do with policy positions or even temperament. It has to do with the fact that Bush, from birth, has allowed others to manage his career. His abortive foray into the oil business, his stint as Texas governor, his bumbling, monosyllabic presidency -- all of it was coordinated, shepherded, guided, orchestrated by others. If there's one thing that even the fiercest McCain detractor has to give the man, it's that he's always been at the helm of his own career. He may make mistakes, or hold foolish positions, but it's always him at the wheel.

Any Republican willing to give Karl Rove the finger can't be all bad.

P.S. Prediction: if option (2) does in fact take place, that will seal McCain's fate as a one-term president. That would create a fascinating race in 2012: Clinton vs. Palin!

Pope Condemns... Uh... Himself

2008-09-13T11:24:00.000-07:00

Nothing incites the unsheathing of my poison pen quite like religion. The ultimate in denial and intellectual blindness, religion (or even a vague, unstructured, personalized "belief in a higher power") is a psychological contagion that has left few areas of human endeavor uninfected.

Witness the Pope's latest exhortation, in which he "condemned unbridled 'pagan' passion for power, possessions and money as a modern-day plague" and "decried 'insatiable greed' and said 'the love of money is the root of all evil.'"

This from the leader of a privately held multinational corporation whose net worth is estimated to be somewhere around $10 - $12 billion dollars, with significant investments in banking, insurance, chemicals, steel, construction, and real estate, and which has been called "the biggest tax evader in Italy."

The Catholic Church has a long and illustrious history of glorifying poverty in the abstract while in actuality accumulating vast wealth. The Middle Ages were characterized by exceedingly pious men pointing out this hypocrisy, thereby inviting the papacy's wrath.

What makes this latest papal miasma-expectoration especially disgusting is that the largest population of devout Catholics in the world is in Central and South America, regions not known for their economic prosperity or conspicuous consumption. The risk of those particular Catholics somehow jeopardizing their souls through a money- or possession-induced sickness of the spirit seems rather low to me. (Although I suppose it's hard to disagree that "the love of money is the root of all evil" when you live in a world where the two most profitable industries are kidnapping for ransom and cocaine production.)

There are many valid reasons to deride Catholicism as the cruel, witless, anachronistic joke that it is, but I have a hard time imagining even the most ardent of its brainwashees denying the hypocrisy intrinsic in these words coming from their ancient, cloistered, pompous leader.

Fuck the Pope and the two-thousand-year-old horse he rode in on.

Elites

2008-09-12T18:20:00.000-07:00

This word is a fine example of how conservatives and liberals can use the exact same vocabulary to talk past each other. Both sides accuse the other of harboring "elites," and of course, the favorite pastime of all "elites" is "elitism," i.e. ignoring or ridiculing non-elites.

The problem is, what qualifies one as an elite? The dictionary definition is "a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence." Liberals seem to focus on the "position" half while conservatives seem to focus on the "education" half. Meaning, liberals use "elite" to attack rich people, while conservatives use it to attack smart people.

Now, all things being equal, who do you think exerts more "power or influence" on the affairs of this country -- the rich or the smart? Granted, there exists some group of indeterminate size that happens to be both rich and smart, but we're talking generalities here. If you're not an elite, and you're determined to hate the elites, who makes a likelier target?

If you answer "the smart" then you definitely do not qualify for your definition of elite.

Newfound Respect for David Frum

2008-09-12T08:40:00.001-07:00

I'd never heard of the American Enterprise Institute's David Frum until last spring, when he appeared on Bill Maher's fabulous HBO show. I came away from that episode disliking him pretty strongly.

However, he has written a very thoughtful piece in the New York Times titled "The Vanishing Republican Voter" in which he engages in the same kind of "I'm on your side but I'm still going to point out what you're doing wrong" reasoning, directed at Republicans and conservatism in general, that I try to direct at Democrats and liberalism in general.

Check it out if you get a chance.

Ayn Rand Is Remedial Reading for Women

2008-09-11T18:08:00.000-07:00

I've never read anything by Ayn Rand, but not for lack of trying. People have accused me of writing stories that are thinly veiled philosophical tracts, but nobody can beat Ms. Rand for sheer transparency of agenda. I found the going rough. It took me a while to realize that she didn't write any of her books with male readers in mind. Her ouvre is one giant shout-out to the ladies.

