tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5469194089357182892024-03-13T22:27:16.799-07:00Humbabella's GamerySPREADSHEETS!Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.comBlogger427125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-78456495055609272262020-01-10T07:40:00.001-08:002020-01-10T07:48:10.827-08:00Transmissionism: Do Books Work?I was reading an <a href="https://boingboing.net/2020/01/09/steelmanning-and-reflecting.html">article on BoingBoing</a> about how to read long, difficult books.<br />
<br />
So this guy's advice is to read the Wealth of Nations <b>twice</b>? Here's some better advice: <div class='tipped' data-text="Just joking... not joking.">don't read it once</div>.<br />
<br />
The tips are fine as they go, but what I'm really interested in the article it the link to the thing the tips were responding to: Andy Matuschak's essay "<a href="https://andymatuschak.org/books/">Why books don't work</a>". It makes a lot of sense if you read it, but it does something that I'm really on guard for these days: it assumes everyone in the same.<br />
<br />
The essay talks about "transmissionism" which is a failed theory of teaching and learning. In transmissionism one person puts information out there in sentences and another person reads or hears the sentences, then absorbs the information. It turns out this isn't great. Which is one reason why you may have been to a lecture in school and walked out realizing you basically never understood what the teacher or professor was talking about.<br />
<br />
But if you are going to say:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. Transmissionism doesn't work</blockquote>
You are going to need to have an explanation for:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. <i>Some</i> people seem to learn from lectures and books</blockquote>
Matuschak's explanation is that you can learn from lectures or books by doing the kinds of things that <i>really</i> make people learn. You take notes. You think about what it being said to you and connect it to other things in your life. You do little exercises and check back to see you understood. It's a lot of metacognition that needs to go into this process and we don't teach those skills directly so most people just don't have them. Basically a lecture and a book put a whole lot of work onto the listener and the reader with no good reason to think that they can or will do that work.<br />
<br />
But when you encounter two statements like (1) and (2) above, there's a pretty easy way to reconcile them that I think was overlooked. We say, "Well, what if (1) isn't <i>universally</i> true. What if it's only true for most people?"<br />
<br />
I'm pretty sure transmissionism works on me. You encode your thought into a sentence, you write it down or you say it out loud. I encounter the sentence, understand the meaning of the words and then use the meaning of the words to understand your idea. I don't think it works on me because I learned some great techniques to absorb the content of lectures or books. Quite the contrary, I'd sit in classrooms, tortured, wishing I could tune the teacher out but paying attention involuntarily. I barely read because I found it extremely annoying.<br />
<br />
I found limits of functions in highschool calculus but the whole process seemed mysterious to me. Then in my first university lecture they said that the limit of a function f(x) as x goes to a is L if and only if for every epsilon greater than zero there is a delta such that if the difference between x and a is less than delta the difference between f(x) and L is less than epsilon and I thought, "<b>Oh!</b> That's what a limit is." My grade 12 physics teacher joked with my mother that I sat there limply in class, slightly slumped, apparently catatonic, then got the highest mark on the test.<br />
<br />
None of that had anything to do with thinking critically or taking notes, it's just actually how I receive information. I think transmissionism does work for some people. Not because those people have learned a special set of skills that allow it to work, but because those people are just the kind of people who learn that way.<br />
<br />
I also don't think books started as a way of communicating ideas to the world - without a printing press that's not practical. If you wanted to write something for everyone to read you wrote it on a sign or a wall. Books started as a way of <i>archiving</i> knowledge, whether to make sure that multiple people agreed on the specifics later or as a way of passing it on to future generations. Retrieving the knowledge from the archives wasn't something that everyone did, it was the work of very few people: scholars. So I'm not sure the lecture showed up as a bad way of communicating that we accidentally imposed on people. It may well exist because it was a good way of communicating to the small group of people who would ever really be lectured at - future scholars. People who needed to be selected for their ability to be receivers of transmissionism.<br />
<br />
None of this really takes away from Matuschak's point that maybe the vast bulk of people are subjected to a school system that doesn't work for them. <div class="tipped" data-text="The school system sure seemed like garbage to me and I'm saying I was one of the ones it basically worked for.">That sounds totally plausible to me</div>. But it feels like there's a much better explanation for how we arrived at using a system like the one we use than "We just didn't know any better." Of course we didn't know any better, but behaviours evolve, there was some reason to repeat it for a long time.<br />
<br />
Having finished my commentary on how it's a good idea to contemplate diversity, there was a second problem with Matuschak's essay I want to address. The jump from the presumably familiar experience of absorbing nothing from a lecture to the less intuitively grasped experience of not remembering what was in a book seems iffy. Matuschak tries to convey this by asking the reader what the Selfish Gene said.<br />
<br />
If you've read the Selfish Gene you might not have a deep knowledge of what it said. It's possible you think you remember it but under questioning your knowledge would wither. That's what Matuschak expects of you. But that doesn't mean you never understood it, it doesn't even mean you forgot what it said. It may only be that you forgot that the knowledge you acquired from that book came from the book. That is that you retain the knowledge, but the knowledge doesn't have pointers attached to it referencing back to where it came from.<br />
<br />
This is especially problematic with the books that Matuschak picks as examples: The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns Germs and Steel. These books were all pretty widely read and they affected popular culture and popular thinking. If you didn't read them right away there's a good chance that by the time you did read them you'd had already been exposed to most of their ideas.<br />
<br />
For example, I have read the Selfish Gene, but by the time I read it I already knew the basics of genetics. For a person who didn't know anything of genes the book might have been very educational. For me, it contained very few new or useful ideas. So if Matuschak asked <i>me</i> was the Selfish Gene was about, I'd say<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Richard Dawkins trying to use a metaphor of selfishness for survival of the fittest and, despite specifically admitting that selfishness is a bad metaphor because it implies intent, falling into their own trap and ending up laying infrastructure for the popular acceptance of greed as natural and the neoliberal sacrifice of future generations.</blockquote>
I'm not going to remember Dawkins' layperson account of genetic inheritance because I've got a perfectly good layperson account of genetic inheritance. Even if Dawkins <i>had</i> been my first source for that account, I've probably refined it since with other sources of information, and I wouldn't recall exactly the way I was wrong when I finished the book. Remembering what the book said wouldn't just require me to absorb the knowledge that the book contains, it would also require me to having good <i>versioning</i> of that knowledge. The idea that we don't remember what books said doesn't go a long way to proving we don't understand what they said.<br />
<br />
I guess, though, what I'm most interested in is the inherent irony of writing sentences to teach people that you can't teach people a thing by writing sentences. To whatever extent you are successful you disprove your thesis. And Matuschak might be tempted to argue, if they were to ever read this blog post, that the reason I might remember what they wrote is because I went to the trouble of arguing against it here, but that would be a deep misunderstanding of what I am doing.<br />
<br />
I am not reflecting on the work and learning it as I reflect.<br />
<br />
I am reflexively vomiting out a stream of automatic thoughts that whirred around inside me concurrently with reading the piece because it is uncomfortable to contain them.<br />
<br />
I'm not learning by taking notes, I'm taking notes to relieve the <div class="tipped" data-text="My tips for reading books: read until you find one worthwhile idea then stop reading.">unbearable feeling of learning</div>.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-32799942714034014972019-11-05T08:48:00.002-08:002019-11-05T08:49:54.875-08:00It Happened AgainI was watching a stream the other day and people were talking about triggered mana abilities for some reason. Honestly I can't remember what card interaction it was that made this a conversation, but it all reminded me of my own observation about the problems with deciding whether a triggered ability was a mana ability. You can read the <a href="https://humbabellasgamery.blogspot.com/2013/10/oracle-rulings-review-caged-sun-and.html">full post here</a>, but suffice it to say the problem deals with <div class="tipped" data-magicid="46559">Quicksilver Elemental</div> copying the abilities of a <div class="tipped" data-magicid="5836">Witch Engine</div>, <div class="tipped" data-magicid="107346">Cytoshaped</div> into a <div class="tipped" data-magicid="282542">Dryad Arbor</div> with a <div class="tipped" data-magicid="446914">Caged Sun</div> in play.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I was going to relate this little story to chat, but before I did I thought I'd check my facts, and I was astonished to see I was wrong. That is, I was wrong during that stream. I had been right at the time.<br />
<br />
In that post I quote the comprehensive rules as saying:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>605.1b</b> A triggered ability without a target that <b>triggers from activating a mana ability </b>and could put mana into a player's mana pool when it resolves is a mana ability.</blockquote>
But today they say:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>605.1b</b> A triggered ability is a mana ability if it meets all of the following criteria: it doesn’t require a target (see rule 115.6), <b>it triggers from the resolution of an activated mana ability (see rule 605.1a) or from mana being added to a player’s mana pool</b>, and it could add mana to a player’s mana pool when it resolves.</span> </blockquote>
<i>Now </i>the triggered ability from Caged Sun is safely a mana ability because it actually triggers from the mana being added to your pool, not from the activated ability that adds the mana to your pool. That distinction wasn't meaningful when everything involved was a mana ability because mana abilities resolve immediately, but when the activated ability goes on the stack there is a big difference between triggering from the ability vs. from the mana being added.<br />
<br />
Obviously I can't say for sure that I'm responsible for this change, but this is the second time in my life I've written to the Magic rules team with a question and had them end up changing the rules to avoid the confusion that the actual answer to my question would create.<br />
<br />
I am a Magic rules genius. It's almost like Wizards should hire me; to fix the Oracle wording of old cards if nothing else.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-4429645419486204552019-04-23T07:45:00.001-07:002019-04-23T07:45:26.376-07:00PrestidigitationIf I were to ask pretty nearly anyone why the National Rifle Association (NRA) runs commercials that promote fear and paranoia, they'd give me one of two answers:<br />
<ol>
<li>The NRA does not do that</li>
<li>Fear and paranoia <i>sell</i></li>
</ol>
I probably would have said the latter. I think I've been duped, and not because I believe the former.<br />
<br />
I read a fairly long piece in the New Yorker about <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/secrecy-self-dealing-and-greed-at-the-nra">Secrecy, Self-Dealing and Greed in the NRA</a>. The short summary is the the NRA, which is a non-profit organization, appears to have a extremely tight relationship with their public relationship firm, Ackerman McQueen, a for-profit organization. That is, many people who work for the NRA are former Ackerman McQueen employees, and many people who are thought of as NRA spokespeople are actually Ackerman McQueen staff.<br />
<br />
The result of this close relationship is that the NRA tends to make decisions that benefit Ackerman McQueen rather than its membership. In public filings in 2017 the NRA revealed it paid Ackerman McQueen more than $40 million. It's fine to pay your public relationship firm more than $40 million is you are getting more than $40 million of value from that payment. The evidence suggests they are not.<br />
<br />
Glossy magazines, TV spots and launching their own NRATV don't appear to bring in as much money as they pay to produce them. Some of the promotional materials seem outright self-destructive - highlighting rich donors when the NRA gets most of their money from a broad array of small donors who might not like to see them spend it in this way.<br />
<br />
It all adds up to why I said I think I've been duped. The NRA doesn't buy TV spots selling the idea that the Democrats are coming to take your guns because that's what gets them money or makes them powerful. The NRA buys those TV spots because the decision making at the NRA is controlled by the PR firm that they pay to make those TV spots. The people doing this know that people like me will believe that fear sells because we are cynical.<br />
<br />
We're convinced that fear and paranoia sell, but they are not actually selling. They aren't selling fear, they are paying to put it out there. But they have been paying <i>themselves</i> to put it out there, using donor money. What fear and paranoia have been doing in this instance is make a loud distraction.<br />
<br />
If the NRA continues to lose millions of dollars a year at some point it will collapse. I think it would be easy to see that as a victory for a lot of people who oppose the NRA's politics.<br />
<br />
But this isn't a story about one half of America supporting gun massacres and another half opposing them and team good winning. This is a story about people who are supporting gun massacres <i>as a distraction</i> while they line their own pockets. Those people are getting away with it, team good is not winning. If the NRA collapses, the people who are responsible both for the poisonous politics <i>and</i> for the collapse of the organization will walk away millionaires. And then they will do it again.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-34078889932869740562019-04-16T11:04:00.001-07:002019-04-16T11:05:17.096-07:00Improved Epistemology<span style="text-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #edf">I once stormed out of a philosophy class because I didn't agree with my professor's point of view that speaking fictionally and speaking literally were a binary and nothing existed in between.</span><br />
<br />
Epistemology is the <div class="tipped" data-text="You can't study this, it's just people making shit up.">"study"</div> of what it means to know something which is closely connected with what it means for something to be true. Obviously people have had all kinds of wacky, unique ideas about this over centuries of people thinking about it, but I'm going to oversimplify that by putting everything into two big buckets.<br />
<br />
The classical idea of truth is basically summed up by the famous <div class="tipped" data-text="Socrates didn't say this, it's extremely misleading. On theme for this post, despite being extremely misleading, it's also completely fair and basically accurate.">misquote</div> of Socrates, "I know that I know nothing." In this model actual truth is unattainable, but we console ourselves with calling things true because they seem true to us. If someone points out that we can't know anything is true we just remind ourselves not to invite them to our next party. This is a garbage idea of truth that has no real world application and doesn't even let us distinguish what's true and what's not.<br />
<br />
The scientific idea of truth is that the truth is whatever our best evidence points to. This is a useful and self-consistent idea of truth. After all, our best evidence suggests that our best evidence points to the truth. Otherwise that bridge would be falling down. But this kind of truth, it turns out, seems to be impractical for a large swath of people for everyday purposes. It puts evaluating truth claims out of the hands of people who make truth claims. It doesn't align with people's sense of what truth is supposed to be.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I experiment a lot with holding contradictory ideas in my head because it turns out that they very nearly don't exist. The only way to get solid contradictory ideas is to say, "Well that's not what I meant" every time you notice a way they can be reconciled. There's almost always more than one way of looking at things.<br />
<br />
<div class="tipped" data-text="Like Socrates above, Hegel apparently never says this, which feels very odd to me, because I was quite sure of it. Hegel's idea wasn't quite this, and, unlike with the Socrates quote above, varies in what I think is a meaningful way.">Hegel is attributed</div> with the idea of using a dialectical method to arrive at truth using the thesis, antithesis, synthesis approach. That is, you begin with a claim of truth, you formulate its opposite, and then you find something that reconciles the two.<br />
<br />
As a philosophical exercise this is stupid. You can't take the statement that water is wet, contradict it with "water isn't wet" and then find some deeper truth by combining the two. But if we look at the world we'll find lots of places where people hold seemingly contradictory ideas, and have those ideas serve them in their lives. These are the kinds of ideas that we actually need to synthesize.<br />
<br />
So this brings me to my third bucket for how to understand the idea of truth. Notions <i>connect to truth</i> to the extent that they ought to be taken into account when forming a higher truth. This idea of truth is less obsessive about labeling things as true or false and more focused on understanding things well so that useful parts of them can be salvaged.<br />
<br />
I think this is probably actually closer to the ideal embedded in the scientific method than the statement of scientific truth I gave above is. I doubt more than a handful of people ever took the idea of best evidence <i>being</i> truth as literally as I did. But philosophy is primarily about spending a long time thinking about something to arrive at a conclusion everyone else already knew, so here I am.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-32407535139541657862019-04-09T08:40:00.002-07:002019-04-09T12:27:23.887-07:00DiversityThere's something I have to say, and it's embarrassing to say it, so I don't want to. But let me promise you, I'm not being uncharitable here, this is really an accurate and banal description of what really happened.<br />
