tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33820605166922006272023-11-27T00:46:03.040-08:00We Are Not SavedThe harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.comBlogger113125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-11271626505908210032018-10-06T14:23:00.000-07:002019-06-14T15:34:51.759-07:00Everything has moved!I have finally moved all of my posts over to <a href="https://wearenotsaved.com/">wearenotsaved.com</a> and will no longer be posting them here. I hope you'll follow me over there.Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-56465376184048764132018-09-29T07:07:00.002-07:002018-09-29T07:08:54.255-07:00Objectivity: Ford and Kavanaugh<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have a friend who teaches Gender Studies at a university back east. As you can imagine we have very different ways of looking at things. So different that when I tried to share a few posts with him, he claimed he couldn’t even talk to me about them without understanding my frame of reference and audience. (Also, he may have been trying to figure out how to call me a Nazi without using the word “Nazi”.) Given these difficulties (and the other various frustrations) after several awkward emails back and forth I decided that we should probably not try to talk about it. I suppose he felt similarly. Though, as it turns out, unlike me, he did manage to get some benefit out of the exchange. I found out last month that he was using some of my posts as examples in the classes he teaches. At the time he didn’t get into the details (and based on my previous resolve I didn’t press him on it) but it was clear that my posts were presented as an example of what not to do. Sort of, “Can you believe how clueless this guy is!” Though when I imagine it, I see him standing in front of his class shaking a printout of my writings and yelling, “This is what the patriarchy looks like!”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, he could be entirely correct, it’s possible I’m just as clueless as he claims. As I have said repeatedly, I could be wrong, about everything. And if there was an area I was going to be wrong about it could definitely be everything I say with respect to the current social justice movement. Certainly there are an awful lot of people who think anyone who’s even remotely conservative is not only wrong about most things but hateful to boot, and I think it’s fair to say I’m at least “remotely conservative”. That said, no one is forcing anyone to read my stuff. (The same cannot be said for the millions of students who are daily forced to read whatever passes for the current progressive manifesto.) And much of what I write is just me thinking out loud, and I guess let he who has never had a bad thought cast the first stone?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As you can imagine all of this is leading up to another post which (if my friend reads it) will probably make it into his next class on feminism, as yet another example of my cluelessness, or my privilege, or something similar. But, if I have done poorly in the past, I am going to attempt to do better, or at least do a better job of considering as many viewpoints as possible. And on that note, I’m going to dive into the current political crisis: the Kavanaugh confirmation and the allegations of sexual assault by Ford and Rodriguez. Though before we begin I need to take a slight detour through my process. I work on my weekly post every morning for a couple of hours. Which means that what I’m writing right now was written on Monday the 24th, and so, by the time I publish this on Saturday the 29th, any number of things might have happened. In particular while Ford will have presumably testified by the time this is published, she hasn’t at the time of this writing. Also at this point the Rodriguez accusations are still pretty fresh, and I guess (now it’s the morning of the 25th) last night </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels%E2%80%93Donald_Trump_scandal" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stormy Daniels</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’ attorney, Michael Avenatti has announced that there’s a third accuser? All of which is to say that some of the things I say may be out of date by the time I get around to actually publishing this.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With all that out of the way let’s talk about Kavanaugh, though I guess yet one more preface is in order before I do. It should be stated that I write from the standpoint of someone with absolutely zero influence on whether he’s confirmed or not. This is enormously comforting. Also, as much as I might try to imagine my mindset if I did have an impact, it’s not the same, which means I will probably be too flippant and too confident. There are obviously things going on in the Senate which I am only dimly aware of. Whatever I say has no power to change the course of this confirmation hearing. I can’t delay it until the FBI investigates, nor can I push it through despite the evidence, but, all those caveats aside, it is my intention to approach things from the standpoint of someone who does have some impact in that matter and needs to decide what to do.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Join with me in imagining that you’re a member of the Judiciary Committee or just a Senator, period, and you’re trying to decide whether to confirm Kavanaugh. Let’s further assume that you were going to confirm him up until the Ford revelations, and you’re now trying to decide whether to change your vote based on those revelations. Ideally it would be nice to just know, with 100% certainty whether they’re true or not, in which case your decision is easy. But 100% certainty is not going to be possible in this case. You’ve got to make an absolute decision one way or the other despite the lack of any absolutes in the evidence. Needless to say, you’re operating under serious uncertainty. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For those who may not have been following it closely here are some things which might incline someone to favor one side or the other. All the things which appear to preclude absolute certainty, particularly for someone with an initial inclination to confirm Kavanaugh. Also, it should be mentioned, there are definitely people following this more closely than I, so I may miss something big. To be clear, these lists are not meant to be exhaustive.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The events involved in the accusations happened a long time ago: It would be nice if everyone had a photographic memory of everything that ever happened to them but we don’t. Memory is fallible, and as much as we would like to believe Ford, you do have to take into account that it was 36 years ago. Also if he was a true predator you would expect more recent accusations.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are no contemporaneous witnesses: As far as I know there is no one (with either of the accusations) who is willing to come forward and say, I remember Ford telling me about it at the time. Yes, if it happened, not telling anyone at the time is totally forgivable on Ford’s part, but it makes things less certain now.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The </span><a href="https://www.apnews.com/1f7e47de5ce340f7b4cab8e92ef91cf0" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">65 women who signed a statement in defense of Kavanaugh</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: You certainly can’t imagine something similar happening with Weinstein, so I’d be inclined to give it some weight, though I’m not sure how much. (A statement which really applies to all these points.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The stakes of the whole thing: I’ve </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/06/which-side-is-really-losing-in-politics.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">talked in the past</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about how the Supreme Court might be considered the true power in the United States, and given that Kavanaugh is likely to be more conservative than Kennedy, this hearing may be as consequential as a presidential election. And if Roe v. Wade is overturned (</span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/07/divorce-is-better-than-murder.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t think it will be.</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) Then it would be more consequential. Lying about sexual assault is a rare and extraordinary act, but this is a rare and extraordinary situation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The vast majority of sexual assault allegations are true: It’s estimated that false rape allegations make up only </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2% to 10% of all allegations.</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Now that’s rape, not sexual assault, but I assume the numbers (which in any case aren’t incredibly precise) are similar.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ford has sworn statements from people who say she told them about Kavanaugh’s assault before the nomination:</span><a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/christine-blasey-ford-husband-friends-sworn-statements-about-brett-kavanaugh-accusation.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> three women and Ford’s husband have signed sworn statements</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> saying they remember her mentioning the assault. The first instance of this was in 2012.