I've known a number of people who have found Rand's writings transformative, and they're all women. I think there is a pretty simple reason for this, although I'll admit I'm venturing onto (even) shakier ground than I have with my more exclusively political posts thus far.

Her central philosophical tenet seems to be that self-interest, selfishness even, are virtues to be celebrated. Women have reported receiving this idea as if it were news. But as far as I can tell, males embrace the notion sometime around age zero. They don't need to be sat down and lectured about it at length and subjected to contrived dramatizations of it in order to start acting accordingly. It's either built in, or socialized into place right from the getgo.

In shaping the attitudes and personalities of young girls, this civilization does not place a premium on self-interest. (Self-absorption, maybe, but that's a distant second in terms of value.) Selflessness, service, duty to others -- these are consciously and unconsciously inculcated as feminine virtues, but not self-interest.

So, thank you, Ayn Rand, for helping correct this lopsided double-standard. You've performed a valuable service to humanity. (How unselfish.)

Pride and Slavery

2008-09-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

Pride is just about the most abused emotion in politics. It may manifest itself in all areas of human endeavor, but only in politics is it applied to things that just don't deserve it.

Pride is "faith in one's own abilities based on merit." You can be proud that you got an A in calculus, or proud that you came in first in the 100-yard dash, or proud that you managed to pick up two girls simultaneously at that bar the other night, or proud that your azaleas have flourished so beautifully under your care. You can be proud that you earn as much as you do, or that you volunteer in a soup kitchen as often as you do. You can be proud of your achievements. You can be proud of what you've done.

You can't be proud of what you are. You can't be proud of an innate characteristic over which you have no control. You can't be proud of your gender. You can't be proud of your race. You can't be proud of your ethnicity or nationality or religious belief (sort of -- most religious folk adopt whatever faith they were born into). It would make no sense. It would be like being proud to be tall or being proud to have blue eyes or being proud to have blond hair.

This is why phrases like "Proud to be an American" annoy me. So you were born with US citizenship -- how is that an achievement of yours? On what basis can you derive pride from something in which you had no hand? The only people who have actually earned the right to say "Proud to be an American" are legal immigrants. The only people who have actually earned the right to say "Proud to be a Christian" are converts from Islam or Judaism or Buddhism or whatever. The only people who have actually earned the right to say "Proud to be a woman" are those who paid the reconstructive surgeon for the multiple sex-reassignment operations.

This cuts both ways. Gays had better stop talking about "Gay Pride" unless they want to tacitly concede that sexual orientation is a choice, as opposed to a genetic characteristic.

Now, perhaps I'm being a tad linguistically rigid here. It occurs to me that some people might be using pride as a refutation of shame. This alchemy produces "Gay Pride" from the base metal of "Lack of Shame at Being Gay." But is that really what people are trying to communicate? "I'm Not Ashamed to be an American"? What kind of statement is that?

Maybe (and this is what I think) people derive their pride from the achievements of other individuals that shared the innate characteristic being celebrated. "Proud to be an American" really means "Many Americans have done great things, and I'm an American, too, so I'm proud by transitivity!"

That transitivity is a very interesting phenomenon. It requires a willingness to vicariously take ownership of acts that were perpetrated by others to whom you're somehow related. It's a slippery slope.

I would bet that the vast majority of people whose SUVs sport "Proud to be an American" (or, even worse, "Power of Pride") bumper stickers are opposed to the idea of reparations for slavery. But this, too, is an idea that requires the very same willingness to vicariously take ownership of acts that were perpetrated by others -- in this case, one's slaveowning ancestors. Suddenly, transitivity seems like a bad idea.

So, you can't trumpet your pride in being American unless you're ready to pay back the descendants of any slaves that your ancestors owned.

It will be a happy day when both flipsides of this moronic coin vanish from public discourse entirely.

Another Missed Opportunity for the Democrats

2008-09-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

I would love to see a graph that depicts the relationship between an issue's actual importance (the X-axis) and the number of times it is discussed or even referenced in American political discourse (the Y-axis). It would be a logarithmic curve that would very tightly hug the two axes, I suspect.