<br />
One day some years ago someone I worked with found they couldn't attend a continuing education session on economics. They asked me to take the seat because they didn't want it to go to waste. This was basically a few days off work, it was my boss asking me to go, and I love to hate-learn things, so this seemed like a good idea to me.<br />
<br />
In the economics course, aimed at professional people who have degrees and work in public policy, they explained a fairly basic idea from economics: trade makes people better off. Here's the explanation:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Alice has a car and Bob needs a car. Alice sells the car to Bob for $3,000. Now, Alice would not have made that sale unless the car was worth less than $3,000 to them. Let's say Alice valued the car at $2,000. Bob would not have bought the car unless it was worth more than $3,000 to Bob, so let's just say Bob values the car at $4,000. Previously Alice had an asset worth $2,000 and Bob had currency worth $3,000. After the exchange Alice had currency worth $3,000 and Bob had an asset worth $4,000. Thus each is $1,000 richer and society is $2,000 richer.</blockquote>
Now I find the majority of my education to be painfully embarrassing, but that little parable seems so dumb to me that I feel like I am being dishonest by recounting it. Surely there was a more intelligent point that I am leaving out.<br />
<br />
Actually there are far stupider points that are being left out. Like the idea that the value of a thing is reliably determined by how much the individual willing to pay for it is willing to pay, which pretends to employ the wisdom of crowds but actually allows the value of things to be set by weird outliers. It also holds the value of currency to be equal to each person in contradiction to that previous premise.<br />
<br />
But I think there <i>is</i> a more intelligent point being left out. It's just a point not recognized by economics. In physics we say energy can't be created or destroyed. In order to make that make sense we have to acknowledge a thing called potential energy. If I have a large rock fifty feet from the ground it has gravitational potential energy - that is, if whatever is suspending the rock were to cease to suspend it, the rock could crush my body leaving a grisly pulp. The energy to do that was not created when the rock was released. Rather, it was converted from the kinetic energy that was the rock moving up there in the first place to the potential energy stored in the rock's position. When the rock is released it is converted back into kinetic energy.<br />
<br />
I think there is a useful analogy in there. Intuitively, the car did not become an inherently more valuable thing when Bob took possession of it, <div class="tipped" data-text="Assuming Bob wasn't just making a mistake.">but rather its potential value was unleashed</div>. After all, what if Alice was conning Bob and the car is junk that won't work in a week? Economists would try to hold that as an exception by carving out some rule about fraud and coercion <div class="tipped" data-text="Prolonged exposure to the idea that trade creates value except in the case of coercion leaves people feeling like the whole world is coercive.">without actually being able to define either</div>. I think instead we should look at things in the world actually having value, which is not affected by what we choose to pay for them.<br />
<br />
A note, I think most economists would agree with me on that and say that market price is just the best way to know the value of things, it isn't the value of things. I think the discipline of economics has entirely substituted the metric for the thing they want to measure.<br />
<br />
So let's think of the world as a <div class="tipped" data-text="?">real</div> place with <div class="tipped" data-text="?!?">real</div> things that <div class="tipped" data-text="?!??!!?!!!!">really</div> exist in it and that have some properties that stand regardless of whether we recognize those properties or not. Things may have value that is unrealized to any person, but unrealized value is only unrealized until it is realized.<br />
<br />
There's an undoubtedly apocryphal story of two ancient civilizations living in what we'd consider close proximity that never met. One had domesticated animals, the other had invented the wheel. Because they never met they never combined these two synergistic inventions. Imagine the great increase in well-being in both of these two possibly fictional civilizations had they happened upon one another.<br />
<br />
Where would that value come from? The facile argument from my economics course would say it came from trade. But I would say that the creation of value wasn't in the exchange of a <div class="tipped" data-text="The version I heard set this tale of two civilzations in such a place in the world that llamas are a likely choice for the animal.">llama</div> for a wheel. The creation of value was in the invention of the wheel and the domestication of the llama. The explosion of well-being is the realization of the value of both of those things, and in the further creation of spin-off technologies like a harness to have a llama pull a wheeled cart.<br />
<br />
Let's take those two civilizations. A traveler from one meets a traveler from another. They check out the wheel and the llama and say, "Wow, what's up with that?!?" They take the knowledge back to their civilizations. Next thing you know everyone is making wheels, everyone is training animals, and everyone is better off.<br />
<br />
Instead let's imagine they meet and conspire to figure out how they can make as much personal gain off the new knowledge as possible. There is an agreement that civilization A can have trained animals but must buy them all from person B's farm, and civilization B can have wheels but must pay person A a fee per wheel-kilometer rolled. The explosion is considerably less.<br />
<br />
Economists would say that everyone is still better off because of the trade. But in this example people are better off because of the sharing of ideas and <i>worse off</i> because of the trade. The <i>trade</i> part is limiting people's well-being, not expanding it. The point economists would make in rebuttal is that the trade is necessary for the sharing of ideas, but they would make that point because they base their understanding of society on the simple multiplication of number of people in society by the diary of an 18th century philosopher who spent their life obsessing over their trust issues.<br />
<br />
So when an economist tells you that trade creates wealth, make sure to let them know that in fact what creates well-being is just that different people are different and thus have different ideas and we can combine those ideas. That is, diversity creates value. Trade is a way to realize that value <i>but</i> trade takes a cut of the value for itself.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-65147382588948980582019-03-26T08:58:00.000-07:002019-03-26T09:00:05.476-07:00Feeling Wronged is a ThingHere is an article about a program in California where healthcare "<a href="https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/201260/targeting-and-healing-medi-cals-most-expensive-patients-and-saving-money-">super-utilizers</a>" are tracked and treated in a way that dramatically reduces healthcare costs. About 1% of healthcare users use about 24% of healthcare funding. Some people cost the system in excess of $1M a year.<br />
<br />
So the idea of the program was to find these people and coordinate services for them to minimize their use of the emergency room. In the article the program which serves just 37 patients is estimated to have saved $14M over two years without even counting the fact that these people also had fewer police and ambulance interactions.<br />
<br />
I remember reading about a pilot for a program like this in the past. It took people who were costing the system over half a million a year each, some of them more than a million, and instead spent about $250k to $300k each. It produced better health results for less. When the pilot ended, the program was scrapped.<br />
<br />
Usually better-results-for-less-money is an easy sell. But the program was also doing something else - it was changing which pocket was paying for the program. Instead of the money coming out of a general pot that pays unfunded emergency room visits, it came from a specific fund allocated to serve specific people. It was now easy to say that those people had been made a priority and that they were being treated preferentially. Especially in a place where healthcare isn't free for all, it's a tough political sell to say to a majority who have an average of only a few thousands dollars allocated to their care that a tiny minority ought to have $300k of healthcare a year.<br />
<br />
If it were for people who had the most serious illnesses, maybe it could be sold. But the highest users of healthcare aren't even the sickest people, they are usually homeless, often with mental health issues, and simply rely on the emergency room for everything.<br />
<br />
You work hard, you pay for health insurance, you pay for your home, for your clothes, for your food. Out there somewhere is a person who has massively more expensive healthcare than you, who is being given a home and clothes and food. It seems unfair.<br />
<br />
I'm a technocrat by nature. My instinct is that the best way to run a society is to use the best tools we have available to determine how to produce the best results and then do whatever we need to do to produce those results. If we are going to save $7M a year by providing intensive care to a handful of people and produce better results for those people at the same time, it seems obvious to me that we ought to do so. If someone disagrees, I think that person is allowing pettiness or selfishness or hate for the poor to cloud reason. Reason says that you always pay less for better if you can.<br />
<br />
So let's say we've got 40 people who are simply going to cost the healthcare system over $1M a year with their current care. Nothing is going to magically change how those 40 people behave. We can't simply tell them to stop being lazy and get a job. We have to think of solutions that work, that are practical.<br />
<br />
Now lets say we have 60% of the population that thinks those solutions <b>feel</b> unfair. Nothing is going to magically change how those people feel. We can't simply tell them to stop feeling so jealous or angry or victimized. We also, here, have to think of solutions that work, that are practical.<br />
<br />
California has a population of 39.5M people. If it really is 50 or 60 percent of their population who feel that way, then an extra $14M in healthcare costs is not even a dollar a year for each person. What if they argue that it's worth the state spending a 50-70 cents a year per person to reduce their sense of anguish over what feels like inequitable distribution of resources towards people who aren't contributing to society?<br />
<br />
Economic calculus values emotions at zero until those emotions start producing measurable damaging eternalities. The intolerable emotional problems of a person that keep them homeless and sick and using the emergency room twice a day produce a dollars and cents effect on expenditures, and a minutes and seconds effect on emergency room wait times. The everyday small jealousies and resentments of people who feel like they are getting less from society than others are seem hard to measure. We can't draw a straight line between them an a specific cost. Then again, it's not much of a stretch to say that, added together, those hurt feelings are responsible for the US trade war with China, or Ontario's refusal to acknowledge environmental realities, or the mounting catastrophe of Brexit.<br />
<br />
Thinking that the large group of people who resent others for getting what they see as handouts should develop empathy is probably even more ridiculous than saying that the 100 top healthcare users ought to get over whatever psychological trauma is contributing to that status. Sure, it's easier for one middle class person to learn empathy than for one homeless person to recover from trauma that has stayed with them for decades, but is it easier to shift empathy up one and a half standard deviations for 400,000 people than for one person to get over trauma? That's not easy to quantify.<br />
<br />
And let's not get into the numbers. <div class="tipped" data-text="A few people do, and those people are probably dramatically overrepresented in my readership.">No one</div> cares if facts show that one course of action is better than another. <b>I</b> may change my feelings when exposed to numbers that prove it is foolish to feel the way I feel, but I have a toxic bullying relationship with my feelings that few people can replicate and <div class="tipped" data-text="[Trigger Warning: Perfectly ordinary people with no history of trauma will probably be disturbed by this note.] On one occasion, for instance, I poured a large cup of freshly made tea over my left hand.">they find ways of getting me back for it in the end</div>.<br />
<br />
More and more I feel we have to accept that technocracy just isn't possible. There isn't a right answer to problems. There's no such thing as strictly better. Someone always wants it a different way. We pay for everything - by having to endure our emotions about it if in no other way - and people's individual calculi weight things differently. I think it is probably possible to build a consensus that it's better to pay less money to provide better medical treatment to people. But it's also possible to build a consensus that we need a civil war to sort out our problems. The trick is actually building that consensus, not saying that the numbers prove you right.<br />
<br />
I've got a coherent morality system that says we should help each other instead of kill each other, but we <b>do</b> live in a democracy.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-2784047972614699012019-02-21T13:16:00.001-08:002019-02-21T13:17:09.300-08:00Baby, it's cold outside<i>Another post from the past that I just never posted.</i><br><br>
<b>Content warning:</b> This post contains Misfits lyrics and calls half the population "pro-rape". I imagine people could be triggered by both of those things, but the odds that someone here will be I guess are pretty low.<br />
<br />
Apparently many radio stations in Canada <div class="tipped" data-text="Imagine you were reading this when this was actually happening.">won't be playing <i>Baby it's Cold Outside</i> this year</div>.<br />
<br />
First of all, let me say that on it's face this is just a sensible decision. What would my answer look like if one of my children asked me, "Why is she asking what's in her drink like that?"<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The song is about a man and a woman who are in love. The man is trying to convince the woman she should sleep over and the woman is saying that she shouldn't. Don't worry, I'll get to the drink part in a little bit. It's like Captain Underpants - before I tell you <b>that</b> story I have to tell you <b>this</b> story.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So you know that mommy and daddy sleep in the same bed. To live together and sleep together is something that people normally do after they've been in love for a while. Just like you might have friends you'd be eager to have a sleepover with and others you like to see at school but don't invite over. And when you grow up and move out, you might move in with a friend you've known a long time but probably not with a new friend. So you can think of people in love going through stages: at first they are usually very excited to be around one another, but they don't organize their lives around one another by doing something like buying a house together.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
These days people usually do what's right for <b>them</b> in a relationship. But people also get pressured by their families. Like think about the Boo York movie. Cleo's dad and sister really don't like Deuce, right? And Pharoah's family want to choose who he marries. I'm not going to do that to you, but this is something that happens - people get pressured into making choices their family wants about who to love and who to live with.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Back when this song was written there was a lot more pressure to do what people thought you were supposed to do. One of the things people thought you were supposed to do back then was not sleep together until you were married. But people really thought it was the responsibility of girls to make sure that happened. So if the woman in the song did sleep over at the man's house, she would be the one who would be blamed. That wasn't fair, but it's something she would have to deal with even though it wasn't fair.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I'm getting to the drink soon.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So the man and woman both want her to stay there, not to go home. She also doesn't want people to be angry at her or treat her badly, so she's saying no. The man is thinking about what he wants, not how much trouble she'll get in, so he keeps saying she should stay.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Since she really wants to stay, she's trying to think of ways she could explain it to other people. That's why they sing about it being cold outside. She could stay and then just tell everyone, "Oh, I had to stay because it was so cold." But that excuse wouldn't really work.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So finally we get to the drink. We've talked before about how drinking wine can make people feel different. That's because of something in wine called alcohol. That's also in some other drinks like beer and whiskey. When people drink alcohol it can make them find things funnier, it can make them feel sleepy, it can also make them feel more like doing whatever they want to do without thinking about what will happen. I don't know if you remember this, but sometimes when I'm putting you to bed and you are getting really sleepy you kind of get the giggles and there's this sort of happy sleepiness. Drinking a lot of alcohol sometimes makes people feel like that.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So when she says "What's in this drink?" she's sort of saying she thinks there's a lot of alcohol in the drink. I'm not sure there really is. Just like when they say, "It's cold outside" she might be kind of looking for an excuse to stay over. So she might say to someone else, "I had too much to drink and I couldn't get home." Again, back then people were really mean to women who got too involved in relationships before they got married. So women would sometimes blame their decisions on alcohol, even though they were decisions that they really wanted to make. The alcohol would have been taken as a better excuse that the weather - though she might have been judged for drinking too much alcohol as well.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So basically the women lives with people who will judge her for doing what she wants to do, and she is upset because she wants to do it but also doesn't want to. She is trying to think of ways to excuse herself for doing it. She doesn't want to be blamed unfairly. If I were that man I'd say, "I know we'd both like you to stay, but I also know your parents would be mad, so how about I walk you home. I wish this wasn't so hard for both of us."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I know this isn't really what you asked about, but I want you to know that when you grow up and fall in love if you ever feel torn, like you want to and don't want to do something, I'll support you, not get mad at you.</blockquote>
