Benevolent Menticide

Proxy Wars

2012-01-13T15:57:00.000+11:00

Having recently begun reading Peter Singer’s classic text Practical Ethics, I was interested to see his stance on Affirmative Action. I don’t completely agree with Singer’s final conclusions but his lines of reasoning have nonetheless been extremely illuminating - and it allows me to discuss something else that’s been on my mind lately, which is our use of proxies in decision-making.

Singer broadly subscribes to the ethical system of Preference Utilitarianism. I’ve touched on Utilitarianism before and I don’t really have the space to delve into its complexities, but the basic premise is that we should judge a specific action as ethically good if it promotes happiness in sentient beings, and judge it as ethically bad if it promotes suffering, rather than judging them on how well they fit rigid, generalised laws (such as “Thou shalt not X”). Preference Utilitarianism differs slightly in that it judges actions as good if they advance a sentient being’s preferences, not its happiness. The distinction is pertinent but very subtle.

It deserves a blog post of its own to discuss the finer points, but speaking broadly, I too consider Utilitarianism the most useful moral schema yet devised.

In discussing affirmative action, my view has always been roughly this: the idea that a person who is better-qualified for a position should be denied it to fill a quota is a false economy. It may buck historical trends of discrimination, but it is discrimination nonetheless. My view is that while we absolutely should be acting to eliminate discriminatory hiring practises, this is not really with the goal of having more black people as doctors, or more women as CEOs - it is with the goal of having it so that a person need not worry about their race or gender, and be assured that if they are smart, talented and hard-working enough, they will get the job they deserve. Having more representative demography is a side-effect, not the goal.

Historically, humanity tends to avenge itself from one extreme by flying to the other - when a group is oppressed for a long time and eventually throws off their shackles, they tend to end up taking over and being just as oppressive as the last lot were. I am therefore very, very wary of any system that tries to compensate for disadvantage by giving disproportionate advantage - I would much rather have slow progress that resulted in equality than fast progress that quickly swung around to a different kind of inequality.

In my view, if there happen to be fewer women in a certain line of work - solely because they choose not to enter it - then we should respect that choice. There will never be complete demographic representation across all careers due to various cultural factors (and to some extent, statistical trends of inherent ability) and I think that’s fine. This isn’t to say that the current inequalities are due to such factors - they aren’t. But it is to say that a person’s skin colour is the wrong metric, and that the key is to judge people individually. While it is right to say “We should have hired Jim, he was more qualified than the white guy” it is wrong to say “We should have hired Jim because we need to hire more black guys.” More on this later.

In any case, Singer points out that under his system we must maintain equal consideration of interests - that is, your goals are no more or less important than another person’s goals, even if that person is of a different race, gender, sexuality etc, or if they are a relative or personal friend of mine. This is a very useful system for making a lot of decisions but in certain cases it proves kind of useless.

Okay, so you have two people, and both want the job. You mustn’t favour one’s interests over the other…so how, then, do you resolve the conflict? You have two applicants and only one job - you must use some heuristic to decide. We’ve covered that a person’s gender or race is not an acceptable means of differentiating between them, so what is acceptable? The short version is, due to Utilitarian gains that would result from how well they would perform the job, you must hire the person who will do the job best. Thus in such situations I have always taken “Who is better qualified?” as a proxy-question for “Who will promote the most happiness?”

But Singer uses the case study of Regents of the University of California vs Bakke, in which Bakke sued UC Davis for introducing a quota system to their medical program, so that Bakke missed out on a spot despite having better scores on the entrance exam than some who made it in. Singer points out that Bakke’s argument is essentially based on the premise that as the smarter student he had a right to the position in the course - but that under Singer’s model, he and whoever took his place have exactly equal rights because they have equal consideration of interests. My initial response was as above - the more qualified kid should get it. However, Singer raises some interesting points.

The main reason a black kid might struggle to get into such a course is not because of the inherent intelligence of black people, but is because of the specific socio-economic circumstances of his upbringing. The kid may be as smart as or smarter than Bakke, but since he didn’t have the same advantages growing up, his test scores are stunted. Therefore, the most qualified kid - in a more abstract sense - may not be reflected in the test scores, and we should take this fact into consideration when filling spots in a medical course.

Here we have taken MCAT scores as a proxy for “How good a doctor they will be.” Singer points out that this is wrong, and that if our goal is truly to produce the best doctors, then we should have no problem with rejecting a student whose test scores are artificially inflated due to affluence, in favour of a student whose test scores are artificially lowered due to poverty; from there he concludes that it is therefore just for colleges to practise affirmative action in their admission principles.

Singer hasn’t gotten it quite right, though, and he’s making the same mistake I did. Okay, so a person with a worse socio-economic background is likely to have been academically disadvantaged, and their lower MCAT scores may not reflect their true career potential. Notice how I didn’t mention race or gender anywhere in there? Yes, skin colour is strongly correlated with socio-economic status, but it is not a direct causal relationship.

Since socio-economic status is the thing you are looking for, that must be the metric on which your adjustments are based - not skin colour. There are, after all, poor white people who are disadvantaged academically, and rich black people who are not. Even socio-economic status is not a foolproof indicator - a poor family who encourages their children, reads with them and helps with homework is likely to produce students with better test scores than a rich family who does not value education and spends no time with their children. But in the meantime, while we search for a better metric than socio-economic status, we must use the best metric we have available - not the proxy metrics of race or gender.

You need to do some research, of course. See if there actually is a correlation whereby students from a poor socio-economic background improve their class ranking from MCATs to final exams, or have lower-than-expected drop-out rates, or finish on time more often, or have better careers after leaving college. I suspect that they might. If they do - that’s your metric, right there. Don’t even ask about their skin colour, just ask for their parents’ income bracket.

It’s also worth noting that even this is a fairly poor way of doing things since a poor smart kid might be so stunted as to fall below the threshold of visibility - that is, they might not even take the MCAT, or indeed might not survive/remain outside prison long enough to do so. Especially given every other problem it causes, fixing the initial conditions - opportunity inequality arising from wealth inequality - is a much higher priority, but given that tweaking admissions is a much easier task, it’s quite a good interim measure.

The real take-away from all this, though, is not a lesson about affirmative action - a more general lesson can be learned. While it is often necessary to use proxies - something that stands in the place of what you actually want - it is important to remember that they are just proxies, and what those proxies stand for, so that you can discard them in the situations where they don’t fit as well.

This applies to everything. We don’t want to take licenses from the elderly because their independence is important, but that independence is only a proxy for the happiness it is likely to provide. At a certain point the danger to themselves and others outweighs the advantages gained by independence, and we must discard the proxy.

(Also, note how I used “elderly” as a proxy for the things we should actually test, such as visual acuity, reaction times and motor skills)

We don’t want to needlessly restrict people’s choices to take certain drugs, but that freedom of choice is only valuable in so far as it promotes happiness in that individual. At a point where it becomes clear that they are doing more damage to themselves by abusing that drug than they are gaining in joy from taking it - and simply assuming that when this point is reached they will choose to stop is untenable given what we know about addiction - we must discard the proxy and save them from themselves, be it by intervention, regulation or outright banning.

These are just the first examples that come to mind. The point is, though, it takes a great deal of thinking to peel back the layers of justification to the core reasons why we value things. But it is time well-spent, since often our pursuit of sub-goals can actively damage our true, long-term goals.

The Road Ahead (Part Two)

2011-12-17T15:10:00.000+11:00

Further to my last piece on the intersection of religion and morality, I want to talk about the intersection of religion and intelligence. A lot of New Atheists are pretty derisive when it comes to the beliefs of the religious - a fair bit of mocking goes on, rightly pointing out the ridiculousness of some of the beliefs, but then extending this by laughing at the believers as though they were stupid, ignorant children.

In response, it is often pointed out how many brilliantly intelligent people are in some way religious - even scientists, a fact which is used specifically to undermine the New Atheist claim that the God Hypothesis is a scientific theory that holds no water. In point of fact, both these attitudes are wrong because they misunderstand the intellectual terrain being traversed.

These people see it like this: Stephen Hawking, say, or maybe an equivalent theologian, is the top of the peak - the Mt Everest of the intellectual landscape. He’s at the far right of the bell curve, therefore he is the standard against which intelligence should be judged. His intelligence is not really seen as a relative thing: because he is so much smarter than the people in question, he is labelled in the brain as “smart” - as an absolute, not a relative quality. Therefore, the things he does are the things that intelligent beings do.

In reality, the situation is more like this: Stephen Hawking is a chimpanzee who has figured out how to fish termites out of a mound more effectively than anyone else in his tribe. He’s less the peak of Mt Everest than a coral reef, slightly above the seabed. Sure, he’s the smartest, but are you really going to take his word for everything? Is it really sensible to judge the concept of intelligence as a whole by his benchmark?

The arrogant view undergirding both sides (falsely justified by either creationism or evolution or whatever else fits their preconceptions) is that humans are the top of the world, a miracle of intelligence, a wonder of ingenuity and adaptability. And sure, at a glance, when you compare us with the other animals on this planet, we are. But the thing is, we’re not being judged against the slap-bang intelligences of the animal kingdom - we’re not being graded on a curve at all. As we face the challenges the universe throws at us, we’re being graded in absolute terms – though most of humanity’s current problems could probably be solved if we would just get our shit together, there is a very real chance that we will one day come up against a problem that we are flat-out not smart enough to solve.

We’re riddled with cognitive biases. Our senses lie to us constantly. What seem like perfect, untouched memories are in fact constantly being altered and misremembered. Indeed – we forget things all the time without having much control over what we do and do not retain. We reason incorrectly. We do things that are diametrically opposed to our goals, both stated and innate – and those goals often conflict with each other. In short, the more you learn about human psychology, the more you realise how really fucking stupid we are. It’s just that some of us, like Stephen Hawking, are slightly less stupid than the rest of us.

It’s not all nihilistic and gloomy, though. To borrow a metaphor, if you know how a lens is flawed, you can compensate and get a clearer picture – and one of the many things our brains are smart enough to do is invent tools to investigate this lens. Science and logic are chief among them – so the more you learn about logical fallacies, the more you learn about how your brain twists the world, the better you can compensate.

So, yes - for the many reasons that have been outlined by people over the years, a small percentage of which I’ve made reference to on this blog, the God Hypothesis is an untenable one. The idea that religion is the source of morality has the same holes shot through it. Religion is wrong - don’t mistake my point about human fallibility for a culturally relativistic argument that suggests that all ideas are equal.

All I’m saying is, the atheist who mocks the believer is like a six-year-old who mocks a five-year-old for not being able to spell as well as him. Sure, technically he’s right, but he’s still far too ignorant to justify the arrogance he’s showing. He’s still got so much to learn - and after we shed our childish notions of religion we will still have a lot of other biases and wrongheadedness to get rid of.

Like I said yesterday, atheism is just the beginning. And we have one hell of a long road ahead of us.

The Road Ahead (Part One)

2011-12-16T14:36:00.002+11:00

New Atheism, as a movement, spends a not-insignificant amount of time pointing out the evils done in the name of religion. We get criticised a lot for being constantly negative, for opposing certain religious practices with such fervour - as though we have no higher goal than to see religion consigned to the pages of history. Certainly, there are practices that we really do want to see the end of; things that have no place in modern society. And the sheer number of ways religion fosters intolerant, violent acts makes it pretty clear that religion is, as some have said, the root of all evil, right? Wrong.

Religious people tend to counter the many examples of religious bigotry in two ways. First, they point out the good people do in the name of religion; and, while religious charities sometimes tend to do a lot of harm at the same time as they’re doing good (for example, missionaries who give medical aid but insist that people not use contraceptives, even in impoverished, AIDS-rife areas of Africa) the selflessness, generosity and general goodwill they provide is invaluable. The other counter, however, is to claim various examples of evil done by atheists; the primary ones being Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

Some examples can be debunked in simple matters of fact - Hitler was not an atheist, and his anti-Semitism was born out of hundreds of years of Christian bigotry towards the Jews. Indeed, the whole idea of Aryanism is predicated on a creationist worldview, in which God created perfect, angelic people whose bloodlines were subsequently polluted by lesser people.

But the others are less simple. Mao and Stalin are branded as atheistic tyrants as well. In reality, both abolished religion as a means of creating a power vacuum of sorts - without a God to worship, it was much easier to make their followers worship them, thus granting them all sorts of power. That said, the fact that they didn’t style themselves explicitly as gods or conduits to god - as any number of cult leaders do – probably does indicate that they were atheistic.

The thing is, when you want to criticise what Stalin and Mao did, the fact that they were atheists is at best a side-issue. While everything from the crusades to the Holocaust to the modern Jihad phenomenon are explicitly justified by religious teachings, the same can’t be said for the crimes of communism - not least because there are no teachings of atheism. You do of course need to be fairly selective in cherry-picking which bits of a religion you follow if you want to justify these things – but the raw material is there if you want to use it. There is no centralised dogma of atheism - all it really specifies is a lack of a belief.

Think of it this way - Christians attributing the crimes of Stalin and Mao to their atheism is like a Scientologist attributing every atrocity of the 20th century to out-of-control thetans. Sure - none of the people involved were Scientologists, but that does not demonstrate that their lack of thetan control was the defining factor.

The less-strident claim is that it’s not so much atheism - as in, not something taught by atheists - but more a lack of religion; as though these people would have resisted the urge to power if they’d had religious morals instilled into them. I think the amount of evil sanctioned and committed by religion over the years makes such a blanket statement pretty obviously incorrect, though.

So, if not atheism, if not a lack of religious morals, then what? What drove these men to do these horrific things? The short answer is - unbridled greed and lust for power, justified by various totalitarian, fascist doctrines. These base desires of human nature - greed, jealousy, fear - are in us all, and people tend to find an ethos that will justify whatever it is they already want to do, rather than tailor their actions to what their ethos tells them to.

Religion is not the root of all evil, by any stretch of the imagination. Humans are the root of all evil - religion, like all totalitarian regimes, is just a symptom of that. It is one of many - but the reason we spend so much time dealing with it is because it holds such privilege.

Firstly, its place in society is buttressed by a number of institutions. In most countries, churches are given the same tax-free status as charities, even if their funds are not used for charitable purposes…so unlike any other philosophy, they are taxpayer-funded. They’re also frequently granted exemptions from laws such as anti-discrimination laws (Ted Baillieu recently forced through legislation to allow churches and religious groups – even those that administer government-funded projects – to discriminate against pretty much anyone they want) which reflects their general status as a ‘special case’ within society, something effectively above the law. Most pertinently, in Australia at least, religion is integrated into our school system, indoctrinating children at an age when they cannot possibly judge the truth of what they’re being taught.

Secondly, the internal logic of most religions has evolved quite a few useful tricks over the millennia. It’s hard to realise a belief system is wrong when part of that belief system discourages questioning. When that belief system calls faith – belief in the absence of, or in spite of, evidence – a virtue. When it helps transmute the idea of tolerance from “Just because we disagree doesn’t mean we can’t be civil” to “Any idea is as good as another, so you can’t attack our beliefs for being ‘wrong’”. When it has pre-made counterarguments for anything that seems to prove it wrong – God moves in mysterious ways, God has a plan we can’t understand, God is just testing your faith. Basically – it’s really hard for new evidence to dislodge a belief that holds that doctrine and tradition should be held above new evidence.

But religion is still just one manifestation of what New Atheism is trying to combat. Like I said, though, New Atheism doesn’t have a set dogma of any kind. It is extremely common for members to hold certain views - for example, New Atheism is strongly correlated with democratic, liberal values, with a strong sense of social equality and justice, with open-mindedness on sexuality and gender politics, and above all a lot of value placed on science and rationality. But it really doesn’t specify any of those things, and to a certain extent it can’t and shouldn’t.

At the end of the day, though, that makes it just a transitional body. A loose coalition more than a movement, really. The thing is, although most of us have more or less the same goals in mind, there’s no one term that encompasses it all. Rationalism sort of takes care of the ‘facts of the world’ and the ‘how to get things done’ part, but it doesn’t really have the connotations of morality. And the morality is hugely important - but then, Humanism (which is probably the closest approximation) deals only with the morality and not so much with the facts. There’s no reason why you can’t have an ideology that both describes how the world works and gives moral guidance, but there really isn’t a good enough one yet.

Prominent New Atheists, from your Dawkins and your Harris right down to your McCreight and your Rad, are trying to fight the huge beast of irrationality. It is a ravenous monster that feeds off the animalistic emotions of human beings, that whispers into your ear to seduce you into feeding it more. It lies to you about what you should value and how you should get it. It draws you in like a Siren, it has an unendingly ravenous maw like Charybdis, and it has many heads like Scylla - but religion is just one of those heads. Once that’s dealt with, things like racism, homophobia, consumerism and anti-intellectualism will still need to be dealt with (though it’s worth noting that many New Atheists are also part of movements that are beginning to tackle such problems now).

As I’ve pointed out before, atheists are trying to do a lot of things, and ridding the world of religion isn’t really one of them - it’s just that religion tends to get in the way of our real goals a lot. What we’re doing, we don’t really have a word for yet. Maybe I’ll come up with one. But one thing’s for sure - atheism is just the beginning.

(Part Two here)

What capitalism hath wrought

2011-11-19T23:14:00.001+11:00

A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
- Charles F. Kettering, inventor and engineer (1876-1958)

Whenever someone dares to challenge the capitalist ideology that so many people hold dear, people often point out the good that has been done under capitalism’s watch. The underlying assumption is that people are essentially lazy bums who don’t want to do anything, and that the only reason we have made any advancements is because we’re bribing them with money. They point to all our modern technologies and say “This! This is what capitalism has given you - so be grateful, dammit!”

I bought into that for a while, too. But the more you learn about the world - about how things actually advance, about the real reasons behind certain policy decisions - the more you realise that it just isn’t true: not as a matter of ideology or values, but in simple point of fact.

For example, we have all these copyright laws that are purported to protect content creators. The justification is, while we might want to access culture for free, it’s not in our long-term interests. If we all take this culture for free, the reasoning goes, the content creators don’t get paid, and they have to get day jobs to survive - so they won’t be able to produce (as much of) their culturally-valuable art. This is why you get such opposition to music and movie piracy.

But then you look at the facts. When someone gets a contract with a major music label, that label will pay for the studio hire, they will pay for the advertising, they will pay for the CDs to be produced, etc. So when the CD actually gets released, the studio recoups this cost before the artist even sees a cent - and then they still only get a relatively small piece of the pie (though this varies artist-to-artist, label-to-label). With the result, most musicians - even relatively popular ones - don’t really make much money at all from selling copies of their music, they make almost all their money from touring and selling merch.

So where does the money go? Where does the pressure to pass these laws come from? The record companies. The ones who have no real talent of their own, but just live off the talent of those beneath them.

And yet, despite the lack of protection offered to the musicians themselves, we still have music. We still have music because most people who actually succeed in music are in it for the love - sure, everybody wants to be a rock star, but generally speaking, anyone who gets into it predominantly for the money will be at most a flash in the pan. Real musicians, just like real painters and authors and actors, don’t need money to motivate them - they’d do it for free if they had to.

The same goes for science - especially medical science. The reasoning goes that without patent laws protecting drug companies, without some means of ensuring they make money from their R&D investments, medical research would stall - which would have negative implications for all our health.

But talk to the people on the front lines of medical research. These are passionate people who care about their fellow human beings. They are driven to cure diseases because they share in the suffering of those afflicted by them - sometimes because a friend or family member has fallen victim to it. Money has nothing to do with it.

Money, in fact, is not a motivator but a mere enabling mechanism - in addition to giving them the requisite living money, they need money for expensive machines and other supplies with which to perform their experiments. But while under the current system it is a necessary part of the process, it’s a profoundly corrupt one.

Instead of funds being directed at the most worthy candidates, the ones that seem most likely to solve the most pressing problems, we have the current system. We have government bodies that attempt to do this, but that are very often strongly swayed by political concerns and tend to be very short-sighted and capital-driven anyway. Why re-test a drug to confirm someone else’s results - among the most basic tenets of science - when that money could be spent on developing a new one?

Much more medical science funding, though, is provided by corporations. And all corporations, it must be remembered, are ultimately in the same business - the business of money. They might make drugs or sell dolls or exploit musicians as their means, but their ultimate end is always money. This can play out in some very interesting ways.

For example, it has been known to happen that a pharma company will come up with a drug that isn’t very marketable. Instead of trying to produce another drug that solves an actual problem - one that cures a disease that needs curing - they will then proceed to convince you a non-problem needs fixing so that they can sell it to you. Hardly in the best interests of society.

(Incidentally, the “Invent a problem then charge you to solve it” business model is devastatingly effective, and has as its primary proponents such luminaries as the cosmetic industry, the mafia and the Catholic church)

Another big medical one - we don’t actually need antibacterial soap for everyday use. In fact, providing an overly-sterile environment actually hinders the development of children’s immune systems - they need exposure to germs so they develop antibodies. But since profits have been held above social good, most people have been convinced that we must have completely germ-free houses - and that this is best achieved by antibacterial soap.

This, combined with the extreme over-prescription of oral antibiotics (for example, they are given to people who have viral infections - which are not affected by antibiotics - just to shut them up) means that our current range of antibiotics are rapidly becoming useless as resistant strains evolve - and the lack of expected profitability means that no company has really bothered to make significant advances in antibiotics in decades.

Then we look at technology. We have this myth that we wouldn’t have all these fantastic technologies if we didn’t have patents to protect the earning ability of those who first created them - which in turn assumes that those people invented these things in hermetically sealed rooms by lightning-bolts of intuition. But the truth? Well, Henry Ford said it better than anyone:

“I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.”

The PC - that cornerstone of the information age we now live in? Depending on where your allegiance lies, you probably assume that either Steve Jobs or Bill Gates first invented the modern system, with a keyboard, mouse and window-based interface. In reality, they both got the idea from Xerox, who had gotten 90% of the way there and basically given up on it; the people that really changed the world are the ones who took that idea and ran with it.

A little further down the line, many manufacturers were building mp3 players, but most of them were kind of crummy - Steve Jobs saw the potential, tweaked the basic concept and improved a few aspects, and gave us the iPod. Then other people took that model, combined it with existing phone technology and made mp3-playing phones - Sony were the first to really do this properly, which isn’t that surprising when you consider the cues the iPod took from Sony’s Walkman. And after seeing what they’d done, where they’d succeeded and where they’d failed, Jobs tweaked the idea and gave us the iPhone. And now Samsung and a few others have come along and improved upon that; the circle of life continues.

(As an aside, Jobs took a peppercorn salary, preferring to keep the money that otherwise would have paid him within the company for reinvestment - he did it for the love of design, as all the testimonials since his death have attested. He wanted to change the world, not make money - and Bill Gates’ dedication to philanthropy tells a similar tale)

You can pick out hundreds of examples like this just from fairly basic observations of how the world works, but the science is catching up too - and it tells the same story. Once you get past menial tasks you don’t give a shit about, money doesn’t really motivate you very much at all; or at least, it doesn’t motivate you to do anything useful. It may, however, motivate you to get more money at the expense of whatever you’re actually supposed to be doing, because it becomes just a means to an end and you will half-ass it accordingly.

It turns out that these systems don’t foster innovation at all. They are put in place to protect a select few individuals whose primary goal is not to change the world but to make more money. It’s not about raising the standard of living for us all, it’s specifically geared towards the hoarding of wealth; and that is a profoundly bad idea for most of us, especially since - for the most part - that wealth is hoarded by people who aren’t actually contributing the benefits we’re looking for. Protecting these individuals at the expense of crushing the rest is cutting off our nose to spite our face.

I’m not saying I have the answer. I don’t know if completely abandoning capitalism is the right idea, or if we just need to radically change how capitalism works. But if we’re to have any chance of improving things, we need to be honest about our system - note its strengths and acknowledge its weaknesses. Nothing can ever get any better unless we look at things critically - I hope that by now, that much is clear.

The Free Market Gambit

2011-10-31T21:17:00.000+11:00

Imagine a game where every time your team kicked a goal, it was worth one point. But every time the opposite team kicked a goal, it was worth ten points. Then imagine that if you commit any sort of foul or breach of the rules, you’re instantly ejected from the game - but if the other side does, they just lose possession of the ball, no matter how many times or how egregiously they foul you. Then imagine that every ten minutes, the other team gets to flip a coin, and if it comes up heads they get to take all of your points, and if it comes up tails they just double their own score.

You don’t need to imagine such a game. This is the world that you live in every day. Sure, it wouldn’t be impossible for you to win at that game. If you were really, fantastically talented and they were disastrously incompetent, you might be able to compete on a serious level. But can you really make the claim that the game is in any sense fair? Can you really blame someone who tries to fix that system? That wants to level that playing field?