A good example of this is the McCain mantra to drill offshore for oil. It's just a retarded issue. Both sides are equally retarded. It's retarded to oppose offshore drilling, and it's retarded to be so strongly in favor of it that you make it one of the primary planks in your platform. Drilling for oil offshore should be something that some working group deep in the bowels of the Department of Energy proposes and submits to some subcommittee deep in the bowels of Congress, which, after cursory review, sends it off to the Environmental Protection Agency for comment, and if it ever gets passed, it gets mentioned on page 6 of the Wall Street Journal. This should be a governmental background task, not a focal point of policy debate.

But if the Republicans can take such an obscure, back-burner issue and successfully drag it into the spotlight, to their benefit, then I've got a similar issue with which the Democrats can do exactly the same. And that is asserting sovereignty in the Arctic.

There's another Cold War brewing, and that was true even before the Russian invasion of Georgia. It is estimated that 13% - 25% of the world's untapped oil and natural gas reserves are locked beneath the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean. There are five nations with coastline along the Arctic Ocean -- the US, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Russia. The UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf has been busy for years with proposals from one or more of these five nations, each trying to ensure that future shipping lanes, commercial fishing zones, and petrochemical extraction fields are divided up to their advantage. Russia recently planted a flag under the seabed of the North Pole. The world in general is realizing that, if it must piss off backward locals in order to extract oil, it would happily trade away Arabs with rocket launchers in favor of Eskimos with homemade kayaks. All the elements are there to make the Arctic the premier battleground in the 21st-century war for global economic supremacy. And we shouldn't waste time in asserting our intent to dominate.

This would seem like the perfect Republican talking point: it involves saber-rattling and whipping up of nationalistic furor; it furthers the interests of domestic Big Oil; it gives hawks a new angle from which to demonize Russia. But Republicans never mention it, and there's one hilariously good reason:

It presupposes the validity of global warming.

The only reason all these issues are coming to a head is that the ice is melting. Pretty soon the Arctic Ocean will truly be exploitable like a real ocean, instead of being this frozen vacant lot stuck on top of the planet.

Obviously the other four Arctic nations agree about global warming, or they wouldn't be rushing now to stake their claims. What good would such claims be without massive melting of the ice? They'd own closed shipping lanes and wells whose weatherproofing and maintenance costs would exceed the value of the petroleum they extract. The region is valueless without global warming.

If Democrats were to start talking about this, it would help them in a couple ways. First off, it would help explode their image among conservatives as a bunch of namby-pamby pacifists who never want to exert military might to further the country's goals. It would also allow them to not merely fold to the "drill now" mantra, but in fact do it one better. And it would force Republicans to acknowledge the reality of global warming.

Fuck Canada! The Northwest Passage is ours for the taking! Who's with me?

Global Warming

2008-09-10T17:15:00.000-07:00

There are four possible positions on the issue:

(1) The globe is not warming.
(2) The globe is warming, but its primary cause is not man-made. Sunspot fluctuations, variations in the Earth's orbit, etc. are the culprit.
(3) The globe is warming, but there has not been enough data yet collected to reach a decisive conclusion either way as to its primary cause.
(4) The globe is warming, and its primary cause is man-made.

I hold the fourth position, but there are many who do not. The (1) position is almost more understandable than the (2) position, if only from a psychological perspective. If you agree the globe is warming, then you have already demonstrated an ability to trust scientists at all -- why would the next logical step, of agreeing to humanity's involvement, cause you to suddenly decry as bureaucrats suffocated by institutional orthodoxy the very same scientists you already listened to? At least (1) is consistent in its rejection of scientific consensus. It's more honest in its devotion to dishonesty.

Less honest in its devotion to dishonesty is (3), which almost sounds like a reasonable thing to say. The existence of (3) as an option in the first place is due to a rhetorical masterstroke on the part of global warming skeptics: by intertwining the issue with its debate about itself, skeptics have replaced a scientific decisionmaking process with a political decisionmaking process. "We don't trust the scientists to make such a declaration at this time." So when exactly do you plan to start trusting the scientists? The unstated answer is "Only when the scientists start agreeing with us," which rejects the scientifically required possibility that further data will only confirm what the scientists are already saying. Hence, the debate has been sequestered into a place beyond the reach of science. Genius.

What positions (1) through (3) all share, though, is a response to the question "So if global warming's primary cause isn't man-made, how come the vast majority of respectable scientists say it is?"