<br />
You'll note that my description of what is going on in the song assumes the woman totally wants to get it on. I'm not saying the guy is trying to rape the woman or that he slipped something into her drink. That's because I <b>do</b> take the song in it's historical context and I know it was written by a man for he and his wife to perform at holiday parties. The author of the story that the song tells was telling a story about horny young people in love, not about date rape.<br />
<br />
But of course, in the cultural proxy-war over this song, the issue isn't really whether people want to hear this song or not, or even about the details of this song. It's about people identifying being for or against the song as a flashpoint and taking sides. One comment I saw on a CBC article about this song was that the commenter was going to go listen to the song on repeat.<br />
<br />
That'll show 'em.<br />
<br />
No one cares if you listen to the song in your own home. I like <i>Bullet</i> by the Misfits, a song about JFK's head shattering when the bullet hits, ending with Jackie Onassis having to jerk the singer off to pay the bills. It's pushing the limits of offensive. Their song <i>Last Caress</i> opens up with:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I got something to say<br />
I killed a baby today</blockquote>
In highschool I used to listen to a lot of Ministry. In their song <i>Flashback</i> they sing about tearing off someone's head, shitting down their neck, and <div class="tipped" data-text="Specifically, 'I'm gonna laugh like a motherfucker.'">laughing</div> while they do it. The thing is, I didn't like that song <i>all that much</i>, but I singled it out as one of the songs I listened to when I listened to the <div class="tipped" data-text="The only tracks I really liked that much from Land of Rape and Honey are the first three - Sigmata, The Missing and Deity.">album</div> it was on. While I didn't like the song all that much, I liked that the song had that violent, shocking imagery. I think, as a teenager, indulging in things that I knew would be judged as wrong by others appealed to me.<br />
<br />
By all means, if you actually like <i>Baby it's Cold Outside</i> please listen to it whenever you want. But if grown-ass adults spend their time listening to music that they don't actually like all that much just to upset imaginary villains, then they need to grow the hell up.<br />
<br />
Which brings me to what I <i>really</i> don't like about <i>Baby it's Cold Outside</i>. I can take the fact that "what's in this drink" was really a thing a woman might say in the 40s as a way of suggesting that she ought not be held responsible for her desires. What is a lot harder to take is the part of the narrative that is still part of our culture narrative today. Because I don't actually mind having the above, long conversation with my daughter, punctuated by many interruptions and questions, about the pressures people face in relationships. What bothers me a lot more is <i>not</i> having that conversation and instead having the song be incorporated as one more story into my kid's mental banks of how to navigate romantic situations.<br />
<br />
I don't accept that this is trivial or that it's better to stay above it. The reason we have the concept of "proxy wars" is because <div class="tipped" data-text="I think the cold war was the birth of 'proxy wars' but I'm not a real historian and I'm not checking my facts">during the cold war</div> the USA and the USSR could not engage each other directly for fear of mutual annihilation. If the cost of a true conflict is too damaging or painful, we fight about something else.<br />
<br />
We aren't arguing about <i>Baby it's Cold Outside</i> because either those against it or those for it are taking trivial positions over a song. There is a real, substantive and extremely painful conflict that we aren't willing to have. If we take the song in it's proper historical context we <i>still</i> have a conflict between positions:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Men pursuing women for sex and women being the gatekeepers is natural and fine</li>
<li>Men pursuing women for sex and women being the gatekeepers is toxic; it excuses and promotes rape</li>
</ol>
<br />
I'd love it if we lived in a world where the very gendered message of the song would be missed by children, but we <i>really</i> don't live in the world. Honestly the world of six- and seven-year-olds is even more gendered than it was when I was growing up. The song <i>will</i> be interpretted as an example of how <b>men</b> act and how <b>women</b> act, not as an example of how two people happened to act. And while some of the specifics of the story are anachronistic, the basic idea that it is the man's role to pursue and the woman's role to resist is not. That's still baked into our culture.<br />
<br />
Of course, as I point out in my explanation of the song, the reality of the men-pursue/women-resist dynamic is that it is a man's role to try to get what he wants, consequences be damned, and it is a woman's role to balance what she wants against consequences. In other words, <div class="tipped" data-text="This extends well outside of sexual relationships. If people joking that it would be better if women ran things has ever seemed to have a ring of truth to it to you, it's probably your grasp of this fact telling you that maybe the grownups ought to run things.">it's a man's role to be a child and a woman's role to be a grownup</div>.<br />
<br />
I think it has to be true that the pursue/resist dynamic contributes hugely to our seeming inability to really denounce and punish rape. Men, we think, have to be forgiven for trying to overcome resistance because otherwise no one would ever get laid. Added to that is the idea that men can't be expected to tolerate their own emotions in service of someone else. <div class="tipped" data-text="And men don't have any other emotions.">Horny men rape, angry men punch</div>. There's no, "this is uncomfortable, but I guess I just have to sit with it rather than acting impulsively". That's bullshit we need to unlearn, and it wouldn't hurt us to not teach it to a some future generation.<br />
<br />
Because that is pro-rape. I know that men who like pursuing women and women who like being pursued don't - with exceedingly rare exception - think rape is okay. But when people talk about "rape culture" that is the sort of thing they are talking about. A culture that accepts predatory sexual behaviour as normal, creating a blurry line between rape and consent where no blurry line needs to exist. That people might occasionally misunderstand each other or make bad decisions is an unavoidable part of human existence. That the norm for sex doesn't involve asking the other person what they want is culture, not nature.<br />
<br />
I'm not telling an old man who is sick of "politically correct" culture that he can't listen to his song because <i>someone might be offended</i>. I'm telling him that he can listen to his song if he likes, but that his highschool, his church, his home town, his mother and father, his grandmothers and grandfathers, all raised him to excuse and promote rapists. Odds are good he thinks rapists are some of the worst of the worst people. He believes in a mythical rapist who jumps out of the shadows to attack stray teenage girls with a knife. The idea that he excuses such people is insulting. The idea that his mom excused such people is infuriating.<br />
<br />
It's infuriating but it is also true, and the people defending the song are probably overwhelmingly people who thought the Ghomeshi verdict shows that Ghomeshi was unfairly treated by the media. They probably, more often than not, think we don't have good enough reason to think Brett Kavanaugh assaulted anyone. But if they face the fact that their entire lives have existed within a context of rape-promotion, then they will feel like they have to either repudiate their home town, their parents, their culture; or switch from subtly defending rape to outright defending rape. They can't do the former and I can't accept the latter. That's the mutual annihilation scenario we are avoiding by arguing about an annoying Christmas song from 1944.<br />
<br />
"Centrists" are always talking about how there needs to be a road back for right-wing extremists. We can't call someone a racist because they need to be led gently away from their bad views/behaviour in a way that doesn't make them defensive.<br />
<br />
I hate these faux-intellectual centrist positions. As if radical left wingers and radical right wingers are having a fight over something as trivial as a Christmas song and sensible people would say, "it's just a song." But really, if we want to be sensible, let's just pull all of the sexy Christmas songs. I mean, what if instead of asking about <i>Baby it's Cold Outside</i> I was asked what is going on in <i>Santa Baby</i>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Well, the singer is trying to let Santa know that she is down to fuck if he's willing to spend some cash.</blockquote>
I'm not even down on the singer of <i>Santa Baby</i>. While people might disparage her with a derogatory term like "gold digger" I think reasons people get into relationships can be complex, and we shouldn't judge people who are seeking a partner for status or wealth; or people who are willing to make even more direct exchanges.<br />
<br />
I don't think children need to be shielded from nudity, and I think that kids' questions they have about sex should be answered correctly, even if those answers make the grown-ups uncomfortable. But little kids aren't sexual. Until your body starts sending out the right hormones, <div class="tipped" data-text="When my daughter finally asked a direct question that got her an answer about how the sperm gets to the egg and I answered her, the next thing she said was, 'I don't think I should have asked.' Half an hour later she told me she thought she would be willing to do that for a minute to get a baby.">sex just seems weird and off-putting</div>. I don't think we need to shield children from the existence of sex, but I also think that it's pretty fucking weird to force it on them by putting bawdy humour that we know they won't <i>enjoy</i> in kids movies and christmas carols.<br />
<br />
<i>That's</i> rational. Reflexively taking the middle between two sides is not. Actual synthesis of antithetical positions shows wisdom. Blandly putting yourself in the middle show a desire to conform to a technocratic culture where the social customs of rationality denote status, even when rationality itself fled long ago.<br />
<br />
The idea that we need to be careful about harshly criticizing the pro-rape crowd is buying into the same bad cultural messages that I complained about in the song. If someone is promoting a position that we now recognize is part of rape culture, and we tell them that, we are showing that we believe they will be in charge of their own feelings about that. If we try to hold their hands to get them away from that position, we are saying, "I know you can't manage your own emotions, I'll manage them for you".<br />
<br />
What I described as a "mutual annihilation" above isn't really one. If I eschewed the proxy war over <i>Baby it's Cold Outside</i> and instead targeted someone directly on the toxic male/female, predator/prey dynamic that we are really upset about, I might make it about <i>them</i> instead of about a song. And that might make them angry or hurt. And that might make them defensive. But <div class="tipped" data-text="Not always.">for the most part</div> we outlive our anger and our hurts. No one is going to be annihilated, we're just going to feel bad.<br />
<br />
Let's all fee bad! Let's be pained by the way we've treated one another in our lives. Let's think back with regret on our actions and on the times we justified the actions of others. And then, when that sorrow, pain and regret has run out of energy, let's have fun playing video games. <div class="tipped" data-text="Again, mostly.">Because it will pass</div>.<br />
<br />
I'd rather not have <i>Baby it's Cold Outside</i> played for me without my consent. If someone thinks that's an absurd politically correct position, I'd gladly welcome them to my home with their kids to listen to <i>Falling Back in Fields of Rape</i>. If someone wants to talk about the real issues underlying the "debate" about the song, I'll be happy to hurt their feelings.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-37283365518637720662019-02-11T13:52:00.001-08:002019-02-21T13:12:07.460-08:00Selfishness is as bad as everyone already knew it is<b>I'm going through some old posts I wrote and never posted and posting them. So look for some posts about articles and events from months back.</b><br />
<br />
<a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Frev0000111">A study published in July in Psychological Review</a> identifies what the authors call the Dark Factor of Personality (via <a href="https://boingboing.net/2018/10/01/the-road-to-sadism.html">Boing Boing</a>). I've previously read about the "dark triad" of personality types which were masochism, machiavellianism and narcissism. This study finds that those, and other personality types that tend to lead to "ethically, morally and socially questionable behaviour" all stem from one common factor: the tendency to maximize one's own utility accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications.<br />
<br />
If you got into a time machine and traveled back ten thousand years and told the pre-civilization humans you met that you were from the future with a dire warning: "Selfishness is the root of evil!" those humans would let you know that they already knew that. Everyone knows that.<br />
<br />
John Nash, an important game theorist reportedly had trouble understanding why people didn't play games the way his theories suggest they should be played. Adam Smith, the progenitor of economics, thought that maximizing personal utility was the root of all human activity. Ayn Rand appeared to think that maximizing personal utility <i>ought</i> to be the root of human activity and that people who disagreed with that are holding you down. Gordon Gekko said "Greed is good."<br />
<br />
John Nash had schizophrenia with paranoia. Gordon Gekko is a fictional symbol of unrestrained greed. I'm not sure what <div class="tipped" data-text="Actually I think I know this one, I'm just not saying right now.">
Smith</div> and <div class="tipped" data-text="Communism related trauma?">Rand's</div> excuses are.<br />
<br />
But the study doesn't really say that greed is the root of all evil. And I'm not just saying that "greed is the root of all evil" is hyperbolic and the study is careful. I'm going all in on translating the meaning of the study into an inaccurate but digestible bit of wisdom. It's just that greed isn't enough. To get to the root of all evil you need greed <b>and</b> beliefs that serve as justifications.<br />
<br />
Often when people try to apply game theory to the economy and get evil-sounding results, they say that greed is just human nature. In the sense that they mean it that is probably false, but let's say it's true in a limited sense - we all sometimes think of ourselves above others or think of ourselves the exclusion of others. That in itself isn't enough to lead to us being assholes, though. What breaks through the asshole barrier is when we think that the near universality of these thoughts is a reason why those thoughts are okay to have.<br />
<br />
It's not the human trait of being selfishness that's the problem, it's the <div class="tipped" data-text="Also, it's the selfishness.">people saying that trait isn't a problem who are the problem.</div>
<br />
<br />Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-9743801499048755532019-01-31T09:26:00.002-08:002019-01-31T09:26:48.801-08:00DepersonalizationMany or maybe most people experience "depersonalization" or "derealization" at some point in their lives. Depersonalization is a detachment from yourself, or a detachment between your mind and body, or even observing yourself as an outsider. Derealization is a detachment between you and your sense of reality. It most often happens when people experience a trauma, like being a car accident or finding out someone has died unexpectedly.<br />
<br />
If you've ever experienced these you might have described it like this:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>I felt like it was happening to someone else, not me</li>
<li>I felt like I was dreaming, that this wasn't reality</li>
<li>I felt like my body was going through the motions, but I was somewhere else</li>
<li>I heard the words I was saying, but I didn't feel like I was saying them</li>
<li>Time seemed to slow down and sounds became hollow</li>
</ul>
<div>
These experiences aren't delusions, and the person experiencing is still aware of reality.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It turns out there is a disorder in the DSM-IV called Depersonalization Disorder or Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder. I took an online screening test:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1etdAIaPbv4/XFMlH2S6olI/AAAAAAAAA-c/Vjv92rFpiYguFuLWWmHDOH_1EN6FSdiGgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/screening%2Btest.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1etdAIaPbv4/XFMlH2S6olI/AAAAAAAAA-c/Vjv92rFpiYguFuLWWmHDOH_1EN6FSdiGgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/screening%2Btest.png" /></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In the past I wrote about how I found resources that suggested I might have Borderline Personality Disorder. The description of the disorder in a manual I read about treatment of it fit me, but I wouldn't have really qualified under the criteria. This time, I think I've <i>really</i> found the disorder that described my experiences.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But whether I fit the disorder or not, I certainly experience depersonalization nearly all the time.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
What's neat about this is that it also gives me a way to talk about my experiences to other people that I've never had before. If they've ever had a sudden trauma and felt a sort of, "I'm not here, this isn't happening" feeling in the wake of it, I can say, "That's how I feel <i>nearly all the time</i>."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I really mean that, nearly all the time. From the screening test, questions I answered "many times" or "almost all the time" to included:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>I have gone through the motions of living while the real me was far away from what was happening to me.</li>
<li>I feel that I can turn off or detach from my emotions.</li>
<li>I have purposely hurt or cut myself so that I could feel pain or that I am real.</li>
<li>I have had the feeling that I was a stranger to myself or have not recognized myself in the mirror.</li>
<li>My whole body or parts of it have seemed unreal or foreign to me.</li>
<li>I have felt as if words flowed from my mouth but they were not in my control.</li>
</ul>
<div>