A lot of people have criticised the Occupy movements by pointing out how modern capitalist systems make it theoretically possible for someone who is born into relative poverty to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become the richest person in the world - the implication (or, often, the explicit statement) being that they’re all lazy bums who want to redistribute wealth so they can sit around doing nothing. The only problem is that these people are almost all qualified and hard-working, and bootstrapping yourself to the economic stratosphere is theoretically possible in the same way that it’s theoretically possible to win Tattslotto.

Nobody is saying that pulling yourself up by your bootstraps isn’t possible. We’re just saying that the system is weighted heavily against that happening.

Proponents of free-market capitalism try to model it as a meritocracy - a system whereby the lazy and stupid will sink to the bottom of the pile, no matter how high they started, and where the smart and motivated will rise to the top, no matter how low they start. I do a lot on how people lie to you and how your brain facilitates this, but make no mistake - this is the biggest lie you were ever told.

You are taught from the moment you’re born that if you study hard, work hard, and play by the rules, one day you’ll rise to the top. Your parents and teachers drill this into you both explicitly and via conditioning, and undoubtedly your first few bosses - assuming you have the kind of menial job most of us have when we’re teenagers - will give you a powerful refresher course.

But of course, as most of us know by our early 20s, hard work and book-smarts rank fairly low on the list of things you need for success. Things like connections (“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”) and seniority, which no amount of hard work will give you, matter more. Things like good bargaining skills, and having a good bargaining position, are taught to a tiny minority of people and are hugely important, too, because there is something you need to know about free market capitalism.

It isn’t free at all. When people invoke “Free-market capitalism” what they’re doing is trying to get the government to stop levelling the playing field, because they don’t want to give up their advantage. But mark my words, if they ever see an opportunity to get an advantage from the government, they do not stick to their moralistic free-market notions - and very often, whether or not people will come to your defence (either as a person or as an industry) depends solely on how much keeping you around will benefit them. This rings as true for politicians as it does for CEOs - you’ll see some politicians condemn workplace agreement regulations on the Monday but call to protect a local industry from foreign competition on the Tuesday.

Taxation systems, import tariffs, regulatory laws (for emissions, product labelling, etc), workplace relation laws - a huge number of our laws affect this system and are very often weighted much more for the benefit of corporations than for the people working for them. The system is not free, it is controlled - and it is being controlled for the benefit of those in power, not for you.

They claim the Free Market as the moral high ground; they profess that if an entity is able to succeed on its own it shouldn’t be restricted, and if an entity is failing then it deserves what it gets. This is as true of corporations as it is for people - it doesn’t matter how dirty they played to get it, successful people deserve their success; and it doesn’t matter how unfair the system is, poor people deserve to be poor.

The most abominable thing about this rhetoric is that it’s used on the lower- and middle-classes - and it actually works. People treat the mining companies as these fragile entities; oh, we can’t demand that they contribute their fair share, or they’ll put off workers! They’ll go elsewhere and ruin the economy! Firstly: no they fucking won’t, because it is the first rule of capitalism that if they could do things any cheaper (ie if they could fire half their staff) they already would have. They don’t just try to streamline their workforce in the face of new tax laws, they are trying to streamline their workforce every single day - they’re not doing anyone any favours by hiring people, they’re doing it because they have to.

But more importantly, people just fail to accurately weigh up the costs and benefits of these arrangements. Are we really better off with an enormous mining industry that contributes a pittance back in tax? Or would we be better with a slightly smaller mining industry (in the unlikely event that it happened) that contributed fairly? The mining industry employs fewer people than you might think. Similarly, the amount of money communities lose to problem gambling dwarfs how much the community benefits from the paltry sum given back to sporting clubs, or employing people in the hospitality industry.

As I said once before, anyone who thinks they’re free under modern capitalism is either rich or blind. The narrative that claims that the poor are just lazy and that CEOs deserve every penny is pure fiction, but it’s the most widely-believed fiction this side of the Bible. All the Occupiers want to do is make it a reality - make the system fair, so that those who deserve to be at the top really can rise, and so the reckless and inept fall to the bottom. That is our dream, and if you really think about it, I suspect that it’s yours as well.

Direct Democracy in Action

2011-10-29T23:35:00.000+11:00

I’d been following Occupy Melbourne closely online, along with its counterparts around the world, but until very recently I hadn’t been able to attend because of work. I’ve also read a few interesting pieces since my last post, so take it as read that my viewpoint is a little more nuanced now.

Firstly, this piece asserts that Occupy Wall Street isn’t really a traditional protest, it’s like a beta-test of a new way of life - which, as part of its functionality, incorporates activism for political change. The way they run things, with their consensus-based decision-making process and their peaceful resistance, is not just an incidental way of running their protest - it is what they’re doing, with the protests being incidental to that. The process is the point, to borrow their phrase. This is an interesting point, and footage I’ve seen from OWS certainly backs this up.

But having been to the 8th General Assembly of Occupy Melbourne, it seems…less the case. I’m not sure, but it’s my impression that it may have started out a lot more along these lines; the existence of the working groups, especially the Education and Food working groups, which educate/feed anyone who wants it, attests to this. But since they were forcibly evicted by Victoria Police, they’ve gathered a lot more numbers to the cause - numbers who are angry at the Police and those who command them for the violence they employed. And, since they weren’t part of the original group and are so angry at this one specific target, a large number of the crowd at GA8 didn’t conform to the ideal presented in the article.

There was a definite tension between those who think of it as a protest, who want traditional protesting methods - marches, disruption, banners and slogans - and who want to target specific people and organisations rather than the system at large; and those who are trying to test out this new way of life, to build something lasting. This conflict came to a head (as much as things do come to a head amongst generally-agreeing people committed to peaceful consensus) in the issue over what to do on Saturday. The plan was to set up camp in Treasury Gardens, but the option presented was to meet somewhere beforehand and march to Treasury Gardens as a group, which would present a powerful front, get attention, and make it harder for police to prevent them entering than it would be if they arrived in dribs and drabs.

Both sides presented compelling reasons for why theirs should be the chosen option but they both seemed to miss that their disagreement was not so much over what was right to do in this specific situation but over what Occupy Melbourne is and will be. If it’s a protest, then yes - acting quickly while they’re still in the public mind, causing some disruption and refusing to be silenced or cowed, marching and banner-waving are all valid strategies.

If it’s this societal testing ground that happens to protest when it’s useful, then not so much; people were concerned about causing more disruption than is necessary, about turning the public against them, about seeming like they’re just in it to cause trouble and not effect change. People often responded to this by saying that the Civil Rights movement, and labour strikes in general, are only successful because they cause people enough trouble to force them to listen - and they’re right, but that’s not really the point.

This tension is an interesting one and I’m interested to see how it plays out - but although a consensus was found it seems the larger issue is unresolved and can’t be resolved in this manner.

This also, incidentally, relates to what I was saying last time. I was assuming that this wasn’t such an open-ended thing; that it needed specific short-term goals because it would in all likelihood only last a relatively short time. Now? Not so much. I definitely think we need to propose specific solutions but for reasons that will become apparent below, I have no problem with thoroughly discussing the problem for now, while the movement grows.

Which brings me to my next point. When I was about 18-19, I first discovered Direct Democracy. I thought it was brilliant at first - many of our problems stem from the fact that Representative Democracy only allows you to pick the closest fit, even if it’s a very poor fit - but it does have its own problems. It really doesn’t scale well; what worked for ancient Greek city-states doesn’t really work too well on 23 million people, especially not when they’re spread over 7.5 million square kilometres. There was talk of eDemocracy changing this somewhat (electronic polling booths eliminate the tyranny of distance and make counting infinitely easier) but I eventually gave it up as unfeasible, especially since no Australian government would choose to give up their power by installing such a system - not without overwhelming pressure, anyway. I didn’t think it worked and I didn’t think anyone would try it if it did.

Well, having been down to the General Assembly, I can tell you now - I was wrong. It does work, remarkably well, and this sort of grassroots movement is exactly the kind of thing that has a shot at slowly working it into the system. But it’s definitely not perfect. The primary problem is that which affects all forms of Direct Democracy - it struggles to work unless your population is reasonably small and within earshot. The entire notion the movement is founded upon is that we, the 99%, need to have more proportional control over our destinies and so effectively restricting the decision-making process to those who live very close by and only have work/study/other commitments within conventional hours is antithetical to everything we stand for. Including the voices of supporters from further afield, supporters whose jobs don't let them attend every GA, supporters who can’t take time away from their families, can only strengthen the movement.

The second main problem is the time constraint. You have what can be complex issues that require reasoned, well-researched discourse, and trying to get several things done in a 3ish hours, when it’s getting dark and cold and people have jobs and families to get to…things get rushed. They’ll either stall and people start leaving, or they get rushed through on increasingly lax definitions of “consensus”. People will be presented with a problem and a proposed solution and expected to come up with the right answer almost instantaneously, without any time for reflection or time to assess the facts (both as presented and as may be necessary for responding). This is a relatively minor issue at this stage, but it will only become more problematic in the future as the movement expands and takes on bigger questions.

Thirdly, although there have been concerted (and to an extent successful) efforts to structure the GAs in a way that includes everyone and values difference of opinion, the fact remains that for a lot of people, standing up in front of a crowd is a hard thing to do. Standing up and openly disagreeing with a large group of people you identify with is even harder. This effect tends to make the voices of the experienced protesters heard disproportionately; while their experience is no doubt useful, I suspect that an Occupation led in large part by card-carrying members of Socialist Alternative will be less pluralistic than the ideal we’re striving for.

My proposal to fix this is really something every person involved in OWS should have thought of instantaneously (and maybe did, but if so I haven’t seen it). Just crowdsource the damn thing on the internet! It allows people who can’t be physically present at the time to add their valuable insights, it allows those involved to respond more carefully (both with more research and with the time to structure their arguments better); and it makes it more likely for the shy to contribute. This tendency for many people to be hesitant to speak out is (as I think we all know) drastically reduced on the internet.

You would need to retain some aspects of the meatspace version, I think, some of which are even more important given what we know about discussions on the internet. An absolute time limit on the thread, to prevent discussion from spiralling onwards forever and ever, would be absolutely necessary - but, say, a few days to a week, depending on the nature of the question. Not 45-odd minutes. A limit on each person’s post size would be good, too, in an attempt to mimic the 2-minute speaking limit; we’ve all seen internet debates in which each successive rebuttal gets longer and longer, and that’s counter-productive - though links to useful info would be a good way to make your points while keeping things brief.

A simple Reddit-style upvoting system could mimic the spirit-fingers of the meatspace, and suggest to moderators which ideas are worth putting to an actual vote. Ideally, I’d hold off on creating any type of poll or even proposing any solutions until after everyone’s thoroughly explored the problem, because if people propose solutions and then discuss their pros and cons, it’ll be too late because most people will have already made their minds up (1). This is difficult to implement and people will strongly resist it, but if we can pull it off, the evidence suggests it’d massively improve the group’s ability to make clear decisions.

There are some caveats to this approach too, of course. People who aren’t going to be present don’t have skin in the game, and so might be more willing to approve a risky course of action (ie one that might result in arrests or police violence) than they otherwise would. Some of the older and/or poorer members of the movement (I was surprised by the number of people over 50 at GA8) might also have some trepidation or difficulty accessing the internet to participate, but I suspect this would be far less than the effect of distance and could be mitigated by the use of libraries and by younger members teaching older members. Finally, the same distance that gives the shy a voice also gives the trolls a voice, and given some of the flak I’ve been copping on social media (and I would be getting almost nothing compared to some people) that might be a problem that takes some fixing.

I wrote the first draft of this piece on Thursday night, but now I feel I need to comment on today’s events. Maybe it’s convenient for my argument, but it seems to me that what happened today only highlights the need to fix this process - in my opinion it could have saved one hell of a lot of fuck-assing around while everyone ummed and ahhed about what to do next. The decision was hastily made to camp in Treasury Gardens; there was no consultation with the City of Melbourne or Victoria Police, and they predictably refused to allow people to camp. If people had decided to camp anyway in defiance, that’s fair enough - but instead, despite knowing they weren’t allowed to, everyone marched to Treasury Gardens and then started to decide whether or not to camp.

It was a disorganised shambles, which is why the even more-hastily chosen alternative of Bowen Lane had to be abandoned so quickly as well. If today’s moves had been well-thought out and decided properly in the first place, none of this would have happened. It might’ve resulted in another forcible eviction, if they’d stayed at Treasury Gardens, but the decision would’ve been made knowing full well what the risks and rewards were.

This evening’s megaphone shenanigans by Socialist Alliance highlight my point about the loud taking over too; @nzmrmn on Twitter suggested the People’s Mic be used for announcements so minorities with bullhorns can’t monopolize things, which is also a good solution.

I’m extremely proud of those who toughed it out today while I was stuck at work, but courage and passion will only go so far if we can’t organise. Assuming this piece gets as much coverage as my last one I’m sure a lot of Occupiers will read this, so I encourage you to comment on my suggestion, and in particular ways we can refine it - and, all things being equal, I’ll see you tomorrow for the next GA.

1. N. R. F. Maier, "Assets and Liabilities in Group Problem Solving: The Need for an Integrative Function," Psychological Review, 1967, 239-249.
(Apologies, I couldn’t find anywhere online that gives an adequate description of the study that isn’t buried amongst a big wall o’ text, but here's the citation anyway)

Where to now for Occupy Melbourne?

2011-10-22T21:40:00.002+11:00

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win” - Gandhi

On September 17, about 1000 New Yorkers converged on Wall Street to protest the outrageous crimes perpetrated by financiers and their manifold consequences. NYPD responded brutally, macing unarmed and peaceful protesters, violently arresting hundreds, and - much to their chagrin - lending a lot of legitimacy to the cause. Since then it has spread like wildfire; other major cities in the US, across Europe, and now to Australia.

For the past week protesters have been camped at City Square in Melbourne, but the other day Lord Mayor Robert Doyle decided that these people had no right to continue protesting on public land, and evicted them. Yesterday morning, when the deadline came, the protesters exercised their right to protest peacefully, and stayed - so Doyle sent in the Riot Squad.

Unarmed, non-violent protesters were maced and forcefully dragged from their position; taken away from the park, they (and the great many Melburnians who showed up in support for the core group) then caused traffic mayhem as they blocked off key routes through the city. Now, there has been a lot said for and against Occupy Melbourne - but whether you agree or disagree with the protesters, seeing Victoria Police quelling legitimate, peaceful protests with such violence is an appalling thing for anyone who values democracy.

One of the major criticisms I’ve seen around Twitter and Facebook is that the Occupy Wall Street movement as a whole, and especially its Australian incarnations, are complaining about nothing - they have no real demands, they’re just angry and protesting for the hell of it. I can understand why this impression exists, and I want to explore that - but first, you need the back story. You probably know snippets (and the whole thing would be long and boring) so I’ll keep it to the bare essentials.

If you haven’t already read Matt Taibbi’s brilliant piece "The Great American Bubble Machine" I strongly recommend you do so, but here are the cliff’s notes: Wall Street, and especially Goldman Sach’s, has much more control than most people think. Wall Street itself, the SEC and the legislators of financial regulations are all taken from the same pool, and - effectively - are the same people working for the same goal: money for themselves and their allies.

They effectively write their own rules; even when the rules are broken, the culprits are rarely pursued; and even if they were convicted, their punishments are insignificant. With this power, these investors are able to manipulate the market at will - financial stock no longer really represents what the market wants, but increasingly what a handful of investors find temporarily useful. When they’re done with it, they dump it - taking their profits and leaving the little people to deal with the consequences.

This all happens partly because of and to benefit those who aren’t in the top 1% (who own 35% of the nation’s wealth) but who are in the next 19% (who own 50% of the nation’s wealth) - the extreme upper-middle class, those who earn immensely more money than the remaining 80% (who collectively own just 15% of the nation’s wealth) but who aren’t necessarily actively involved in manipulating the market. They do this through rhetoric. I’m sure you’re familiar with it: the free market is the best way to run an economy. Too much regulation stifles business and makes it hard for businesses to employ people. If we lessen the tax burden on the rich, that money will trickle down to the lower rungs in the form of jobs and spending - the rich will stimulate the economy by effectively utilising that money.

So, basically, what is and has always been a strategy that helps the rich is framed as a help to the poor and the middle-class. “It’s not for us - it benefits you, you won’t have jobs if the mean old government regulates us out of existence!” And, sadly, a lot in the lower rungs believe this rhetoric and will vote for it - hence the Tea Party.

To anyone with their eyes open, though, the Global Financial Crisis proved once and for all that deregulated, free markets cannot self-regulate. Competition self-regulates the system in a haphazard sort of way for a while, but the trend towards oligopolies means that eventually competition consolidates itself and systematically eliminates any potential challengers.

So you have people’s houses being foreclosed. You have hard-working, educated people either being retrenched as their company goes under or unable to find a job in the first place. You have companies and individuals in massive amounts of debt and unable to dig their way out - and unable to get any new credit with which to grow their business/stimulate the economy. You get the exact opposite of trickle-down economics, basically, and so you get a lot of angry, poor, unemployed people demanding action. And so you get Occupy Wall Street.

Now: because so much of this is a generalised anger, because you have so many people who don’t really understand economics properly, you get a lot of misplaced rage. You get a lot of incoherent and unrealistic demands from individuals, you get no centralised leadership but just a kind of mob. A lot of these people are using Wall Street as a touchstone for unrelated issues because they are, more than anything else, angry at being lied to - the media, financial sector and government all said, implicitly or explicitly, that it was going to be okay. These are the right moves. Trust us, we know what we’re doing.

So, inevitably, you get a bit of bleeding over into other issues - one protester demanded an end to the culture where consumer products define identities, which is the other main lie the media sells us (“Buy this product and you’ll be like us”). But, generally speaking, it's righteous anger. Anger at things these people really deserve to be angry about - the whole point of democracy is that government should be working for everyone, not a select elite.

But still, much of the crowd is angry in a generalised way, and the knowledgeable ones can't rise to leadership roles because there is no hierarchy...which means that it’s basically an angry mob - no coherent demands, no clear strategy. Just make noise and make them take notice. And so far this ad hoc strategy has worked quite well - in many ways the lack of demarcated borders makes it much easier to attract numbers because if you have any issue in that general spectrum you can join, and the lack of clear demands provides airs of unpredictability that bolster your bargaining position.

But this point is a bone of contention for many commentators, especially regarding the Australian protests. We can see Europe’s reasoning; they suffered as much as the US did in the GFC, and while they may have Dead-Cat Bounced for a while, several countries are teetering on the edge again. Other economies around the world are even worse off - China’s growth is slowing and it has wealth inequality orders of magnitude worse than the US.

The sense in Australia is that these people really copped it, and really need to fix things, but we sailed through the GFC relatively unscathed - and through a combination of a well-regulated financial sector, a strong budgetary position, effective stimulus measures and sheer luck, we did. But that doesn’t mean these things are irrelevant to us in Australia.

It’s obvious that things that happen to the US and EU economies inevitably affect us, so there is a case to be made simply from solidarity. The United States political system is so corrupted by the power Wall Street has that it’ll take a massive, coordinated effort to get real change on any kind of meaningful scale - it’ll require pressure not only from American voters but from American lobbyists and from the International community. The Australian government, along with the EU nations and indeed the rest of the world, needs to make their voices heard on this - they need to make it clear that the US needs to get its act together because their folly affects us all.

But the other thing is, we need to be vigilant. You hear a rebranded version of trickle-down economics when it comes to the mining sector - which, whatever side you come down on, is undoubtedly the industry that will define our economic climate for the next few decades at least. You see the makings of oligopolies in the supermarket price wars, in the hugely concentrated ownership of media (and its ridiculous lack of accountability in law); you see the offshoring of jobs and profits that result. You see opposition to the NBN based on the idea that it’s interfering with the free market, despite the fact that the current telco oligopoly leaves Australia with considerably worse internet than economically comparable nations. You see Tony Abbott saying he’ll dismantle clean energy investment programs if he wins government because he believes in the free market (except when it comes to protecting the jobs of whoever's hard-hat he’s borrowed that day). You see a general reluctance to regulate what businesses do, in the opposition to the carbon tax - again under the guise of what’s best for “working families.”

We may not have a touchstone like Wall Street in Australia that can serve as the focal point for our issues, but you hear the same rhetoric threatening to gain ground at every day, if you know what to listen for.

The result of this, however, is that the Australian protesters look even more unfocused and shambolic than those in the US. Which is why I think it’s time to concentrate our efforts and put out a coherent set of demands - the protests should continue because they add weight to our demands but they should be part of a two-pronged attack. The amorphous nature of the movement has so far been an advantage, but now that we’ve got the numbers, now that we’ve made ourselves visible, we need to direct our energies more effectively or we’ll just burn out into nothingness.

Unsurprisingly, Taibbi has some excellent suggestions as to where to start. Those refer specifically to America’s problems, though, and Australia would need its own set. I think an in-depth discussion with people well-versed in the subject is necessary before anything concrete is decided, but as a starting point: the original Super Profits Tax was a better idea than the watered-down version; the raising of the tax-free threshold is a good idea, and the proposals of lowering taxes for small business while raising them slightly on high-income individuals are good too; and there’s no need to change much but bolstering support for the carbon tax would be a good idea too.

And as a word of caution - while you’ll probably find a lot of support for including things like gay marriage in the demands, we really should keep it out. We want to focus strictly on the issue at hand, which as broadly as I can state it is this - the ability of the hyper-rich to sell our future for their own profit. Adding social justice issues in will just confuse things and make us seem unreasonable and unfocused; exactly what we need to avoid.

We have much to be thankful for. Right now, at least, we have a relatively strong economy. We have jobs. We have excellent minimum-wage laws, healthcare, unemployment benefits, education…we are in an excellent position. But the fact remains that we can’t get sloppy - and that what America does affects us all.

We may not have quite the same wealth inequality, but in spirit and in solidarity, we are the 99%. And we are all in this together.

The Truth About Evolution

2011-10-10T21:18:00.000+11:00

It might not be quite the same in other places, but in Australia - anecdotally - it seems like the level of scientific literacy is high enough that the vast majority of young people say they believe in evolution. The problem is, many of them profess belief, and maybe have a vague idea of how it works - but don’t actually understand it well enough to apply it properly in arguments.

This is why you get people attributing powers to evolution that it doesn’t have. You get people who insist that they don’t want medical staff anywhere near them when they give birth because it’s “natural”. You get people who argue points based on what nature “intended” us to do. Basically, you get a lot of people who label it evolution but talk about it like Intelligent Design.

I didn’t do a lot of biology in high school, so I don’t know how well evolution is taught there - and in any case, if you really want to understand evolution you should probably read a book instead of a blog post. But it seems like most people get their ideas about evolution from pop culture, so I want to try to clear up people’s perception of it.

The first thing you need to know about evolution is that it’s inherently reactionary. The process of natural selection goes like this: there is a random mutation. If it’s a really bad one, it’ll kill the organism and it won’t be passed on to the next generation. If it’s a good or fairly neutral one, or if it’s bad but the organism can compensate long enough to reproduce, it will get passed on. If it is really good - and things are deemed “good” only with respect to how well they allow that specific organism in that specific environment to live until it reproduces - it will eventually become common, through the purely statistical fact that organisms with that mutation are more likely to survive and reproduce than those without it.

That’s it. There is no evolution fairy that sits there and says “Hey, I know it’s not much good now, but that gene has a lot of potential! I’d better hang onto it for later.” There is no foresight, there is no intent. It’s the simple maths of what works in the here and now. It can’t plan ahead; it only reacts to what worked last time. Sure - things that were once useful stick around past their use-by date, and occasionally those things get used for a different purpose. For example, land-specific limbs get repurposed as flippers on dolphins, feathers that were used to regulate body temperature get used to help birds fly, etc. But all of that is just accident; evolution is not some process of gradual improvement or refinement. It’s a series of accidents, with the least-shitty examples being perpetuated.

This game really illustrates the point well. It uses evolutionary algorithms to build cars; the longer the randomly-generated design goes without grinding to a halt, the more likely its template will be incorporated with the next generation (the attributes of the cars are blended between rounds to simulate breeding). So a car that goes a long way will be better-represented in the next generation than a car that crashes early, and so on until you breed in good adaptations and breed out bad ones. But try this - sit there for five minutes, cheering on certain designs because you, as an intelligent observer, can see that they have potential. Watch as, over and over, a design that would be by far the best - if it weren’t for one tiny flaw - gets out-competed by cars that are competent now but won’t ever be fantastic. After five minutes of that you will understand just how slap-bang and capricious evolution really is.

People often talk about natural selection in awed tones, saying what remarkable products it has wrought. And sure - I’m down with that. It is fascinating, and given that we arose from completely random processes we are pretty marvellous - and the last thing I want to do is to make nihilism seem like the logical progression from evolution. But at the same time it’s important to be realistic about it.