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The enormous cost of coming forward: </span><a href="https://heavy.com/news/2018/09/death-threats-force-ford-family-into-hiding-200000-raised-for-security/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ford has suffered numerous death threats and had to go into hiding</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I imagine (particularly if Kavanaugh is not confirmed) that this vitriol will continue for many years.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Circumstantial evidence: Alcohol and partying seemed to be a big part of Kavanaugh’s life. Lots of people have in particular pointed at his statement in his high school yearbook with all sorts of references to drinking and sex. This apparently continued into college. Finally he was a </span><a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gomez-kavanaugh-kozinski-20180920-story.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">clerk for Kozinski</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> who was embroiled in his own scandal recently and ended up resigning. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Beyond what I’ve said above there are currently thousands of pages of commentary on each item. To say nothing of the motivations of the various secondary actors. (I haven’t mentioned Judge, or any of the senators.) But this should at least give you a taste of the muddy waters of uncertainty we’re jumping into. And here, approximately halfway through things, we’re finally ready to look at the various ways for approaching this uncertainty.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’d like to start with a method I hope my friend the gender studies professor would appreciate, though it could just as easily fill him with rage. We’ll call it:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Folded Paper System:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Imagine that you take a piece of paper and you fold it. Now imagine that after it’s been folded for a long time you decide that folding it was bad idea and now you want the paper to lie flat. If you just unfold it and set it down the paper will still bend in the direction it was originally folded. It’s only if you fold it aggressively in the other direction that it will actually lie flat. This can be viewed as a metaphor for past injustice. It’s indisputable that in the past men got away with a lot more sexual harassment than they should have. Or to put it another way, in situations of he said-she said, the “he” was believed a lot more often than the “she”. Or to put it yet another way, the standard of evidence for accusations was tilted against women. All of this is the original fold.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now we want the paper to lie flat. We want everyone to be believed equally, all evidence weighed equally, and a gender-blind justice to prevail. But in order to get to that point we have to instead fold the paper the other way. We have to give women the benefit of the doubt, in cases of he said/she said we have to believe the “she” more often than the “he”, we have to tilt the standard of evidence in favor of women. That in areas of massive uncertainty, like with the Kavanaugh nomination, we should believe the woman. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m sympathetic to this system, and the folded paper metaphor is arresting, but I think it only takes you so far. Culture is not a piece of paper, and when you bend stuff back the other way, you’re implicitly saying that unfairness in one direction is going to make up for unfairness in the other direction when in reality you have just compounded the injustice. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The “What’s going to get me re-elected” System:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> On the one hand you would hope that this isn’t the system any of the Senators are using and on the other hand it’s probably the system they’re most likely to use. For Republicans my guess is that they’re getting a lot of feedback from their base along the lines of, “Ford is lying and if you’re too stupid to see it or to spineless to push ahead regardless then you won’t be getting my vote in the next election.” (Possibly with several additional profanities thrown in.) And on the Democratic side of things I assume they’re getting something similar, but in the opposite direction. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I said I hope this isn’t the primary consideration of any of the Senators, but I’m not naive enough to assume that’s actually the case. And even if, by some extraordinary exercise of ethics it’s not the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">primary</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> consideration it has to be among the considerations. And unfortunately this is not a bug in our system, this is a feature. A feature that may have unfortunate effects in situations of high emotion and polarization, but we also definitely don’t want the reverse, where our representatives never take our opinions into account.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Wisdom of the Crowds System:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Closely related to the above, we could take a broader sample of things. There are various polls and prediction markets with their own take on the accusations. And insofar as these represent a broader snapshot of public opinion than just listening to the most vocal members of the two parties, it could be argued that they’re preferable. On this count we have the </span><a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/19/politics/brett-kavanaugh-poll/index.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">favorability of Kavanaugh on steady decline</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and places like </span><a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fivethirtyeight.com</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> advising Republicans that the </span><a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-gops-least-worst-option-is-if-kavanaugh-withdraws-and-soon/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">least bad option is for Kavanaugh to withdraw as soon as possible</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. On the prediction market side of things I don’t see anyone actually predicting whether Ford is telling the truth, but we do have one for whether Kavanaugh will be confirmed which after surging to over </span><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-26/avenatti-s-new-claims-against-kavanaugh-drive-down-betting-odds" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">50% on Tuesday dropped to 40% after the latest accusations</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (The Avenatti/Swetnick accusations, I’ll get to those, before the end.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Robin Hanson (who coincidentally) invented prediction markets, went a step beyond that and posted a poll on his twitter account. The question was:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What fraction of women assaulted by a nominee for Supreme Court in high school would wait to publicly accuse him not just 30 yrs, but after Congress hearings & just before Congress vote?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He gave people the options of:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">< 1%</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1-5%</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">5-20%</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">>20%</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The most popular response, with 62% of the vote was “<1%”. Of course he also got many responses claiming that he was “pro-rape” for even asking that question. Though being fairly familiar with Robin Hanson (I just finished Age of Em which I’ll talk about sometime in the next few posts, also I we did meet once, briefly) I don’t think that’s what was going on. He claims he genuinely didn’t know what the response would be. And was surprised to see such a huge percentage in the less than 1% category. I believe him on this point, and I also think that something like this should be a valid question. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We all have an opinion on whether something is likely, but perhaps we’re horribly biased on that question in ways we don’t even realize. And being able to ask a large group of people whether it’s just you or if X seems unusual, should be perfectly acceptable, particularly when it’s consequential. Now the appropriateness of asking the question is separate from the utility of the answers. I totally agree that it was appropriate to ask the question, but I also don’t think twitter polls should carry a huge amount of weight, though if I was a Senator and I came across it, I probably wouldn’t give it zero weight either. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A System of Strict Utilitarianism:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> While all of the systems I already covered have some degree of utilitarianism to them, this system imagines a Senator making his decision entirely based on long term machiavellian calculus that has nothing to do with the actual accusation. Perhaps it’s a Republican senator who feels so strongly that abortion is wrong, that despite believing Ford and her accusations, votes to confirm Kavanaugh anyway based on the chance that he could be instrumental in overturning Roe v. Wade.