Global warming skeptics sieze on our use of the word "respectable" to shape their answer. This is where the depictions of scientists as bureaucrats suffocated by institutional orthodoxy come in. Science, we are told, is nothing but an extension of academia, where concerns over gaining tenure or finding a thesis advisor or having a friend on the grant allocation committee at the National Science Foundation exert at least as much influence over how science is done as does the desire to pursue knowledge.

Basically, the global warming skeptics are saying that there is a conspiracy in the scientific community to convince the public that position (4) is true.

I'm certainly not one to automatically reject conspiracy theories out of hand, but I do subject them to a few rudimentary plausibility tests. The first of these is to ask, "Qui bono?" Who would such a conspiracy benefit?

I don't see how it could benefit the scientists. Even universal public acceptance of position (4) would not significantly increase their material wealth, certainly not like lobbying for, say, an oil company. I suppose it might boost public opinion of scientists -- the extreme form of this would be for the public to venerate scientists as "the saviors of humanity," although that's a very generous exercise of imagination.

The next rudimentary plausibility test would be to ask, what would the costs be to the organization perpetrating the conspiracy if its true conduct were to become known? We've seen that political scandals involving conspiracy rarely have any lasting fallout: if they did, Watergate alone would have ensured the demise of the Republican party. Scandals can end the careers of individuals, but they never do more than temporarily disrupt the organizations to which the involved individuals belong.

But that's in politics, where scandal is to forever be expected. Science is the only area of human endeavor when the number-one concern is to make sure that one really knows what one thinks one really knows. Its only goal is to be honest. A concerted effort to distort the truth within the scientific community would spell the absolute suicide of science in the world, and I don't think any scientist would be willing to risk that for the remote prospect of being regarded as humanity's savior.

Bottom line, the reward is too paltry, and the risk too enormous, for scientists to be involved in such a conspiracy. If individual members of the scientific community find themselves shunned and ostracized because of their statements on global warming, it's because their thought processes are somehow flawed, not because they're heroic whistle-blowers.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument in favor of a scientific conspiracy to promote position (4). I hereby invite anyone from positions (1) - (3) to advance such a case in the comments section. I guarantee I will issue some sort of reply.

Cognitive Dissonance, Only Two Posts In?

2008-09-10T17:14:00.000-07:00

So my first post says, one should never deliberately narrow one's scope of interests in politics. The second post says, deliberately narrowing one's scope of interest can be politically helpful. Huh?

Individual people, in making their voting decisions, should be as broad-minded as possible, consider as many different angles and issues as possible, and are irresponsible for doing otherwise.

Political organizations, in struggling to make progress toward their goals, must narrow their scope to focus on an achievable set of goals. To do anything else isn't irresponsible, necessarily, but it sure is ineffective.

TRIVIA FACT: What I just engaged in -- i.e. elaboration of nuance -- is referred to in the media as "flip-flopping."

Little Green Footballs vs. Daily Kos

2008-09-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

These are my two favorite political blogs. I'm mostly liberal, so one would think I'd spend my time agreeing with whatever's on Daily Kos and getting pissed off at whatever's on Little Green Footballs. But over the last year, the opposite reaction has developed. I've accrued a great deal of grudging respect for Charles Johnson and his digital stomping ground.

The source of this respect can be characterized in one word: focus. There are tons of issues in politics, and there's a traditional conservative viewpoint on all of them, but LGF doesn't waste space banging the drum on each one. There are really only two issues that Johnson seems to care enough about to post about them repeatedly:

(1) Islamic fundamentalism is really bad and needs to be eradicated.
(2) Creationism is utter bullshit, and evolution is the way the (biological) world works.

Let's ignore the fact that (2) runs counter to the opinion of a significant portion of the conservative base, because it muddies the point I'm trying to make. The point is not the specific content of either of these agenda items -- the point is that there are only two of them. LGF exhibits focus.

Daily Kos, on the other hand, is a disorganized grab-bag of issues, all of them treated with equal importance by their various authors and advocates, regardless of how important they truly are ranked against all the other issues vying for our attention and action.