Because the second thing is, evolution is ongoing; we are still evolving. And it pays to remember that the mechanism by which evolution works is by killing what doesn’t work - so every creature that failed nature’s test was just as much of a remarkable product of evolution as we are. We are not immune from this process, by any means, so what nature provides us is absolutely not guaranteed to be enough.

A particularly good illustration of this is cancer. Cancer is basically as evolutionarily fit as you can get - cancer cells contain mutations that allow them to reproduce much more quickly than normal cells, and have figured out how to reroute resources from your body to do so. They are so fit, in fact, that they eventually completely take over their host body and kill it. This is how evolution works - it can’t see ahead to say “Woah, that rate of growth is unsustainable, we’d better put the kybosh on that!” All evolution sees is that it’s working now, and it does not care in the slightest if it eventually kills you.

Evolution gave us the eye. But it gave us an eye with an optic nerve poking through the retina at the worst possible spot, giving us a blind spot right in the centre of our field of vision. It gave us the ability to walk upright and use our hands more freely…but at the expense of knees that are poorly suited to our posture, a spine that wasn’t really built for it either, and a change in our pelvises that makes childbirth much more hazardous than it was before (the text of that article is the important bit, but beware that there are videos of births at the bottom). It gave us a useless appendix that is prone to inflammation, it gave us a jaw too small for our teeth, it gave us reproductive organs that don’t work properly inside the body and so have to hang out the front in a sack.

We are not efficient, perfectly-designed machines. We are the epitome of “near enough is good enough” - the product of a few billion years of being just good enough to scrape by…for now. Remember this next time you talk about what nature intended.

Tangoing with the One-Armed Bandits: UPDATED

2011-10-06T16:30:00.000+11:00

Independent MP Andrew Wilkie has proposed several measures to help problem gamblers as a condition of his support for the Labor government. Independent Senator Nick Xenophon has supported him in this respect, and there are a number of parties that have half-heartedly signalled approval or disapproval as well - but it’s important to note that as yet, no legislation has been put forward, so it’s impossible to say exactly what measures will be included in the bill.

Clubs Australia and a number of other outfits have put forward a relentless campaign of lies and slander in an attempt to block this from happening. I think anyone can see that they are running scared, are about to lose a large chunk of their profits, and will say pretty much anything to stop it going forward, playing up their contributions to the community while ignoring the disproportionately negative toll problem gambling takes on the community.

Their tactics are so transparent I don’t feel I need to address their lies here (though I’m happy to in the comments) but, as someone who has worked in pokies venues for about 4 years now, I do feel I can contribute to this discussion by pointing out that while I can share Wilkie’s goal, there are easier ways of achieving it.

It should go without saying that everything included here does not necessarily reflect the views of my employers, past and present.

As was pointed out in this illuminating piece by Grog’s Gamut a few months ago, the main difference between pokies and other forms of gambling is the speed. It’s much easier to spend a lot of money quickly at the pokies than anywhere else - simply because, even if you’re betting small amounts per game, you play so many more games.

Sure, it’s still possible to spend that much playing blackjack or poker - but throwing down 100 bucks a hand, ten hands in a row, is psychologically a big deal. Your brain takes a lot of notice, and so you will think about it a lot harder before you decide whether or not to do it. Throwing down one dollar per push is the kind of thing your brain barely notices - it’s only a buck, so your brain sort of rounds it down to zero, a lot of the time. But considering that, on max-bet, max-lines, on the highest value-per-credit machines, you can spend $1200 bucks an hour in some states, those basically-zeros add up very quickly.

The solution, then, is not to put in place mandatory or voluntary pre-commitment; though that absolutely would help, as it’d make the amount you were losing much more confronting, it would be too technologically expensive in the mandatory case, and not effective enough in the voluntary case. The solution is simply to lower the intensity of the machines.

(Note that although Clubs Australia et al. are saying the technology is so expensive it’ll put smaller clubs out of business, the REAL reason it’s going to cut into their finances so much is that they make around 40% of their profits from problem gamblers)

It seems Wilkie and Xenophon do already realise this, to an extent, because the way they generally phrase it in interviews is “pre-commitment on high-intensity machines.” Basically, on the 1c machines, it is really hard to lose a lot of money because you simply can’t lose it fast enough - it’s only the higher-value machines that present such a disproportionate problem. The solution, then, is simple - get rid of the high-intensity machines.

Converting a $1 machine to a lower-value game is child’s play - they already have the necessary software in place for their other machines, all they need to do is adjust some settings. Right now this just requires a technician to come out and make the adjustment, but I’d be willing to bet that if they wanted to save on wages they could probably do it en masse, remotely - Tattersall’s and Tabaret both have so much telemetry to their machines that they know about every single note that goes in, every coin that comes out, and every time I open the door to fix one of the stupid things.

Now, as to what the actual rate should be - I’m not entirely sure. I’d say $200/hour, at a guess, as the absolute maximum a person could lose on the highest-intensity machines, but I suspect there are people in Productivity Commission-land who could put a better-reasoned figure on it. This should be done by lowering the maximum bet per push, and/or lowering the speed at which the machines spin - but whatever they do, these rates should be consistent across all states. As the table above shows, every state has its own way of doing things now, which is just messy.

This is a quick, simple, cheap way of allowing occasional gamblers to continue without any real noticeable change to their experience, while still helping to stop problem gamblers losing quite so much money. Mandatory pre-commitment, with the IDs and so on, would be too difficult to implement and, really, would not be noticeably better than this method alone. Voluntary pre-commitment is apparently already in place in Victoria (and possibly one or two other states) but I’ve been in the industry for four years and only found out about it in the course of this debate. No customer has ever asked to use it, none of my many training courses has ever told me about it - I’ve seen the information about transaction receipts (a person can ask us to start data-tracking at the start of their session, then stop at the end, so they can see what they’ve won/lost) but again have never had a customer ask me to perform the task. The self-exclusion program does help somewhat, but is clearly not doing enough (and has many administrative flaws I won’t get into here).

There are a few other laws I would change that could help, too. Currently, it is a matter of venue policy whether or not a person is allowed to play more than one machine at a time - at my first job it wasn’t allowed, but at my next two they didn’t mind. Obviously, if someone can play multiple machines at a time, they can circumvent loss-per-hour limits, so a single-machine policy should be mandated.

Secondly, as bar staff we are taught how to recognise drunk behaviour and use our discretion to cut people off when appropriate. We have no such training or discretion in the gaming industry. When I was first took my Responsible Service of Gaming course, the argument I was given was that we didn’t know a person’s financial situation, so we can’t accurately judge what is “too much” for them - one person might have no trouble paying their bills after blowing a grand on the pokies, but another might struggle after blowing a hundred bucks.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. We know. We know who the problem gamblers are. We have our regulars, we talk to them while they’re in the venue and we very often know them in the outside world - it might be to a lesser extent in city clubs, but in country clubs and in regional centres, you get to know your regulars well enough to know roughly how much they can afford. We might not catch all of them, we might get a problem gambler from another area (the primary flaw of the self-exclusion program), but for the most part - we know.

We know what’s too much, and we see some of them go over that limit. But we are powerless to stop them. We can suggest a few things - would you like a coffee break, would you like a smoke break, would you like to look at some brochures - but for reasons of customer service, tact, and an unwillingness to be told to go fuck ourselves on a daily basis, that doesn’t happen often. We can only actually kick someone out of the gaming room if they are: under 18, on the self-exclusion program, drunk, asking to borrow money, or generally harassing other people. I don’t know how it works in other states, but that’s how it works in Victoria - we could know that we’re giving a person change for their last hundred bucks, the hundred bucks that would save them from losing their house, and we would have to do it. With a smile on our face.

Now - just because the course of our job, and our lives in the community, equip us with some of the skills necessary to spot this behaviour, does not mean we’re adequately prepared to deal with it. The RSG would need a massive overhaul to include ways to spot problem gamblers and to effectively deal with cutting them off; implementing these powers without the knowledge necessary to use them would be a disaster. But still, in conjunction with the other measures, I think it could help.

Nothing is going to completely stop problem gambling. As long as you have desperate people who don’t understand probability, you will have problem gamblers. As long as you have elderly or mildly disabled people, who are provided no other means of entertainment or socialisation - nor even somewhere warm to go - except the pokies, you will have problem gamblers. Even if you completely ban gambling, it’ll just go underground. We, as a society, need to take a good hard look at these deep-rooted problems (especially the maths one. How can you not know that the house always wins?) if we really want to cure this.

But in the meantime, these few simple, cheap measures could go a long way to limiting the damage it causes - and may be a much easier pill for voters to swallow. Just don’t expect Clubs Australia to agree with me.

UPDATE 15-10-2011
When I posted this piece, I emailed a truncated version of my suggestions to both Wilkie and Xenophon. Within a few hours I had a response from Xenophon’s office that wasn’t a form letter - something I’m pretty sure no politician has done since the 1930s.

In any case, it pointed out that my idea about lowering the intensity is basically a component of the current proposal; effectively, the choice will either be to convert to low-intensity machines or to use the pre-commitment technology on the higher-intensity ones. The hope is that this will strongly encourage clubs to take the former option, while keeping a reign on the machines that exceed those limits.

In addition, in the last day or so the Greens have come out in support of something like my suggestion - a maximum bet of $1 per push - that, as I suggested, should do the same job with less political fallout. As I predicted, however, Clubs Australia still don’t want it.

Plausible Deniablity

2011-10-03T00:02:00.000+11:00

If you’re ever in a discussion about one of the big questions of life (everything from the origin of the universe to the nature of morality) eventually you will come across this phrase: “But you can’t prove there’s no God.” This is usually in response to something of the flavour “There is no evidence for a creator-god”” and, technically, is true - I can’t prove there is no God. I can debunk purported evidence, but I can’t prove the nonexistence of God any more than I can prove the nonexistence of fairies. That line of thinking, however, misses the point.

At our core, we’re social creatures, and it affects us in ways we don’t often realise. Our brains are pretty good at problem-solving - at dealing with the environment. But they’re positively built for navigating complicated social mores - dealing with each other. Constantly outwitting each other is literally the reason we’re smart in the first place. Those who knew how to avoid conflict at the right time, and to press their advantage when they saw it, were strongly selected for, both in not getting killed by rivals and, in the case of males, by having the social status required to hold a harem.

As a result, we’re not built for science, we’re built for politics - so our first instinct is not to find the most accurate position, but the most socially acceptable one. You get a hint by the way that it’s phrased - “But you can’t prove there’s no God” implies “…therefore I’m allowed to keep believing it.”

But we’re not in the ancestral environment any more. Nobody’s going to kill you or take away your woman for believing in something (well, not in Australia, anyway). You are allowed to believe whatever you want. This kind of thinking is deeply rooted in the ancestral politics of you versus me, tribe versus tribe, Self versus Other - and while you will often still require this kind of thinking in everyday life (though nowadays it’s called ‘politeness’) you really don’t for the discussion we’re having.

The weighing of opposing arguments, the weighing of evidence that we do when having discussions or debates mimics the process that should be going on in your head, with one important difference: unlike in a debate, in your head there are no sides.

You see this kind of thing in straight-up science as well as religion-tinged debates. The climate change debate is a big one - as long as some scientists disagree, you’re allowed to believe it isn’t real. It doesn’t matter that those scientists are in an extreme minority, have no expertise in a field even tangentially related to climatology, and often have huge biases in the form of ties to oil companies - as long as there are some scientists who back you up, you have plausible deniability.

The other one you see a bit is in the realm of particle physics - it’s not really seen amongst the professionals actually doing the work, but amongst the people who eagerly await the results, you’ll occasionally hear a “but supersymmetry might still be a valid hypothesis - the LHC hasn’t disproved it yet.”

Actually, that’s probably a good heuristic - if it seems reasonable to say that the thing you’re defending hasn’t been disproved yet, start worrying. It’s a sign that you want it to be true more than the evidence tells you it’s true.

If you frame the discussion as you defending the God position and me attacking it, then of course I can’t win - when you define a concept so ephemerally as most people define God, it is literally impossible to empirically test their claims. But if you frame it as you, yourself, trying to work out the actual facts of the universe - with me and whoever else feeding you data that supports various positions - you’ll find that it goes a lot differently.

It’s not adversarial - it’s not me versus you, it’s you and me together, just trying to find our way. “I’m still allowed to believe…” and its corollary “You can’t force me to believe…” are missing the point because your beliefs about the world inevitably affect how you live in it; you’re allowed to believe a lie, it’s just not in your best interests.

Like everything I write about on here, I have been very guilty of this in the past - and in non-intellectual areas, am extremely guilty of it still. But ask yourself this - are you better off with a position that you like, and can’t be blamed for holding? Or are you better off with the most accurate position the evidence suggests?

Plausible deniability is a tool for justifying beliefs to others, not for deciding on those beliefs in the first place. The only way forward is to shed those hangups and face the evidence with the cool, impartial eyes of someone who only wants the truth.

The Paradigm Shift

2011-09-11T18:39:00.000+10:00

Imagine this, if you will.

You fly into a city on the other side of the country. At home you drive a fairly standard late-model sedan, and when you arrive at the airport, you walk over to the rental lot and the car you requested is waiting - the same make and model as your own car. You walk up to it, and as you approach the door, the car gets the signal telling it to unlock the door.

You throw your luggage in the back, and hop into the driver’s seat. The phone in your pocket - which a few seconds ago acted as a remote key for the doors - uploads your personal settings to the onboard computer. The seat, steering wheel and mirrors adjust automatically to your preferences. The aircon and the radio are set how you like them, and if you don’t want to listen to the radio, your mp3 playlist is waiting for the command to pick up where you left off listening on the plane.

As your GPS directs you to your hotel - having received this information from your phone as well - it occurs to you. On every functional level, you are now driving your own car. The fact that it’s made of different atoms is really neither here nor there - in every way that matters, it’s identical.

It’s a theme that crops up a bit in my writing, I know, but it seems to me that the vast majority of society’s problems are based on our extreme materialism. Our society and our economy are both based explicitly on the idea that the best way for us to be happy and healthy is to get more stuff - to have the freedom to buy the stuff we want, to have the means to buy it, and so on.

To put it bluntly, I completely disagree with this notion and I plan to refute it in detail in the near future (it might take a while. It’s, um, rather involved). But even accepting that we need these material possessions to live fulfilled lives, it’s becoming more and more apparent that we can challenge our current notions of ownership without it much affecting the joy we get from the objects.

Because, your first reaction to the above scenario is probably along the lines of - “Awesome, I can basically have my own car when I’m on holiday!” - but the logical progression is “If I can do that, do I really need my own car when I’m at home?” If you can have the experience of owning a car without actually owning it, what’s the incentive to buy it?

Everything I described is technically possible right now, and you’ll find disjointed bits and pieces of them in real-world applications - for example, high-end cars do have the seat-position memory I described and will save multiple settings for, say, a husband and wife. No such integrated commercial product exists right now, but my point is, we don’t really need to be squinting into the distant future to see this kind of thing - it’d be expensive, but we could do it today.

And it’s not just the technology, either - the social will is there to do it today. Just look at Rachel Botsman’s TEDx talk on the various sharing programs that are already in place, and how fast it’s growing:

(The whole thing is definitely worth watching but you can get the gist from the first 5 minutes)

It goes well beyond cars, too. It’s a function of mass-production in general; okay, so you love your new dress, but do you really love it any more than the identical one next to it on the rack? If you lost all your clothes in a fire, assuming your wardrobe was fairly new, you could literally recreate your entire wardrobe out of identical items. Similarly, I really love my new smartphone. But if I were to lose it or break it, you know what I’d do? I’d get the insurance money, buy a new one, and retrieve all my data from the cloud - my phone syncs all its data to Google’s servers every day or so. Functionally, my new phone would be identical to my old one.

When it comes to data, this sort of thing is already taking off. In the relatively near future, Google will launch its Chrome operating system, which will come bundled with laptops that are pretty light on processing power and hard drive space - it will make heavy use of the cloud (that is, a number of server farms around the world) to do its work and store its data remotely. The laptop is just a means of access, which means you can pick up another Chrome laptop, log in, and treat that laptop as your own - basically the way we’ve been doing things like Hotmail for years, but on a much larger scale. Like with the car, the laptop is just a shell you temporarily inhabit.

There are some caveats. It doesn’t work for everything - for example, the car thing doesn’t work too well for me because I am a car person; to me, my car isn’t just a mode of transportation, it’s a thing of beauty. It’s not a stock-standard family sedan, it’s a customised, modified sports car (albeit a cheap and battle-scarred one). So it’s going to be pretty hard to satisfy me with that sort of thing. But clothes? They aren’t important to me - they’re just something to prevent nakedness, so they’re as interchangeable to me as the car would be to most people. There is always going to be a niche market for the things people love, but this is definitely a good thing - mass-produced consumerism has made individuality difficult, and I think it’s something we should foster.

The other thing is, it’s not one of those “Why didn’t anyone think of this before?” type of ideas. This kind of thing takes massive amounts of infrastructure and very advanced technology to implement, so it couldn’t have worked before now - and it’ll be a million times easier to get off the ground in urban locations, where the population density is high, than in more sparsely-populated areas, for basically the same reason.

It has the same kinds of problems as public transport - which is another example of something that’s steadily growing and should continue to do so. It also faces similar bureaucratic hurdles to public transport - much like how the current level of oil company influence is severely hindering High Speed Rail in the US, the current telco situation in Australia will make cloud computing of all kinds difficult. If everything is taking place remotely, you don’t need much disk space or processing power - but you need to transmit a hell of a lot of data, which in Australia is currently neither fast nor cheap.

But for the most part - for the things we have for purely utilitarian reasons - we really don’t need such rigid, individual ownership. As Botsman points out, a drill is sitting idle for most of its life, so it might as well be shared amongst a large group of people. Because the benefit of all this, aside from saving money for the users, is that it saves resources - we don’t need to build as many copies of various objects, so as a race we consume less of the planet’s finite resources.

The implications of this movement could be world-changing, if we really embrace it. I think it’ll happen organically, to a certain extent, but we really need to interrogate our notions of ownership and shrug off the petty, niggling need to own physical things, if we want this to reach its full potential. I don’t know about you, but for me, this is a genuinely exciting time to be alive.

Census 2011

2011-08-04T16:30:00.000+10:00

Next Tuesday, the 9th of August, Australians will take a census. As you may have noticed, given the advertising the Atheist Foundation of Australia has put up around the nation, this year there is a campaign to ensure the question about religion is answered accurately.

In the past, people have put “Jedi” or “Pastafarian” or any other number of joke answers (admittedly some people actually do consider themselves Jedis or Pastafarians, but the majority of people who give this answer do not) as a sort of protest/laugh at the census. The thing is, though, census data affects a lot of things, from which areas require funding for schools or other infrastructure, to the amount of sway religious lobby groups have - the answers people give do have real-world consequences.

And therein lies the problem. Despite the fact that only 8.8% of Australians attend church weekly, in the 2006 Census 69.5% of Australians self-identified as belonging to some religion or other. Now, obviously, some people might consider themselves to be religious but not see the point in attending church regularly, but there still seems to be quite a big gap between the reported number of religious and the actual number of religious.

Part of this is probably due to the leading nature of the question. Instead of “Does the person have a religion?” and then an “If so, what?”, the question reads “What is the person’s religion?”, with several common religions being listed as options, followed by an “Other - please specify”, followed by “No religion” at the very bottom. The Atheist Foundation suggests (and I agree) that this formulation of the question is likely to lead people to answer according to the religion they were raised in, or baptised in, instead of their current religious identity - it assumes as the premise of the question that the person has a religion and must specify what it is. “No religion” is just an afterthought.

Another reason may be due to campaigns by certain religious/political elements - it turns out that some have been telling people to mark “Catholic” or another form of Christianity in an attempt to prevent Mosques from being built nearby. The census-taker in the link may be an aberration but there have certainly been emails and so on circulating to that effect - “Mark Christian, even if you aren’t, to keep away the scary Muslims!”

That’s not what we want to do - we think that kind of thing is reprehensible. We just want the data to be accurate - to give a clearer picture of the true nature of the population than it otherwise would. People who say marking “Jedi” will get it recognised as an official religion (whatever that means) as they said in emails that circulated before the last census are wrong - it gets counted as a non-response.

These figures do matter, so it’s really not good to have a heap of non-responses, particularly from people who (in the case of protest-answers) do at least somewhat care about their answer. These figures determine where religious buildings are built, they influence how much power religious lobby groups have, they influence the funding of religious schools. Inaccurate figures make it harder to argue against the enormous waste of taxpayer money that is the National School Chaplaincy Program. They make it harder to argue against the indoctrination of children through SRI programs throughout the nation. They make it harder to argue against religious institutions being automatically classified as charities - despite not using much of their income for charity work - costing Australian taxpayers over $20 billion per annum.

Media narratives are built around our nation’s values, and these figures reinforce the idea that those values are uniformly Christian. Furthermore, the Australian Christian Lobby is now campaigning on precisely this premise - that if you hold typical Australian values, those are Judeo-Christian values and you should therefore indicate some form of Christianity on the Census.

This is ridiculous - some of these values may have come to us via Judeo-Christian traditions but they are absolutely secular values now, and are held by many atheists and religious non-Christians. Nobody owns these values, and in most cases these religions simply adopted them from other traditions that were around when they were forming. Marking “Christian” because you hold these values would be like marking “Greek Pantheon” because you value democracy.

So, don’t mark “Jedi” as a protest, or a joke. Don’t mark “Christian” if you were baptised, but no longer believe. And don’t mark “No religion” just because some dude on the internet tells you to, either. Answer according to whatever belief you actually have right now, so we can get a clear look at what Australia really believes.

Free Will

2011-07-28T23:31:00.000+10:00

Over the past century or so, we’ve seen some pretty revolutionary changes in the world of physics. Newtonian mechanics held the crown as the best explanation for a long time, but in fairly rapid succession, relativity and quantum mechanics came along to oust it from the top job. It is now pretty much universally acknowledged that Newton was wrong about several important things, and that the modern theories do a much better job of explaining the physical universe.

Why, then, are Newton’s formulae still taught in schools? Because, in a broad sense, Newton wasn’t wrong - he just wasn’t quite specific enough. If you are calculating the motion of an apple falling in Earth gravity, to the kinds of tolerances required for such a task, Newton’s equations are perfectly fine to use. It’s only when you want to describe things with immense gravitational fields, things that are moving extremely fast, or things on a subatomic scale, that Newton falls apart. Now, don’t fall into the trap of treating these things as separate magisteria; if you use relativistic equations to calculate the motion of the apple you will get the correct result - to a much greater degree of accuracy than you will with Newtonian mechanics.

But since your methods of measuring the strength of gravity, the weight of the apple, and the time it takes are probably going to be pretty crude, and rounded to whatever decimal place you decide upon; and since it’s not moving fast enough, or in a strong enough gravitational field for relativity to make much of a difference, you can get away with using Newton. And in fact, you are absolutely better off using Newton in this case, it’s not just laziness - it would take you a hell of a lot more of your precious time to use relativity, and since your results are only as good as your least-accurate measurement, it’s unlikely to give you a better result anyway.

So, for the kinds of medium-sized, slow-moving objects we encounter day-to-day, Newton is still useful. This kind of near-enough-is-good-enough approach to science jars a bit at first; it seems antithetical to science’s spirit, the search for absolute truths. People often have this idea that there are these golden equations hidden in the base code of the universe, and that science is trying to discover what they are. But science isn’t really like that. Science isn’t about discovering a pre-existing set of equations that run the show, it’s about making equations that describe the way things happen, with varying degrees of accuracy. It is very much a results-oriented enterprise.

As an aside, none of this means we should get complacent, or that the things we’re learning now aren’t useful. There’s still so much we don’t know, and the applications of the things we learn from these small-scale studies into the nature of matter do have an effect on the everyday world. For example, if you’ve ever used a hard drive, you’ve benefited from humankind’s knowledge of quantum mechanics.

But nonetheless, for everyday-scale problems, Newtonian mechanics are a useful tool. “Right” and “wrong” aren’t really salient concepts here - quantum mechanics may be more “right” than Newtonian mechanics, but on a quantum scale, the interactions are too complex for us to get meaningful macroscopic answers very easily. So Newton, while “wrong”, is a useful abstraction.

In philosophy of late, there has been an ongoing debate between two camps. On the one hand, you have Free Will, which says that I am the author of my own actions, I have control over my life, and the phrase “I could have done X, but I didn’t” has meaning. On the other hand, you have Determinism, which is generally formulated as a denial of traditional notions of Free Will - we are just atomic machines, and our actions are the consequences of the electrochemistry in our brains; it’s all just atoms interacting with each other, so to say “I could have done X, but I didn’t” is false; since it’s simple cause-and-effect, you couldn’t have done anything but what you ended up doing.