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the other hand you might also have a Senator that firmly believes Kavanaugh, but thinks that elevating him to the Supreme Court would fatally undermine the court and by extension the entire nation leading to some future catastrophe. Or that it would create an immediate catastrophe in the form of widespread civil strife.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I either case the utilitarian calculus could move them to vote against their present best guess of the facts in the favor of some greater payoff later.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Antifragility:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I talk a lot about antifragility in this space. Which may appear to be another form of long term machiavellian calculus, though with more focus on embracing short term pain and less focus on any kind of future knowledge, than the previous options. Also with a greater focus on long-term norms. So how would an antifragilist vote? What criteria would they use? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Frankly I’m not sure, the whole situation is a giant mess. It’s kind of hard not to feel that things are definitely off the rails, and it’s far too late and there’s far too much momentum for the actions of any one Senator or group of Senators to avoid a large negative outcome. (Speaking of any one Senator, it’s now Friday morning and I just saw where Flake has agreed to vote for Kavanaugh at least at the committee level.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I do think there have been a lot of decisions which seemed great in the short term but which had long term costs which are only now becoming apparent. The list of things which contributed to the current debacle include, but are not limited to:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Merrick Garland</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bill Clinton’s various sex scandals and the lack of any consequences</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bush v. Gore</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Bork Nomination</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Roe v. Wade</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At this point, I think the best we could hope for is a backroom deal where the Republicans agree to withdraw Kavanaugh in exchange for the Democrats agreeing to confirm Amy Coney Barrett even if the Senate changes hands in November. I can’t see such a deal being made at this point, and maybe even this idea would be just another short term bandaid with long term costs. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Beyond what I’ve just discussed, there are, of course, many other systems you might use. And some might in theory be based on the evidence. Perhaps you’re convinced, after listening to Ford and Kavanaugh, that it’s obvious that one of them is lying and the other is telling the truth. Perhaps you think the evidence shows that women never lie about these sorts of things (I don’t think it does, which makes this more of a folded paper system, but that’s just me.) But I think most such, supposedly evidence-based systems, are just covers for one of the systems I mentioned above, and most likely a cover for the “What’s going to get me re-elected” System. You may have noticed that there was really no new evidence of any substance during Thursday’s hearing and yet everyone seemed more convinced of whichever position they had before the hearing started. Meaning whatever system they were using it wasn’t based on the accumulation of evidence.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In conclusion I’d like to offer up a few miscellaneous observations:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Observation 1- As an example of people following their biases rather than the evidence. We’ve reached the point where how you feel about the credibility of an accusation is entirely based on the party of the accused. From the </span><a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/metoo-falls-to-tribalism-kavanaugh-ellison-trump/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">American Conservative</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">According to a recent </span><a href="https://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/athena/files/2018/09/19/5ba234fde4b046313fc11590.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">YouGov poll</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, 53 percent of Democrats consider Ford’s allegations credible, compared to only 4 percent of Republicans. Ah! Yes! Down with the evil, misogynistic GOP—the “party of rape,” as I’ve seen them called on Twitter.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But wait. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison is currently favored to be elected as the state’s next attorney general despite ex-girlfriend Karen Monahan’s allegations of sustained “emotional and physical abuse.” </span><a href="http://m.startribune.com/minnesota-poll-keith-ellison-leads-doug-wardlow-most-not-sure-about-abuse-allegation/493500621/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One poll</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> shows that, while 42 percent of Republicans believe Monahan, only 5 percent of Democrats do.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Observation 2- For a long time people have been complaining that worthwhile candidates for high government office are being discouraged from accepting nominations because of the media circus which immediately ensues. This is certainly not limited to just one side or the other, and it’s hard to see how the Kavanaugh hearing won’t make this problem (whatever it’s actual impact) worse.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Observation 3- There has been a </span><a href="https://www.change.org/p/abolish-the-statute-of-limitations-on-rape-and-sexual-assault-in-every-us-state" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">push recently</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to extend or entirely eliminate the statute of limitation on things like rape, sexual assault, attempted rape, etc. I know that sounds like a good idea, and I totally understand why people want to do it that way. But you can apply the same logic to essentially any crime. Why should any criminal be able to get away with it just because enough time has passed. This is one of those long-term norms I’m talking about. Statutes of limitation date back to Roman Times, Now of course the Senate wouldn’t care about the statute of limitation even if there was one, I’m just making a related but not directly applicable observation. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Observation 4- I’m sorry, I’m calling BS on the Avenatti/Swetnick accusation. It just sounds too much like what people imagine happens at a drunken high school party with evil dudebros. Also Avenatti does not have the best track record on this sort of thing. Finally, I would expect this to be the kind of thing that is so outrageous that it should be easy to verify. And given that this is the first we’re hearing of it despite all the attention, I’m declaring, that this, at least, didn’t happen.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I end, Kavanaugh has made it out of committee, and Flake has called for an FBI investigation before the full vote. I suspect that means we’ll get one. I think that’s a good thing. Certainly not sufficient to calm anyone down, but I think that’s what I probably would have done as well. Though as I said in the beginning, the biggest takeaway here is that I’m glad I’m not the one deciding. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you think I should do more posts like this of things that are currently controversial right this minute consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as an encouragement to do just that. If, on the other hand you hated this post then you should also consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. If we can take anything from politics it’s that money equals influence.</span></div>
Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-7615842358403990072018-09-22T14:44:00.001-07:002018-09-22T14:46:51.409-07:00The Founders, Civility, and Godzilla<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Last Friday (the 20th) I went to the 2018 Moral & Ethical Leadership Conference, put on by the </span><a href="https://byums.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BYU Management Society</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. They had a pretty impressive lineup of speakers, including </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Flake" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Senator Jeff Flake from Arizona</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, or as he liked to joke, the “other senator” from Arizona, given that he has been overshadowed by John McCain the entire time he’s been in the Senate. And as it turns out, this is unlikely to change since Senator Flake has decided not to run for re-election (also </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/obituaries/john-mccain-dead.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">McCain died recently</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.) He didn’t get into his reasons during his speech, but most people agree the biggest was that he was </span><a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/350458-dem-leaning-poll-shows-flake-down-huge-in-primary-and-general" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">unlikely to win the Republican primary</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And why was that? Well despite both of them, in theory, being Republicans, Flake and Trump do not get along, at all. And for good or bad (probably bad) these days it’s difficult to win a Republican primary if you’re anti-Trump. Which Flake definitely is, and, unlike most Republicans, has not been shy about expressing, going so far as to write a book, </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conscience-Conservative-Barry-Goldwater/dp/1604598921" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Conscience of a Conservative</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, where he declares Trump to be </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/books/jeff-flake-conscience-of-conservative-trump.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a domestic and international menace</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I picked up a copy of Flake’s book while I was at the conference, though I haven’t a chance to read it yet, so I can only speak to what I heard him say, and his primary theme seemed to boil down to a call for greater civility. In fact I would hazard to say that the need for greater civility was the unofficial theme for the conference as a whole. Given the nation’s current political climate and leadership, this is not exactly surprising. Of course, if Flake’s call for civility was entirely unobjectionable he wouldn’t need to give a speech defending it, let alone write a whole book on the subject. But lately, even this principal is controversial, and under attack. I thought that looking into why might make a good topic for a post.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To start, let’s look at the area Senator Flake presumably knows the most about, congress. What does civility look like in congress? Is it just people saying things like, “I graciously yield my time to the Honorable Senator from Kentucky”? I suppose that this sort of etiquette is a small part of it, but only a very small part. No, I think civility in congress, as Senator Flake described it, is more about people calmly working together despite having very different ideologies.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That does seem to be an admirable goal, but unless all members of congress are saints (which clearly isn’t the case), then in order for this type of civility to be present it has to provide some benefit. In the past it may have been enough that it made them look noble and statesman like. But these days, at least among the base, it does the exact opposite, and makes them look traitorous and cowardly. In the past it might also have been driven by a sense of duty, a duty to put aside differences and work together for the good of the country, but the general concept of duty has been on a long slow decline since the early 1800’s (at least </span><a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=duty&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cduty%3B%2Cc0" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">according to the Google Ngram Viewer</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, getting members of the two parties to work together, no longer makes them look good, and it’s definitely going to require something a lot more concrete than the fading idea of duty. It’s going to require something like money, money for something they want, something that will make the people back home happy, and which will, in turn, help them get elected. Maybe something in a bill? Something set aside specifically to this purpose? Something... “earmarked”?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This history of earmarks is interesting. You can find things which fit the basic criteria going all </span><a href="https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/may/13/harry-reid/harry-reid-says-congress-used-earmarks-200-years/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the way back to 1789</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, though initially such things were definitely rare. By the end of the 1800’s the practice was common enough that it started to be called </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pork-barrel politics</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but apparently things really took off between 1994 and 2005 (the most memorable example being the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bridge to Nowhere</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). As you might imagine some people took issue with the practice and in 2010 they were banned (though not for non-profits). And who lead the charge on that? Who was the most ferocious opponent of earmarks? As it turns out, it was Senator Flake. Here’s the relevant section from Wikipedia:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Flake is "known for his ardent opposition to </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics)" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">earmarks</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">."He has been called an "anti-earmark crusader,"</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 6pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and frequently challenges earmarks proposed by other members of Congress. Since May 2006, he has become prominent with the "Flake Hour," a tradition at the end of spending bill debates in which he asks earmark sponsors to come to the house floor and justify why taxpayers should pay for their "pet projects." He is credited with prompting House rule changes to require </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics)" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">earmark</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> sponsors to identify themselves.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 6pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Until September 2010, Flake issued a press release listing an "egregious earmark of the week" every Friday. Usually the earmark will be followed by Flake making a humorous comment; as an example, Rep. Flake once said of Congressman </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Enrique_Serrano" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jose Serrano's</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> $150,000 earmark to fix plumbing in Italian restaurants, "I would argue this is one </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannoli" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">cannoli</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the taxpayer doesn't want to take a bite of." The "earmark of the week" releases were ended and replaced with the "So Just How Broke Are We?" series of releases. In March 2010, the House Appropriations Committee implemented rules to ban earmarks to for-profit corporations, a change Flake supported. "This is the best day we've had in a while," he said to the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">New York Times</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which reported that approximately 1,000 such earmarks were authorized in the previous year, worth $1.7 billion.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Senator Flake’s opposition to earmarks is not only easy to understand, it’s laudable. But in retrospect, some people have </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-a-functioning-legislative-branch-bring-back-earmarks/2018/01/24/981b1672-0089-11e8-8acf-ad2991367d9d_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5dac8c6b9f45" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">started wondering</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> whether it might be part of the reason why congress has become so “uncivil”. Their theory is straightforward: Earmarks were one more thing that could be offered as part of the negotiation for a congress member’s vote. One that’s particularly useful when you’re crossing party lines and the member is otherwise opposed to or at least unsure about the bill. You overcome their reluctance by, in essence, offering to “pay” them if it passed. It’s a basic law of economics that you get more of what you pay for and so naturally you ended up with more bipartisan support for bills which contained earmarks. Eliminate earmarks and you have less bipartisan support. And if civility means working together across party lines, that means you have less civility.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, I’m not here to say that earmarks are actually good. Or that banning them is solely responsible for the breakdown in civility and working across the aisle. Or to make any insinuation that Flake is a hypocrite, or that he screwed up. Rather, what I want to do is point out how complicated even a simple call for civility ends up being. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I said, civility seemed to be the unofficial theme of the conference, so what did other people have to say on the subject? Well I just got done asserting that it was complicated, so I guess I should move to the speaker who offered a very simple definition of civility. This was </span><a href="https://dowdlefolkart.