This affects all aspects of my life. I don't feel like a person, I feel like a puppeteer, making this ungainly thing that has it's own stupid feelings about everything go through with the things that I need it to get done.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This has also helped me understand that this isn't normal. Lots of people have probably said, at some point, that they were just "going through the motions" at work or some similar phrase. But for them that phrase means that they have lost interest in what they are doing, for me it always evoked allowing the part of you that you don't really regard as you to complete tasks without supervision despite the fact that that part of you can hardly be trusted to do so. I did this last week and when I went back to review it my writing was full of grotesque mistakes and half sentences that abruptly morphed into other half sentences. I hope I haven't done a lot of that here. It's hard for me to tell.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Back when I read <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> in university it occurred to me that I was no a human being, and it's really only this month that I've finally solidified what I must have meant by that.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
A human being is a synthesis of many competing sets of instructions: nucleic DNA, mitochondrial DNA, lived experience, exposure to viruses/bacteria/other environmental effects that shape development, etc. But when I talk about myself, when I live my life, the thing I call me is no that synthesis. It's a disembodied rational thinker that has a hostile and domineering relationship with a homo sapiens organism.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This also explains my challenging relationship with the language of mental health and wellness. If you had a car where the engine was disconnected from the wheels, you would look at it from the outside and say the <i>car</i> is disordered. But from the perspective of the engine, which isn't invested in a car it has never seen itself as a proper part of, there is no disorder and maybe being connected to the wheels wouldn't be such a good thing.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I think it also explains the distance I experience from other people when processing traumatic events like terrorist attacks. It is common for other people to experience traumatic events through a different lens than they see their normal lives in part because their brain presents those events to them in a different way. Since I already dissociate so frequently, trauma seems like a natural extension of normal life as opposed to something distinct and different.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Of course just like every other disorder I've ever seemed to have, the theory for <i>why</i> this happens to people runs through childhood trauma. My life would make a ton more sense to psychiatrists if I had been abused as a child, but I just don't think it happened.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Since my therapist had a mild stroke I haven't really had anyone to talk this out with much. But I still think I'm really on to something.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I guess I sort of casually brought up self-harm in this post and I don't know whether I've really been open about that in the past. </div>
Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-71306879885891732732018-07-09T17:12:00.000-07:002018-07-25T19:16:39.428-07:00We're Wrong About Basically EverythingPavlov's dogs were a cultural touchstone of my youth. <div class="tipped" data-text="A bastardized version of if, anyway.">Everyone knew the story</div>. Pavlov had a bunch of dogs. Before serving food, he'd ring a bell. Later, he observered that if he rang the bell they would start salivating, even if no food was present. The dogs were "conditioned" to have a physical response that is supposed to be associated with food in response to an audio cue.<br />
<br />
This is part of the development of the theory of classical conditioning. By repeatedly artificially pairing stimuli in the environment, a thing with <div class="tipped" data-text="Including people, of course">a brain</div> can be made to pair those stimuli within their body. Turn on a light and puff air in face enough times and eventually I'll flinch when the light comes on even if the air puff doesn't come. The mechanism for this has a well understood neurological basis. Classical conditioning works. You can produce a behaviour by associating it with a reward and extinguish a behaviour by associating it with a punishment.<br />
<br />
In the 1970s a new kind of "conservativism" rose in the English-speaking world. Maybe in the rest of the world too, but it certainly happened in the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia. There were people who were very concerned about the debts that were being run up by societies. They believed that being frugal and living within our means was an important value. They didn't want to pass down the growing debt to future generations.<br />
<br />
But it wasn't just a complaint about debt, it was a new way of solving the problem. Thanks to a new school of economic thinking, they believed that they could reduce government deficits by reducing taxes. The notion, expressed by the "Laffer Curve" was that when taxes go above a certain threshold, the incentive to avoid taxes becomes too high. When taxes are lower, the reward for working is greater. Therefore, people will work more and pay more taxes. At the same time, social programs should be reduced, as they provide incentive to be lazy.<br />
<br />
"People respond to incentives" is a key tenet of economics. This isn't meant to be a a grade-school simplication of economic theory. Try typing it into a search engine. You'll find articles written by serious people, you'll find free university courses, you'll find it's a real idea that real economists rely on to think about the world. Take continuing education classes at universities and you'll have economists telling you this as an important part of economics.<br />
<br />
So drawing on simple conditioning, providing incentives, we eliminated national debts over the 1980s and stopped passing on the burden of debt to our children. Now people live within their means as individuals and as societies.<br />
<br />
Okay, so that last part is the opposite of what happened. What went wrong?<br />
<br />
Let's go back to Pavlov's dogs for a moment. First of all, it's time to hate Pavlov, because he didn't use bells, he used various stimuli including electric shocks. But I don't say that just to slag some guy who died close to 100 years ago. I say that because it's worth remembering that at the time there would have been no ethical guidelines that told you not to torture animals to do psychological experiments. I'm sure that in part there were no such guidelines because the whole idea of being an ethical scientist didn't really catch fire until the latter half of the 20th century. But that aside, people apparently just weren't horrified or repulsed by the idea of shocking dogs. <div class="tipped" data-text="This means you pretty much have to assume they didn't.">You have to wonder whether they</div> thought of dogs as sentient beings that had their own experiences.<br />
<br />
That's sort of important to the whole process. In psychology and neurology there are people running into people making substantial chicken-egg problems out of neurological changes and psychological changes. The dogs can be described as being "conditioned" to associate two stimuli in a very mechanistic way. Then, when the knowledge of conditioning is used on human subjects and it works the same way, we might be tempted to write off our conscious thoughts on the matter as after-the-fact rationalizing of a conscious mind that believed itself to be the boss of the body.<br />
<br />
Pavlov's experiments started because he noticed that dogs salivated when the people who were in charge of feeding them showed up. The white lab coat was a trigger that food was coming. <div class="tipped" data-text="It's not weird, but only because of that previously discussed dogs-aren't-thinking-things perspective.">It's weird to me</div> that this would inspire someone to think of automaton-like behavioural modification when there is another considerably more obvious explanation: dog's aren't stupid.<br />
<br />
Thinking about food makes you salivate. Writing about dogs salivating while thinking about food is making me salivate because I'm thinking about food. Unless the dogs were stupid beyond belief, it would be impossible for them to not recognize the people who feed them, to not know where their food comes from. Unless the dogs are essentially capable of no thought at all, they will think of food when they see people whose job it is to bring them food. The entire process is explained by saying, "Well, if someone rings the dinner bell at dinner time, then when the bell is rung, you will think, 'Oh, it's dinner time.'"<br />
<br />
It's not just intelligence. It's also trust. Dogs don't just know that dinner comes when the bell rings. They know that <i>the humans</i> bring dinner when the bell rings. If the humans ring the bell and dinner doesn't come, the dogs will be confused. If it happens several times, they might start to think the humans aren't really all that reliable at delivering dinner. They might wonder if the bell meant dinner or if it meant something else and dinner just used to happen around the same time. They might be angry at the humans. And of course they might still salivate because one way or another they are thinking about dinner, even if it's just, "I remember we used to get dinner when we heard that bell."<br />
<br />
I'm going off speculating that dogs would think of these interactions the way that humans would. I have no reason to believe that. Regardless of the actual mental processes of dogs, the point is that a dog doesn't simply react to a signal - or to a reward or punishment - it also <i>has feelings</i> about that signal, reward or punishment. And humans certainly do. The element of how you feel about the person offering you incentives plays a big role in how you choose to react to incentives.<br />
<br />
The idea that we can condition humans to behave in a certain way by exposing them to stimulus gets far too much credit. Of course it can be done. But the moment the human becomes aware that another human is providing the stimulus for the purpose of conditioning them, all bets are off. The recipient of the conditioning then has feelings about whether they care to be conditioned or not. They may intentionally rebel just to prove a point, or they may start looking for ways to game the system to get the reward without doing the desired behaviour. They may do exactly what is expected of them, but only because they have thought about whether they want to or not and have decided the incentive is worth it. It becomes a contest between the conditioner and the conditionee and there is no guarantee at all that the conditioner is smarter or better at the contest.<br />
<br />
It's a pretty good bet you can get someone to do something they don't really mind doing by paying them some amount of money. To extrapolate from that to the idea that you can generally control or predict human by providing the right incentives is idiotic and provably false.<br />
<br />
I had <div class="tipped" data-text="Not a friend. I knew them for a time. But if you write that you once knew a person who grew up in India there is a lot of ambiguity in the statement. It's unclear whether you are saying there was a time when you fulfilled the criteria of 'knows a person who grew up in India' or if you are meaning to refer to a specific person you knew, and then to mention as a fact about that person that they grew up in India. I mean the latter, the former being weird, dehumanizing and seemingly racist.">a friend</div> who grew up in India in the 80s. Corporal punishment of children was common; when you misbehaved you got the strap. This person told me that they and their friends got the strap every day. That was India in the 80s but it was also many other places in the world for huge swaths of history. The same "bad kid" got the same corporal punishment every single day, sometimes multiple times a day.<br />
<br />
Every day they misbehaved, every day they were punished for it. Every day the administrators gave the strap, every day they got the same misbehaviour. Why didn't the disincentive of punishment stop the kids from misbehaving? Why didn't the disincentive of misbehaving kids stop the administrators from giving the strap?<br />
<br />
Anyone who has paid attention to children know that's just not how it works. And we don't change that much when we grow up. We easily get struck in maladaptive cycles with one another instead of changing our behaviour to create a different outcome. We don't respond to the punishments and rewards that others try to impose on us, we emulate their behaviour, imposing punishments and rewards back on them. People do respond to incentives, they respond to incentives by <b>learning that offering incentives is the right way for humans interact with one another</b>. They emulate the incentive-offering behaviour, and regard one another as dogs, rats, insects or mould - however far down the mental-capacity ladder we have to go to get something that has behaviour that can actually be programmed with electric shocks.<br />
<br />
So I have my own Pavlovian reaction. When I hear "people respond to incentives" I immediately roll my eyes and/or clench my fists in rage. It's utterly stupid. People who say, "people respond to incentives" can't use that information to successfully predict anything. It's an empty phrase that predisposes us to treat each other badly.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-90941249173498788052018-05-29T11:44:00.001-07:002018-07-09T17:13:20.053-07:00Sustaining InjusticeCanada should legalize cannabis pretty soon now, supposedly this summer. I've been a long time supporter of legalizing cannabis, so I'm very happy they are doing this. I plan on going to my government-run cannabis-selling shop, making a purchase, and using cannabis <div class="tipped" data-text="Yeah, I'm that person.">for the first time in my life.</div>
<br><br>
But being a very negative person, I tend to see what is going wrong more than what is going right. And on this front, despite following the right overall plan, my federal and provincial governments are doing a hell of a lot wrong.
<br><br>
The War on Drugs was an American policy started under Nixon in order to attack American democracy. Prohibition and restriction of intoxicants has been around far longer than Nixon, but highlighting drug abuse as a particular societal ill and treating that illness with long prison sentences was a way to try to arrest hippies and black Americans for felonies. In many states a felony conviction strips you of your right to vote, so by making a common and nearly harmless drug a serious offense, Nixon could suppress the votes of people who didn't tend to like Nixon.
<br><br>
It worked. America has a massive prison population that is extremely disproportionately black. <a href="http://newjimcrow.com/">The New Jim Crow</a>, which talks about mass incarceration as the post-civil-rights-movement tool of choice to maintain racism, opens with a story of Jarvious Cotton who cannot vote, whose father and grandfather and great grandfather could not vote. At some point his ancestors couldn't vote because they were slaves. One of his ancestors was killed by racists when he attempted to vote. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he has a felony conviction for cannabis possession. One way or another, America will keep political power away from its black citizens.
<br><br>
America exported this policy all over the world. I feel very safe saying that Canada's laws against cannabis are largely what they are because Nixon wanted to suppress the black vote. In Canada this isn't about disenfranchisement. Canadians with criminal convictions don't lose their right to vote. But whether Canada started it's own war on drugs as an explicitly racist campaign or not, its effect is racist. It's non-white Canadians who bear the brunt of the enforcement of drug policy. After all, there's more to being convicted of a crime than <div class="tipped" data-text="The actually going to prison part is a good example.">losing the right to vote</div>. And people with criminal convictions are marginalized by Canada <div class="tipped" data-text="Being barred from some careers, for instance.">in other ways</div>.
<br><br>
So are we legalizing cannabis as a way of righting this wrong? Well, no. We are legalizing cannabis because wealthy white people who have had effectively legal access to cannabis for more than a decade just want to recognize their lived reality in law. They'd rather be able to google the closest place to buy it than to have to find a seller through a word-of-mouth network.
<br><br>
Canadian legalization of cannabis is not about trying to right a historical wrong. They aren't going to open up the prison doors and let everyone who sold or possessed the drug go free. It might be easier to apply for a pardon for possession, but it will still be a pardon. The rare child of a wealthy family who got caught in a sting that was intended for people of colour will have no problem convincing a board to expunge their conviction. Many of the people most abused by the law won't be able to afford <div class="tipped" data-text="Interestingly the website for applying for pardons doesn't tell you what the application fee is. I'm sure at some point it would, but not until after you enter your information. It's almost like they don't want to let people know how expensive it is. I understand it is hundreds of dollars.">the application fee</div>.
<br><br>
And for people who applaud this purely as a person freedom issue, it's not going to work out that way. Many small dealers will be made worse off by the change in legislation. They will be competing with a government monopoly selling cannabis <div class="tipped" data-text="Or so I've heard, I recently heard from someone else it might actually be more expensive than the current black market. I guess we'll find out.">cheap</div> specifically to run them out of business.
<br><br>
The black market will still persist. The black market is doing fine in Colorado where cannabis has been legal for a while now. That's partly because it's not <i>really</i> legal - it's legal under state law but not under federal law. It's partly because it's safer for organized crime to grow cannabis in Colorado and smuggle it to neighbouring states where it is illegal than to grow it in those states. Some people just like their old dealers and didn't want to go to the new, legal dispensaries. But most people would rather buy milk at the grocery store even if they knew a guy who could hook them up with discounted milk on Friday night. The dispensaries are doing just fine.
<br><br>
In Canada if you like your dealer will you be able to keep your dealer? No, they will face fines and charges. Imagine finding out that your the illegal product sold by your small, illegal business was being legalized, only to find out that it will still be illegal for <i>you</i> to sell it. I'll be very interested to see whether the bulk of those fines and charges are handed out to black and indigenous Canadians.
<br><br>
I try not to see malice where there is more likely incompetence, but it sure feels like the government must have put together a committee to figure out how to maintain cannabis-related institutional racism while making the drug legal.
<br><br>
The right way to legalize cannabis would have been to retroactively strike the criminal laws against it the first week they were in power. That would have resulted in a chaotic and difficult transition. As much as we should avoid such transitions in public policy, we should also avoid the incarcerating tens of thousands of people for the colour of their skin. For me, the latter principle takes precedence over the former. Unfortunately Canada's governments at both the federal and provincial level disagree.
Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-33870806704307813182018-04-19T13:31:00.000-07:002018-04-20T09:49:43.998-07:00Oracle Review - Hand of Justice and Tourach's GateI was just about to start complaining about how <div class="tipped" data-magicid="2396">Arcum's Weathervane</div> doesn't put counters on lands, and I realized that Fallen Empires was also a Magic set. It's time to do a conjoined review of two very different cards:<br />
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<b>Hand of Justice and Tourach's Gate</b><br />
Here's the Oracle wording for these two cards.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Tap, Tap three untapped white creatures you control: Destroy target creature.</span></blockquote>
And<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Enchant land you control</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Sacrifice a Thrull: Put three time counters on Tourach's Gate.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">At the beginning of your upkeep, remove a time counter from Tourach's Gate. If there are no time counters on Tourach's Gate, sacrifice it.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Tap enchanted land: Attacking creatures you control get +2/-1 until end of turn. Activate this ability only if enchanted land is untapped.</span></blockquote>
There's obviously only one thing that links these two cards - they both tap something that isn't them as part of an activation cost. And there's something that links them to maybe hundreds of others cards - they do so with an unnecessary clause about the thing being untapped to begin with.<br />
<br />
Every single card that requests that you tap another permanent to pay an activation cost either specifies that the permanent in question must be untapped, or specifies that you cannot play the ability unless the permanent is untapped. This goes right up to a 2018 set where <div class="tipped" data-magicid="439821">Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca</div> says, "Tap another untapped merfolk you control:" as the activation cost of the ability.<br />
<br />
Why specify an untapped zombie or an untapped white creature? Why say that the ability can't be played unless the land is untapped?<br />
<br />
Once again, I think we have to go back and think about <div class="tipped" data-magicid="1824">Maze of Ith</div> and <div class="tipped" data-magicid="566">Serra Angel</div>. After accepting that tapping an tapped creature means doing nothing and untapping and untapped creature means doing nothing, Wizards ran into a problem with the card <div class="tipped" data-magicid="4738">Tradewind Rider</div>. The rider said that you had to tap two other creatures to activate it. Players pointed out that if you are instructed to tap a creature and you can't, you do nothing, so if you tapped Tradewind Rider with two other tapped creatures, the cost would be "Tap, do nothing:" and then you get the effect.<br />
<br />
Right?<br />
<br />
The entire argument was silly on it's face but it passed muster at the time with the rules team who issued errata. Since then, the rules have been clarified in a way that obviously obviates the need for extraneous "untapped" on our cards, but they just keep putting it on.<br />
<br />
By the same logic that required "untapped", if you had a <div class="tipped" data-magicid="215092">Platinum Emperion</div> and a <div class="tipped" data-magicid="383157">Yawgmoth's Bargain</div> you could draw as many cards as you like. You can't pay 1 life because your life total can't change, if something told you to lose 1 life you'd do nothing, therefore you have to do nothing to draw.<br />
<br />
In fact, the precise same argument would justify activating an ability with a tap symbol in its cost while the permanent with that ability is already tapped. Let's check out the definition of the tap symbol from the comprehensive rules:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Tap Symbol<br />The tap symbol {T} in an activation cost means “Tap this permanent.” See rule 107.5.</span></blockquote>
Yeah, it just means to tap the permanent. It doesn't mean "Tap this untapped permanent". Then how do we know we can't activate that ability when the permanent is already tapped?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">117.3. A player can’t pay a cost unless he or she has the necessary resources to pay it fully. For example, a player with only 1 life can’t pay a cost of 2 life, and <span style="background-color: yellow;">a permanent that’s already tapped can’t be tapped to pay a cost</span>. See rule 202, “Mana Cost and Color,” and rule 602, “Activating Activated Abilities.”</span></blockquote>
Even though it's just an example, it's written there explicitly in the rules. Hand of Justice doesn't need to specify that the creatures are untapped because you can't pay a cost if you can't do whatever thing the cost tells you to do.<br />
<br />
A permanent that is tapped can't be tapped and a permanent than is untapped can't be untapped. When an effect tells you to do something and you can't, you shrug and move on to the next thing the effect says to do. When a cost tells you to do something and you can't, you can't pay the cost.<br />
<br />
These are the rules of magic that I intuited in 1995, these are the rules of magic that are written in the current comprehensive rules. If we want reminder text to say that the permanent you tapped to pay the cost had to be untapped then put it in, even though that would be the equivalent of putting in "<i>(If you can't pay 3 life you can't activate this ability)</i>" on Tavern Swindler.<br />
<br />
Hand of Justice, Tourach's Gate, and a lot of other cards that have been printed as recently as this year all get:<br />
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<br />Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-51818113138901995222018-03-20T11:52:00.002-07:002018-03-20T11:52:40.355-07:00UltrasnobberyIf one thing defines my life, it is finding people who are being snobby because they think they are smart and out-snobbing them to make them feel the way they are trying to make other people feel.<br />
<br />
I had this idea for a book about the idea of god. I'm clearly an atheist by any sensible definition. But the point of my book wouldn't be to say, "Hey, jerks, there's no God, stop doing all that stupid God stuff." No, people who believe in a god of one sort or another have no shortage of books to say that to them. Instead, I'd being going after ignostics.<br />
<br />
Ignoticism is the idea that any discussion of God's existence is meaningless because the term "God" is not sufficiently well defined to discuss. It's an extremely snobby point of view held by people who just want to tell other people that what they are talking about isn't worth talking about. I don't know what could be more infuriating to me.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I've got the general outline of the book. I've got eleven chapters mapped out and the argument running through them in my head.<br />
<br />
But writing books is daunting hard work with no payoff. It would be my third. My philosophy manifesto, world changing as it was, didn't exactly pick up steam. I've been rewriting the second half of my novel about a magical girl from a magical world who finds herself in mundane Toronto for about ten years.<br />
<br />
I want to share my prophetic genius with the world, but it seems very hard to find the time. Maybe, though, the idea of sticking it to some snobs will motivate me.<br />
<br />
It's hard to say.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-16581905022159750912018-03-19T08:56:00.002-07:002018-03-19T08:56:40.350-07:00Where the Line isI literally have a half-dozen half-written posts from the last month and a half but here I am starting a new one. It's because I've had an epiphany on why free speech for white supremacists is such a problematic issue.<br />
<br />
We all agree that killing people is a net negative. We agree on that to such an extent that my tepid description of it a "net negative" makes it sound monstrous because it doesn't convey the extent to which I should condemn killing people. We also recognize that there are various reasons why people kill other people:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>The killer is angry that the victim was cheating on them</li>
<li>The killer is disturbed that the victim is unresponsive to their demands to stop eating the face of another person who appears to be unconscious, maybe dead</li>
</ul>
<div>
So killing people is a bad thing but we are able to draw a line and say: on this side of the line where you are just struggling to deal with your anger the killing is unacceptable; on this side of the line where a possibly-still-alive person is being mutilated by someone who has been driven to psychosis by bath salts, killing is acceptable.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Let's make a five point scale. At five we have situations that are so over-the-top that we all agree that shooting someone is pretty much the best possible option. From <div class="tipped" data-text="Why do I bother having three numbers that mean the same thing? Obviously to give a sense that there is a high bar to cross before you have a good reason to kill someone. You can't just have a two, you need a five!">one to three</div> we have varying degrees of sympathy for the shooter, but we still find it very clear cut that shooting someone was unacceptable. At four we run into the problem cases where we understand why the shooting was justified in the mind of the shooter but think they ought to have made more of an effort to escape the situation, or we think that a reasonable person ought to have known better, or some other set of facts makes us question whether it was justified.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Let's imagine a similar scale for suppressing political speech, for trying to deny people a platform which to spread their views. Just like killing, it's weighted towards allowing people to say what they want. A one might be "I haven't decided who I'm going to vote for." and a two or three might be, "Ice in November? What happened to Global Warming?"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
A five would include things that are obviously already illegal. If you specifically ask people to kill your someone of an opposing political view or threaten to kill them yourself, for example.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
A lot of people who argue that white supremacists should have the same speech platform as the Green party seem to think that advocating genocide of a group of people based on their ethnicity, religion or skin colour is a four and we are haggling over how far we ought to go. Actually, a lot of them seem to think it's a three.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It's a five.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I've made the joking-not-joking analogy that if we want to protect my freedom to cut vegetables we have to protect someone's freedom to stab people. Free use of knives. That analogy may seem unfair, but that is the degree to which people who say that white supremacist recruitment events are just another kind of free speech sound insane to me.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
They think that banning the Communist Party's speech is the equivalent of shooting someone because they killed your father, while banning nazi speech is the equivalent of shooting someone because you felt afraid when your level of fear was totally irrational and you weren't really in danger. I agree with them on the Communist Party bit, but to me banning nazi speech is shooting that drug-addled face-eater. It's shooting the blood-axe-wielding berserker running for the maternity ward. The line is <i>way over there</i> and there is no question that we are across it.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So while they think they are arguing principles of free speech, a tacit part of their argument is that promoting genocide just isn't <i>that</i> harmful. It's not harmful the way saying, <div class="tipped" data-text="Incitement of a specific crime.">"smash every window in this place"</div> would be, or the way that <div class="tipped" data-text="Though I hope to hell that any free speech advocate I'd be arguing with would think copyright laws overstep in their balance between allowing private profit and suppressing expression. I would never assume a person actually thinks drawing Mickey is more harmful to society's interests than recruiting the next Dylann Roof. I'll wait for them to say it themselves.">drawing an unauthorized picture of Mickey Mouse</div> would be.</div>
Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-11646500052683633612018-01-31T09:32:00.001-08:002018-01-31T10:21:37.970-08:00Bill Maher is a Small, Skinny DumbassI don't watch a lot of <div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="I typed this because I couldn't remember it was called "Real Time" and decided to leave it that way because it gives credit to my claim that I don't watch it that much despite the fact that I watch plenty of clips of it on youtube.">Bill Maher's TV show</div>. I don't watch it mostly because I find him hideously smug and overly concerned with stupid issues. He loves to act like political correctness is ruining things. He also loves to make fun of people for being fat.<br />
<br />
I also don't watch it because he's short. If I were standing next to him I could put my chin on his head. <div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="I'll get to the obvious untruth of this later.">I don't respect short men</div>.<br />
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<div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="I think this is probably always the case.">In Bill Maher's mind he's doing the right thing</div>. He talks about the obesity epidemic and how being fat is tied to diseases and how this is a health crisis. He says you shouldn't support people who make bad life decisions in their bad life decisions, that it makes sense to shame people for things that should be shameful.<br />
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<div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="I probably wouldn't be connected to this issue otherwise, it doesn't exactly get press.">Through my twitter</div> feed I'm sometimes exposed to articles on fatphobia. If you aren't attuned to this issue you might not really know what is going on out there. Fat people endure mockery by strangers, they endure nasty looks and comments, they even endure physical violence from people who find fat people's bodies disgusting. Of course there's more to it than being fat. Fat men aren't going to take the same kind of harassment as fat women, for example.<br />
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The idea that there is something acceptable or right about treating people this way is stupid. Of course I'm sure Bill Maher would agree with that. He'd say it's terrible to assault someone because you disapprove of their body. He'd say that calling out people on his show for living unhealthy lifestyles isn't the same as making nasty comments to strangers or hitting them. Of course since he's a defender of free speech absolutism there's no point making a comparison between insulting fat people and insulting any other marginalized group and how that promotes this kind of behaviour.<br />
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I was watching clips of the View one day and I saw Trevor Noah. Joy Behar brought up the issue of political correctness and how you can't say anything these days without someone getting offended. Trevor Noah took a different view:<br />
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Maybe it's a good thing, he said. Earlier in his career he used to make jokes about fat people and he thought he was being edgy, but really he was just being mean. Being mean and propping up the status quo. Maybe it's good that people are learning to be better.<br />
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If I have an opinion on an issue and I'm told that one of Bill Maher and Trevor Noah agrees with me, while the other disagrees, I'm going to be thinking, "Oh please! Please let me be on Trevor Noah's side!" For one thing, Trevor Noah is <div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="I don't mean to imply that Bill Maher was ever funny">still funny</div>.<br />
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I don't know why I'm so fixated on Bill Maher with this. Fatphobia is baked into our culture pretty deep. It's just that I wish I could have five minutes to talk to him about his position.<br />
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I remember when I was young people criticized the term "homophobia." They said it wasn't fear, it was hate. I think the affix "-phobia" to describe bigotry is often right on the mark. We used to joke that all those bible thumping Republican pastors going after gay people were themselves in the closet. Years later when one after another was "caught" I started to wonder if it was really a joke at all. Lots of people don't like gay people for stupid reasons, but they don't all found a megachurch so they can have a platform to talk about it every day. It seems it takes someone who is afraid of their own sexuality to make a life-time cause of really going after other people's.<br />
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The "-phobia" affix seems even more apt for fatphobia. The story our society tells us is that all of us have the potential to be fat or not fat. Almost all of us like cake. So <div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="Don't read too much into my use of "we" here. It includes a certain group of people who will be described as I go forward, but doesn't include everyone.">we</div>'re in the position of the person who is attracted to people of the same sex but who has convinced themselves that this is wrong. If we give in to temptation we become something we don't want to be - something we know we will be judged for being. The temptation is always there.<br />
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So I think calling Bill Maher "fatphobic" is probably right on the money. I bet he is terribly afraid of <i>being</i> fat. Terribly afraid that if he doesn't do the things that make him thin he will be subject to the kind of judgment that he currently dishes out. I don't think a person would go on TV to loudly proclaim that shaming fat people was a good thing if they weren't afraid of being shamed for being fat themselves.<br />
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Bill Maher presents his idea of shaming fat people like it's revolutionary. Like we now have lots of scientific evidence that <div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="This is probably true, since fat people are probably regularly mistreated by a medical system that blames whatever is wrong with them on fat rather than investigating the cause the way it would for a thin person.">being fat is a hazard to your health</div>. We have more and more people who are getting fatter and fatter. We have a rise in weight-associated diseases. So it's time we all finally get on the bandwagon and shame fat people!<br />
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But Bill Maher probably made fun of fat people as a child, or was made fun of for being fat as a child. He probably made fun of fat people as a teenager or was made fun or for being fat as a teenager. He probably refused to consider dating women because he thought they were too fat. He probably hit on a woman and then when she turned him down <div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="Do you know that this year he said on the air that the reason men sexually abuse women is that they aren't getting sex from their wives?">pretended that she was too fat for him</div>.<br />
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People made fun of fat kids when I was kid. People said girls and women were sexually unattractive because they were fat when I was a teenager and when I was in university. Due to my inability to take my own perspective seriously I once followed a societal script and deeply hurt someone I cared about because of their weight when in reality I actually thought they were beautiful. I've heard people my age imply that fat women don't get raped because they aren't attractive enough.<br />
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<b>Making fun of fat people is not some revolutionary act, Bill. It's just being the same kind of zero-empathy dipshit that you were <div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="I don't actually want to paint all five year olds with the same brush, many of them are quite empathetic. But it's certainly an age where you can be forgiven for having little empathy; it's the job of the adults around you to teach you.">when you were five.</div></b><br />
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If fat shaming made people thinner, there wouldn't be many fat people around. It's been the policy of our culture to shame fat during the entire growth of the "obesity epidemic" that Bill Maher is so concerned about. And that's not some coincidence, at least some of <div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="Unlike my bizarre "we" above, this "us" is actually meant to include me.">us</div> are fat because we use sugary foods to medicate our mental health issues. Shaming is not a very good solution for that. That's the kind of how-things-work-in-real-life thing that I'd think Bill Maher could understand. There's no always a straight line between incentive and outcome. He gets that making weed illegal doesn't make people stop smoking weed.<br />
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And I don't want you to read that paragraph and think I'm buying into the idea that being fat is a bad thing we should minimize. Fatphobia means a lot of bad policy. It means we measure health far too much using <div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="BMI">a very bad proxy for health</div>. It means that we when we talk about "ideal weight" we define it to be a weight that is statistically <div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="Doctors want you to be between 20 and 25. If you are at 20 and you believe that statistical associations between BMI and longevity can be extrapolated to the individual, you should eat more ice cream. Maximum longevity is 27 and dipping below 20 increases your risk of death at a much steeper rate than going above 30.">not even maximizing longevity</div>. Not to mention that the way we measure fat, and research into how being fat affects health <div class="tipped" style="display: inline" data-text="I don't think my blog readers are overly sensitive to the r-word, but if you need me to clarify, racism often finds its way into medical research when research is done almost entirely on white people being and then applied to people of all racial groups without considering that there may be differences. Similarly medical research is often sexist.">is racist</div>. We have a lot more to gain, healthwise, by accepting people's bodies than we do by warping our assessment of health around a bigoted classification of bodies.<br />