And using these formulations, if you look at everything we know about the physical universe, let’s be blunt - Determinism is right, and Free Will is wrong. The human mind is inseparable from the human brain; states of consciousness are states of biology; if you go down the line, biology is chemistry, and chemistry is physics; it really is a causal chain of interacting quarks.

People don’t like this because it conflicts with a sense of Self that is still very much rooted in dualism. Even atheists, and other people who don’t really believe in souls in a traditional sense, still tend to think like this - like their consciousness is a computer program, for instance. And, certainly, it may be possible in the (relatively) near future for us to “download” our minds into a computer and live there - but this would not really be a download, it’d be a port. You can’t separate the self from the physical structures that underpin it, like you can with a program on a hard drive, because the Self is the structure. You can probably create a reasonable facsimile of that Self on a hard drive; it’s just important to remember that it’s a facsimile and not the thing itself.

The other main reason this answer doesn’t satisfy people is because it doesn’t answer any of the accompanying questions; we want to know whether we have Free Will for a reason, we want to use that information to answer other questions. We want to know whether it’s right to punish people for their actions. We want to know whether or not to fall into nihilism; whether what we think, feel and will actually matter. We want to know if morality can have any coherent purpose, through our will to act. And Determinism, while correct, doesn’t really answer these questions.

Free Will, however does. Much like Newtonian mechanics, it’s not so much a literal, accurate truth as it is a useful abstraction. Yes, your consciousness is the product of nearly 4 billion years of evolution, of the society you were brought up in, of the input of your family and friends, of every experience you’ve ever had; and therefore any act you perform can in some way be attributed to these causes. But the causal links are so mind-bogglingly complex, so incomprehensibly tangled, that it’s simpler to just call the whole Black Box “You”.

People get quite uppity about the notion of Determinism; as though the rejection of the idea “I am the author of my own actions” means that someone else is the author of their actions. As though the things your subconscious does are somehow separable from “you”. As though there can be any definition of “you” that does not include your biological urges, your upbringing, your experiences. These unique characteristics are what make you “you”, and we should not be so keen to bin them as Other.

In any case, this clearer positioning of Free Will as an abstraction - an abstraction we know the underlying truth about - allows us to answer those nagging questions. Is it right to punish someone for their actions? We can see that the focus needs to be on results; yes, that person may have been caused - or at least predisposed - to commit a particular crime by their upbringing, which is a causal force. But our punishment for this crime can also be a causal force; we can make this person see the error of their ways. In this light, it becomes clear that while it is certainly right and desirable to “punish” someone in a broad sense, it should not be punishment so much as rehabilitation. The focus should be on behavioural change in the offender, not on revenge.

Further, do our decisions matter? Does morality have any relevance; do our moral choices count? The answer to this one is clear: absolutely. People sometimes forget that introspection, reading new things, having discussions, and just plain thinking, are extremely powerful causal forces, of the same order as biology and cultural upbringing. Biology and acculturation are certainly important factors but they are by no means the last word - deliberate learning and willpower are much more important, if properly exercised.

Now, okay - the impetus for a particular thought might come from reading this article, or from reading what someone else has to say on Free Will; but the information you receive is going to be filtered through so many of your cognitive algorithms that what comes out the other side is definitely going to be a product of “you”. Furthermore, our brains have the capacity to self-modify, so whatever thinking you do will actually change the way that thinking is done (not just the data it thinks about). So yes, thinking matters; if we’re concerned about morality, if we ponder the big questions, it will affect our actions, and those actions do have an effect on the world. This formulation gives us the sense of agency that makes self-improvement possible under a Deterministic model; "I" may be the result of many preceding causes, but whatever "I" am, "I" have the power to act.

When comparing Newtonian mechanics with quantum mechanics, “right” and “wrong” aren’t really important concepts - what matters is what gives useful results in a particular situation. The same applies to Free Will and Determinism - and to answer the big questions of life, a notion of Free Will built on the facts of Determinism is by far the most useful.

The face of evil

2011-07-18T13:04:00.000+10:00

“Evil is a little man afraid for his job” - Blue Thunder

There are dozens of quotes I could have used at the top of this piece, and I may include some of the better ones throughout. Because it seems we are so invested in the notion of a Hitler or a Manson as the face of evil that people need to come up with a lot of new and inventive ways to remind us that it simply isn’t the case.

Certainly, one particularly evil man can do a lot of damage if he so chooses, and the psychology of those individuals is very interesting. But the really large-scale evils, the world-changing ones, are enforced by the everyday people on the ground. Hitler may have been (one of) the brains behind the Holocaust but his arms and legs, his eyes and ears were the German people. And to be sure, not all of them participated in war crimes, but enough did. Not all of them turned a blind eye to things they shouldn’t have, but enough did.

Now: we must of course be fair to these people, and look through the lens of empathy. The state of the interbellum German economy meant that people were desperate. They were poor, often struggling to survive, and they needed scapegoats. They were willing to latch onto whatever a strong, eloquent public speaker threw at them, and when they found their scapegoat, their need for catharsis after this extremely difficult period meant they were more willing to allow extreme punishment. (Obviously I don’t need to tell you who I mean, but it is worth noting that by ‘extreme punishment’ I mean the ghettos, theft, beatings and forced relocation - the killing was less well-known to the public, although wilful ignorance may have played a part in this).

Now, I don’t say this to excuse what the Germans did, of course - quite the opposite. I say it because we need to understand how these acts of evil are allowed to happen, so that we can prevent them from happening again - as the saying goes, “evil prevails when good men fail to act”. In fiction of this genre we are generally presented with one of two archetypes - either the completely racist, 100% evil Nazi who takes pleasure in killing and cruelty, or the misunderstood Nazi who feels great sympathy for the Jews and is only following orders, and is therefore meant to be absolved.

We would do better to remember Oskar Schindler - the non-fictional example, who risked his life and spent every last penny of his fortune to save the lives of others. The one who saw through the bullshit propaganda he was presented with. The one who knew that the economic price was minuscule compared to the cost of human lives.

A more contemporary example is that of terrorists. We’re told all sorts of fanciful lies about them - my favourite is that they “hate freedom”, but another is that they’re cowards. This is sort of because people just want to bag them out, to make themselves feel better. To demonize them, because they are the Other, and therefore very different to us. Again, I in no way want to defend them or their actions, but if we are going to try to solve the problem at its root, we need to understand it properly, so hurling false insults at them serves no useful purpose.

They don’t hate freedom - they want freedom from what they perceive as Western meddling. They’re not cowards, really - hijacking a plane does take a reasonable amount of courage. If I were to comment on their actual motivations I would just be regurgitating what I’ve read from people better-versed in Middle Eastern politics than I, but suffice to say: if you get caught up in the pursuit of creative new insults for your enemies, you’re probably going to miss their actual faults.

This applies to less militaristic areas of society too. Asylum seekers are a major one - the ‘economic refugees’ and the ‘boats are too dangerous’ arguments both fall in a hole when you properly put yourself in their shoes, when you weigh the risks as they would. It doesn’t really confirm either way whether it’s something we should do, but people who say that if they were in the same situation, if they were that desperate, they wouldn’t jump on a boat too, are kidding themselves. We live in such prosperity that it’s hard to imagine living in the conditions they do; it’s downright impossible to imagine how the feeling builds up over years.

The current big ones, though, are live export and the carbon tax. I’m willing to accept that the cattle producers of the north were mostly unaware of the goings-on in Indonesian abattoirs until the Four Corners footage aired, even though I’m tipping MLA and a lot of people further down the line knew full well what was going on. But now that they do, do they hold some moral responsibility for allowing the practice to continue? Absolutely. The practice cannot continue without your input - sure, if we don’t, another country might jump into the breach, but as long as everyone is saying that, no progress can be made. Sure, if you boycott, all the other farmers will keep going - but the movement can’t gain momentum until the first person moves. No single snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche, after all.

In the real world, away from hypotheticals, I can accept compromise. I understand; you’re hard-working people who care for your animals, you didn’t intend for this to happen, and now you feel like you’re being punished. You depend on live export for a living, and you have people depending on that income; it’s a tall order to ask you to boycott live export by yourself, given the financial implications of it. But you need to do something. If you won’t boycott, you need to campaign. You need to demand better treatment. Lobby the government, get stuck into MLA, get the word out to the general public so their voices can be heard with yours. Or if you can’t get anything done within a reasonable time frame, you need to get out; find yourself another stream of income, so you can eliminate the economic excuses. Doing nothing is not an option, because every day that you perpetuate the status quo is another day you’re morally responsible.

The same goes for the carbon tax. Or, more accurately, for the case of acting on climate change in general - the quote-unquote greatest moral challenge of our generation. If we act, it will make no difference because nobody else will; we can’t do it by ourselves. We can’t afford to act; I’m on too tight a budget as it is, not another tax, etc. If it seems like I’m repeating myself, it’s only because I’m replying to the same, tired old arguments that are always used to justify selfishness. Most of these arguments can be dismissed purely by facts - we are far from the only country that is acting, and although we are certainly acting in a more comprehensive way than many poorer nations we must contribute to the momentum that will eventually sweep them along too.

As for the financial arguments? Well, they disgust me. Not only are they demonstrably not true - if you could potentially have been in any financial trouble as a consequence of this legislation, you have just effectively been given a large tax CUT, not a hike - but they smack of selfishness, and a lack of appreciation of just how lucky Australians are compared to the rest of the world.

And I don’t just mean compared to Third World countries - according to the OECD, among rich countries, we have the lowest government spending, the lowest taxes, among the lowest inequality of wealth, one of the most progressive tax systems…and to speak from personal experience, having spoken to Americans in similar situations to myself at the time (fresh out of high school, going to college, not getting much or any assistance from their parents) we have it made in the shade - tuition money loaned to us by the government at very reasonable rates, Centrelink payments for students so they can actually live while they study, minimum wages high enough to live off, unemployment benefits and Medicare in general…the list goes on. The media narrative about how much Australians are struggling is laughable, but some sense of entitlement makes us cling onto every last cent like a croc in a death roll.

My point, however, is this. We may currently be in vastly different circumstances, but deep down, we are really not that different to the people who put their fingers in their ears and allowed Jews to be carted off, to the people who are so desperate as to kill civilians to spark change, to the people who jump on boats to flee persecution. We like to think that we are - we like to think of them as monsters, as evil, as something completely different to us. As an extreme Other that we can’t relate to. But this is just the Fundamental Attribution Error playing tricks on us again, magnified by the fact that it’s a thoroughly uncomfortable truth that conflicts violently with most people’s self-images.

We are, at the core, the same as all of these people. We share the same urges, the same fears. We can be manipulated in the same ways, manipulated to do things we don’t imagine we’re capable of. And distancing ourselves from those kinds of people, Othering them into oblivion, thinking it could never happen to us, makes us less aware of the warning signs. And that makes us susceptible.

At Last - The Carbon Tax

2011-07-11T18:17:00.002+10:00

Well. It’s about time.

Yesterday Julia Gillard announced the details of the Carbon Tax her Multi-Party Climate Committee has been hashing out for the last few weeks. Throughout the negotiations, and since the announcement, Tony Abbott has been doing his darnedest to spread fear and misinformation as a means of sabotaging the government’s position, and has been doing a pretty good job of it – so this won’t be just my thoughts on the good and bad of the package but will try to clear up misconceptions about the facts of the issue as well. I will not, however, be discussing the science of climate change.

The first thing I want to deal with is the rise in cost of living. One of the major tools Tony Abbott has been using to scare people away from the carbon tax is the allegation that hard-working, struggling Aussies would be made a lot worse off. However, the details have now come out, and the compensation for taxpayers is generous to say the least – for every dollar you lose in cost of living rises, you’ll gain back at least $1.20 in various tax breaks. Assuming you’re of a relatively low income, anyway – the people Abbott was supposedly defending before.

I don’t want to get into the ways it varies between singles, couples, and families but the ABC has all the data you’ll need; after a certain level, which for singles is 40 grand, your return is cut back to even money, and then shortly after that you start losing a bit, until at 85 grand you don’t get anything back. Even then, though, the cost to you will be minimal; $463 in a year is nothing to someone who earns 85 grand. It’s also worth noting that the tax-free threshold will be raised to $18 200, which will be very helpful for low-income earners. It’s apparently not quite as big a difference as everyone is making out, though; while the current tax-free threshold is only $6000, the Low Income Tax Offset means we have an effective tax-free threshold of $16 000 (according to the hive mind, anyway. Don’t quote me on this one).

The takeaway from all this: if you were worried about how much this tax was going to cost you, you can sleep easy tonight. You’ll be fine, and indeed will probably be better off than you are now. Is this a good thing, however? I’m a little undecided. Tony Abbott’s calling it wealth redistribution, socialism, etc. Note that he was attacking it from the exact opposite angle five minutes ago, and that he considers socialism to be a dirty word, when it really isn’t, but it’s still something worth considering: is this the best way to be spending the money earned from taxing the polluters?

I suspect this is just the way it has to be. I would have had no problem with making a bit of a sacrifice to ensure we tackled climate change quickly and decisively, so such robust compensation was by no means necessary to me – and, technically, I’m below the poverty line. So from an ethical standpoint I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to overcompensate low-income earners; it’s unreasonable to expect major change without at least a small sacrifice by somebody. That said, if there was a huge revolt and the government fell apart because of this – and in their current fragile state that’s a legitimate possibility – we’d lose all the good aspects as well, so in that sense, if it placates the fears of voters it’s money well spent.

One thing I was quite worried about prior to the announcement was how the tax would affect agriculture. If the tax had been levied on the emissions of livestock, for example, that would have been both disastrous for farmers (with all the flow-on effects that entails) as well as pointless; unless you want to move away from farming livestock altogether (an argument for another day) there’s really not you can do about lessening those emissions, so as a catalyst for change it would be completely ineffectual. Similarly, while farmers need to do their bit in the same way as everyone else with respect to moving to cleaner energy sources, some pragmatism is required; farmers may hold millions in land assets but are better compared to small business owners than large corporations, so their ability to absorb financial punishment is at times quite minimal; and having farmers leaving the land in droves is bad for everyone.

The end package, though, is quite excellent. Farmers are exempt from the carbon tax for their off-road vehicles (tractors etc) and the light on-road vehicles (utes) but if and when heavy on-road vehicles (trucks and road trains) lose their exemption, farmers will not be treated differently to anyone else. This seems to me to be a fair compromise as a beginning point; as cleaner cars become more economical, it’s going to be important for farm machinery to adopt this technology as well, so I think as we move into the future there might be scope for taxing those emissions as well. But in the meantime, this definitely doesn’t slug them too hard. Furthermore, there are a number of programs that allow farmers to actually benefit by helping the environment; carbon sequestration of varying sorts, adopting no-till techniques, etc. As I said a while ago, with every downside to a raft of legislation there will be an upside, and it’s important to take advantage of these opportunities.

The one big gripe I have with the package, though, is in regards to transport. While the maritime, aviation and rail industries will be taxed on their fuel, road transport (trucks) will not – at least not at first. I think it’s safe to say the decision was not made on ideological grounds, but instead on pure politicking grounds; the truckers are threatening strikes and we’re so dependant on trucking in Australia that they hold a fair amount of clout. Still, it needs to be pointed out how wrong this is – rail transport is much better for the environment – and the economy – than truck transport. Per km/tonne, it uses about a quarter as much fuel, over long distances it’s considerably quicker, it’s much safer (truck crashes versus train derailments, both in sheer numbers and likelihood of killing civilians) and an increase in rail freight would take a huge burden off our roads, which would save a lot of money both in wasted time (traffic jams) and in repairing and maintaining our roads.

Obviously trucks are needed to go where the tracks don’t – from the rail depot to the final destination – but in terms of long-distance hauling, on a level playing field, rail will out-compete road any day of the week. The thing is, though, the playing field is currently far from level in Australia. We’ve been plagued from the beginning when it comes to interstate railways because between the five mainland states there are four different gauges of track, making interstate freight nigh-impossible. There has been some attempt to slowly Standardise the tracks in Australia over the last few decades but there has been minimal headway.

Furthermore, in Victoria especially, the Liberal state governments of the 90s gutted the railway industry and privatised what remained, which has had disastrous consequences. Right now, rail is a shadow of what it used to be, so it doesn’t have the infrastructure to compete with trucks, especially given the huge amount of funding road has been given in its absence. It’s unfair, and antithetical to the spirit of the carbon tax, to further incentivise trucking, when it is exactly the kind of dirty industry we’re trying to eliminate.

So I think what needs to happen is this; we have a 3-year period in which trucking is exempt, and this should be treated as an opportunity. We have 3 years to start building the kind of infrastructure – and the kind of awareness and reputation – that would be necessary to make rail a serious competitor to road freight, so that when the full-fledged ETS comes into effect in 2015 we can start moving our freight off the roads and onto the cleaner, more economical option of rail.

I don’t usually solicit comments directly in these essays but this time I will – if you have a question, or an objection, about the carbon tax, I’d encourage you to say so in the comments. I’m serious when I say there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and that there may have been industries I’ve failed to take much notice of (though my general policy is: if I didn’t include it here, it seems fine and roughly what I expected), so consider this an open invitation to make use of my political nerdistry and black-belt Google-fu.

One exception: nothing about the science of global warming and whether this is a good idea in the first place – I want to confine the discussion to the political and economic models for dealing with it. It’s kinda moot now but I’ll deal with the science another day.

The Empathy Heuristic

2011-06-27T14:30:00.000+10:00

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust

Most people see empathy as being primarily concerned with the moral sphere. We should try to consider other people’s feelings before we act, so we’re not inadvertently assholes to them. We should imagine how other people might react to what we say before we say it, so that we don’t offend anyone. It’s framed as a benefit to others - it’s not that you’re doing it for yourself, it’s that you’re making someone else’s life easier.

But, as some people much smarter than me have recently taught me, empathy is an extremely powerful tool to help you make decisions. And I think part of the reason I never picked up on this myself is that I already thought I was very empathetic, when really I was only sympathetic.

It’s still somewhat of an uncommon (or perhaps just under-used) skill, but sympathy isn’t really that difficult. It’s easy enough to commiserate with someone who is feeling what you are feeling, or to lend an understanding ear to someone who is going through what you’ve gone through. What’s more difficult is to connect with people whose point of view you don’t understand - to see the world through their eyes, not because they’re so similar to your own but precisely because they’re so dissimilar. Connecting with someone because you understand them is sympathy, but understanding them because you can connect with them - that is empathy.

And it obviously has its benefits when it comes to relating to other people, to developing emotional bonds, and all that stuff. I don’t want to disparage that side of things, because empathy is very valuable in that regard as well. But once you start trying to understand people’s motives through an empathetic lens, you begin to see just how many other applications there are for it.

The door I entered through was the Fundamental Attribution Error, which in its most basic form is this: people usually attribute their own actions, especially faults, to their circumstances; but they will attribute the actions of others to their fundamental personality. That is, if you are rude to your waitress, it’s understandable, because you’ve had a bad day - but if a customer is rude to you, it’s because they’re generally just a rude person.

The reasons for this are manifold and too complicated for me to properly understand, but I suspect it’s partially an extension of what you do and don’t notice - you know a hell of a lot about yourself, you know intimately what kind of a day you’ve had, and possibly how rare such rudeness is for you, so that information is easily recalled when making value judgements; but when it comes to a stranger, that one act of rudeness is literally all you have to go on, so it makes it harder to imagine extenuating circumstances.

Knowing this sort of thing about people is useful in both directions. Firstly, when you consciously stop to think what the reasons might be behind someone’s rudeness, you begin to realise that it doesn’t really matter. I don’t want to harp on rude customers because this applies to other areas of life, but to keep with the example - part of the reason we don’t like rudeness is because it upsets us to think that they might have a point. On one level we might think “What a jerk” but on another, deeper level, we take the things people say to us to heart; as though we somehow brought it upon ourselves. Realising that the person has probably just had a shitty day is the first step towards not caring what random strangers think of you. It sounds kind of Zen, but it’s really more Stoic.

The other direction, of course, is to consider when we might be letting ourselves off too easily. The fact that we have had a bad day is not really a good enough reason to be an asshole to the people around us - what we tend to consider to be extenuating circumstances are much more often just excuses. When you realise that pretty much everybody considers themselves to be a fundamentally good, rational person - and you contrast this with the irrational bastardry you see in the world - it becomes apparent that a lot of people are fooling themselves, and none of us are immune. It takes a powerful mind to look critically at what society feeds us, what other people say to us - but it takes a much more powerful one to look critically at itself.

The beautiful thing is, though, that this has applications in all areas of life. And I have historically been terrible at reading people - as anyone who knows me well will attest - so I’m sure there’s a lot of applications I haven’t gotten to yet. True empathy helps you deal with menial tasks and annoying customers. It helps you deal with stupid bosses, with annoying co-workers. It can keep you out of the drunk tank when you realise that the cops don’t want to give you a hard time, they just don’t want you to cause any trouble. It can help you understand why people oppose political policies you support - and to understand how you can better present your case to them. It helps you understand that the ‘unattainable’ girl you like probably feels as insecure as you do at times.

Empathy doesn’t just make life easier for the people around you. Empathy makes you smarter.

Whose side are you on?

2011-06-21T20:56:00.001+10:00

Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than virtue. - Robert Wright

I have been in arguments on the internet (I can quit any time I like, I swear) in which I have spent a long time vehemently disagreeing with the other participants on the topic at hand, but then have agreed completely with them when the inevitable digression surfaces; when the argument on a carbon tax turns into an argument on nuclear power, for example.

This tends to surprise the shit out of your average bogan commenter, because to them, argument is war. You have a side, and I have a side, and we square off. We can use different tactics to achieve victory, but at no point do we concede defeat; I must argue that everything you say is wrong, even if I begin to realise that you’re right.

So when I concede points, they get surprised, but recover quickly because they see it as a small victory (note that it usually isn’t - it’s usually that they’ve falsely packaged the second, separate argument with the first, but that’s a topic for another day). Who really gets surprised, though, are the people who originally agreed with me. When they spout off a false statistic that supports my argument, and I know it’s false, I tend to point it out. The response to this tends to be along the lines of “Whose side are you on?”

Similarly, I have a small number of friends who I’m very close with, who are like brothers to me. They’re generally pretty upstanding people, but, being human, they do fuck up from time to time. I don’t want to air any details here, but suffice to say there have been some times when they have done things that made me extremely angry with them. Times when they have wronged a mutual friend, and so on.

And in those instances, or at least those instances where I’ve had the courage to voice what I was thinking, I have called them on it. I have told them that they’re being cockheads, and that they need to stop it. And it’s not always, but the response is often the same - “Don’t you have any loyalty? Aren’t you going to stick up for me? Whose side are you on?”

This is it, ladies and gents. This is the biggest point I can make. This is what I’ve been trying to explain to the people in my life for as long as I can remember.

I’m not on anybody’s side. There are no sides.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am loyal, in the sense that I will always forgive my friends for their cock-ups - as they have done for me on any number of occasions. I will defend their interests as best I can, even sometimes when those interests conflict with my own. There are forms of loyalty that are worthwhile, and I’m not suggesting anyone throw away a time-honoured friendship on the basis of a simple disagreement - far from it.

But nonetheless, if you are wrong, you’re going to hear about it. Whether it’s a moral decision you made, or a factual point in a debate, my relationship to you does not affect the truth. That is not an argumentative crutch that is going to work, ever.

Furthermore, no cause is important enough to be above this standard. I don’t care if your argument is going to convince your opponent that gay marriage should be legal - if it’s based on bullshit, I’m going to say so, however strongly I might agree with your goals.

The other side of this coin is that you have to be open to changing your mind. There’s no point avoiding all the traps of picking a side, if you then create a rigid Side of One. In this context, you aren’t a side either; so if one of your beliefs is looking like it’s been proven false, discard it.

I know it feels like conceding the point undermines you, but unless you’re participating in a televised debate, nobody cares - and you have the enormous advantage of being able to move forward into the future with the right information. Never underestimate this - in admitting you were wrong, in discarding your cherished belief, you are not making yourself weaker, you’re making yourself stronger. In the grand scheme of things, accuracy far outweighs perceived credibility.

It’s funny that both sides of this coin come from a childish need to be right. Well, I say, “need to be right”, because that’s the phrase used when talking about obstinate teens (a charge often levelled at me a lot as a teenager - and rightfully so).

But it’s really a need to be perceived as right - an insecurity that values what people think of you much more highly than really being intelligent. You’re better off with an actual need to be right - a thirst for the truth that overpowers your pride, that allows you to concede small losses so that you can win the war.