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Eric Dowdle</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, an artist who specializes in drawing very interesting landscapes and cityscapes and then selling them as puzzles. He defined civility as character plus diversity. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You may wonder what qualifies him to make such a definitive proclamation. (Though as a blogger with no especial qualifications myself, I don’t.) Or at least you may wonder what prompted the invitation to speak from BYU Management Society. Well Dowdle, in addition to being an artist, is the founder and chairman of the board for the proposed </span><a href="https://www.gwmuseum.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">George Washington Museum of American History</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This is an effort to assemble an exhibition of the 250 “Greatest Moments in American History” and then take them on tour of all 50 states in 2026 (the 250th year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence). After which it will have a permanent home in Utah. As you can imagine the Museum has many goals from increasing historical literacy, to a celebration of the Founders, but included in there is a goal to educate people on, what Dowdle feels, are the twin pillars of America: character and diversity. Which, when combined, create civility. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As you can imagine he is also worried about the ills of the nation and the increasing polarization. And he hopes that by educating people about these twin pillars that he will help bring about a return to civility, much like Senator Flake. And, once again, this is another clearly laudable goal, though I’m not sure that his definition entirely captures the full nuance of what civility is. That said, I nevertheless think that it captures something important about what civility means at the present political moment.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m a big fan of “character”, but I think it’s place in the equation leads to some weird conclusions. Would he say that people who push diversity, while ignoring civility, must therefore lack character? If so that would be a fairly incendiary claim, and if true would immediately lead to a question of what sort of character do they lack? What aspect of character is not present in their advocacy for diversity? Does character equal a respect for a certain set of ethics? Could it be extended to mean respect for the rule of law? On the other hand, and probably even more inflammatory, are we meant to conclude that people who civilly rail against diversity do it because they have a lot of character? It is interesting to ask what ramifications this equation has if taken to its extreme, but, unfortunately, I think it breaks down pretty quickly.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If we leave aside character, then I still think he makes an important point about the connection between diversity and civility, and the need for increasing civility as society becomes increasingly diverse. (In fact, if we hold character constant then this is certainly one way to read his formula.) And it’s also interesting to draw inspiration, as he clearly is, from the founding of the country. So much of what made it into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was designed to create civility among diverse groups. In that vein, allow me to offer another equation, one that might have been on the minds of the founders: diversity minus civility equals violence. Before the American Revolution there was a lot of violence generated by ideological diversity, something which would have been on the minds of the founders. I refer you to the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">European Wars of Religion</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The conflicts began with the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights%27_Revolt" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Knights' Revolt</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1522), a minor war in the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Holy Roman Empire</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Warfare intensified after the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Catholic Church</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> began the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Reformation" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Counter-Reformation</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in 1545 to counter the growth of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Protestantism</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The conflicts culminated in the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thirty Years' War</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1618–1648), which devastated Germany and killed one-third of its population. The </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Peace of Westphalia</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1648) put an end to the war by recognising three separate </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Christian</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> traditions in the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Holy Roman Empire</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholicism" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Roman Catholicism</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutheranism" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lutheranism</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Calvinism</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Although many European leaders were 'sickened' by the religious bloodshed by 1648, religious wars continued to be waged in the post-Westphalian period until the 1710s.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I understand the explicitly religious wars were over by the time of the Revolution, but if you draw a graph from “killing one third of the population”, through continued bloodshed up until 1710, and zero it out at the election of JFK, who won despite people wondering if he was going to </span><a href="http://www.wbur.org/news/2017/05/25/kennedy-catholicism-presidential-campaign" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">take orders from the Pope</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> you’ll see that in 1776, things were still pretty heated, and the founders knew that the only way to avoid violence in the diverse republic they were creating was to bake a lot of rules for civility right into the Constitution. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is not to say that we’ve always been civil, or that there hasn’t been violence, for example you may have heard of a little thing called the Civil War (which, despite its title was very uncivil). Further, this doesn’t mean that the rules the Founders added were perfect, or that they were were always followed. And it most especially doesn’t mean that there weren’t any trade-offs. A subject I’ll be returning to shortly. But, I think if you look back on things, especially relative to other nations at the same point in history. The US did pretty well at accommodating a diversity of nations and peoples and ideologies with a minimum of violence. In fact, it may be argued, we did so well that people no longer see the need for some of the rules the Founders came up with, in particular Freedom of Speech.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve talked about free speech a </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-value-of-free-speech.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lot</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/10/scott-adams-and-what-counts-as.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/11/is-facebook-more-like-newspaper-or.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">space</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and while I tend to be pretty vigorous in it’s defense, I can also acknowledge that much like the other two endeavors we’ve considered, defending free speech is laudable, but, particularly in this day and age, can be </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/01/speech-as-censorship.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">complicated as well</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This also takes me to another of</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the speakers from the conference, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKay_Coppins" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">McKay Coppins</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, a </span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mckay-coppins/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">columnist for the Atlantic</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I also picked up his book, </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wilderness-Republican-Combative-Contentious-Chaotic/dp/0316327417" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and even had him sign it, though, once again, I haven’t had time to read it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As a columnist you might imagine he is a strong supporter of free speech and opened his talk with a Thomas Jefferson quote that’s a favorite of journalists everywhere. (Back to the Founders!)