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Which is all totally secondary to the fact that we are dehumanizing people, and we have been our whole lives, and we are pretending it's okay. If you eat something you think you shouldn't and say you feel fat, you are saying to everyone who <i>is</i> fat that you use their body as a proxy for "bad". If you are prone to do that, try doing something you think you shouldn't and mournfully saying you feel like a member of a racial group that has been stereotyped as stupid. You probably won't try that since it would make you feel awful about yourself. What was that nonsense about short people being untrustworthy that I wrote near the beginning of this post?<br />
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Reasons why some people are fat and some people are thin are extremely complex. That cultural idea I mentioned that people choose whether to be fat or thin may not be quite as nonsensical as the insistence from some bigots that people choose whether to be gay, but it's in that direction.<br />
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I don't think Bill Maher is all that stupid. But intelligence can be just as useful in rationalizing a bias as it can be in examining it. Of course he gets why making weed illegal is bad policy but doesn't get how shaming fat people is bad. He smokes weed, he isn't fat. It's all about what works for him.<br />
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You don't have to be stupid to be a dumbass.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-5961966702445782052018-01-30T10:30:00.000-08:002018-01-30T10:32:16.845-08:00Schrödinger's AxiomSchrödinger didn't believe in Schrödinger's Cat. He created the story of the cat to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the idea of superposition. Einstein praised his thought on the matter, noting that, "Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation."<br />
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The wikipedia entry on the cat has brief summaries of numerous other interpretations of superposition and collapse, some of which I'm pretty familiar with but some of which I'd never heard of. My favourite is the Relational Interpretation which is summarized by saying:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To the cat, the wavefunction of the apparatus has appeared to "collapse"; to the experimenter, the contents of the box appear to be in superposition. Not until the box is opened, and both observers have the same information about what happened, do both system states appear to "collapse" into the same definite result, a cat that is either alive or dead.</blockquote>
Which sounds a lot like saying <div class="tipped" data-text="I simultaneously admit that it's more complicated than this and insist this is a perfectly good explanation of it.">"different people might know different things and that's okay."</div><br />
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I've been thinking about the cat recently, and about the idea that some things in reality are undetermined until they are observed, and it struck me that this is circular reasoning.<br />
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How does science work. We craft hypotheses based on information we have, we concoct tests based on those hypotheses, we either disprove our hypotheses or we give them weight by conducting our tests. The key to this entire process is that there is something in the world that would let us know the difference between a world where we are correct and a world where we are incorrect.<br />
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Victor Stenger made this point very well in his book "God: The Failed Hypothesis". While one resolution to the debate about the existence of God is the idea of "<div class="tipped" data-text="Science and faith are two completel separate things, dealing with separate aspects of our existence and neither has the competence or authority to comment on the other.">non-overlapping magisteria</div>", Stenger points out that a great many of the things that are asserted about God <i>can</i> be tested.<br />
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For example, if God exists in the way that God is described by some Christians, then praying for another person's health would help them recover sooner from an illness. We can test this and know that it isn't true. As long as a claim has any observable result, it's the domain of science. If a claim doesn't have any observable result - that is, if the universe as we are capable of knowing it would be the same regardless of whether the claim was true - then <i>that</i> claim would fall into the other magisterium.<br />
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We might say, well, if it makes no difference that is possible to detect in any way, then it doesn't matter, it doesn't exist. But that statement isn't the conclusion of quantum physics, it's the bedrock on which the entire idea of science is built.<br />
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Science <i>is</i> the idea that the way to know thing is by observing them. Science <i>is</i> the idea that is a thing cannot be observed then it is not real.<br />
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So it seems that the whole observation issue is sort of a breaking point for science. It's coming full circle and proving your first axiom as an important theorem. We already know that is a thing is not observed then science necessarily has nothing to say about it.<br />
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This is all just me thinking, and there's a good chance someone will read this who has a better understanding that I do. I guess my question is, what would be observably different about the world if it were the case that things that couldn't be or that had never been observed were still very real? This might be letting philosophy get in the way of reality, but it strikes me that the answer to that question can't possibly be anything.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-42551195207804481652017-12-20T12:11:00.003-08:002017-12-20T12:11:29.922-08:00Cloak of InvisibilityIf you've read the title of the post, you might wonder whether I'm going to be constructing some elaborate metaphor about marginalized people or whether I'm posting about video games again.<br />
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It's video games.<br />
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I've been playing a lot of Hearthstone dungeon runs. It's very fun single player content which is what I want out of computer card games. I find Hearthstone fun to play, but when I play against other people, those people use up an <div class="tipped" data-text="Hour">entire minute</div> deciding on their mulligan and then another entire <div class="tipped" data-text="Day">minute</div> before passing the turn without doing anything on turn one. I open up video games to play video games, not to fantasize about other humans beings choking.<br />
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I've written about hearthstone single player content <a href="http://humbabellasgamery.blogspot.ca/2016/09/hearthstone-difficulty.html">previously</a>. Sky at Bright Cape Gamer had written about the challenge in single player content and I had a very different take where I largely disparaged the <i>idea</i> of challenge in single player content. This time I am also launching off of <a href="http://brightcapegamer.blogspot.ca/2017/12/enter-cave-fight.html">something Sky wrote</a> but instead of woe I am writing with incredulity. I agree with Sky's assessment - I like the dungeon run, there is challenge but it doesn't feel like just rolling the dice over and over, it's fun to keep doing even after you win. He's also right about <div class="tipped" data-text="It's good and that's not immediately obvious. I don't think his comparison to Crystal Gem is totally fair to the Gem, which is also good. But it's obvious in what way the Crystal Gem is good. For the potion, it really helps to know about 60 health Candlebeard when you evaluate how much it's going to help you.">Potion of Vitality</div>. But he raises something I find super weird:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I have found it super interesting that people have wildly differing ideas of the power level of various items. Some are obvious, such as the Captured Flag which gives your minions +1/+1. It is excellent, one of the best for every class and strategy. However, there is one in particular, the Cloak of Invisibility, that seems to have some serious disagreement on its strength.</blockquote>
Okay, so I guess I'm not surprised that Hearthstone players are not sold on the power of Cloak of Invisibility. Apparently people weren't sold on Dr. Boom when he came out. I heard people disparaging Darkshire Councilman when it was first available. The Hearthstone community is not good at evaluating how good cards are.<br />
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As above, Sky is right. It's good. Partly because it allows you to have good trades in combat, and partly because it has the potential to break the game against some encounters, particularly the Darkness, leaving them stranded with a full hand and unable to do anything for the rest of the game.<br />
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But what struck me is that anyone could even debate whether it's good or not in a general sense. I'm sure no one is debating whether doubling your battlecries is "good". There are a couple of decks that effect is very good in, but for most decks it's very close to useless.<br />
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Cloak of invisibility gives all your units stealth permanently. That doesn't obviously interact with cards the way double battlecries interacts with battlecry cards or sceptre of summoning interacts with cards that cost 8, 9 and 10.<br />
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Hearthstone is full of minions that have devastating effects while they are on the battlefield. It's <div class="tipped" data-text="If it's not obvious to you, let me tell you that my empirical trials have confirmed this.">pretty obvious</div> that if your opponent can't remove your KelThuzad you win, but there are plenty of other cards that are very problematic if they stick around. Pirate and murloc decks that have cheap minions that buff other minions become very difficult to beat. Cards with powerful inpires like Thunder Bluff Valiant and Nexus Champion-Saraad are brutally overpowered when they can't be attacked. Frothing Berserker sometimes seems outrageously unfair when you <i>can</i> attack it, but when it can't be attacked it's easy to trade other minions while you beat them dead with a 15/4.<br />
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Cloak of Invisibility is the most broken effect of any of the passive treasures. Breaking the game is good, but you have to make sure it breaks in your favour.<br />
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It would be silly to try to say whether Robe of the Magi or Ring of the Justicar are good without thinking about what class you are playing. Khadgar's Scrying Orb is sometimes good and it sometimes isn't that good, but you can't evaluate it the same for <div class="tipped" data-text="Warriors can't get Unstable Evolution. Shamans can.">a warrior and a shaman</div>.<br />
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Active treasures lend themselves a little better to a strict ranking list where some are just plain a lot better than others. But aside from <div class="tipped" data-text="Captured Flag, Crystal Gem, Potion of Vitality">a few</div> that are just all-around good and <div class="tipped" data-text="Come on Tome of Mysteries, give me a break. Though one time I took it because my other options were battlecries and deathrattles in a deck where those would not help, and one game the tome really came home for me in a hilarious way.">one</div> that is all-around bad, the value of all passive treasures is "it depends."Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-31547157120662450952017-12-18T11:25:00.000-08:002017-12-18T11:25:39.835-08:00Sex-BlindnessI was reading an article from the Atlantic about the American <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/why-republican-women-arent-galvanized-by-the-trump-era/546533/">Republican party's troubles holding onto supporters who are female</a>. I'm not exactly recommending it, since it could be summarized pretty easily by saying that the Republicans have long thought that they have a problem in the way the communicate with women, and they are being rudely awoken to the fact that they have a problem with their actual policies.<br />
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But there was one part I found a very interesting insight into how patriarchal policies work:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“This is one of the main differences between the left and the right: We don’t see every issue as being a ‘man’s issue,’ or a ‘woman’s issue.’ It’s not a men-against-women, us-against-them mentality,” said Sue Zoldak, the head of communications for RightNOW Women PAC. “I don’t understand the idea that something is a ‘women’s issue.’ I don’t comprehend that as a statement.”</blockquote>
This is an interesting way of casting right wing thinkers as the righteous ones on sex equality. Well, I say "interesting". It's not that interesting because it's exactly what they do with race as well.<br />
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The subtitle of <a href="http://newjimcrow.com/">The New Jim Crow</a>, which I do recommend, is "Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness". The book explains at great length how "colorblind" language is used to justify policies that as a matter of fact disadvantage people of colour, but that never overtly target people based on colour.<br />
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The penalties for drug possession don't actually say that black people will be put in prison for longer than white people, but the laws against drug possession have clearly been used as a tool to incarcerate black people.<br />
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It's undeniable there there is a difference in the wages people get paid based on their sex. If you were to choose a sex based purely on maximizing salary, you'd choose male. While there are fools who deny it, some of this gap is based on straight up inherent bias - the employer simply offers a person who looks like a woman to them less money than a person who looks like a man. However, there's lots of reason to think that kind of bias is only a fraction of the gap.<br />
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<a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explained">This Vox article</a> goes through a bunch of data and puts together a few patterns:<br />
<ul>
<li>jobs where certain hours are of higher importance and jobs where working long hours are valued tend to be jobs where the gap is higher</li>
<li>the gap increases when people are 30 and 40 and then goes down when they are 50 and older</li>
<li>women are disproportionately doing the work of raising children</li>
</ul>
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You put all that together and it looks an awful lot like women's duties to their families prevent them from achieving the same salary as men in jobs where work hours are very inflexible and/or long. None of this is all that new to anyone who's watched this discussion. It's actually a very common explanation of the wage gap from people who want to downplay it's importance - that the wage gap results from real world differences between how men and women work. If a man gets paid more because he was willing to work longer hours, then that wage gap is justified, they say.</div>
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The Vox article doesn't go this way, but instead suggests that something we could do to help close the wage gap is change our attitudes about work. Some jobs have inflexible hours for very legitimate reasons, others have them just because that's how it's always been.</div>
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What it stops short of saying is that financially rewarding people for their ability to adhere to inflexible work hours are a discriminatory practice hidden behind a veil of sex-blind language.</div>
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We like to think there is a clear ordering of things, a clear way to say what causes what: A person who is male has their wife take on more of the after work childcare duties which means they can stay late which makes their boss think that they are more committed to getting the job done which makes them more likely to get promoted or get a bigger raise, which creates a gender wage gap.</div>
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But that <i>way of telling stories</i> is systemically discriminatory. I could tell the story in reverse: It is pointed out that there is a gap between the wages of men and women at a company which causes people who are in charge of determining wages to come up with a rationalization for that gap that doesn't make them look sexist, which causes them to latch onto working longer hours as a reason to promote people and give them higher wages, which causes them to actually promote people based on that criterion despite the fact that everyone knows it's a poor criterion.<br />
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I could tell the story starting in the middle of the chain and cascading in both directions. I could tell the story as feedback loops with no clear beginning or end. <div class="tipped" data-text="Those stories don't seem equal to us. We think that staying late at work has some kind of logical connection to being promoted. We don't believe that people had any intention of creating a gender wage gap but think that instead structural factors created that outcome. I'll have a bizarre claim to make about this in the future.">We can write stories in lots of ways.</div><br />
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The same goes for the story that women don't negotiate as hard for salary when they start a new job, or that women take maternity leave. We know that paying people more because of their salary negotiations and that paying people less if they took a year off to look after dependents are two ways of doing things that result in women being paid less than men. But we refuse to acknowledge that those two things are themselves sexist policies because they are coated in sex-blind language.<br />
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I think one way we can emphasize how sexist these policies are by pointing out that they serve no real world purpose. Rewarding people for working longer hours is likely counterproductive. The Vox article briefly mentions this:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It also means not giving disproportionate rewards to those willing to work the longest, either. Numerous studies find that long hours aren’t always productive. One study published last year found that managers couldn’t tell the difference between those who worked an 80-hour week and those who pretended to. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The research is clear," the Harvard Business Review declared last summer. "Long hours backfire for people and companies."</blockquote>
This isn't a revolutionary idea from last summer, though, it's been standard, accepted theory of business administration since Henry Ford if not longer. People who work longer hours are not more productive.<br />
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Similarly, is paying people more because they drove a harder bargain during their interview actually a way to get better employees? It might make sense if you are hiring people to do sales since for sales staff their ability to drive a bargain is a direct asset. For most jobs I think the answer is almost certainly no.<br />
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When we have widespread implementation of a policy that seems to sacrifice better outcomes in the name of producing more sexist ones, it's probably pretty easy to think of that policy as sexist. What about a policy we can make sense of, like paying people more if they have worked more years?<br />
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Maternity leave seems to connect to the idea of seniority. You pay people who've been there for five years more than you pay people who've been there for one. Therefore you pay someone who has been there for ten years more than someone who has been there for nine - that is, ten but took one of those years off.<br />
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But if you think that pay for seniority comes out of the idea that people with more experience are better at their jobs, I think you're applying a contemporary reasoning to a policy that has existed in many places for a long time. It's just as true that pay for seniority is about rewarding people for staying because turnover is hard on companies. For that latter explanation, a year of maternity leave doesn't change the reasoning for why you would pay an employee more. The rationalization we choose for our cultural tradition affects women's equality, and we chose the rationalization that goes against equality.<br />
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My arguments that these polices are sexist are, in a way, speculative. What I can say for sure is that discussing any of these polices <i>without</i> acknowledging their contribution to the gender wage gap is definitely sexist. Unequal pay based on gender is a bad thing. If it is the consequence of a policy, that policy had better be at least good enough to outweigh the harm.<br />