Because at the end of the day, if you never change your mind, you can never get any smarter - so how right can you possibly be?

The Tribe Has Spoken

2011-06-16T18:16:00.000+10:00

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. - Aldous Huxley

For most modern Westerners, our moral sphere - those we consider to have value, who we take into account when making moral choices - encompasses all human beings, regardless of their race, gender or social status. Many people include sentient non-humans, and to a certain degree some even go further and include non-sentient life forms into their moral sphere. But it wasn’t always the case.

The current size of our moral sphere is the result of centuries of expansion. Not so long ago, and for many people to this day, people of a different gender or race were on the outside. For a long time, slaves - who historically weren’t chosen on such strict racial lines as they were in post-Columbus America - were outside it, too. If you go back far enough you get to the point where anyone who was not a part of your tribe was not worth caring about. They were the enemy. They were the Other. And they were evil, barbarous sons of bitches.

This was the case for a hell of a long time - long enough to be important on evolutionary timescales. But we don’t really have tribes any more. Our societies have grown large and incredibly interconnected, and it has become nearly impossible to remain divided into tribes. So what do we do? We invent them. We assign different groups different labels - Self and Other, although the label for a person or group may differ in different situations.

I tried to add up all the ones in my immediate social circle once. One Uni Residence hates another, but they are unified by their hatred of a third; those three, in turn, are unified by their hatred for Residences on other campuses; and on it goes. Of course, in this case I’m using ‘hatred’ very glibly - friendly rivalry would be a better description, for 99% of the people involved. But people do this all the time: we constantly label people as Self and Other - as friend and enemy - and rank how close or far someone is from us. And even when we are randomly assigned into these groups, like on Res, we are so fiercely territorial with these labels that sometimes shit gets out of hand.

Tribalism of this sort is the root of a lot of problems, some of which I will probably deal with in later pieces. But what I want to talk about today is the idea that when you see yourself as a part of a group, you become much more eager to praise them, and reluctant to criticise them, than if you were judging their actions fairly.

We’ve moved beyond rivalries between football teams or home towns here. We’re talking about big ideologies. Religions. Philosophies. Political parties. And, honestly, I’m not quite so concerned with people who are actually members of the parties - actual Labor MPs sticking to the Labor party line, or whatever. They’re a party, and maintaining party discipline is a valid strategic move, if not a valid intellectual one. What concerns me is when a person who votes for that party - who subscribes to a philosophy, who follows a religion - sticks to the party line just as rigidly.

If you tend to vote Liberal, and a new issue comes up, does the Liberal policy affect your position at all? If you vote Labor, and a Liberal politician makes a stupid mistake, do you feel like your side has had a victory? If you’re unsure what to think about an issue, do you find out what your church’s position is? If the footy team you support wins, do you feel like you’ve won? Because you haven’t. You might imagine yourself to be a part of something - indeed, this feeling is what drives the success of organisations such as these - but you’re really not.

You don’t work for these political parties - they work for you. You should run for the hills if anyone ever mentions anything to do with loyalty; vote for them, or don’t, depending on how best you feel their current policies will serve the country. What they’ve done in the past is only relevant as a predictor of what they’ll do in the future, and their policies are a much better indicator. What the party stood for ten years ago might be completely different to what it stands for now - and indeed it may be a completely different bunch of people who just happen to be holding the old banner.

People will always try to label other people. They will try to fit you into neat little check-boxes, and they will try to fit themselves into those same boxes. And when a square peg doesn’t fit a round hole, it’s the peg that gets rounded; people change their beliefs to fit their labels, not the other way around. I don’t want to belabour the point, but since so many forces of society are (indirectly) telling you otherwise, I want to be clear - this is absolutely, fundamentally wrong.

There may be a rare case when you come across a religion, a philosophy, a political party - hell, a single human being - with whom you agree entirely. Who you can unequivocally say represents your views in every way. But in every other case, you have to cherry-pick. You have to say “Okay, the Squares have the general idea, and they’re right about a lot of things, but they’re completely wrong on this issue. And the Circles are generally idiotic, but they’ve taken a much more practical approach here, so I’ll support that. And on this issue - none of these jackasses know what the hell they’re talking about; it should be dealt with like this.”

Thinking for yourself isn’t a tool for deciding which team to pick, it’s the ability to stand on your own, without a team. Because the truth doesn’t take sides.

The Parable of the Good Point Guard

2011-06-12T16:05:00.001+10:00

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses - Francis Bacon

Just a short post today, but an important one.

I remember quite a few years ago I was sitting in the stands, watching a game of basketball, waiting for my own game to start. When one of the players was dribbling the ball down the court, he dribbled it off his foot and it went out of court.

My father turned to me and said “Everybody points and laughs when the point guard dribbles the ball off his foot. A good point guard dribbles the ball down the court thousands of times without making a mistake, and nobody remembers it - they just remember the one time he messed up.”

People drink Echinacea when they get a cold. After a few doses, the cold goes away. Yay! Of course, if they hadn’t drank the tea, their cold still would have gone away in the same amount of time, but people still attribute their success to the Echinacea because it happened at the same time. Same goes for glucosamine; joint pain tends to go away of its own volition, for a lot of people, but people who take glucosamine tend to praise it quite highly.

It’s not even that they’re placebos, per se - the placebo effect mimics that of the treatment in question, so there can be genuine improvement in some cases. These make absolutely no difference, but are still credited with powers they don’t have, simply because they are the kind of thing that the human brain notices - and because the human brain loves to make associations between performing an action and seeing a result.

Your brain categorises drinking the tea as “doing something” and not drinking the tea as “doing nothing”, in the same way that it categorises dribbling off the foot as “something” and dribbling up without incident as “nothing”. But here’s the thing - “doing nothing” is a notion that exists entirely in our brains. Because while you’re not drinking the tea, you are drinking water, eating food, resting, regulating your body temperature, fighting an automatic immunological war…the multitude of things that you are doing right at this very second are impossible to transcribe - and all of them will have an effect, be it on your cold or on anything else you do.

When you are trying to make a decision and “doing nothing” is presented to you as an option, reframe it in more accurate terms - especially if this option is presented to you in the course of a moral debate. “Doing nothing” is often presented as a kind of null response, a moral zero when considering ethical questions - like, you can either actively help the starving children of the world by sending clothing, food, money, etc; or you can be one of the people over there actively oppressing them, forcing them to work in diamond mines and so on; or you can do nothing, and it’s just neutral.

But when you say “doing nothing” you really mean “not donating to whatever charity someone is currently asking about”, which means that all your other actions are still open for assessment. The food you eat, the products you buy, the pollution you produce - everything you do as part of the status quo, as a part of your normal routine, has an effect. So you’re not doing nothing - you are doing all of those things, with the various positives and negatives each action creates.

It’s important to recognise the power that each of us has - that even the most unintentional of actions can have such great and far-reaching consequences.

Some housekeeping

2011-06-10T15:47:00.000+10:00

Okay, it's been roughly a year since I started linking to the blog, so this is sort of an anniversary. I've got some actual posts coming up very shortly (got about four in the works at varying stages of completion) but today I just want to do some housekeeping.

Firstly, the blog has a Twitter account, @Benev_Ment - following it will mean you get notified every time I post a new blog, including stuff that you wouldn't get by just checking here manually, such as the guest post I did recently on Partial Objects. I think Blogger has built-in RSS capability so if you want to follow it that way, go nuts, but be aware that I have no idea how to do anything with it, so I can't guarantee that it works.

Secondly, comment! Agree, disagree, criticise, build on what I've said - whatever. I have thought about putting ads on here but let's face it, it wouldn't make enough money to be worth the effort, with current rates of traffic. But that's fine because this was never meant to be a money-making exercise, it's a learning exercise - it's something that gives me motivation to write more often, and to get valuable feedback from you guys. Am I onto something? Am I an idiot? Am I on the right track but missing a key detail? Then tell me! And not via Twitter, or when I link it on Facebook - I really want to foster discussion, so if you have the urge to say something, please do so here, in the comments. All posts and no comments make Jack a dull blog!

Finally, if there are any general comments about the blog that you have - about the content, the site itself, the update frequency, whatever - let me know in the comments to this post, and I'll see what I can do.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks

2011-04-05T13:02:00.000+10:00

I don’t know what’s more pathetic: that the Coalition has been reduced to saying that the Greens are extremists who have Gillard by the short and curlies, or that it seems to be working.

In the inaugural Gough Whitlam Oration, she basically only addressed two things in detail – the extreme failure of NSW Labor on the weekend, and the notion that Labor are in bed with the Greens. I don’t really know enough about NSW politics to comment much on that part, but in both cases it seems the message was clear: don’t associate our government with either of them. We’ll reconstitute the NSW wing, and we’ll distance ourselves from the Greens because we are flat-out terrified of what might happen to the polls if we don’t.

Which is fine, I guess. It’s crude, transparent politicking, and I really hope that the voting public doesn’t fall for it quite as easily as she seems to think they will. But if she wants to attack her allies in an attempt to distance herself from them, such is her prerogative. So too is it Tony Abbott’s prerogative to act like a petulant child, and attack any attempt at progress in the hope of getting what he wants. What annoys me, though, is when they tell lies to do so.

Gillard says that the Greens do not share the values of everyday Australians. In the last federal election, the Greens got 11.76% of the vote in the House of Representatives, and 13.11% of the Senate (by comparison, Labor won with 37.99% of the HoR). They got more than three times the lower-house vote that the National Party did, for instance; in fact, they run a close third behind Labor and the Liberals, ahead of all the other parties that make up the Coalition.

So in a very real sense, everyday Australians do share the values of the Greens, and they voted accordingly. The only reason this is less than apparent in the current makeup of Parliament is because of how spread out the votes were – the Greens only won a single seat with their 11.76%, whereas the Liberal National Party of Queensland, the second-biggest component of the Coalition, won 21 seats with only 9.12% of the vote.

Furthermore, the idea that the Greens have an agenda that is out of step with that of the Australian people is ridiculous too. Unlike the two major parties, the Greens support the right to die with dignity – as do 76% of Australians. Unlike the two major parties, the Greens support the right to gay marriage – as do 60% of Australians.

The biggest focal point for the Greens at the moment is climate change; they believe it is happening and is caused by humans, as do the majority of Australians (although different surveys give different percentages) and indeed the two major parties believe this as well, differing only on how best to attack the problem.

From the other perspective, both Labor and the Coalition have spent the last few days (and indeed a lot of time in the past) kowtowing to religious lobby groups – groups which oppose the above social issues – affirming to them their commitment to all these supposed ‘family values’. The political sway of these religious groups far outweighs their relevance to everyday Australians, and as the statistics above suggest their agenda is positively counter to that of most of us.

There are of course policies of the Greens that some people vehemently oppose, but the same can be said of Labor and the Coalition. The notion of the modern Greens as an extremist party is at best deeply flawed.

Finally, though, the idea that the Greens are pulling all the strings is for me a thoroughly puzzling one. The major reasons I voted for the Greens were their positions on climate change, gay marriage, euthanasia, censorship and asylum seekers – and I suspect most other Greens voters would include at least some of those in their reasons.

We have made little, if any, progress on gay marriage and euthanasia. The asylum seeker problem worsens every day, under Labor’s utterly ineffectual guidance. Conroy’s Clean Feed proposal has been shelved, but this was done well before the election. We finally have some progress on climate change, but as Gillard has repeatedly said, Labor always intended to act on climate change – all the current situation has done is tweak the way she’s done it.

So, basically, of the many things the Greens wanted to do – most of which are supported by the majority of Australians - they’ve convinced Labor to do exactly one. The one that they were already going to do anyway. Tell me again how Bob Brown is the master puppeteer?

The Tax That Saves You Money

2011-03-23T23:33:00.000+11:00

Being too busy to write lately, I figured I’d sort of missed the boat on this issue. But seeing the huge opposition to the Government’s proposed Carbon Tax at the Parliament House rally today, I realised just how effective the Liberal scare campaign has been. So, as always, it’s time to cut through the hysteria and rhetoric and get to the facts.

The first thing you need to know is that if you have seen a figure on how much more you will pay for something - be it electricity, food, fuel or anything else - it is a complete fabrication. The Liberal Party does not share all of the blame for this, as the media has done a very good job perpetuating these claims, but it serves no purpose but to attract votes and ratings.

Prices on many products are indeed projected to rise, but as yet the government has not given any indication as to what rate carbon will be taxed at, so it is currently impossible to calculate this rise. Furthermore, it has not even been decided precisely which items will be taxed - electricity will be, agriculture won’t, but petrol is still very much undecided. So don’t go counting the moths in your wallet before they’ve hatched.

The second thing you need to know is that climate change is going to cost us all, whatever happens. Even setting aside the direct environmental impact on the economy (loss of farming income, etc) the rest of the world is moving. The European Union has had an ETS in place since 2005, and New Zealand started one last year, to name a few countries comparable to Australia. Although the US does not have such a scheme in place at a federal level, several states do.

People often claim that our efforts are negligible in the face of continued pollution by China and India, but India began the process of moving to cleaner fuels by placing a tax on coal last year, and China are investing better in nuclear than we are. We are fast being left behind - even I was surprised to see that the EU’s system has been in place for six years already - so if we want our economy to remain competitive in a low-emission market, we need to act now.

It has often been argued that less-developed nations - China and India, particularly - would not self-regulate, and that the efforts of Australia and similar countries would therefore be in vain. As stated above, this is not necessarily true (especially since they use coal for no other reason than price - if we make renewables cheap enough, they will use them) but is pervasive nonetheless - and could apply to nations other than those two - so some strategies have been formulated to deal with it.

The most likely one is this - in the event that other nations refuse to regulate their emissions, the EU (and likely other nations with low-emission economies) could put a tariff on certain products coming from high-carbon countries. So if we wanted to export our steel to Europe but had no emissions system in place, we would have to pay more than a low-carbon nation, and would therefore be outcompeted. And I don’t need to tell you how bad that would be for the economy.

Furthermore, we are already seeing rises in electricity prices for the simple reason that the companies are expecting a carbon reduction scheme of some type but have been uncertain as to the specifics. This uncertainty has caused a massive drop in investment in their industry, and the prices have risen in an attempt to regain costs. It is predicted that introduction of firm, reasonable legislation will increase confidence in the industry, which will effectively lower prices. Although the economic modelling of this is reasonably sound, in my opinion, whether we’ll actually see price drops is another thing entirely.

When you have an industry where just a few key players hold all the cards, the difference between that and a monopoly is negligible. They don’t even need to collude on prices, which is illegal - they just slowly rise, and as long as nobody jumps too far ahead of the others, consumers are unlikely to riot (the most obvious example is petrol companies).

Furthermore, in situations like this, where the cost of entry is so high (I could say “Fuck you and your prices!” to my local florist and start my own, but I can’t exactly build my own power plant) what sets the price of goods is not actual supply and demand but perceived supply and demand.

Translation - if the media keeps telling everyone that electricity prices will rise by 30%, the prices will rise by 30%, because the companies know they can get away with it - they know the public expects it. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. So while the prices should drop with the introduction of a fair carbon tax, there’s no guarantee that they will; my guess is it’ll split the difference and have a small but manageable rise.

The third thing you need to know is that whichever party you support, they support action on climate change that is likely to cost you money, at least initially. The Carbon Tax may be the product of the Greens-influenced Labor government, but the Liberals have a policy too. Who the hell knows what Tony Abbott thinks any more - one minute he calls climate change crap, the next he says the CPRS is ineffective and that if climate change were real a simple tax would be better, and now he says that anthropogenic climate change is real but that a tax is the wrong way to go (and, funnily enough, that Gillard isn’t allowed to change her mind).

At the end of the day, however, despite their red-faced spittle-whipping towards “Juliar”, the current Liberal policy is also that anthropogenic climate change is real, and must be acted on. They just believe that the best way to deal with it is “direct action” - basically a mix of direct regulation (saying that you can only have a certain amount of CO2, in the same way that the cleanliness of drinking water is regulated), subsidisation of clean energy projects, or buying out heavy polluters (which, funnily enough, is a larger version of Labor’s horrendous proposal of a “cash for clunkers” scheme).

This system could work to effect change in industry, though it is generally believed to be less effective than a carbon tax or an ETS would be - Emission Trading Schemes for other chemicals have a good track record (for example, the Acid Rain Program), whereas direct action does not. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the two systems would be equally effective and that the only point of difference would be how much it would cost citizens.

A direct action system such as the Coalition is proposing would cost money - money that would come straight out of the budget. Direct regulation of carbon emissions will have the same type of effect on cost of living as a carbon tax; under direct regulation, companies must buy new equipment in order to comply, or face fines - the cost of which would be passed onto the consumer. A carbon tax would initially not force companies to cut emissions, as such (that will come later, when the ETS comes in) just make it very much in their best financial interests to do so - so either they are taxed and pass the cost onto consumers, or they buy new equipment and pass the cost onto consumers.

This might seem lose-lose, since both would effectively result in cost-of-living rises, but from the citizen’s perspective the two are very different. With direct action, the government spends budget money on technology investment, buying out companies, etc - all of which must be accounted for either by increasing debt (something the Coalition has previously ranted about), cutting spending (something the Coalition periodically complains about, on select issues) or increasing taxes (something every opposition is always shouting about).

With a carbon tax, the government actually makes money from it - money that is then used to offset the cost-of-living rises. Under the Rudd CPRS, pensioners and low-income households actually stood to gain more by this mechanism than they would lose, although we don’t yet know what the case will be with the current formulation.

Though it’s probably less settled in the minds of voters, in current policy all major facets of Australian politics now agree that climate change is real and must be stopped - in this context, the scientific and ethical arguments are effectively moot. The only question remaining is how to act.

So to those who are worried about whether or not they can afford Julia Gillard’s new carbon tax, ask yourself this - are you better off with cost-of-living rises that will be offset by the government, or unchecked cost-of-living rises on top of a probable tax hike?

The Helen Lovejoy Argument

2011-01-21T16:20:00.000+11:00

“Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children!”

David Novak - No right to marriage for same-sex couples

David Novak is an example of an interesting, but sadly not uncommon, subtype of those opposed to gay marriage. He is a very religious man - a Professor of Religion, amongst other things - and he is entirely opposed to gay marriage, but puts forward his arguments on ostensibly unreligious grounds. As tends to be the case with such people, though, his otherwise logic-based arguments are built on the sands of prejudice.

Novak’s article is full of ridiculous non-sequiturs, contradictions and outright falsehoods that I could debunk in great detail (in fact, I did - the first draft of this was over 3000 words, before I cut it down). For example, his claim that the state invented public education but inherited marriage is both incorrect (the state institutionalised private education just like it institutionalised the custom of marriage) and irrelevant (in some sense everything we do is inherited; we must change things to improve them).

He claims that gay marriage would redefine it so radically that it would lose all meaning, all continuity with the tradition and the meaning of the word; the etymology of most marriage-related words ultimately come from either love or alliance, not procreation; and when he talks about ‘tradition’ he is not referring to ancient Babylonian practises, he’s really only going back about as far as his own great-grandparents.

He claims that he’s fine with correcting injustices within the institution - such as the legal treatment of a wife as the property of her husband, and presumably the illegality of mixed-race marriages - but, for some reason, not this one, for fear of somehow “destroying” the institution.

He says the state has a right to control marriage because it needs people to breed in order to maintain statehood, and that allowing gay (read: childless) marriages would undermine this…but somehow I doubt people would stop breeding in the absence of a state to make sure they do. We have officially got that one covered.

But then he gets onto the child-rearing arguments, and that’s where it gets interesting. Because a lot of people who are totally in support of gay marriage have reservations about their abilities to raise children - not so much in their quality as parents but in their uniformity of gender. So it’s these arguments I will be taking a closer look at.

He starts out well enough - parents have a right to raise their kids, and to be looked after by those kids if they grow too old to look after themselves. Kids have a right to be supported by their parents. This is all well and good - the problem is, he is presupposing the words “biological” at the front of all these words and he shouldn’t be.

He thinks of the biological, heteronormative nuclear family as a norm that should not be deviated from except under the most extreme circumstances, and it just plain ain’t the case. Who a person’s “real” parents are, or who a person’s “real” children are, is something decided by their actions rather than their blood.

He says to ask kids of divorce if they feel violated - if they feel bad that their family was torn apart. I say, ask kids whose parents stay together when they shouldn’t. If the relationship is working then of course parents should stay together - that’s a nurturing, loving environment. But if it isn’t, raising children in such a toxic environment is much worse than divorcing. Ask kids whose parents got divorced relatively late in the piece, or kids who never knew the family unit - a large portion of both will tell you they don’t feel violated at all.

He says to ask parents whose kids have been taken if they feel violated. Forcibly taken? Absolutely. Willingly given? They may feel a bit conflicted, depending on the circumstances, but if they made the decision they will have had their reasons and will undoubtedly feel less violated than if they’d been forced to keep an unwanted child.

If you actually look at the facts instead of cherry-picking them to suit your argument, you can see that marriage and child rearing are both done in multifarious ways, and that the only necessary condition for either of them is love and a desire to enter into that particular commitment.

Then we come to the real crux of the argument - and a surprisingly common problem in thinking. Despite the fact that Novak is rigid in his commitment to the heteronormative nuclear family, he’s fine with single parents - and therefore “fails to see” what the addition of another adult adds to the family.

That’s right - he can’t see how another parent to love, support, teach, and financially back a child could possibly be of any benefit. His basis for this? The fact that they’re the same sex. Because, let’s face it, one man or woman is much the same as the next - they’re basically Pokemon cards. “Aww, I’ve got doubles of Dad, can I trade you for a Blastoise?”

Novak here reveals his huge, glaring heteronormative bias, and general ignorance. He suggests that, in the case of a lesbian couple, the addition of an extra woman would mean that one would be, essentially, “playing father” (and vice versa for male couples) and that this is unnatural - a poor simulation of an actual father.

This is a very popular myth, as it turns out, and is an extension of the assumption of a butch/femme lesbian paradigm. But guess what? The child wouldn’t have one mother and one simulated father - the child would have two mothers. Novak is so mired in the heteronormative paradigm that he tries to cram the gay couples into this mould - and he is far from alone, even people who are fairly progressive and supporting of gay rights tend to think this way (myself included, for a long time).

He then moves past children from a previous marriage and onto surrogacy and artificial insemination (and thence to adoption, where he uses similar arguments). Again he starts out with the baseless accuastion that biological parents are automatically better than adoptive ones. This assumption is ridiculous, and statistics strongly disagree with it - through a combination of factors, (mostly the lack of unwanted pregnancies and the intense screening process) adoptive parents are much, much less likely to mistreat their children than biological parents are.

He goes on to say that heterosexual adoptive parents would be better for ‘simulating’ the child’s biological parents. To the eyes of someone as biased as him, maybe, but if you look at the facts - the dozens upon dozens of studies that have been done over the last 40 or so years - children raised by gay parents are no different to those raised by heterosexual parents. And I don’t mean “as good as”, I do mean “no different” - their respective bell curves fit in every area, from reported happiness to education levels to social skills to sexual orientation.

Reading between the lines of Novak’s arguments, he is making the common assumption that male children need a father to act as a role model for their behaviour as a man, and that the opposite is true for female children. There are two problems with this. Firstly, the studies I referred to above show that this is patently false; children raised by homosexuals are perfectly “normal”. Secondly, as you may have guessed by the quotation marks, the current standards of what is and is not “normal” are often stupid, arbitrary and deeply rooted in sexism - and such standards are often very well-entrenched in even medical science and psychology.

For example, there have been scientists who have seen things like not wanting to play with dolls, a disinterest in motherhood or an interest in “masculine” jobs as serious diseases that require radical hormone treatments or even surgery to correct. Even if children raised by gay parents showed some behavioural differences, this might very well be a good thing - but the idea that the status quo is “normal”, and any deviation is a perversion, is so entrenched that most people can’t see it.

The takeaway from all this? Our society has serious issues with anything even remotely approaching gender and sexuality, so you really can’t assume that current trend = normal = good. And this above all else is the reason that the Helen Lovejoy “Won’t somebody please think of the children!” argument falls to pieces.

Well, Virginia, that’s an excellent question

2010-12-21T23:00:00.000+11:00

Newseum.org - Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

Apparently it’s fairly well-entrenched in North American culture, but I was only recently made aware of this letter. Plenty of people seem to love it, but not me. The original Santa Claus lie pisses me off enough, but to tell an 8-year-old child who wants to know the truth that it’s wrong to be curious or skeptical, that without magic and ‘childlike faith’ there could be no good in the world…that sickens me to the core. It’s not just the reinforcement of the Santa lie; it’s the undermining of all the intellectual traits we should be fostering in children that makes this kind of patronisation despicable. This is without even mentioning the fact that it trivialises the work of the human beings that actually do spread joy at Christmas time.