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I recall he only recited the last bit, but I think it’s worth quoting the first part, since one of the things which has definitely changed since the time of Jefferson is what “full information” means, what “channel” they get that through, and the way it “penetrates”. Which is to say, would Jefferson be as confident in saying, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without social media or social media without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” I suspect he might not.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I said things have become more complicated, and Coppins did acknowledge that in his speech. In particular he talked about fake news, and the waning power of the larger media outlets. To combat this he urged us all to be individual media outlets. To civilly work to combat misinformation when we see it, and help move the national conversation in the direction of the truth. The Jeffersonian idea that more speech is preferable to less speech and that if we encourage as many people as possible to speak that this will create the “full information” necessary for truth to triumph. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I currently agree with Coppins that this strategy is probably the best way forward, but I also know that when presented with this strategy many people argue that it’s largely a continuation of the status quo and as such will allow those with the biggest microphone to continue to dominate the discussion, and that whatever power imbalance which currently exists will continue to exist. Given the overlap in our proposed strategy I was curious to get Coppins take on it, and asked him about it during the question and answer period. He pointed out that when you’re encouraging more speech you’re also encouraging those who haven’t had much of a voice. In fact, you may even offer them more encouragement, and that hopefully as this process continues it won’t be the same individuals and organizations doing all the talking. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All of this finally takes us to the arguments against civility. As I already mentioned, there are those, traditionally on the left, who feel that civility is just an excuse to continue to silence and oppress those who are already powerless. For example this quote my friend </span><a href="https://www.proudlysurrey.ca/candidates/stuart-parker-council-candidate/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stuart Parker</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, who’s running for office in British Columbia:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I read a post by a fellow socialist running for office today and I feel I need to make a point about calls for civility: liberalism is about civility. Socialism is not. Socialism is about meeting people who are being screwed-over by the system and hearing them out. And a crucial part of hearing them out is hearing their anger.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And we, as socialists, should share that anger. A full debate, a debate that encompasses the global extinction event, the affordability crisis and the opioid epidemic is a debate that confronts pain, death and loss. It confronts injustice. Our discourse today should not seek to suppress people's justified rage but to channel it, to hone it, to express it with precision without losing one iota of the urgency and conviction it contains.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">British Columbians are outraged. And they are seeking candidates to articulate their rage for them. Let's not let them down.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Instinctively you’ve got to have sympathy for this position. But as he points out, liberalism, particularly classical liberalism, the liberalism of the Founders, does place a high degree of importance on civility, and I don’t think we should casually toss that aside. It’s been a long time since we’ve experienced true incivility, and as I pointed out in a </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/search?q=godzilla" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">previous post</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, we imagine that we can tolerate small amounts of incivility, and censorship and it won’t lead to violence or repression. Or that if it does it will be righteous violence and repression of only evil people. But that’s not how it works. Rather once things start it’s less like a righteous cleansing and more like Godzilla trudging back and forth through your city. In other words, once those norms get broken it becomes difficult to draw a line. I think this is the lesson the founders had learned from the several hundred years before the revolution, and it’s the lesson they tried to impart to us.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To be fair, it is not only people on the left that have turned against civility. It’s also happening on the right, particularly the alt-right, who insofar as they have a point, believe that conservatives have very civilly and very politely lost </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">every single battle</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in the culture war. Whether or not this is true (though I’ve already </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-cultural-war-and-overton-window.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">written about how it’s basically true</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should abandon civility. (Though, i guess, there’s always a chance it might mean that…) In fact if it means anything I would opine that it means we need to be </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> civil and less censorious, especially with respect to the typical Trump supporter, lest we inadvertently confirm this exact belief, the idea that there is no point in being civil. Of course, as far as I can tell this is the exact opposite of the direction we’re headed. In fact, I just barely saw that apparently James Woods has been </span><a href="https://twitter.com/Millerita/status/1043022265573498882/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">locked out of Twitter</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. (Though, as usual with stuff that just happened this may turn out later to be incorrect.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Putting everything I’ve said together I suppose my central point is that the current situation is more complicated than it may at first appear, and that a simple return to civility may be more difficult and less effective than people think. But, that we should push for it anyway, because the alternative has the potential to be much, much worse.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every week I try to civilly and with humor ask for donations, but perhaps the week I write about civility should be the one week I abandon all that and just say, “</span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GIVE ME MONEY!</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” Or maybe not.</span></div>
Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-69802521084069494082018-09-15T10:49:00.000-07:002018-09-15T10:50:22.499-07:00Is War Necessary?<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’d like to start this week by making a point I’ve made over and over again: </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s probably a mistake to assume that everyone in the past was horribly violent, irredeemably evil or massively ignorant.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rather, as I have repeatedly pointed out, they probably had a reason for doing whatever it was they did. That reason may no longer exist, the world is a very different place than it was 500 years ago, or even 100 years ago. So we certainly don’t want to automatically assume that it’s a good idea to continue doing things the way we always have, but that hardly seems to be the mistake most people are making. Rather most people seem to be making the opposite mistake, the one I keep pointing out, declaring that all the reasons for how things were done in the past were bad reasons and we can safely ignore them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you were going to point out a place where people in the past acted irrationally you might point to the omnipresence of war. Something which, thankfully, seems to have experienced a massive decline since World War II (at least in terms of combat deaths as a percentage of population.) If there’s anything we can all agree is bad, it’s war. Though as it turns out, not everyone does agree with that, or at least a few people have raised some interesting questions.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I talked about one of these people just last week, Robin Hanson, and his assertion that we are engaged in rapid cultural exploration, which carries unknown risks we may not be properly accounting for. In his </span><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/08/spaceship-earth-in-culture-space.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">original post</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> he gives seven examples of risky cultural exploration, including one related to the subject of war:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While the world has become much more peaceful over the last century, this has been accompanied by big declines in cultural support for military action and tolerance for military losses. Is the world now more vulnerable to conquest by a new military power with more local cultural support and tolerance for losses?