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Like if a company pays sales staff by commission and is convinced that paying by commission greatly increases the success of the company, they may acknowledge that it can also contribute to a gender wage gap by rewarding working for longer hours but say that it is nonetheless a policy they need to keep. Firefighters don't relax their rules about how much you have to be able to carry even though those result in discrimination based on sex. You can justify a policy as being important enough to overcome it's downside. But choosing not to even evaluate gender-based wage inequality as a <i>bad thing</i> is <br />
<div class="tipped" data-text="Implicitly">explicitly</div> promoting sexism. It's shouting sexism from the rooftops.<br />
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Trying to frame policies in a way that is blind to discrimination is directly promoting discrimination. Policies may promote discrimation, they may reduce it, they may have no effect. If you don't care which one of those your policy does, you don't care about discrimination, and that means that you <div class="tipped" data-text="By your deeds, not intellectually.">support</div> whatever form of discrimination shows up in popular culture.</div>
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Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-81046908279160710532017-12-12T12:19:00.000-08:002017-12-18T13:45:36.179-08:00Solving the American Healthcare DebateWhenever someone raises the idea starting a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, someone says it would cost too much. They act like people are naive and say things like, "I want a free pony too!"<br />
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According to <a href="http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA">OECD</a> numbers, Canadians spent $4071 of public money per person in 2015. Americans, by contrast, spent $4692 of public money per person in 2015.<br />
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The Canadian system doesn't just cost less, it costs fewer <b>public dollars</b> than the American system. The private dollars poured into it by individuals are on top of this public spending.<br />
<br />
We aren't talking about free ponies here. We are talking about stopping paying the full cost of a pony plus 15% to make sure no one has a pony, and then telling people they have to buy their own pony if they want one. I can't think of a reason for such a public policy other than lawmakers who feel indebted to the pony industry.<br />
<br />
But I started thinking about those numbers. Suppose American lawmakers could wave a magic wand and having the Canadian system. In addition to all the private money that could be used for other things, the government would save $621 per person for 323.1 million people. That's just barely over $200 billion.<br />
<br />
So you might think they are throwing $200 billion in a hole, but they aren't just throwing it in a hole, they are spending it. They are spending it to kill Americans. A 2009 study concluded that being uninsured meant about a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/24/us-healthcare-republican-bill-no-coverage-death">40% higher risk of death</a>. America has a death rate of <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm">823.7 per 100,000</a>. The uninsured rate in America is <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/11/the-number-of-americans-without-health-insurance-rose-in-first-quarter-2017.html">was 11.3% in the first quarter of 2017</a>. That death rate, is therefore composed of the 11.3% of people who have a 40% higher risk of death and the 88.7% who have a "normal" risk of death, which means the "normal" risk of death is 788.1 per 100,000. So the excess death rate caused by lack of insurance is 35.6 per 100,000. With 3231 groups of 100,000 Americans, that would give us <div class="tipped" data-text="There is no way this is right, but I'll address that below.">115,092 Americans dying each year from lack of insurance</div>.<br />
<br />
Divide that into $200 billion and you get a price of about $1.74 million per american killed.<br />
<br />
Now, let me ask you, what do you think it costs to hire an assassin?<br />
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That's not something I can google easily, nor is it even something I want to type into google. But I feel like it's safe to say you could procure that service for less than a million dollars.<br />
<br />
So I have a solution to the current American healthcare problems. First, implement a single payer system that works much like Canada's does. Second, in order to mollify the people who don't like assistance from the government, also hire assassins to kill about 100,000 Americans a year.<br />
<br />
Better health outcomes, lower prices. That's a win-win.<br />
<br />
<b>A Note for Those Interested in Making a Counterpoint</b><br />
The math in this post looks simple but it's not that simple. Estimating the number of people who die from a lack of insurance is hard to impossible, and some people dispute there being any causal relationship between those two things at all. Some people want to say that no one dies from lack of access to healthcare, some people would probably point out that my figure of 115,000 is much higher than any other estimate, almost three times as high as the estimate from the study cited in one of my linked articles that was conducted before the ACA when there were more uninsured Americans.<br />
<br />
So why would I use such a high estimate? I was being generous towards the current system. My calculation was the cost per American killed. More Americans killed by the current system means a lower cost per American killed. If a million Americans died a year from the lack of single payer healthcare, the cost would only be about $200,000 per death. At that point, you might say, "Humbabella, can you <i>really</i> get assassins for $200,000 a target? Maybe you could under some circumstances, but through government procurement processes?"<br />
<br />
Then I'd have to admit that my plan probably wouldn't save money. But if only 10,000 Americans die for lack of healthcare then the cost is $20 million per American killed. There's no way that assassins aren't cheaper than that.<br />
<br />
And if you think that no one dies for lack of healthcare, like some American politicians seem to, then I have two things to say.<br />
<br />
First, you are transparently disingenuous and think I am stupid. Otherwise, you wouldn't want healthcare for yourself. If something that saves lives costs a penny more, other things being equal, some fraction of a statistical person dies. There's no way around that math.<br />
<br />
Second, in that case you are paying $200 billion and not killing even a single one of your citizens for that? What the hell are you paying for?Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-69392138216679848102017-09-13T08:01:00.000-07:002017-09-13T08:01:11.034-07:00Dating AdviceI was watching a stream when one of the people in chat asked the streamer what to do in a romantic situation. The asker <i>liked</i> a girl but had done something to put her off. I didn't see the details because I don't real chat.<br />
<br />
The streamer started answering that the best approach was to find ways to spend more time with her. Like walking home alone the same path she does. It doesn't matter if you actually live in that direction if she doesn't know where you live, the streamer explained. If she doesn't want to walk with you that's fine because it's not illegal to walk down the street. If she started running, you can run alongside her, because it's not illegal to run.<br />
<br />
The streamer was joking. I was glad they clarified that because there wasn't really a way to be sure.<br />
<br />
I can't rule out the possibility that the asker wasn't asking because they had a real problem but because they thought it would be funny, so maybe everyone got what they wanted. But it wasn't the first time that I've seen people in a chat for a Twitch stream treat the streamer like a kind of father figure who can provide advice about life. It feels odd to me. I don't think I have any reason to believe someone who streams videogames is going to also do well in a Dear Prudence type role.<br />
<br />
But whatever the reason it got me thinking about what advice I have for the young people who see me as a source of wisdom. To be clear, there are none of those, but <i>because</i> of that, I want to offer the following.<br />
<br />
If you are a <div class="tipped" data-text="Yes, I'm making this very gendered on purpose.">boy and you like a girl</div> and she doesn't notice you or doesn't seem to like you or just doesn't like you the way you like her, use that as an opportunity to learn that you are capable of tolerating your emotions.<br />
<br />
First, realize that the feelings that are tormenting you are <i>your</i> feelings and they aren't something she is doing to you. There is nothing she can do to help you feel your feelings. Even if it turns out she's crazy about you, you are still going to have feelings. Sure, you'll recontextualize them as wonderful instead of agonizing, but you still need to deal with them.<br />
<br />
Second, remember that feelings tend to get more intense when you try to deny them or avoid them but get less intense when you accept them. That doesn't mean you should profess your undying love so as not to "deny" you feelings. Professing your feelings to someone else is asking that person for help in dealing with your feelings, not dealing with them yourself. I'll borrow from <a href="http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/guest-house">Jalaluddin Rumi's "The Guest House"</a> and say that we ought to treat emotions as welcome guests in our mind and invite them in to entertain them. That's not an easy thing to do, which is precisely why it's a good idea to get some practice in with your highschool crush.<br />
<br />
Third, I said that telling someone else about your feelings was asking for help. I didn't mean not to do it. In fact, you <i>should</i> ask for help, but ask an appropriate person for help. It is pretty obvious that going up to someone you are infatuated with and saying, "I don't know how to handle my powerful emotions about you, perhaps you'd help me even though you don't really know me?" is not a strategy for a successful relationship. But going to a friend and talking about the anguish you are experiencing might help. If you don't have friends who you think you could talk to, that's actually a bigger problem than the infatuation situation, and you should probably seek some emotional support in the form of counselling. If you are a teenager or in university/college you undoubtedly have free resources available to help you.<br />
<br />
Do not grow up to be a man who thinks that every time he is tormented by a powerful feeling there must be <div class="tipped" data-text="That is, a woman.">someone else</div> to blame. That's <i>way</i> more important than getting someone to reciprocate your infatuation.<br />
<br />
Also, if you want to get laid, start a band.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-57333555949596165812017-09-08T07:18:00.000-07:002017-09-13T08:01:26.395-07:00I'm Not Really An ACLU FanSo I read an <a href="https://www.aclu.org/blog/lgbt-rights/lgbt-nondiscrimination-protections/president-trump-and-attorney-general-sessions">ACLU blog post</a> today about a case where a wedding cake designer is discriminating against gay customers.<br />
<br />
The case is clear cut discrimination. A gay couple went into a bakery that makes custom wedding cakes, asked for a wedding cake, and were turned away because the shop did not make custom wedding cakes for gay weddings. Anyone who doesn't agree that is <div class="tipped" data-text="If you think the cake shop owner has a case, you can think he has a right to discriminate in this case, but if you say it isn't discrimination that's just outright bullshit">discrimination</div> is not sufficiently engaging with reality. A state-level court agreed with this obvious conclusion, though the decision that it was <i>illegal</i> discrimination was a little more complicated than you would think. I'll get back to that in a moment.<br />
<br />
The government of the United States of America has decided this is a really important case that they'd better get themselves involved in. So they've filed an <div class="tipped" data-text="Basically they wrote their own legal opinion and submitted it to the court handling the appeal">amicus brief</div> in favour of the cake shop owner. That's no surprise because the Department of Justice is run by a bigot. But even though it's obvious straight up bigotry, the brief does actually make a legal argument, and one that might sway a judge.<br />
<br />
The defense of the cake shop owner is that making wedding cakes is a matter of personal expression. He would sell any baked good in his shop to a gay couple, but he won't engage in a personal creative effort to express support for a gay wedding. That is, he's saying it's his first amendment right to not express himself in a way that violated his religious beliefs.<br />
<br />
The court that ruled on the case originally considered this argument, they didn't dismiss it out of hand. The question was whether creating the wedding cake was a sufficiently expressive thing to trigger the first amendment. They said it was not, but part their reasoning noted that the couple hadn't actually discussed details or custom messages of the cake before leaving the shop. So the cake shop owner hadn't refused to write, "I love butt sex" on a cake, he had refused to make a cake merely on the basis of the couple <i>being</i> gay. If he had kicked the couple out of his store for wanting him to write that on a cake, <div class="tipped" data-text="And we'd actually probably mostly agree that he was within his rights to do so, if only because we have a lot of weird hangups about sex.">we wouldn't be having this discussion</div>.<br />
<br />
The ACLU post engages in a very silly slippery slope argument where they suggest that if this ruling was made a doctor might refused to treat people who are transgender or a restaurant might refuse to follow food safety laws citing food preparation as a kind of free artistic expression.<br />
<br />
Neither of those make any sense at all. You don't trigger first amendment freedom of expression protections by employing technical skills like medicine. Your right to free expression has never included the right to poison other people and never will.<br />
<br />
I think what the ACLU is doing here is encountering cognitive dissonance as they realize their position on the first amendment generally is a pro-discrimination opinion. When Charlottesville tried to deny a permit to hold a rally to neo-Nazis, the ACLU came to the defense of the Nazis and precipitated the events of August 12. Their position was that it is more important to protect free speech than to prevent Nazis from marching in our streets. They've been grappling with that position since, and they've decided they won't support violent hate groups that plan to bring weapons to rallies. So basically they will continue to stand up for first amendment right to advocate genocide, but won't do it if people are also exercising <div class="tipped" data-text="The ACLU doesn't believe the second amendment gives individuals the right to carry guns down the street, but regardless of that, it seems odd they'd take the position that legally carrying guns down the street might <i>negate</i> someone's first amendment rights.">second amendment rights</div>. Fundamentally, their position hasn't changed, though: crowds shouting pro-genocide slogans in the street should be protected.<br />
<br />
If someone wrote custom poetry to be read at weddings and didn't want to write poetry about gay love, the argument the US government is making on behalf of the cake shop owner would work. In fact, based on the factors considered in the lower court, we'd never be at this stage, as the lower court would have supported this as <div class="tipped" data-text="I <i>think</i>. This is based on my understanding that the first amendment has been deemed to protect the right to <i>not</i> express yourself as well.">protected first amendment speech</div>.<br />
<br />
Legally speaking, the constitution of the United States protects freedom of speech and does not protect gay people against discrimination. Well, it seems to protect them from discrimination within the legal system by guaranteeing equal protection under the law, but it doesn't protect them at a bakery. The case for the baker rests on a legal quibble about whether the first amendment applies, but <i>if</i> the first amendment applies, the ruling is clear. The argument that the baker is using to defend his decision not the make the cake is legally the same argument that another baker would use to refuse to make a cake with a swastika on it. The difference is that in one case a baker is refusing to acknowledge the validity of gay people's love, in the other they are refusing to acknowledge the validity of Nazi ideology. <div class="tipped" data-text="Or without taking a simple 'Fuck Nazis!' moral approach which really takes primacy over the law. But I'm speaking <i>within</i> the law right now.">Without noting that this is a question of rights butting against one another</div>, we can't tell those two things apart.<br />
<br />
If I'm being kind, I think they ACLU, and Americans in general, have to grapple with the fact that giving one kind of human right - freedom of expression - primacy over other kinds of human rights - the right to be treated equally without regard to race, sexual orientation, etc. - means devaluing the latter right. It means being <i>against</i> the latter right in some cases. There are decisions to be made about how to proceed with that information.<br />
<br />
If I am not being kind, I'd say the ACLU's readiness to engage in spurious slippery slopes from wedding cakes to doctor's visits combined with their <i>unwillingness</i> to engage in factually supported slippery slopes between Nazi rallies and violence means <div class="tipped" data-text="Not deep down in their hearts. In the effect of their actions.">they are an anti-semitic hate organization</div>.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-78643827718232107672017-09-06T07:15:00.001-07:002017-09-06T07:15:12.893-07:00Race to the BottomHow do we know what a thing is worth? That's easy, the marketplace will reveal it's value by assigning a dollar cost to it.<br />
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But if a thing is worth the amount it costs then buying it isn't a good deal, it's a neutral proposition. So we'd better try to get a better price.<br />
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If we can't support our concept of value with something other than the revealed value of the market then it is a race to the bottom for everything, and the only thing we value is money itself.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-40233535774666026042017-08-30T10:49:00.001-07:002017-09-05T08:37:55.135-07:00The Void<i>Trigger Warning: This post contains apparent sympathy for Donald Trump</i><br />
<br />
Here's a slightly outdated <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-president-of-blank-sucking-nullity-roth">article</a> about Trump being a vessel of positive emptiness (via <a href="http://boingboing.net/2017/08/23/trump-is-a-human-void.html">BoingBoing</a>). I'm not sure if I recommend you read it. If you do you may have to overlook the rocky beginning in which it is implied that <div class="tipped" data-text="I would call this an 'interesting' hypothesis.">dogs don't have emotions</div>.<br />
<br />
The point of the article is that we should be beyond the point of wondering what Donald Trump believes or thinks. It doesn't matter whether he really supports Nazis, because his calculation on the matter is probably something more akin to, "People are saying I'm bad for what I did so I will tell them I was right," rather than anything that factors in real world consequences beyond his own emotions. I think that's probably right.<br />
<br />
What I don't think is right is that this makes him a "blank sucking nullity" or a "human void". Ordinarily I'd be fine with a novel insult for Trump, and in this particular case I am also basically fine with it. Still, this also awkwardly strikes home for me in a way that is a little tough to explain.<br />
<br />
I am not much like Donald Trump as far as human beings go. I certainly have some similarities but I think personality wise most people would say I'm extremely far away from him. There are, however, a lot of dimensions on which you can measure things, and two things that are very different in an ordinary sense of how those things would be compared might be very similar along an unusual axis. If we believe a certain dossier then people who are into golden showers may have something very much in common with Donald Trump despite them being generally nice people who might bristle at the comparison.<br />
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That is not what I have in common with Donald Trump.<br />
<br />
The thing about Trump that makes him so hard to understand for most people is that he seems to exist in a different dimension of personality. Most people will lie or tell the truth, and a person might be a liar or very honest. Donald Trump says things without regard for whether they are true or not, substituting an entirely different axis of decision-making. Some people know etiquette and some people don't, some people who know etiquette for a situation obey it to be polite and other flaunt it to be rude or to show rebelliousness. Trump behaves how he is going to behave regardless of what etiquette may or may not exist.<br />
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Trump isn't a liar or a boor, he exists on an axis orthogonal to those considerations. I keep hearing political commentators try to return to what they think the point is - how will this help or hurt Trump's agenda. But Trump doesn't have a political agenda, he has something perpendicular to that.<br />
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You probably have a moderate-to-good understanding of other people. Maybe that's a very intellectual understanding or maybe it's a very emotional one. However you came about it, the reason I can say you probably have it is because you have to have it to get on in your life. If you have or have had a job, or a romantic relationship, or friends, or a twitter following, you must have at some point figured out how to relate to people in some way they understand. You figured this out because your brain is a pattern matching machine and you were perpetually exposed to hundreds of data points on how humans behave.<br />