So, with that in mind, I decided to write an alternate response. I think the link makes it all pretty clear, but make sure you read it first, because the structure and the turns of phrase I’ve used won’t make sense otherwise.

DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET.

----------------

Your little friends are right, VIRGINIA: there is no Santa Claus. I don’t know if they figured it out for themselves or if their parents told them, but your response was a good one – you weren’t sure, so you tried to find out more from a source you trusted. I wouldn’t go so far as your Papa did, though; just because the Sun says it doesn’t make it so. And now that you know that Santa isn’t real, you know that just because all the adults say it doesn’t make it so, either. If something’s true, it will stand up to whatever you can throw at it – so make sure you keep asking questions and figuring things out for yourself.

Thankfully, we don’t need a Santa, VIRGINIA. All those presents you’ve gotten, all the happy times you’ve had at Christmas, all the love and generosity and goodwill you see; all of that does exist. And we should be thankful for all the people who are good and kind and giving, because this greatness of human spirit is life’s highest beauty and joy. This greatness can and does exist without magical beings, and that makes it even greater.

Now that you don’t believe in Santa, maybe you should inspect some of the other things you might believe in, VIRGINIA. Like fairies, or magic, or the Easter Bunny, or God. You don’t need me to tell you if they exist or not – you can find out for yourself. You could stay awake and try to catch Santa coming down the chimney, and you would find that it is your parents who lovingly place the gifts under the tree; beware of people who make claims without proof and then try to stop you testing their theories. You could show your evidence to those who made the claims; beware of people who change their definitions to escape your proof. To those who say that Santa exists, but as a generosity inside all of us at Christmas time, ask them why they claimed he was a real man in a red suit up until now.

You can tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, and you can apply this inquisitive spirit to everything you do. And even if the answers are difficult to find and seem to be behind an impenetrable veil, the combined strength of all the strongest minds that are still to come can tear it apart if they try hard enough – just look at all the amazing things we know now, compared to just a century ago! You have this power within you – the power to think, to reason, to experiment.

You have been lied to, VIRGINIA. Sadly, you will continue to be lied to for the rest of your life. But as long as you can think for yourself, it doesn’t matter. Nobody can take this power from you, or from any of the brilliant, unique human beings yet to come – not a thousand years from now, not ten times ten thousand years, not ever.

Ethics and Religion

2010-11-30T14:35:00.000+11:00

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion. – Steven Weinberg

One of the biggest things you can say against cultural relativism is that, when you break it down far enough, pretty much every ethical system that human beings have ever created has been based on the same underlying principle. Every society has had as its moral goal the largest amount of happiness for all persons – we’ve just disagreed vastly on who counts as a person, and how to best achieve that happiness. This is why Utilitarianism was such an influential school of thought – it’s not so much that it was revolutionary or innovative; it’s that it finally codified and rationalised what we’ve been wordlessly striving for all along.

Different societies have of course had vastly different ethical systems over the centuries, despite their common goal. This is because of a difference in assumptions; that is, if you start with different ‘facts’ to another person, you will inevitably come to different conclusions.

One of the great paradoxes of ethical philosophy is that, although many practitioners and thinkers will deny is, they are all inherently consequentialist – they are trying to produce the consequence of an ideal society – but that we cannot ever know with 100% certainty what the consequences of our actions will be. We are trying with our actions to make the world a better place, but we can’t predict the future accurately enough to know for sure whether our actions will make the world better or worse. With the result, ethical thinking has been a series of ever more-accurate guesses as to what will produce the best results.

So, at various points in history, we have had vastly different notions of who counts as a person. I am using the term ‘person’ in a very specific sense here, to mean someone who is given moral worth; who matters to us when we make ethical decisions. And, to take modern Western society as an example, we started in a system whereby only adult, white, land-owning males were counted as persons. The circle has been expanded, however, to include women, children, non-white humans, and we are now in the stage where we are deciding whether to recognise unborn humans or certain non-human animals as persons as well (I didn’t mean to denigrate Utilitarianism above – the Greatest Happiness Principle is hugely useful here).

It’s also worth noting that it’s possible to conceive of a society where not even humans count as persons – for example, only gods might achieve personhood status – but I can’t think of a real-world example of one. In societies where gods were held in the highest possible esteem, and things like human sacrifice went on, it was always to appease the gods – and therefore make life better for the humans beneath them – instead of directly for the benefit of the gods. There's also the tribal ethic, where only humans of your tribe count, and other humans don't; it's not always along species lines.

The reason this circle has expanded is largely through the progress of science and logic; through the progress in facts. We now know that phrenology is bunk, for example, and we know that men and women are on average as capable each other in most respects. The removal of incorrect assumptions removed the justifications necessary to keep the old, disparate ethical systems in place.

So too have we progressed in how best to achieve happiness for those we consider persons. We have concluded for some time that generally speaking, we should try to relieve illness in a person – but with the progress of medicine we can now say that blood-letting is not an ethical thing to do simply because it isn’t effective. Treating a person with evidence-based medicine is much more ethical, for no reason other than it is significantly more likely to work.

So with the progress of knowledge comes the progress of ethics. And in light of this, some ethical systems begin to hold a lot less water than they’re traditionally given credit for. The most obvious example of which, of course, is religion.

To begin with, let’s set aside the fact that faith is a poor basis for morality, since you’re just doing what you’re told instead of deciding for yourself (which is no different to following the letter of the law). Let’s set aside the fact that very, very many religious people do not in fact follow the strict ethical pronouncements of their religion in any serious way, and the fact that most of the current pronouncements bear little resemblance to those found in the original scripture (in Christianity, anyway).

What I want to focus on is this: the argument is often made that while we might not believe in a particular religion, or while some of the things it says about evolution (or similar) might be wrong, those claims are separate from its ethics – and those ethics are a source of good in the world that should not be discarded.

Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair had a debate on this very subject very recently, and in the course of this debate Hitchens quoted the Steven Weinberg line at the start of this piece. Since I’m not what you’d call a big fan of religion (try to contain your surprise) I’ve always quite liked that quote, but I realised while watching the debate that it’s not entirely true. Religion can do it, but really for good people to do evil they just need to be misinformed.

A medieval doctor could very well have been a good person, and would have tried to do the right thing; but simply because he didn’t know any better, he would have set those leeches on you in a heartbeat. Similarly, Rene Descartes believed that vivisection of animals was perfectly fine because they were just biological machines without souls (and that the screams of pain you’d hear would be like the sound of gears grinding to a halt) but said that if animals did have rationality (and therefore souls) they would share the afterlife with us. One can assume that if he thought they had souls, he would not think it was okay to torture them.

Both medieval medicine and the philosophy of Descartes were influenced by religion (when you go back that far, everything is) but are not really what you’d call religion itself. And yet here we have two cases of people who would have generally tried very hard to do the right thing, to be good people, but who failed miserably because they were so sadly misinformed.

To take a contemporary example perfectly devoid of religion, I might put some sugar into my friend’s coffee instead of leaving the sugar on the side for him to put it in himself. I think I’m doing him a favour, saving him the trouble – but little do I know, my friend is diabetic. Simply though being misinformed, I could cause my friend serious pain or even death, despite having the best of intentions.

Weinberg’s problem was that he got a bit too specific – good people can do bad things when they’re misinformed, and the problem with religion is that it misinforms us.

For a moment, let’s assume that there is indeed an afterlife. Let’s assume that if a girl does not have her genitals mutilated, she will indeed go to hell, and that she will suffer for the remainder of eternity there. In light of this, it would indeed be reasonable to save her from this fate by performing the procedure – some pain now, continuing medical problems and a high possibility of an early death would be a small price to pay when faced with an eternity of fiery punishment. But as I’ve said before, there is absolutely no evidence for an afterlife or for any of the other claims. And when you look at it in this light – that you are just mutilating a girl for no good reason – it is seen for the abhorrent crime that it is.

This is just one example, and I’m not here to debate the ethics of specific ethical pronouncements that religions make – I’d be here all day. I’m here to demonstrate that you cannot separate the factual claims that religion makes from its ethical claims, because one directly informs the other. The way you act in the world will always depend entirely on the assumptions you make about how the world works, and the expected consequences of your actions.

Religion’s claims of God and Heaven and Hell and sin are all inextricable from its ethics. And while it’s making false claims, it cannot be a sound foundation for an ethical system. Religion’s ethical legacy is a poor argument for accommodationism, because their ideas on the structure of the universe and their ideas on ethics cannot be separated, and are just as obsolete as each other.

Flux and Flexibility (Part Two)

2010-10-29T14:10:00.001+11:00

The Hip-Pocket Fallacy is closely related to another theme I’ve seen in arguments lately. To begin, I’d like to offer up two rules of capitalism: One - change is inevitable; or, to put it another way, we are always in a state of flux and change is constantly occurring. Two - for every negative that comes from a change, there will be a corresponding positive.

It’s kind of like that old saying - the Chinese have the same word for ‘crisis’ as they do for ‘opportunity’ (which isn’t actually true, but is interesting considering that English people started claiming this around the time that ‘crisis’ was a euphemism for the female orgasm). With every change to the system, there will be new disadvantages, but there will inevitably be new advantages as well.

For example: although it hasn’t actually been proposed by a political party, let alone the Greens, some opinion-makers have suggested a carbon tax be applied to livestock due to the greenhouse gas emissions of sheep and cows. This was cited as a reason to not vote for the Greens by a friend of mine just before the election - the line of thinking being that such a law would destroy the farmers’ livelihood.

As I said in Part One, this is hardly a good enough reason to stop implementing the law, considering its aims, but even so - with the raft of laws that restrict polluting industries, there is a corresponding raft of laws that promote green industries. If you’re a farmer, you can invest in sustainable tree planting on your land - a lot of farmers already are. If you’ve got hilly land in windy areas, you might even be able to get a wind farm put on your land - and we’re talking about terrain that was historically quite useless for farming, but that can now be put to good use making the farmer money.

These are examples, mind you, that I’ve come up with off the top of my head, from driving past farmland and idle conversation with a few farmers - imagine the ideas that an actual farmer, who knows the land like the back of his hand, could come up with. Similarly, you might be resistant to carbon-tax laws if you are heavily invested in fossil fuels like coal. The best idea would not be to oppose the laws, it would be to get in early and invest in renewable energy, and make a ton of profit when the laws inevitably pass. As an investor, the real skill isn’t in picking an industry that is always on the up-and-up, and assuming it’ll stay that way - it’s in predicting what the next growth industry will be.

This is the essence of modern capitalism, for better or worse. It’s not just inheriting a piece of land and doing the same old things your father did - it’s trying new farming techniques, getting more out of the land than the old man ever did. It’s not just being fortunate enough to have the money to invest in the first place, throwing it at an old giant, and then watching it grow while you do no work - it’s being smart enough to put the money in the right places. It’s the ability to think, to be nimble and flexible, to be able to adapt to change.

And I know that the people in these fields would agree with me, and say that they already do these things - and to an extent, they definitely do. But at the end of the day, in the face of change, when we try to pass laws like these, that old misoneism rears its ugly head and refuses to budge.

Like I said, I don’t want to argue that money should be completely taken out of our considerations - we don’t want to waste money that could be put to better use elsewhere. And I know that this fallacy will always have appeal to people - it’s just human nature. Letters to the Editor will be rife with it, politicians will use it in their rhetoric, and then voters will often vote for the guy who will save them a few bucks at tax time over the one who will actually take the country forward.

But when we’re trying to have a cogent, logical debate over what the right decision is, we have to take a step back and really weigh up the options. Because sometimes the stakes are too high to worry about a little money.

Part One: here

The Hip-Pocket Fallacy (Part One)

2010-10-26T19:11:00.003+11:00

It’s an argument that comes up in a lot of debates - asylum seekers being one of the most prominent, both in Australia and abroad. And quite often it can be debunked in simple matters of fact - the consequences of a more humanitarian approach to refugees would not bankrupt the country, as is claimed. But even assuming it is based in fact - even if people might be put under financial strain by a political decision, this does not necessarily mean the decision is wrong.

You see it everywhere. Recently on Q and A, they were discussing whether News Corporation owning so much of the nation’s print media was a good thing, and whether a near or total monopoly would have negative effects on the freedom of the press. One view, exemplified by a News Corp employee that tweeted in, was that if it weren’t for Murdoch and his persistent backing of print media, half the journalists in Australia would be out of a job. This is wrong on several levels.

Firstly, this equates ‘not in their current job’ with ‘unemployed’, which are two entirely different things. Assuming that the country needs roughly the amount of newspapers it currently has - or at least, that the market will support this number of papers regardless of who owns them - these people would still have jobs in print media. Also, if Murdoch didn’t own such a large percentage of these papers, it’s not like the papers wouldn’t exist - or that papers wouldn’t exist to fill their respective markets. This is before you even consider that although formats may change, skilled journalists will always be needed - when you get rid of print, even more opportunities will arise on the internet than are already there. So whether online or in print, whether owned by Murdoch or individually owned, these people’s jobs are fairly secure even if you were to take Murdoch out of the picture.

Secondly, it assumes that having people out of a job is the worst thing in the world. Sure - it’s not ideal for people to lose their jobs. But let’s assume that those journos would lose their jobs (which as I’ve said is very unlikely) and weigh things up on that basis: on the one hand, you have a man who has shown himself to have an extreme conservative bias (he owns the Fox Network) potentially gaining a monopoly over the print media in Australia, and you have a few thousand journalists employed. On the other hand, you have those same journos out of a job, but you have a free press, that supplies information to the people of Australia with much less bias - or at least, a wide variety of biases, through which the truth can be divined. At the end of the day, option two is better. Having a free press through which we can view the world and make decisions is of paramount importance, and in the unlikely event that it came down to it, the jobs of a few journos are a small price to pay. They’re talented people. They can get other jobs.

The most common place you see this argument at the moment, though, is with climate change. Whenever a measure is proposed to fight climate change, the most common objection is on the basis of cost - cost to the taxpayer, cost to the business, cost to the consumer. And don’t get me wrong - when you’re considering these sorts of decisions, the cost is definitely a valid concern, because sometimes you will have two solutions that will work equally well, but with one being far cheaper. But cost does not trump all - it is not the ultimate arbiter of whether or not a project should go forward.

Take the proposed carbon tax. Most people have objected to this on the basis that it will drive up electricity prices, and that they can’t afford such a rise. To put it plainly - I doubt it. I’m sure the prices will rise. This is probably more to do with the fact that this is an acceptable excuse for companies to raise prices than it is to do with an actual need to raise them; this is certainly the way it has historically worked with oil prices, in which a perceived shortage has allowed companies to raise prices when there was no actual shortage. But as for not being able to afford such a rise? Most of the people who I’ve heard complaining about it are people who have lots of disposable income that they spend on things they want but don’t strictly need. You don’t need an iPhone, or to go out drinking every week - you want it. You need food, shelter and clothing, and you’ll still have all of those - and to be honest, probably still most of the wants as well.

Of the cases I’ve seen in the media, it seems to mostly be the subprime mortgage fiasco all over again: people who are in financial strife because they overextended themselves, took out loans they couldn’t really afford, and now are struggling to repay them. I don’t doubt there are a few cases, here and there, that don’t conform to either of these scenarios - there are homeless people and so on who can’t afford the current situation, either - but to generalise: if you’re reading this, you can afford it. You mightn’t be able to afford it while maintaining the artificially heightened standard of living you currently enjoy, but you can afford it.

The other side of the coin is the same as with the News Corp issue - let’s assume that the economic claims are true. Would that really be sufficient reason not to act? Let’s weigh up the two options - either you are slightly poorer and we stop climate change, or you live the high life for a few years, and then the planet is irreversibly damaged, and trillions of human and nonhuman lives are lost, probably including your own. Even if we take it to the extreme: even if we were driven to what we’d consider an extremely poor standard of living (which would still be light years ahead of what people deal with in Third-World countries) it would still be vastly preferable to the alternative. Cost is a factor, but it is negligible in the face of mass extinctions.

Part Two here

An open letter to Julia Gillard

2010-10-05T20:18:00.000+11:00

On September 26 2010, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young reintroduced her Marriage Equality Amendment Bill into the Senate, which would remove discrimination based on sexuality or gender from the Marriage Act, thus allowing gay marriage. She urged both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott to allow a conscience vote on this issue - that is, allow each MP to make up their own mind, based on their own convictions and/or that of their electorate - but Gillard very quickly returned that Labor MPs would be voting along party lines on this issue. This would mean the bill would have essentially zero chance of success.

The only way that this decision will change is if Gillard and the Labor party in general are put under pressure by voters. There is still some time before any actual vote is taken, so I would urge you to contact your local member and/or the PM - or at the very least, sign this online petition - and show them how important this issue is to Australians. The more pressure we can put on, the more likely we are to succeed. With that in mind, and with a personalised one to my local member being sent shortly, I present an open letter to the Prime Minister:

Dear Ms Gillard

In its last term, the Labor party made a number of changes to welfare legislation that removed a great deal of discrimination against homosexuals. I’m sure you don’t need me to recount them to you, but this was all good work. When pressed at election time, your stated position was that you did not plan to legalise gay marriage; I thought that your record spoke volumes of your party’s tolerance, and that your hesitance in taking this final step was just another example of the wheels of democracy turning slowly. I could understand your position, which was one of the primary reasons I supported you being Prime Minister over Tony Abbott.

However, the situation has now changed. You are not in the middle of an election campaign. You are not the party that is introducing the changes to the marriage act - the Greens are. You do not even need to endure the accusations of backflipping that might result if you personally voted for the bill. All that you need to do is allow your party members to vote according to their conscience - it is very clearly a conscience issue. In terms of crude politicking, you have nothing to lose by allowing a conscience vote…which is why I am staggered as to why you are sticking to this line. I have been giving you the benefit of the doubt for some time, but decisions like this make it seem less like you are biding your time and more like you are simply homophobic. And if I am drawing this conclusion, you can bet that a lot of other people who have supported Labor in the past will be drawing the same conclusion.

A recent Galaxy poll showed that 60% of Australians support marriage equality - and amongst Labor voters, the figure is 64%. In a nation that quite clearly supports the right to marriage equality, your own voters support it more than average. Then consider the huge swing to the Greens at the last election - the vast majority of which came out of Labor’s share - and that 82% of Green voters support gay marriage. Make no mistake - the fact that Labor and the Coalition had the same policy did nothing to stop this issue from polarising voters; it was a major factor in the swing to the Greens. Australians are screaming for this absurdity to end - the leader who answers their call will be rewarded with votes.

I could make emotional appeals, and tell you heartbreaking stories about gay friends of mine. I could explain why it is discrimination, no different to racism or sexism, and that therefore it is your moral duty to change the law. But I know you’ve heard it all before - not least because the aforementioned gay friends are writing to you as well. The moral choice has always been on the side of marriage equality, and now the political path is clear as well. If nothing else, you are intimately acquainted with what happens to a Labor leader who stops leading strongly.

I personally am not gay. Neither are most of the other 60% of the country that support marriage equality. This is not a niche issue. This is not going away. I urge you to show some leadership and bring Australia’s laws into the 21st century, where its citizens live. Please - allow your members a conscience vote.

Australia Votes 2010 - Post Mortem (Part 3)

2010-09-12T22:30:00.000+10:00

So Gillard had turned around from an abysmal campaign to successfully win the votes of the independents and thereby win government. Now: to the future.

Short of the never-going-to-happen result of a Green government, this is pretty much the best result I could have hoped for - and, to be honest, is probably better than that. Though I’m glad the Greens have a good slice of power, their policies are those of a minor party (and are occasionally slightly worrying - eg the opposition to nuclear power that lingers from their hippy roots) and as such I’m not entirely sure they’re ready to completely run the show. Give them a decade of slowly-increasing power and they will be, though.

The result of this election is one where, as Oakeshott pointed out in his decision speech, the winning party cannot claim to have a ‘mandate’ to do anything. This is awesome, because this has been claimed in the past when it simply was not true - the essence of Representative Democracy is that you can only pick the package that is closest to what you want, not the individual policies, so you will invariably get a lot you don’t want mixed in with the stuff you do. With this government, nobody can just push things through without anyone being able to do anything about it. Every time they want to do something (other than the normal, day-to-day things that get done without any real fuss) they’ll have to convince Bandt, Crook and the independents - or maybe a few Liberals - that it’s a good idea. Toeing the party line when your opinion differs has always been fairly unethical but it will soon become useless as well - conscience votes will become more prevalent.

These two things - the loss of perceived mandate and the lessening of rigid partisanship - will, off the top of my head, have rapid and dramatic effects on the status of gay marriage, the war in Afghanistan, the internet filter, climate change, and maybe even asylum seekers (although I hold out less hope for that one). There’s been so little commentary from the major parties over the last few years that I don’t really know which way the debate on Afghanistan will fall, but the mere fact that there will be a debate is a good sign. Also, Malcolm Turnbull fell one vote short in the Liberal party room of gaining support for the ETS, which indicates that even though Abbott doesn’t really believe in fighting climate change, a significant portion of his party does. A new, improved, probably Green co-authored climate change policy will almost definitely pass, but with the old partisan ways it could have taken over a decade.

Gay marriage, too, is likely to have a decent showing - Penny Wong has been much maligned over her position, but she has played her hand well and will soon get to show it. Of course she is in favour of gay marriage, to suggest otherwise is naïve - she just had to toe the party line until the time was right. What she’s been doing is not only biding her time but attacking on other fronts in the meantime - currying support amongst her fellow party-members, and no doubt being a major force behind the many progressive changes Labor made in their last term that removed homosexual discrimination from other areas of law (welfare etc). The fact that these policies got through, in addition to being fantastic in and of themselves, suggests little homophobia amongst the Labor party, with only the fear of the polls preventing them from taking the final step. It’s hard to say what the level of support would be within the Liberal party - although the Mad Monk’s position is pretty clear - but I’d suggest that at least some must be in support of it, given that 60% of the population are. Adam Bandt will certainly back it, as the Greens’ position is quite clear.

The internet filter seems to be the pet project of Stephen Conroy, and I honestly have no clue how much support he has within his party. The huge amount of outcry from the public against it, though, made him shelve it till after the election, and I suspect that with the current situation other party members will be unlikely to want him to bring it back. With everyone being so intently focused on broadband infrastructure I suspect the independents will oppose it - I know Bandt will. As for asylum seekers…the situation at least has a chance of changing now, and I strongly suspect the Greens will try to exert some influence here. I get the impression - and it is only an impression - that Gillard would be open to a more humanitarian solution, if one were presented to her properly. The Liberals, I fear, cannot be reached on this issue, so it would require pretty much unanimous support from the Rainbow Coalition. The facts are there, and the truth tends to come out eventually - let’s just hope it’s soon.

So. We have real parliamentary reform, real measures to be put in place to ensure a more honest and transparent government than ever before. We have a Gillard government instead of an Abbott one, but with enough power in the hands of non-partisans to keep Labor on their toes. We have, for the first time ever, a Green as one of those non-partisan members, as well as a huge Green slice in the senate. One of the best things about this is not so much what has been done in forming this government - although that’s certainly a good thing. The most important thing is that it shows what can be done. Many people have long wanted to move away from the Labor/Liberal dichotomy, but the feeling was that to vote for neither was to throw your vote away - this has shown voters what a difference they can make.

We look like we’ll have some real progress on a number of issues that have been stalling for too long, and this is only the beginning. This has been by far the most interesting few months of politics in decades, and honestly? I couldn’t be happier.

Part 1: here
Part 2: here
Part 3: YOU ARE HERE

Australia Votes 2010 - Post Mortem (Part 2)

2010-09-10T13:21:00.002+10:00

So the ALP had decided axe Rudd, and Gillard had wisely called an election. But this is when it all started to go downhill.

Given that Rudd’s failure on climate change was the single most credible reason people had to abandon the Labor party, Gillard’s first move should have been to announce a legitimate climate policy. The huge swing to the Greens in the absence of any serious climate policy from either Liberal or Labor tells you a lot - particularly when it was a major factor in Rudd’s election over Howard. Clearly the Australian people were desperate for serious action on climate change, but neither party was willing to provide it - Tony Abbott had famously said that climate change was “crap” and his party’s policies conformed with this, so if Labor had presented cogent, decisive climate policy like Rudd did they would have gotten a considerably larger portion of the vote (although they would have had to provide some evidence that they would follow through better than Rudd did). Unfortunately, Gillard’s focus group-driven response was to assemble a focus group, which actually made her seem even more ineffectual on climate change than Rudd.