Nothing is more frustrating and eyeroll-inducing than the Daily Kos "Diary Rescue" posts. Here's a distillation of all the issues raised in the latest one:

(1) Media silence on Hurricane Gustav's aftermath
(2) Fate of German Jewry after the Holocaust
(3) A defense of the virtues of big-city living
(4) The ACLU urges a letter-writing campaign on behalf of a falsely convicted man on death row
(5) A rumination on the effect Bob Woodward's latest book will have on the careers of the current military brass
(6) The case for libertarian Democrats
(7) A snapshot of the current presidential race viewed through the lens of the electoral college
(8) A primer on how best to use Letters to the Editor as a tool of political proselytizing
(9) A mini-documentary on election fraud
(10) A rumination on the likelihood of government intervention in the future failures of large financial institutions, given the precedent set by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
(11) A piece decrying the Republican attempt to co-opt the "change" campaign theme
(12) A list of suggested Obama campaign ads
(13) A series of videos revealing "the real John McCain"
(14) A piece claiming that Palin is worse than Cheney

Think about the contrast in scale between the two sites. On one site, dozens of posts over months tend to adhere to a list of themes two items long. On the other site, a single post adheres to a list of themes fourteen items long. (Actually fifteen items long -- there was one item whose description clashed with its title so strangely that I didn't know how to summarize it, so I left it off.)

Now, I understand both the theoretical intent and the practical cause of this discrepancy.
The practical cause is that, while Kos is the titular head of his site, he has delegated editorial authority to a panel of trusted associates who oversee and/or author what gets posted. LGF, on the other hand, is Charles Johnson's baby. He is the sole author and editor of everything that gets posted on the site. That difference in approach is naturally going to yield a difference in focus.

The theoretical intent of Daily Kos is to create sort of a clearinghouse of progressive thought, painting the left as a big tent inside which all different subspecies of liberal are welcome. Naturally the items that grab my attention will be different from those that grab the attention of, say, a fortysomething black mother who lives in New York City and works at a nonprofit mental health hospital for children, even though we might both proudly proclaim the title of liberal.

The problem with it is, the purpose of politics is not to preach to the choir. The purpose of politics is to focus one's rhetoric on the people who aren't already convinced by it -- to cast one's positions in terms of beliefs, values, and attitudes that one doesn't necessarily have.

When I looked at Daily Kos solely with liberal eyes (oh those halcyon days), I loved it. But when I look at it with nonliberal eyes, all I see is further evidence of a longstanding conservative talking point: that liberals just like to bitch about everything.

Conservatives like to paint themselves as fundamentally optimistic, happy people -- hey, things are pretty much fine the way they are, except for the following handful of problems. Conversely, they like to paint liberals as fundamentally pessimistic, unhappy people -- everything is falling apart, there's injustice everywhere, economic inequality, needless military aggression, etc. (It's an effective tactic, too -- if you're an undecided voter, or someone only vaguely aware of the daily back-and-forth of modern politics, which group would you rather be associated with?)

Even the most casual glance at these two extremes of the political blogosphere will serve to further this conservative talking point. The overall impression one gets from LGF is, things are pretty much fine the way they are, except for creationism and Islamic fundamentalism. The overall impression one gets from Daily Kos is, everything is falling apart, and here, we'll enlist fifty different equally impassioned people to prove different aspects of it to you.

LGF definitely has its problems -- I get the feeling Charles Johnson has a mild case of megalomania, and would be a rather irritating guy to hang around with. (A few months ago he posted an email exchange he had with a reporter that was presumably intended to make the reporter look bad, but to my eyes just made Johnson look like his namesake.) And a significant number of commenters in his "lizardoid army" seem to be prognathous knuckle-draggers (I won't use "mouth-breather" as a pejorative because I'm one too).

But, Daily Kos, there is a lesson to be learned from Charles Johnson: FOCUS. Focus, focus, focus. As painful as it may be to your delicate progressive sensibilities, you have to stop claiming to give a shit about everything. Prioritize. Make the tough decisions. Pick the right battles. And stop playing into the hands of conservative pseudo-psychologists.

Cunningham's Fundamental Theorem of Electoral Politics

2008-09-07T09:44:00.000-07:00

There is no lower form of political life than the single-issue voter.

Doesn't matter if the issue is abortion, or gun control, or gay marriage, or global warming, or immigration, or proliferation of free markets.

It's a complex world, and a complex nation. Lots of decisions about lots of issues need to be made. They're going to be made by the officials we elect. Those officials won't have the luxury of single-mindedness. They're going to have to make decisions about issues that affect you, even if they aren't issues you feel particularly strongly about. To narrow one's scope deliberately to a single issue, at the exclusion of all else, is essentially an abdication of civic responsibility.