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If a human comes along who is a real decision-making outlier - who operates on decision-making axes largely independent of those that you are used to - they are going to seem inscrutable. That's why you don't understand Trump. There are few enough people who are <i>like that</i> that you've never had enough data to put a model together. Analogies to five-year-old children help, but it really is more like trying to understand the mind of a cat. If you've spent years around Trump you'll get better at it, but that's by developing a Trump-specific model, not by assuming you can work him into your human model.<br />
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There's only one place I could be going with this, and many of my readers may be tempted to stop me right here and say, "Come on, you aren't <i>that</i> different."<br />
<br />
I am.<br />
<br />
In my life there are a number of people I've strongly related to. People whose thoughts and feelings look like mirror images of mine even if they aren't the same. I wrote about this years ago when I <a href="http://humbabellasgamery.blogspot.ca/2014/04/untranslatable.html">wrote about John Campbell</a> and his Kickstarter meltdown. Somehow his huge explanation of his life and himself seemed totally relatable to me while most people found it nonsense and <div class="tipped" data-text="It was actually a damn good reason to burn books.">hardly a reason to burn books</div>.<br />
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There is someone who is widely regarded as a troll on a forum that I sometimes visit who just makes sense to me. To others, they must be trying to derail the discussion because their posts are too disconnected from what everyone else is talking about. To me, it makes perfect sense, and when I respond to them I get <div class="tipped" data-text="To me.">coherent</div> responses back.<br />
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And yes, seeing Donald Trump spoken of as someone who can't be comprehended made me think of myself. Sure, that's probably only because I think of myself as <div class="tipped" data-text="Deep down inside.">essentially bad</div>. But I've never really had much trouble understanding what Trump was like or who he is. I'm not troubled by questions like, "Does he support nazis?" because it's just not a hard question to answer - that is, unless you are caught up on what the word "support" would mean if you "supported" something and you are trying to look for an analogue in someone who just doesn't do that.<br />
<br />
I've always gotten conflicting results on introversion vs. extroversion scales on personality tests. In <div class="tipped" data-text="Which later talk of introversion vs. extroversion is based off.">Jungian terms</div> introversion vs. extroversion is about your flow of energy: extroverts get energy from being around others and need energy to spend time being alone. Introverts need to spend energy to be around others and need to be alone to recover energy.<br />
<br />
The reason my results are conflicting is because I am an extrovert - I get energy from being around other people - but I find <i>having energy</i> to be an intolerable state that I can't handle, so I need to spend time by myself to allow it to dissipate and return to being sedate. Being around other people makes me manic, and mania is terrible. That's a recent realization that fits a general pattern. I'm a funhouse mirror of a normal hedonic scale. Sometimes I'm better at my job <i>because</i> I'm depressed. I can have a negative reaction to <i>feeling good</i>. Most people probably wouldn't even know what that could mean.<br />
<br />
Our zeitgeist tells us that people act out of self-interest, and that's embedded deeper in our thought processes than we are aware. While Trump is the ultimate example of someone who acts only in terms of immediate self-interest, I am probably as close to a counterexample of that as you will find. My actions are usually governed by the interests of others that I substitute for my own because I don't know what my interests are or by the desire to just <i>stop</i>, regardless of the cost.<br />
<br />
The best strategy for most people to deal with Donald Trump is to stop trying to understand his internal workings and instead just look and how he works on a cause-and-effect level. I am the same and opposite to that - the best strategy for most people to deal with me is to assume my internal workings are the way they assume everyone's are because I will do the work to limit the possibility of challenging that assumption.<br />
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I was once told that fundamentally there are two kinds of mentally ill people - those that take it out on others and those that take it out on themselves. I think it's possible that Trump and I - aside from that one very important dimension - are much more alike than we appear.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-61948488133407270982017-08-28T10:16:00.001-07:002017-08-28T13:06:49.714-07:00Look, I'm Seriously Just Trying to HelpAnother CBC article, another complaint from me. This time it's "<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/ryerson-free-speech-1.4259360">The left is alienating its allies by shutting down free speech</a>."<br />
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The arguments in favour of free speech are actually very few. That's not because it's a bad idea to think carefully about laws restricting what people can and cannot say, it's because free speech as an ideal has basically been accepted as right for generations and there's little reason for people on the victorious side of history to be particularly thoughtful in the defense of their position.<br />
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If you support <div class="tipped" data-text="I am going to be using the word speech to mean something that people say. If there is a law saying that a thing can be restricted because it doesn't count as speech, that doesn't make it not speech in English. If you are defending the law only as it currently exists for the sake of what currently exists you are an unprincipled authoritarian, so I assume that free speech advocates actually advocate for people to be able to say what they want, not just for people to engage in the current legal interpretation of what is speech and what is not.">free speech</div>, here are the arguments you will use, and why they are, as arguments, utter failures:<br />
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<b>If we give the current government the power to outlaw speech, the next government, with whom you disagree, will have that power too.</b><br />
<br />
<b>OR</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>If we make saying a thing you disagree with illegal, maybe next we will make saying a thing you agree with illegal.</b><br />
<br />
1. There are already many things you could say that are illegal (threats, harassment, copyright violation, sexual solicitation, etc.). These have <div class="tipped" data-text="Or maybe you think they have. If you want to argue that not allowing people to advertise sex work is a step too far I am actually with you on that one. If you think we should be able to utter death threats, though, you should probably be ready with some kind of very good reason to defend this idea. For the rest of the piece I will assume that we can accept that there will be laws have the effect of not letting people say certain things in any society, even if that is restricted entirely to not being able to say, 'I'll pay $50,000 for that person's severed head.'">not lead to such a slippery slope</div>.<br />
<br />
2. In any nation with constitutionally codified right to expression, it is the role of the judiciary to balance the rights of the individual against laws that are there to protect society. You will find that sometimes the judiciary goes one way and sometimes it goes the other way. You'll also find that they carefully spell out multi-part tests to ensure that their rulings aren't used out of context for precedent. This argument, therefore, is that the judiciary is broadly failing to apply the law and that <div class="tipped" data-text="I have explicitly made this argument before when discussing sexual assault cases. So make this argument if you like, but recognize that it is an argument you are making and that it, therefore, needs a lot of support, not just an assertion.">you know better</div>.<br />
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3. This isn't even a principled argument about law, it's a personal appeal. All I have to say to shut it down completely is the following: "If I express myself in ways that are similarly harmful to society, then I agree that society should step in and stop me." The argument essentially assumes that anyone who disagrees with the strong free speech position being taken thinks they ought to be above laws that they propose.<br />
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4. This is a "<div class="tipped" data-text="Or, to be more precise, that there is no way to tell the difference. Of course <i>we</i> might have things wrong. But the fact that you are arguing that free speech is right shows that you already think that we have the capacity to determine that something is right, so arguments that we can't do that are hollow.">we can't tell the difference</div>" position that says we ought to be able to cut other people because otherwise we might lose our right to cut meat. Freedom to use knives.<br />
<br />
<b>By protecting the rights of a well known and privileged person we protect the rights of everyone.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
I addressed this argument in <a href="http://humbabellasgamery.blogspot.ca/2017/04/c-s-lewis-and-soul-of-freedom.html">this post</a>.<br />
<br />
1. You have no evidence to defend your claim.<br />
<br />
2. This is trickle down human rights. People's rights are being violated all the time, and they don't all have a national spotlight or enough money to fight for their own rights. We can't protect the rights of a poor trans black woman who has been illegally fired by lending our voices in defense of a rich white cis man who is saying that trans people deserve the death threats they get. If you want to protect free speech, use your political influence to ensure better legal representation for the poor.<br />
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<b>We've seen from [specific instance of someone getting in trouble because of what they said that we've already swung too far in favour of censorship.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
This one comes down to the details of the case, but if you are going to bring this kind of things up, at least be knowledgeable enough about the case to:<br />
<br />
1a. Explain why the ruling in the case didn't adhere to the principles in the law as they exist. That is, make sure you can out-argue the judge. Remember that judges are applying the constitutional rights you are arguing in favour of as they really exist in our society now.<br />
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OR, if you think that the current law results in unfair consequences:<br />
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1b. Explain why the consequences were dire or at least significantly disproportionate to the action. Do this using the actual consequences to the actual person you are talking about, not imagined catastrophic consequences. If a speaker has a gig cancelled because they said something terrible, if a person loses their job, or if a group of people are made to experience the pain they caused to others by saying something awful, what happened to them after that? Are they living on the street with post traumatic stress disorder from the incident or are they worth millions and still appearing in major motion pictures? An unjust thing is still unjust if it is minor, but if we are devoting our lives to arguing about famous minor injustices when the world is full of severe injustices, it really ought to make us question that values that led us to that point.<br />
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2. Explain why this case is a useful example and not an aberration. A case will really stand out as an injustice if is stands alone in a sea of cases that were ruled on quite well. People are wrongfully convicted of murder and child abuse, we can't expect any law to have no wrongful convictions. When we look at how sexual assault is prosecuted, or how crimes committed by police are prosecuted, we can see systemic problems that run like a thread through multiple unjust outcomes. Having one or two go-to anecdotes rather than an analysis of a systemic problem actually gives other people reason to believe you are wrong.<br />
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And now, the argument from the article that set me off today.<br />
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<b>You are going to alienate your allies by going against free speech.</b><br />
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<b>OR</b><br />
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<b>These are the wrong tactics.</b><br />
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1. This argument assumes that the majority, or at least a large portion, of people already agree that free speech is very, very important on principle. Most of the time, if someone finds a speaker odious and that speaker is told to get out of the public square, that someone is going to just be glad they shut up, not sympathetic to the speaker`.<br />
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2. The idea that you know what the right tactics are to get your point across seems to be disproven by the fact that I am not even remotely convinced by your argument. You don't know how to convince me of anything, <div class="tipped" data-text="I am not going to hire your public relations firm.">so I have no reason to think that you know how to convince anyone of anything</div>.<br />
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3. My issue right now is that we have a really big white supremacist problem. If you are saying that by taking aggressive tactics against that problem you may be alienated, or you may stop being an ally, you are saying that you may be convinced not to battle white supremacists by me being an asshole. But I think you should be ready to fight against white supremacy - in the way you think is best - regardless of whether you think other people are doing it wrong. I don't care if you like me, I care about results. If you are going to give up doing what you think is right because someone else is doing it wrong, then you don't really think that's the right thing to do in the first place. In other words, when you make this argument, it kind of <div class="tipped" data-text="I'm not saying that people who advocate for free speech are racist. I'm saying that the form of this specific argument makes it sound like the speaker is indifferent to the substance of the issue at hand. That's because being relatively indifferent is a hidden premise of the argument. So if you say this and someone calls you a nazi, be aware it's because you implied you were, not because they think any advocation for free speech is a racist thing to do.">makes you sound like you are indifferent to white supremacy</div>.<br />
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4. This argument is entirely reversible. You risk alienating <div class="tipped" data-text="Yes, the 'left' you are deriding are your allies in creating a free society.">your allies</div> by talking about free speech when there are white supremacists to fight. That doesn't concern you. Either you are not an ally or you don't think this argument really matters. Essentially the argument can be restated as, "It is very important that I am on your side because I am very important, so you'd better appease me."<br />
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Now that you know why your arguments are stupid, let me explain to you how to argue in favour of free speech in a coherent way.<br />
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1. Acknowledge that there are many existing restrictions to speech and provide a reason why you think these existing restrictions are defensible. Alternatively, argue that no existing restrictions are defensible. Then we can argue about whether those are the right principles on which to restrict what people can say, perhaps using individual cases as sort of test cases to see if our principles achieve the right results.<br />
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2. Back stop your reasoning about the value of free speech in itself by asking yourself what underlying value you are trying to protect. Are you trying to protect people's lives, people's dignity, people's range of choices? What is it that you think is important that supports the idea that free speech is important? That way, we can avoid advocating pyrrhic strategies to support free speech.<br />
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Without doing both of these, you are going to end up making an ill-informed nonsense argument in favour of free speech. Free speech to advocate genocide can only be argued for if it can be meaningfully differentiated from free speech to make death threats. Free speech to share nuclear bomb designs can only be argued for by someone who thinks that eliminating government controls on speech is so important that it's better if we're all dead so there's no government to institute such controls.<br />
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Of course by suggesting these things, I'm basically telling you that in order to be sensible you have to basically agree with me - that free speech shouldn't be considered holy and should instead be reasonably balanced against other rights and objectives.<br />
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The reason I'm saying that is because it is objectively true. If you want to burn 10% of your income in sacrifice to the free speech altar in your basement I have <div class="tipped" data-text="Although destroying money is illegal in Canada and the US. So much for freedom of expression and freedom of religion. [I can't put pop-ups on pop-ups, but if I could, I'd note that if you were burning money specifically for religious expression you might very well have a case in reality.]">no objection to that</div>. But blind appeal to a heartfelt principle isn't part of any reasonable argument in favour of anything.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-546919408935718289.post-75185142774187303062017-08-22T11:37:00.000-07:002017-08-23T07:26:35.181-07:00Equivocation between Legal Free Speech and colloquial Free SpeechAll my ranting about free speech is unhinged and disconnected from reality, but probably not as unhinged and disconnected from reality as the defense of free speech that is invoked when we talk about nazis. People have to realize that their common language argument about whether to censor nazis doesn't look much like the legal reality that would implement that argument.<br />
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Free speech advocates say there is a slippery slope between saying "nazis aren't entitled to free speech" and saying "Trump voters aren't entitled to free speech." This would be a great argument against someone proposing to create a constitutional amendment to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the Bill of Rights to clarify that free speech rights are not given to nazis. But no one would ever draft or pass such an amendment.<br />
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When the public debates something, the public debates it in terms close to their hearts. So a person saying they don't think nazi websites should be hosted by DNS services is taking a feeling they have and communicating to us they best idea of what they would like done to address that feeling. That doesn't necessarily mean they want that thing done, they want to feel the wrong they sense has been righted.<br />
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In Canada all rights are explicitly balanced against the public interest. The government can invoke section one of the charter and pass a law that violates the rights granted in the charter is they argue it is necessary for them to do so. Thus, in Canada when someone threatens violence against another person, they can't claim that they were exercising free speech because the right to free speech is outweighed by society's interest in having people not threaten one another.<br />
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In the US, as I understand it, there is no such balance to be made. The free speech right can't be violated. That leads to a kind of legal pretending in the US, where they say that some things you can say simply aren't "speech" in the sense that is meant in the constitution. So you still can't make a freedom of speech claim if you threaten someone, because a threat is not protected speech.<br />
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So if someone wanted to make marching with nazi flags illegal in the US, they would argue that promoting genocide ought not be considering protected speech for the same reason that incitement to commit a crime is not considered protected speech. They would then argue that waving a nazi flag is promoting genocide. There wouldn't be a novel legal argument or a whole new structure for making exemptions to the first amendment, there would just be a fairly common sense idea that the nazi flag stands for "we ought to be killing Jews" and that doesn't deserve more legal protection than "we ought to be killing people in terrorist attacks," which is already not protected.<br />
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So while I advocate extreme and crazy points of view on this blog, a person calling for a ban on people marching around with Nazi flags is not really calling for anything extreme at all. I think you could argue that such a ban would actually be more consistent with existing exceptions to protected speech than the current lack of ban is.Humbabellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16113648850586073091noreply@blogger.com0