Now, I rarely have anything positive to say about Tony Abbott. And looking at his campaign from an ethical standpoint I think I’d be just as appalled as always, but from a strategic standpoint he is to be commended. You can fool a nation about a lot of things, but it’s very hard to fool them about the state of the economy, because they interact with it every day - but Tony Abbott did. I’ve already gone over the truth of the matter in Part 1, but Abbott convinced the Australian people that they were in the midst of an economic crisis; that it was a train wreck, that they had a huge debt that needed to be eliminated, that we needed to stop the boats because they were a huge economic drain (as I discussed here). He may have created a Strawman to defeat, but he was damn good at it. Labor’s catastrophically stupid move here was to not refute him. If they had, as I’ve suggested, responded to this campaign with the facts of the issue - the robust economy, the insignificant debt, the non-issue of asylum seekers - Abbott would have looked like an idiot and a liar. Instead Labor decided to go negative and smear back on separate issues, which was much less effective.

The parties were both terribly samey, but the one issue they really locked horns over was broadband policy. It has been said that Labor’s costing for the NBN is an understatement, though Conroy pointed out that so far it is keeping to budget and even going under-budget in some cases - but Labor’s potentially dubious accounting is nothing compared to the Liberal’s attempts to defy the laws of physics. Labor exploited this weakness to great effect - just imagine if they’d done the same with the economy. Incidentally, this all throws Gillard’s request for an economic debate and Abbott’s refusal into an interesting light, but considering their advertising budget, she shouldn’t have relied on it.

Of the two major parties, I can say quite clearly that I think Labor deserved to win on the strength of their policies. But with the bland, samey message that Labor put out, and with Abbott’s enormously effective campaign, the Liberals deserved to win on the strength of their campaign. Tony Abbott is generally quite unable to control his mouth - a quick Google search of his quotes reads rather like a list of George Dubya’s finest - but he managed to refrain from any stupid comments or decisions for the entire duration of the campaign. It seems, however, that he wasn’t counting on a hung parliament. In a moment when the independents finally had the power to quell the politics and get on with government, Abbott fell back into childish, petty bickering. He challenged the legitimacy of a potential Labor government, citing the two-party preferred percentages (which is an irrelevant statistic, as Tony Abbott well knows). He claimed that the Liberals were “no longer in Opposition.” And to cap it all off, he initially refused to have his policies costed by the Treasury. Since he finally agreed to this we can pretty much see why - the now-infamous 11 Billion dollar ‘black hole’.

Gillard, by contrast, was calm, polite, and accommodating in every respect. Her Treasury costings had proven to be even better than expected - which allowed her to make an additional pledge of $100 million to Andrew Wilkie without even breaking the bank. Abbott pledged $1 billion, and I think this is the straw that broke the camel’s back. The other independents had seen Abbott’s campaign; pretty much the only reason people were considering voting for him was on the basis of the economy. He had built up an image of fiscal responsibility, of repaying debt and cutting wild spending. Then it turns out that he had lost $11 billion and was willing to throw another billion at Wilkie to buy his vote, when the entire hospital project would only cost about half that. He utterly annihilated the image he was relying on, and Gillard strengthened the one she should have been pushing all along. A lot of people have commented on the fact that the Independents were likely to prefer someone with very different views over someone with slightly different views (for psychological, narcissistic reasons) and this was probably a major factor too. But in a complete reversal of the campaign proper, Gillard’s quiet competence and Abbott’s flailing collapse were really what pushed the final decision.

Part 1: here
Part 2: YOU ARE HERE
Part 3: here

Australia Votes 2010 - Post Mortem (Part 1)

2010-09-08T19:15:00.003+10:00

Well, it took 17 days and one painfully long speech from Rob Oakeshott, but we finally have a verdict: a Labor government with 76 seats. It was undoubtedly one of the closest and most interesting elections in recent years, so let’s take a look at the campaign that was.

To truly begin at the beginning, we must first address the issue of Kevin Rudd. Now, I personally thought Rudd had done quite a commendable job - there were undoubtedly some decisions I did not agree with and some failures of policy that were unacceptable - but the sad reality of politics means that even with these setbacks he was still doing one of the best jobs of an Australian PM in memory. Just on the strength of his economic efforts he deserved to keep the job until the next election, despite the negative polls. But in any case, it seems that the powers that be in the ALP had a different view, staged a coup and replaced Rudd with Gillard. Okay; I don’t particularly like that, most Australians voted for Labor because they wanted Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, myself included - but this is not actually the way our system works, we vote for parties rather than leaders, so I have to concede that they had every right to oust him.

Putting aside the issue of whether it was right to fire him or not, we now turn to the question of: what now? Gillard was in charge but many people were furious - even though, as I said, their impression that they voted for Rudd was an illusion, their anger was real. The Liberals echoed this sentiment, but Gillard did exactly what she should have done - called an election. It softened the blow - made it seem less like she was seizing power for herself and more like she was relieving Rudd of command before he lost them the election - and put it in the hands of the Australian people, in effect negating any of the “we voted for Rudd, not you” arguments. Some commentators have said that she should have waited longer, or done it earlier, usually with vague allusions to a “honeymoon period”, but considering the circumstances of her ascent to power, it was really the only thing she could have done.

Rudd inherited a difficult set of circumstances from external forces: namely, the GFC. As Malcolm Fraser said on Monday 30th August’s episode of Q and A, what was needed was quick, decisive action. Bureaucracies aren’t used to being quick or decisive, they make long-considered decisions; so when they’re forced by circumstance to act quickly, they will tend to make mistakes. This is essentially why the stimulus effort wasn’t perfect; it undoubtedly had its flaws. But the fact that Rudd overcame the bureaucracy to act quickly, decisively, and above all effectively, is a great credit to him and the Labor party. Furthermore, Rudd did all this without plunging us into a heap of debt. Looking at Australia’s debt against that of the G7 nations shows just how well we are doing:

Alternatively, you can compare Australia’s national debt to a person who makes $100 000 per year taking out a loan for $6000. Furthermore, Labor had a plan in place to return us to surplus in three years, exactly the same timetable as the Liberals. And yet people were voting based around the Liberals being the only ones who could stop the spending, could repay the debt - could manage the economy. Admittedly by the time these ads were airing Rudd himself was no longer in charge, but still - his efforts were the crown jewel of Labor’s record, why didn’t they emphasise it? Indeed, why is it that I’m telling you now? You should already know it - that graph should be as recognisable as Julia Gillard’s head. But instead I, a person who pays a lot of attention to politics and knew the exact graph I needed, had to actively search for it. This is an enormous campaign failure on Labor’s part.

Before I move on from Rudd I do have to say one thing. He started out well - instead of the bland, Jack Johnson vs John Jackson politics we saw in this election, he campaigned on a positive vision for Australia. He took real stances and presented a vision that was not only cohesive but turned out to be very popular - turns out people wanted the government to say Sorry to the first people of Australia and to take action with regards to climate change. Most of his policies were at least somewhat controversial - he took risks by standing by them, but those risks paid off.

But after the climate change action stalled, he failed to go to a double-dissolution and really started to seem ineffectual. In reality I don’t think it was the case; he probably would have been better off going to a double-dissolution, but he seemed to step back and say “Okay, I do want to do this, and I know the Australian people want me to, but clearly this isn’t working, so how I get this done?” I can’t fault the man for wanting to think things through (and honestly it would have worked if he had just consulted with the Greens at that point, and actually listened to their advice) but with 20-20 hindsight we can see that he needed to take it back to the people. It would have been a big risk, but one I think would have paid off - it would have framed him as immensely more worried about doing the right thing and getting the job done than his own political future, and people would have responded to it (especially considering how strongly they responded to it in his original campaign).

In any case, he seemed ineffectual…and then came the mining tax. It was around the same time as the new tobacco initiatives - which I think, overall, did him a lot of good - and both were designed to send a message: Kevin Rudd may have had to put some things on the backburner but he is still capable of decisive, sound decisions for the benefit of Australia. The only problem was that his move to regain the support of the people was one that needed a lot of their support; he needed to act boldly, but taking on the great lumbering mining industry was something he could only do when he was already quite popular, and they exploited his weak position to great effect. His popularity dropped even further and it was good night, Mr Rudd.

Part 1: YOU ARE HERE
Part 2: here
Part 3: here

Australia Votes 2010 - Asylum-seekers

2010-08-17T16:02:00.007+10:00

Okay. This is an issue that seems to rear its head every time an election is called, so I want to put it to rest once and for all: asylum-seekers and the issue of stopping the boats. It’s an issue surrounded by lies, misunderstandings and hyperbole, and does a very good job of distracting voters from the real issues they should be worrying about. So let’s sort out the facts before everyone goes to the polls on Saturday.

Firstly, there is the idea that these people are illegal immigrants, or ‘queue-jumpers’. It is not illegal to seek asylum, and Australia has signed the UN Refugee Convention which legally obligates it to accept and protect asylum-seekers who arrive here. Furthermore, the oft-cited ‘queue’ that asylum-seekers who arrive by boat are accused of circumventing, does not exist. The standard method of applying for asylum is to leave the country in which you are being oppressed, enter another country and, once there, apply for asylum. Just to be clear - this is exactly what the boat-people are doing. The only queue worth speaking of is the one they get into when they arrive in Australia and wait an inordinately long time to be processed, and they most certainly go to the back of that one. It is possible to apply in a different way - to apply via the UN Human Rights Commissioner or the Australian Embassy - but, of course, in the vast majority of countries that the asylum-seekers come from, there is neither a functioning embassy nor a UNHRC presence, due to the very political climate that necessitates the seeking of asylum.

Next we have the illusion, backed up by the hyperbole of the major political parties, that there is some sort of flood of boats coming, that our population will grow uncontrollably if we don’t stop them, that they’ll take all our jobs, etc. This would be a pretty xenophobic reaction even if there were a flood of asylum-seekers coming in, but again, it’s just not the case. Every year, an average of 677 refugees arrive by boat. By comparison, every year 50 000 people overstay their temporary visas - the majority of which are English-speaking tourists from countries like New Zealand, the US and the UK. Asylum-seekers account for 0.3% of our annual migration intake, and (doing some quick maths based on the latest estimates) around 0.00003% of our total population. In terms of numbers, they are about as significant as a rounding error. Hardly what you’d call a flood.

There is also the idea that a lot of taxpayer money is being spent on asylum-seekers and that it is a contributor to the current government’s (fictionally enormous) debt. Quite frankly, the numbers I’ve shown so far demonstrate that we could buy them all Porsches and it wouldn’t matter much, but let’s look at the statistics of what they actually get. Asylum-seekers are not eligible for any Centrelink payment while their process is being claimed. Once they have been processed, they are occasionally housed in private accommodation for a month or so (ie the government pays for the rental of private houses) until they get on their feet, but after that they are on their own as far as accommodation goes. They are eligible for affordable government housing in the same way that every Australian is, but they get no preferential treatment and certainly do not jump any queue for it.

As far as payment goes, there have been a lot of claims going around about refugees receiving more than pensioners (or various other Centrelink groups), which simply is not the case. The maximum fortnightly payment under Newstart for a single person with no children is $462.80 - for the Aged Pension, the maximum is $644.20 per fortnight. Refugees, however, are only entitled to a maximum of $411.89 per fortnight under the Asylum Seekers Assistance Scheme. Furthermore, these are just maximums - in terms of actual payments, in the 2008-09 financial year, around $2615 per refugee was paid for the entire year; not exactly enough to live off. This adds up to a total of $7.04 million for the year, which for a country with an annual budget of close to $300 billion is a drop in the ocean.

So, economically, legally and population-wise, this is thoroughly a non-issue. This is just paraded in front of voters to distract them, like parents shaking their keys to distract a baby. Voting for Labor or Liberal based on their ‘solution’ to this issue is like voting based on who has the shiniest keyring. That said, the current regime is unacceptable, with such long waits and deplorable conditions, so this is an issue voters need to deal with - but for humanitarian reasons.

Tony Abbott has shown political savvy I didn’t really expect of him - he first promised to stop the boats, largely for economic and closet-xenophobic reasons, and claimed that Julia Gillard doesn’t know how. This is particularly funny since the few attempts he’s made to make a concrete suggestion as to how he would do it have been pretty laughable (ie the bat-signal…I mean boat-phone), but in any case he ensured early on that he had the xenophobe vote, and now, having gotten that, he is trying for the humanitarian vote. Now he’s coming from the angle that he’s trying to protect the asylum-seekers; by making it impossible to come here he hopes to discourage people from risking their lives on the high seas in the first place.

The problem with this is, their prospects are already dire; the asylum-seekers know that it’s an expensive, perilous journey and that when they arrive they will be treated like criminals, and yet still they come. As long as there is persecution to flee, and liberal democracy in Australia, they will come. If Abbott were really serious about protecting these people (and yes, I know he isn’t, but I’m proposing the solution anyway) then he would establish a proper presence in the countries of origin - making the journey to Nauru or any other third-party nation has exactly the same risks for the travellers as coming here. Nothing can be done to stop them wanting to come - all that can be done is to give them a legitimate, safe alternative way of getting here. Ironically enough, the solution to stopping them from jumping the fictional queue is to create an actual queue.

I don’t mean to imply that Gillard’s solution is significantly better - it’s not quite as bad, but it’s still a long way off. If you want a remotely compassionate, logical resolution to this issue (and dozens of others that I haven’t gotten around to writing about yet) then vote wisely - vote Green.

(More information on the issue and citations for my statistics can be found in the PDFs here)

In defense of leniency

2010-08-09T00:33:00.007+10:00

Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry. To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery. – George Polya

Woman let off for drink-driving over lack of public transport

It’s a bit of a role-reversal that the comedians are being pedantic and the lawyer is being compassionate, but that’s what we have here.

First of all, and unsurprisingly, the thing the media has latched onto is a very minor part of the case. The woman in question was let off primarily because it was a low-range infraction (between 0.05 and 0.08) and because she was a first-time offender – no criminal record and an exemplary driving record – who genuinely made a mistake. This kind of thing happens all the time in our courts – I want to stress that, all the time, and not just for traffic offenses. The only thing remotely unique about this case is that the lack of alternate ways home was a minor factor in the magistrate’s assessment that this was an error in judgement on her part and not a deliberate flouting of the law; if she had had the option of taking public transport home she should probably have done so, just in case she were over the limit. But since she genuinely believed that she was under the limit (she had had two standard drinks over a two-hour period, which wouldn’t raise most people over the limit) it would have seemed unnecessary to go out of her way to avoid driving (by sleeping in her car, as Carrie suggested). Like I said; this is a minor issue in the case that has been blown out of proportion by the media.

What’s interesting, though, is the vehemence with which the panellists oppose this kind of leniency. Carrie asks “It’s not Point-Oh-Five-ish, it’s Point-Oh-Five, isn’t it?” Rochford sees this as a sign that “the law just doesn’t work.” Hughesy (though joking) suggests that the ads be changed from “If you drink, then drive, you’re a bloody idiot” to “If you drink, then drive, you’re a bloody idiot – unless you’re a pretty 27-year-old who lives in an outer suburb”. This betrays two things – one, egotistical indignation that comes from people who are angered at what they perceive as someone being treated better than they do; and two, ignorance of the point of our legal system and the way in which it functions. I’ll address the latter first.

In a very broad sense, the legal systems of Australia and most other Western countries are based on the idea of rehabilitation. There are still some throwbacks to the old ‘punishment’ style of running things, but to simplify, modern laws and their punishments are designed to prevent people from doing certain things that could harm others, and if they do so, to prevent them from doing it repeatedly. This is why we have good-behaviour bonds, suspended sentences, parole; why prisons are now more often referred to as ‘correctional facilities’. What’s done is done, and nothing that we do in the here and now can change it; all we can concern ourselves with is trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again. An extreme example of this is the way we handle cold-blooded murder differently to how we handle killing in self-defence, but a more relevant example would be defrauding Centrelink. Due to the complicatedness and often absurdity of Centrelink’s rules, a lot of people end up receiving money they’re not entitled to by way of accidentally filling in a form incorrectly or forgetting to notify Centrelink of something. A small number, however, deliberately rort the system; fake disabilities and so on. The former are just expected to pay back the extra money, while the latter are brought up on fraud charges – our system differentiates between honest citizens who make mistakes and people who deliberately flout the law.

This is why Henley was not convicted – because she was seen by the magistrate to be a law-abiding citizen and a sensible driver who had merely made an error in judgement. The ordeal of her arrest and trial would be more than enough to ensure that she didn’t repeat-offend, so the magistrate considered punishing her further to be unnecessary. The public transport issue doesn’t even really come into consideration on any meaningful level; this isn’t anything new, this is just another example of the way our legal system works.

Now, the reason the panellists get so irate over this is because they see themselves as the victims. They make the effort to avoid driving when they’re over the limit, so why should this woman get off just because of where she lives? There is a lot of complicated identity theory behind this (basically a sharp distinction between the self and the Other, with a little Fundamental Attribution Error on the side) but basically, they will on the one hand say that it’s unfair for her to get off when they work so hard to not break the law, but on the other hand do exactly what she did if the roles were reversed. I guarantee you, without a shadow of a doubt, that if one of them were to be picked up on a minor offence – something that was a lapse in judgement rather than a deliberate flouting of the law – they would get equally indignant if their good record and character weren’t taken into account in the way Henley’s was. But this doesn’t seem to occur to them, so they start opposing leniency.

They should be thankful they live in a system with such leniency. Would the panellists really prefer to live in a country where punishments are harsh and absolute, and innocent mistakes are punished the same way as deliberate, criminal acts? Rochford sees this leniency as proof that the system doesn’t work – this is proof that it does.

As to it setting a precedent, encouraging others to try and excuse their way out of drink-driving offences based on their postcode? As Phillip Stewart said, the court case itself doesn’t do that at all – but by blowing it out of proportion and repeating over and over that it does set a precedent, the media has.

(I’m primarily responding to 7PM’s coverage but this article gives some background info; the beginning is quite as biased and sensationalist as 7PM’s coverage, but note what Lionel Rattenbury has to say at the end)

The God of the Agnostics

2010-07-23T16:20:00.005+10:00

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur

Some people who self-identify as non-religious still believe in the possibility of some kind of supernatural deity. This generally takes the form of either pantheism or agnosticism. I touched on this in The Strawman of the Faithful Atheist, but I want to explain further the agnostic’s flawed conception of God and their even more flawed notions of skepticism.

To begin, an allegory – something that I first came across in a teen sci-fi book but is apparently quite an old idea. Imagine that instead of being three-dimensional people, we only existed in two dimensions; left-right and forward-back, like drawings on a piece of paper. We would go around only being able to perceive the edges of other objects, and if someone drew a box around us we would be trapped. Now, imagine if a normal, three-dimensional person came along – they could pick us up out of the box and set us free. We would never have been up or down before – indeed, the mere concept of this third, up-down dimension wouldn’t really exist for us, except perhaps as a mathematical abstraction. This three-dimensional person would seemingly be able to defy physics – perform things that we had hitherto thought impossible – with the greatest of ease…but there would still be rules, limitations. That three-dimensional world would still have gravity, thermodynamics and all the other rules that govern us in the real world. Although the existence of such a being would rock the worlds of the Flatties, and would change their understanding of the universe forever, it would still be scientific – would still follow logical, cause-and-effect rules that could eventually be understood.

Not-so-thinly veiled, of course, is the comparison with the agnostic God; although it’s obviously not the only possibility, if beings existed in higher dimensions than us then they would seem to the untrained eye to be all-powerful gods. This is, essentially, what the agnostics claim to be keeping an eye out for; they are skeptical of organised religion but dissatisfied with the answers science has given us, so they propose that God might fill some of the gaps – generally not the God of any of the organised religions, but the kind of God that philosophers and scientists have spoken of. Agnostics (like our friend Rosenbaum) criticise the atheists for discounting the possibility of such a god, because one cannot disprove its existence, and seem to think this shores up their ethos.

One of the primary reasons that agnostics use God to fill in the blanks is because there are blanks that science is seemingly fundamentally incapable of answering. There is, for example, the question of the First Cause – if every effect, in a rational and scientific universe, has to have a cause preceding it, then what was the first cause? And what caused the first cause, and so on ad infinitum. Similarly, if time began at the Big Bang, what happened a few seconds before that? These seem, upon first glance, to be insurmountable by the basic tenets of our scientific logic (although less so when you consider that time can be bent and manipulated in very similar ways to the physical dimensions). And so a God, who is not held to the same rules as matter in our universe, is proposed as a solution. Just let that sink in for a moment; these people believe absolutely in logic; logic dictates that each effect must have a cause but science cannot provide this; so they propose a being that can circumvent logic. Yes, that’s right folks, their insatiable appetite for logic has caused them to abandon it completely. Even if this being cannot circumvent logic (ie is just a highly-powerful being that exists on a higher plane) all this answer does is take the question back a bit. We solve ‘what caused the Big Bang?’ by proposing a god. This only gives us a reprieve for about ten seconds, at which point someone asks ‘okay, then what caused God?’

As I’m sure people who disagree with me will notice, this does not necessarily say anything about the veracity of the statement – it may well be that the big bang was caused by a higher being and that the real question is indeed as to the origin of that being. But still – amazing and almost-incomprehensible as such a being may be, it must still follow scientific principles. It may have vastly different laws to us but it will still follow predictable, consistent, scientific laws of some kind. Which makes the God Hypothesis a scientific theory.

So now we have the agnostics and the atheists and their competing views. The agnostics criticise the atheists for discounting the possibility of a god, but as I’ve said in the past, only a tiny minority of atheists would completely discount the possibility of a god. Atheists simply believe that there is no evidence for a god; in the event that we get picked up out of our boxes, rest assured we will believe it. But when you look at the situation anew, you see that both the atheists and the agnostics are generally skeptical people who value their own skepticism. They will believe in something if swayed by evidence and evidence alone, or so they claim. And yet here we have a scientific theory with zero evidence to support it, and you have one group looking at it and saying “Well, I guess I won’t believe in that any more than I believe in dragons” and the other saying “Well, there isn’t any evidence for it, but we’re still going to consider it a legitimate possibility, even a highly likely one.”

Skepticism requires you to keep an open mind, but when all the evidence points one way, you need to accept it until something new comes along. Otherwise, it’s not skepticism at all – it’s faith.

The Strawman of the Faithful Atheist (Part 2)

2010-07-13T16:15:00.004+10:00

The reasonable man bases his conclusions on the evidence currently available while acknowledging that tomorrow’s evidence may show something quite different. – RG Swinburne

Rosenbaum also claims that a significant portion of atheists hold “the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence.” This is not so much a lie as a misunderstanding of the truth.

Atheism as it exists in the real world (not as the theoretical Pure 7 Rosenbaum seems to think most atheists are, which I would call anti-theism) is an inherently scientific theory. I can’t speak for all of them, but I’d suggest that the majority of atheists believe that science (and its parent discipline, logic) will probably eventually solve all the problems that most people circumvent by the increasingly-useless panacea of the God Hypothesis. Very few would state that science and logic will definitely solve these problems, especially given that humanity as a race probably does not have infinite time to work on them. What we are certain of is that science is our best and only hope. Maybe such questions as ‘why something exists rather than nothing’ are unable to be answered by science and logic – but they are definitely unable to be answered by religion. Rosenbaum challenges atheist readers to send in their answers to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing” – and, although I’m sure the vast majority would readily admit to not knowing yet, he laughs at the notion that science and logic could ever answer this question. This boggles my mind – does he think organized religion or the philosophical copout answer “God did it” ever could? All we are saying is that we will take our chances with the ‘maybe’ rather than the ‘definitely not’. Putting a question in the too-hard basket and explaining them with an unknown and unknowable god are exactly the same thing – because then you would need some sort of logical, scientific inquiry to explain how and why God did these things.

Rosenbaum, via John Dewey and his own comments, equates ‘militant’, ‘aggressive’ or outspoken atheism with theism, seemingly only due to the intensity of their beliefs. In doing so, he is conflating intensity of belief with irrationality of belief. While it is true that someone who believes something with 100% certainty does so irrationally (because it is irrational to be 100% certain of anything) and that someone who believes something with 100% certainty will invariably hold that belief very intensely, it does not follow that any belief that someone holds intensely – something that they are very sure of but are open to the possibility of being wrong about – is an irrational one. I touched on this in Part 1, but atheists currently do spend a disproportionate amount of time defending their lack of belief in a deity, due to the constant attacks on this belief by theists. This is not because it is what atheism is about, it is because scientific theories that do not require a deity are constantly and vehemently opposed by theists, and we need to address the issue so that we can get on with our business. Logical processes are disrupted by people imposing illogical, religious beliefs upon them, and so we feel the need to oppose this. Since these beliefs are ruining our society (or, since most of what we are trying to do is fix the mistakes of the past, preventing us from un-ruining it) we should and do oppose them fiercely. But the fact that we defend our beliefs as intensely as theists does not mean that we came to those beliefs by the same methods, and this is so blindingly obvious that I can’t believe I need to say it.