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another person to recently question the idea that war is a horrible mistake, is professor </span><a href="http://politicalscience.jhu.edu/directory/benjamin-ginsberg/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Benjamin Ginsberg</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, who I encountered recently on an </span><a href="https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/worth-of-war-ginsberg-interview/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">episode of the Art of Manliness podcast</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. (I should say that I’m grateful to frequent commenter Boonton for pointing the episode out to me.) Ginsberg is a political science professor at John Hopkins University and he recently published a book titled </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Worth-War-Benjamin-Ginsberg/dp/1616149507" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Worth of War</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I have not read it, but from what I gather he acknowledges the horrible death toll of war as well as the other associated suffering, but points out that there are some positives to war as well. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To begin with Ginsberg seems reasonably certain that true peace is impossible, that </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/There-Will-Be-War-Volumes/dp/9527065593" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">there will be war</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and as long as that’s the case we shouldn’t completely demonize it because it will come back to haunt us when war does return. As you can see his thought process is very similar to Hanson’s though I get the sense that Ginsberg is more certain. For my own part it appears that the key question is whether there are cultures with dramatically more support for war and dramatically greater tolerance for losses than our own. And if so, why haven’t they conquered us already?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Off the top of my head it would appear that the Taliban checks both the “cultural support” and the “loss tolerance” box. Which leaves only the question of why haven’t they conquered us already? Well, there are only 34.5 million Afghanis (and not all belong to the Taliban) and there are 326 million Americans. Also Afghanistan’s </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-water_navy" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">blue water navy</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is notoriously underfunded, meaning a direct attack on America is only possible through terrorism. But we can examine our own attempts to conquer them, and as far as I can tell it’s not going well. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here are a few recent headlines:</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/09/opinions/afghan-war-has-new-cruel-and-senseless-face-killing-of-journalists-kazemi/index.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Afghanistan: The slaughterhouse of journalism</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (published on Sunday)</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/this-graphic-shows-why-afghanistan-war-is-getting-worse-after-17-years-2018-8" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This graphic shows why the Afghanistan War is getting worse after 17 years</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (published a couple of weeks ago)</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/world/asia/taliban-attacks-afghanistan.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">New Taliban Attacks Kill Dozens of Afghan Soldiers and Police Officers</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (published Monday morning as I was writing this.)</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/07/asia/afghanistan-casualties-mattis-intl/index.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Afghanistan: A bad year in America's longest war</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (published a few days days before that)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Some quotes from the last article.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even Kabul is not secure. When I'm coming from home and I say hello to my baby and wife, I am thinking sometimes there is no guarantee to be back at home," says Najibullah Hekmat, a third-generation Afghan surgeon trained and working at the hospital.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ISIS claimed responsibility for </span><a href="https://cnn.com/2018/09/06/asia/kabul-attack-wrestling-intl/index.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kabul's latest attack</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on Wednesday, twin blasts that killed 20 civilians and wounded 70 more.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An escalation in terrorist attacks and fighting between the Taliban and government forces has helped drive the number of civilian deaths this year to its highest point on record -- 1,692 civilians killed by June 30, according to the UN.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No one is arguing that the US is in imminent danger of being conquered by the Taliban but despite spending </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">billions and billions of dollars</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_casualties_in_Afghanistan" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">thousands of lives</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> we’re having a heck of a time conquering them. One would think that our huge advantage in resources and technology would prove to be a decisive advantage, but it has not. Obviously, in part, we’re restrained by humanitarian impulses, which, among other things, restricts indiscriminate killing on a large scale, but even taking that into account, the Taliban obviously have a will to fight, and to suffer hardship and casualties which we don’t. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Is there some future, where the Taliban, or some other nation, pulls even with the US as far as resources and technology, while at the same time maintaining that greater will to fight and sacrifice? This is an important question. As I said I just listened to the podcast, but I get the feeling that Ginsberg’s answer is yes, and that Hanson’s answer is maybe. Personally, I’m on the side of Hanson. It does seem like there might be something about the progress required to get resources and technology, which is inevitably pacifying. That perhaps, when you get to the point where you have a blue water navy and nukes you don’t want to use them. You might argue that the US does, at least, use its navy, but it’s hard to argue we use it in the same way the Taliban would.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Do we have any other examples we can use? On the one hand there is Europe and on the other hand, China. Europe clearly seems like a place which has the technology and resources to be a significant military power, but which also has zero will to fight, and almost as little desire to sacrifice. China has the resources, and is quickly catching up on the tech, and while certainly more aggressive than Europe, it’s unclear when it comes right down to it how warlike they actually are. When was the last time China invaded another country anyway? Does the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sino-Vietnamese War</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> count?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I suppose Russia is also an example, but as with most things, it’s </span><a href="http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/RusnEnig.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something of an enigma</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, is their willingness to fight and sacrifice greater now than it was during the Cold War? What about their resources and tech? Their military is certainly </span><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/size-of-russian-navy-compared-to-soviet-fleet-2016-3" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">smaller</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> than it was during the Soviet era. Though their absolute tech level </span><a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18331/russias-military-tech/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">may have gotten better</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I guess all of this is to say that if technology has no relationship to a country’s will to fight, then eventually you’re going to have a high tech society (with a blue water navy and nukes and the whole nine yards) who really wants to take over the world, and, if, as Hanson and Ginsberg fear, the US and other developed nations have lost that will, then they’re probably going to lose. (Which, as I pointed out, is kind of already happening in Afghanistan, and it didn’t even require equal resources and technology.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If, on the other hand, technology and pacifism, are somewhat linked than maybe getting the military necessary to do something like take over the US, automatically means that you’re too “civilized” to actually do it. Perhaps, but to me this seems like a thin premise to bet the future of the nation on.