Now, obviously Ron Rosenbaum is an idiot, and as the comments on his article will tell you, the vast majority of what he says has been pre-rebutted by philosophers (Russell et al.) before he was even born; I realize I’m not really treading new ground, but I include these rebuttals both so that critics of atheism who use arguments like Rosenbaum’s can see how illogical they are, and so atheist readers have them readily available in a format that can be used when arguing with said critics. But this one is slightly trickier: there are many things which are proposed but have no evidence, that some people will believe in and some will not. The examples given are Vishnu for the Christians and Thor for pretty much every contemporary person; most people aren’t fence-sitting agnostics about these deities, they are 6.5-atheists. Atheists will then often put to agnostics that they should essentially be consistent in their beliefs and also be agnostic about these gods or anything else; the example given is fairies but I think Bertrand Russell’s cosmic teapot is the best one. You can propose almost anything to exist, provided that you put enough limitations on its ability to be observed, and it is impossible to disprove its existence. This endeavors to show the logical fallacy of being agnostic, since the fact that something cannot be disproved is not sufficient reason to believe in it. The reality is a bit trickier though; as he points out, there is a long leap from saying that specific gods or teapots do not exist to saying that no gods can possibly exist, and there are (at least on the surface) several reasons one might suppose god exists (such as the first cause) whereas there is no natural phenomenon for which we can say “Well, if the cosmic teapot did exist, it would explain that.”

Essentially, the answer here is to free yourself from the burden of history. Agnostics almost always come at the God Hypothesis from the angle of theism; they start out assuming that there is a God of some description, and then become skeptical enough to doubt it. In this period of doubt, they don’t find anything that conclusively disproves God, so they err on the side of their previous beliefs and become agnostic – essentially, they want to believe there’s a god, and there are still enough gaps in our knowledge for God to fit into, so they do. It generally stops being the rigid, dogmatic God of the church they grew up in (I’d suggest because it is dissatisfaction with the church that leads them to doubt in the first place) but it’s a god nonetheless. But if they were to free themselves of what they believe, what they want to be true, and look at the facts with fresh, skeptical eyes, they would conclude that the existence of all supernatural beings are equally likely, and that likelihood is very low. It can be seen that although there are gaps in our knowledge, science and logic are the only ways it is possible to fill them; and that although there are some questions that we may never be able to answer, proposing a God raises more questions than it answers. After all, if you propose “God wills it to be” as the answer to the question of why something exists rather than nothing, then you not only need to ask “Why does God will it to be?” and “How does God’s will work?” but more pertinently, “Why does God exist rather than nothing?”

So yes, atheists believe in science. We have faith that its principles are sound ways of discovering the truths of the universe – but it is not a blind faith. We do not think we can predict the future, so we do not profess to know for certain that we will be able to explain everything in the universe. But we think, based on past success, that we will probably be able to discover a lot more, and that religious methods definitely will not be able to. Glad I could clear that up for you.

(Part 1 here)

The Strawman of the Faithful Atheist (Part 1)

2010-07-02T15:09:00.008+10:00

Ron Rosenbaum – The rise of the new agnostics

Ron Rosenbaum wants to distance agnosticism from atheism, claiming that atheists are just as faithful to their dogma as theists are to theirs. He does this in a number of ways, at various points either misrepresenting the truth or misunderstanding it, but these logical errors are very common so I want to address them.

Very importantly, in the early stages of his article, he names names. The reason this is important – and admirably rigorous of him – is because when you say ‘atheists say X’ you could be referring to any fringe idiot who self-identifies as atheist, or to some hypothetical extreme version of the hypothesis that no real person ascribes to; but when you say ‘Richard Dawkins says X’ you allow your claims to be refuted. Possibly he should have been even more rigorous by actually checking to see if these people (Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens) had said what he claims they did, but still, it is refreshing to see someone criticise real people instead of untraceable keyboard warriors. Now, I personally have not read much by Dennett or Hitchens as yet (though what I have read/seen leads me to believe that it is unlikely that they would have said what Rosenbaum intimates) but I am reasonably well-versed in Dawkins’ claims, so I will focus on those.

Rosenbaum claims that atheists “display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence.” And, I suppose you could claim that some self-identified atheists who don’t truly understand the movement do indeed act in such a way. But not Dawkins. Dawkins makes a point, in The God Delusion, of explaining the spectrum of theistic probability – which, for the uninitiated, is a representation of how certain a person is about the existence of god, with 1 being 100% certainty in god and 7 being 100% certainty in no god. As he represents it, a person who calls themself a 6 is saying “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.” Dawkins says that he himself, and he suspects the vast majority of those who identify as atheist, would identify as about a 6.5 – essentially believing that there is not one jot of evidence that supports the existence of any divine being, while allowing for the possibility that they might be some day proven wrong. Indeed, at the same time he also points out how dangerous a pure 7 is – how like a 1 it is in its unwarranted certainty. So essentially Rosenbaum and Dawkins have much the same to say on this topic – both of them warn that professing complete certainty in anything – particularly something that would be so difficult to know with any degree of certainty – is unscientific and just as bad as ardent theism. Rosenbaum, however, accuses Dawkins and other atheists of this crime, despite their fervency in avoiding it.

Rosenbaum says at one point that his New Agnostic’s t-shirt will read “I just don’t know”. Atheism’s will read “Neither do I, but the evidence so far suggests almost zero probability of a deity, so we’ll act on the assumption that there isn’t one. Still, we’re always looking for new evidence and if we find any, we’ll freely admit it.” I suppose the print will have to be pretty small. You might need glasses.

But this is the problem with agnosticism. It doesn’t really tell you anything. Despite what he claims, it is a hybrid of Weak Theism and Weak Atheism. All the attributes he ascribes to it – doubt in complete certainty, radical skepticism – are not only attributes of atheism but are almost by definition not attributes of agnosticism. Doubt in complete certainty is a given, but skepticism? Skepticism is not being non-partisan and standing in the middle of two groups. Skepticism is looking at a hypothesis and thinking critically about it, and making an assessment of its veracity. Atheism is not really about saying “There is no God” – that is the much rarer anti-theism. Atheism is about saying “Phenomenon A is caused by natural law X” and not involving God in the explanation. A quick look at the etymology of the terms will tell you this – anti-theism is against the idea of God or trying to disprove the possibility of God, but atheism simply takes God out of the equation.

So if you consider yourself skeptical, you should look at what theism claims – that God exists in a particular form and has performed particular acts, and that He intervenes in the lives of humans, tells them of His nature and that anyone who says that His nature is any different is wrong/heretical. That the universe acts according to the laws of a book written by people under the impression that God was instructing them, most of which are demonstrably false. Then look at what atheism claims – that the universe follows natural laws that we are slowly learning about through observation, that these observations will hold true to anyone at any time, and that you can test these for yourself…and, as a side note, that these laws require no deities to explain them.

I want to stress this – the fact that there are no deities involved in the process really is just a side note, one that has been brought to the fore by the fact that theists still ask “But, wait, where is God in all this?” Looking critically at both theories does not result in fence-sitting. The truth is, there is no fence between theism and atheism – the competing theories aren’t “God” and “no God”, they are “God” and “science”. It’s a false dichotomy, perpetuated by those who don’t understand and those who wish to denigrate atheism by attacking it on the theists’ terms.

As an aside, you can see how non-skeptical and deliberately non-inquisitive Rosenbaum is by his self-appointed alliance with Mysterians, who believe that we flat-out cannot know the nature of consciousness from within consciousness. Though I don’t pretend to know anything about the Mysterian movement, if it is as he describes then this is the kind of intellectual apathy that appalls me. It’s not a theory, it’s a lack of a theory; a commitment to staying out of the discussion, to not even trying to find the answer. This is agnosticism in a nutshell – saying “I don’t know, and I’m not even going to try to find out.” Come to think of it, that’s what should go on their t-shirt.

(Part 2 here)

Neo-Feudalism and the American Dream

2010-05-21T12:58:00.002+10:00

American pundits, politicians, and even – to a certain extent – voters, seem to have a great fear of communism. It goes in and out of favour – it was brazen in the McCarthy era, it is less so in the opposition to universal healthcare – but it is present as a major political force nonetheless. They want to live the mythical American Dream – which is essentially a rebranding of the capitalist dream – that anybody can start at the bottom of the ladder and rise to the top based solely on their merit, how hard they work, etc. This is a great system to have, and hardcore socialism would indeed threaten that dream. But that dream is already being threatened by the road we are heading down right now

The thing that everyone loves about capitalism is that it (theoretically) makes everyone equal – if the child of rich parents is inept and lazy, he will lose all his money and so get the status he deserves; if someone born in poverty is intelligent and hard-working, they will outcompete their rivals and rise to the status they deserve. One of the main reasons people don’t like socialism is that it doesn’t have this – yes, assuming that the system works (which is a big assumption) everyone has enough to survive, so one person’s wealth doesn’t depend on another’s starvation, but there’s no real opportunity for advancement. If you’re a hard worker, you get the same amount of mashed potato as the lazy guy next to you, which removes your incentive to work hard, and generally opens up a can of worms that we don’t much like. So, since these two options are really the only two economic models the average voter is familiar with, any time something has a hint of socialism (read: opponents call it socialist) they tend to react with fear – they don’t want to give up the American Dream.

Of course, even taken on the face of it, this is sort of silly. Any political model short of anarchy (which isn’t so much a political model as a lack of one) is somewhat socialist – the government taxes you so it can distribute that wealth fairly, making sure that there are things like roads, hospitals, and schools. You need a little bit of socialism for the capitalist ideal to work – no matter how much natural intelligence your kid has, if there isn’t a school for him to go to, he won’t make full use of it, and will therefore stay right where he is.

The thing is, though, there is a third option – one that is an extension of capitalism, but which has none of its benefits (and, it should be noted, no democracy). Hopefully you’re familiar with it, since it also preceded capitalism – feudalism. In the old days, the ruling class owned all the lands, and the working class, well, worked. The Lord would let you work his land for a (large) percentage of the yield, and would also protect you if you agreed to fight for him. The working class were given enough to survive – or at least, enough so they didn’t revolt – but could not advance. Their children, and their children’s children were never going to become Lords; they would always be workers.

You can see the beginnings of Neo-Feudalism in today’s economic model, particularly in the States. You go to work for a big company. Instead of giving you enough money to pay your medical bills (or for your own health insurance) they provide you with healthcare. Instead of giving you enough money to buy a car, you are encouraged (in some cases, maybe even forced) to drive a leased company car, usually in exchange for some of your salary. Expense accounts are also common – less common, but not unheard of, are cases where accommodation is provided by the company. Such things will only increase in the future, unless something is done. Most people think of these things as perks – but, tellingly, they are all controlled by the company. If you want to quit, or you get fired, you suddenly have no car, no healthcare, no place to live, and not enough money to get all these things for yourself. Furthermore, you have salary-sacrificed so much that you don’t really have the money to send your kids to a good school – a good enough one that allows them to become a Lord instead of a worker, like you.

So you don’t quit. And now they own you.

As always, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants here. The Last Psych has written extensively on the subject, and you can get a good preview by reading Neal Stephenson’s brilliant novel Snow Crash. But then, people have also written a lot of dystopian sci-fi on what would happen if the government gets too big – if their level of control over us rivals that of the Neo-Feudal Lords. But here’s the big difference – if your CEO-Lord does something you don’t like, or makes a bad decision, he’s really only accountable to the other members of the ruling class. They will torch him if he starts to lose them all money, but if he makes bad ethical decisions, or fires a heap of people to save money, there’s really nothing you can do.

Compare this to a big government – one that taxes fairly heavily and has a lot of socialist policies in place; unemployment benefits, disabled/elderly pensions, universal healthcare, etc. You still have someone other than yourself dictating how your earnings are spent – which infuriates a lot of the currently wealthy and middle-class – but the difference is, you have power over them. The people who make these decisions are dependant on your votes. There aren’t dynasties – hell, positions are rarely held for one person’s lifetimes, let alone that of their descendants. In Neo-Feudalism you have a small group of people that is very static; in big government, you have a medium-sized group taken from a huge, ever-changing pool, and these changes naturally bend to the will of the people they rely on for votes.

This is why America’s recent federal political progress has been so pleasing. You have elected Barack Obama, the living embodiment of a non-dynastic regime, and he has made wonderful progress on healthcare, thus stripping the Lords of one of their major bargaining tools.

But the battle isn’t over. So next time pundits say that a bill is socialism, and attacks the American Dream, remember that a little socialism is necessary for that dream to succeed. Neo-Feudalism doesn’t benefit you or the pundits – it only benefits the ruling class.

The Fame Monster vs The Media Chameleon

2010-04-23T16:57:00.006+10:00

Know how to be all things to all men. A discreet Proteus – a scholar among scholars, a saint among saints. That is the art of winning over everyone, for like attracts like. – Baltasar Gracian

Is Christina Aguilera the new Lady Gaga?

My favourite quote: “I miss the old Christina Aguilera.” Which one would that be?

With her first album, Aguilera had a very clean-cut image. She was the sweet, innocent teen with the look in her eye that tells you she’s not so innocent. She had, in short, exactly the same image as most teenage popstars (particularly around that time), mostly because it’s an effective one. Every straight man on the planet wanted to rub that genie in a bottle.

Her second album was three years later, and a huge change in tone. Britney Spears, on the other hand, put out three basically identical albums in a row, one each year, until she started marrying hillbillies. Aguilera said she didn’t like the idea of putting out a new album every year just to keep up, and when she released Stripped it was very different, and so was her persona. Rather than cling to the Cute Teen image long past its expiry date (like Britney or Madonna) she reinvented herself. With her new quasi-R&B sound came a quasi-ghetto look – just as hyper-sexual as the last one, but replacing the teen coquette with a badass slut.

Her third album was a new direction again – this time a throwback to the music and fashion of the early 20th century. The Back to Basics persona was more restrained sexually than her previous two personas, but only just. And the fourth album does seem, on first glance, to be following in what you might call a Lady Gaga-esque line, but I suppose it will remain to be seen. The point is, the idea that Aguilera has suddenly changed her image because she’s feeling insecure or jealous of Gaga is ridiculous. Christina Aguilera changes her image like Facebook changes layouts – as soon as you start getting comfortable with the old one, she reinvents herself again.

Now, is she a copycat? This is a bit more difficult to answer. She follows the trends, certainly – there were a million Bubblegum Teen popstars in the late 90s, and R&B was on the rise in the early 00s. Back to Basics was more risky but still based on good market sense – throwbackism as a general concept was picking up momentum at the time (throwback jerseys, shoes, etc) and Human Nature were having great success with their nostalgia albums. This is not even to mention Panic at the Disco’s burlesque-themed music videos and concerts, which Aguilera adapted and ran with. I have only heard one single off her new album, and only seen one promo photo, but it seems to be in keeping with what everyone else is doing. Not with what Gaga is doing specifically, just with what the current market wants.

She is admittedly never really doing anything radically new, but who in pop music is? She’s certainly ahead of the pack with it, largely because the pack tends to copy her – Britney attempted (unsuccessfully) to adopt a more badass image recently, and she and Pink both adopted the circus-burlesque themes for their concerts.

People who change their identities as often as this fall into two categories: you’ve got people who have no real sense of self, who hop between identities and hold onto them fiercely because they’re searching for something that makes them feel complete, and then you’ve got the masters. The ones with an internal, private sense of self that is strong enough that they can play with their public image without it affecting who they are on the inside. You see a lot of the former in teenagers – finally getting a little control over their own lives and changing a lot emotionally, most teenagers try on a few personas to see what fits – but it seems increasingly childish the older a person gets. This is the reason it is more or less acceptable to be a stereotypical emo or jock at 17, but much less so at 27. The latter, however, are the ones that stay in the public focus for years and years – before their image gets stale they reinvent themselves.

Aguilera is calculating with her personas. She doesn’t just churn out a new album – and a new persona – every year. She spaces it out, waits for the public to get complacent before she surprises them with the new one – which is good, because if she were doing it more often it would cross the line from “constantly fresh and interesting” into “schizophrenically attention-seeking” and people would become bored with her.

She is undoubtedly one of the more talented vocalists going around at the moment, but it is her mastery of her media persona that will keep her in the public eye long after her contemporaries have faded into obscurity.

Reductio ad absurdum

2010-04-10T14:57:00.005+10:00

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. – Seneca

While watching a recent piece on Scientology and all its alleged crimes, I was struck particularly by two things; firstly, how many parallels you can draw between what Scientology does and what other, older religions do, and secondly, the demeanour of Tommy Davis, who is the head of the Celebrity Centre in LA and is basically one of their major PR guys. The two are very closely related.

Scientology enforces a number of practices on its followers that people have taken issue with recently. This has been pretty well-canvassed in the media so I don’t need to repeat them all, but what interests me is how almost all of them seem to be found (usually in diluted form) in other, more accepted religions. The fact that Scientology essentially rips off its followers, demanding huge sums of money to progress in the church rankings and then branding it as the church being the beneficiary of “parishioners who choose to give back to their church and therefore their planet”, is an inflated copy of tithing within the Christian religion. Their Committees of Evidence, which take what amounts to hearsay from members and uses it to punish other members, without them being given the opportunity to defend themselves – pretty much a direct copy of what the Catholics did back in the Middle Ages (although ironically with less harsh consequences, considering that they don’t kill them at the end). The indoctrination of children is very much a copy of what every other religion does, and their medical claims (most notably their coercions to stop conventional medical treatment) are echoed in varying ways within other religions – everything from cancer-curing saints to Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing blood transfusions. Their beliefs on abortions are very different to that of the Christians superficially but are put forward on identical spiritual framework; although they accept (and allegedly coerce) women getting abortions, they say that it is alright at certain stages because there is no thetan present in the foetus, which brings to mind the Christians arguing that the soul enters the embryo at conception.

I could go on, but you get the picture – for a religion not related to the Abrahamic faiths it has an awful lot of similarities. And Hubbard knew it – and you can bet your ass that Tommy Davis knows it, too. He knows that all these things, and the aspects which are even worse (human trafficking, slave labour, torture) are all variations of things that exist (or existed) in mainstream religions, and that these religions get away with it because they are religions. Why? Although the sentiment is international it is rarely codified so clearly as it is in the US, so I’ll focus on their laws – it is a constitutional right for people not to be persecuted on the basis of their religion. Unfortunately, simpler (or more devious) men than the founding fathers have taken this to mean that people can do whatever the hell they want as long as they are holding up the banner of religion. What it really means (and this is a definition of religious freedom I can get on board with) is that people shouldn’t be discriminated against purely because of their religion, and that as long as their religion doesn’t harm anyone then it should be allowed. The scarcity with which you will find a religion that doesn’t harm anyone is a topic for another day, but under the current system of law, religions are essentially given a free reign. People are allowed to do any of a number of otherwise-illegal things (refuse to properly educate their children, refuse to serve in the military in times of conscription, perform painful rituals on children, etc) and churches are given tax-exempt status.

Davis and the other modern-day leaders know all of this – they know all the legal loopholes that they are afforded by calling themselves a church. They know precisely how to manipulate their followers and how to get away with it when people start asking questions. They know when to call ‘religious freedom’ – like a ten-year-old calling ‘birthday boy’ when his mother asks him to take out the bin – and they know when to simply play dumb, denying that events took place or saying that if it happened they had no knowledge of it. Make no mistake – this thing is not a church. There is definitely a plan in place, it’s just a question of how high up you need to get before you’re told, and what their endgame is. I don’t want to speculate that the rate with which they make money was designed to bring them into the same sphere of influence as mainstream religions in a fraction of the time (and not just for personal gain) but it has certainly had that effect.

People are finally starting to ask questions, and most of the time they’re met with “Well, other religions can do it, so why can’t we?” Under no circumstances do they answer with “Well, this is acceptable because it teaches X” as other religions tend to; it is always “Timmy’s allowed to stay up past 8, so why can’t I?” I wonder how long it will be before people start to think “Well, why can other religions do it?”

L Ron Hubbard has taken the untouchable, uncriticisable religion, the last great taboo, and extended it to proportions such that the world can see the problem. Charities should be given tax-exempt status, but whether they’re attached to churches is irrelevant. Children should be taken from parents who refuse their children medical care, no matter what archaic superstitions are behind it. Adoption agencies should be subject to anti-discrimination laws whether they cite religious reasons or not. These are quite obvious human rights issues that are staring people in the face but that they cannot see for the fog of religion.

Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the like are forever prompting us, through intelligent and reasoned discussion, to remove the taboos so that we can discuss whether the practices of religion are socially acceptable without fear persecution by their followers. And their arguments are excellent ones, but they tend to only appeal to those who can already see such things – preaching to the choir, as it were. What Hubbard has done is shine a spotlight on the absurdity of religious practices that the masses, and particularly the religious masses, can see. Scientology isn’t ridiculous – it’s satirical.

He may have been a con artist, and have made huge sums of money for his trouble, but L Ron Hubbard could well be the greatest anti-religion crusader of all time. Let’s just hope that the people running the show now are of the same mind.

The percieved failure of New Feminism

2010-03-23T11:41:00.004+11:00

Charlotte Raven - How the 'new feminism' went wrong

Raven makes a critical mistake here - one she seems to acknowledge late in the piece but then dismisses. She notes the narcissism of modern women, ignores the exact same narcissism in modern men, and bemoans the failure of New Feminism as a result.

She says that most women would want to become glamour models and that many would consider lap dancing, and sees these as signs that women are regressing in their fight for equality. The perceived 'problem' is that women are vapid and shallow, not institutionally or socially unequal to men - they can choose what they want to do with their lives, and their choices aren't what Raven wants them to be, so apparently feminism has failed. I am not the first to point out that feminists like these are misogynists. They want feminism to succeed because they feel downtrodden by men, but now that they have the freedom to do what men do (occupation-wise), they can't handle that most women still want to do the same kinds of 'girly' things they always wanted to (albeit within a more overtly sexual society) and so despise them for it.

The point isn't to have every woman be a CEO, a doctor or a lawyer - it's to allow every woman to be able to choose what they want to do. It's to allow the women who want to become CEOs or lawyers to do so, and for the rest to keep doing the same kind of jobs they always have.

This is partly a symptom of focusing too narrowly - if you only focus your attention on what women are doing, you will struggle to see what men are doing, and your comparisons between the two will be accordingly one-sided. Okay, so a large percentage of women say they'd want to be glamour models or lap dancers. What percentage of men do you think would say they wanted to be movie stars or porn stars? I'd wager they'd be pretty much the same. The defining issue isn't the gender of the person, it's the perceived glamour, fun, and sexual power of the job. Generation Y as a whole wants fame, glamour, money, leisure, and to get their rocks off on a regular basis - gender does not come into it.

It's also worth noting that nowhere near that percentage actually become models, or even make any real attempt at it. This is because people will say, "Take a few photos, get to do whatever I want the rest of the time? Be famous, be adored? Get paid heaps and get to travel to exotic locations? That would be my dream job! But yeah, I like kids and I'm good at maths, so I think I'm gonna be a teacher." It's all a (slightly narcissistic) fantasy, but it doesn't really reflect reality in any serious way. Even if you could legitimately say that women leading shallow, appearance-based lives are anti-feminist, use some real job statistics, not a self-reporting test of vague what-if scenarios.

Raven also speaks endlessly as though wanting to wear pretty dresses or "fabulous face creams" is anti-feminist. Again, all she needs to do is take a step back and look at all of humanity instead of solely her gender. Is it anti-masculine for us men, with all our social power and freedom and blah, blah, blah, to want to wear nice suits or get manicures? You could call it shallow. You could call it narcissistic. But you can't legitimately call it any name that has anything to do with gender. The hilarious part is that she then talks about women sitting around in pants-suits talking about their careers as though that would be any different from them doing so in pretty dresses. What, so being shallow and obsessed with clothes is okay when the clothes in question are shaped like men's clothes? Let me give you a tip - if you think that being equal to men is being (dressing, acting) the same as men, and you therefore copy men in attempt to become their equals, you are both completely delusional and doomed to fail. When you are equal you will still be different - you will still be women and we will still be men. But neither will come into consideration when you're applying for a job.

This whole line of criticism can be solved if you just remove one little virus that has infested feminist thought - the idea that a gender-equal society is a perfect one. On the sliding scale of gender relations, with chauvinism at one end and Amazonian feminism at the other, gender equality is indeed perfection. But when you fix one problem in society you don't fix them all - even in a perfectly gender-equal society you will still have laziness, narcissism, vanity, arrogance, stupidity, racism, and a whole host of other problems.

What these women see as symptoms of their failure - vain, shallow women - are symptoms of other problems entirely. Women aren't idiots - people are idiots. You haven't failed - you're so close to succeeding. So let's hurry up so we can move onto the next problem.