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This idea of preparedness is the first positive Ginsberg points out, that war, or at least a warlike attitude, makes us more likely to emerge victorious when war inevitably arrives. I guess if you’re sure there’s going to be a big game, and if that game is for all the marbles, then it’s pretty silly not to practice. To which, guys like Steven Pinker argue, that there isn’t necessarily going to be another big game, that big games are horrible, and by practicing for them we make them more likely to happen. But this post is not about the likelihood of big games, I have </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/12/reframing-pinkers-better-angels-of-our.html?m=0" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">other posts</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about that. It’s about whether there are any positives to having the occasional big game, so let’s move on to the next one.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Beyond the argument that preparing for war makes it more likely, Pinker and people like him also argue that having a warlike culture has negative effects on the culture itself. Ginsberg argues the exact opposite, and mentions it as a positive. This is another topic I’ve discussed in </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/04/tribe-by-sebastian-junger-and-strange.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">past posts</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but to summarize: Pinker and people like him point out that warlike societies have a much greater risk of death due to violence. Case closed. The argument on the other side is more nuanced, and I’m not sure of the specifics of Ginsberg’s version of the argument, but the best argument I’ve come across is in the book </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Homecoming-Belonging-Sebastian-Junger/dp/1455566381" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tribe, by Sebastian Junger.</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> He points out that psychological problems go away and people report being happier during times of war.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The best example of this argument being played out is among the Native American tribes during the colonial period. On the one side, Pinker points out that people in these tribes had an appallingly high chance of dying due to violence. On the other side, Junger points out this quote from french émigré,</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Hector_St._John_de_Cr%C3%A8vec%C5%93ur" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hector de Crèvecoeur</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, who actually was around at the time (unlike Pinker):</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Obviously premature death due to violence is bad, but apparently not bad enough to make people prefer the less violent culture over the more violent one. Meaning that when actually given a choice between Pinker’s world or Junger’s world people choose the more warlike world of Junger. The reasons why or whether this can be extrapolated into the present or whether there’s some way to get the happiness without the violence are beyond the scope of this post. (If you’re interested </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/04/tribe-by-sebastian-junger-and-strange.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the post where I reviewed Tribe</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> does get into it.) But I think at a minimum it points to a more complicated picture of war than what most people entertain these days. Which is Ginsberg’s whole point.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before leaving our discussion of the societal benefits of war, I want to also draw your attention to another post I did, which you may or may not have read. In this other post I discussed the book </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Great-Leveler-Inequality-Twenty-First-Princeton/dp/0691165025" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Great Leveler</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which argued that mass mobilization war is one of the few things that has ever reduced inequality. Opinions vary on how bad inequality is, but if you’re one of those people who thinks that it will eventually result in some kind of internal civil war or revolution, then there’s certainly an argument to be made that a nation is better off occasionally going to war, than eventually self-destructing in bloody violence. Or to put it more crudely if it takes death to reduce inequality there’s an argument to be made that deaths outside the nation are preferable to deaths inside the nation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ginsberg also spent a lot of time (as it seemed to me) talking about all of the technology which has come out of wars. Here, at least, I’m not convinced the benefit is as big a deal as he thinks. I imagine that most of the technology which was developed to help out during wartime would have been developed eventually even without the war. Also, oftentimes the technology being developed is solving a problem which is only significant because of war. Ginsberg mentions the advances in prosthetics which have occured recently. Advances he says we only have because of the recent wars. And it is true, a lot of people have come back from Iraq or Afghanistan with a missing limb, and as a result we’ve gotten a lot better a building artificial limbs, but to be clear these artificial limbs wouldn’t be needed in the first place without the war. I’m not saying there aren’t other people who lose limbs in other ways (or who are born without them). I’m saying when you consider that most of this technology would have been developed eventually, I’m reasonably certain that spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives to hasten it by a few years is not worth it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To put it another way, however bad you think the government is at directing research priorities. Imagine that instead of going to war they said here’s $5 trillion (one estimate for the </span><a href="https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2016/09/12/report-wars-in-iraq-afghanistan-cost-almost-5-trillion-so-far/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">total cost of Iraq and Afghanistan</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) think of all the technology that might be developed in the course of a war, things like battlefield surgery, prosthetics, drones, etc. And see what you can come up with. Imagining this scenario, can you honestly say that we wouldn’t have developed everything that came out of the war and then some? I imagine we could probably do it for a tenth of that money. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That said, there may be a deeper issue, I can see making the more subtle argument that war forces us to focus on certain kinds of technology, technology that’s better at helping us survive rather than technology that’s better at keeping us happy (though “keeping us distracted” seems much closer to the mark.) I’ve talked </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/05/antinatalism-and-happiness-vs-survival.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in the past</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about the conflict between prioritizing survival and prioritizing happiness, and it could be that the farther you go down one of the roads, the harder it is to pay any attention to the other road. That the more new technology consists of things like Instagram, Twitch and </span><a href="https://coffeemeetsbagel.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Coffee meets Bagel</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, that the harder it will be to develop technology which actually contributes to our survival. Once again I think it just makes things take longer, but, on the other hand, there is plenty of science fiction where the whole course of the future was determined by early choices in what to prioritize, leading to technology that could only have been discovered on the exact path that was chosen. Certainly I have warned of the dangers of a long term focus on lotus eating, so maybe we are painting ourselves into a corner.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This does take us to the final and perhaps most compelling point Ginsberg makes about the benefits of war: War is the ultimate test of rationality. The meaning of this observation should be obvious, though I think people have forgotten it. Why? Because since the end of the cold war the US has been so strong militarily that it didn’t matter whether we had the ideal strategy or the perfect tactics, we were going to win regardless. Such was not the case during the Cold War, when there were huge debates about which ideology would provide the decisive edge in the inevitable war. Now we no longer worry about it because no one worries about war against some vastly inferior power, people only worry about a war when it’s going to be close (as most wars are, otherwise they never begin in the first place.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From this the argument can be made that when a nation is powerful, (like the US is currently) they and their citizens can engage in irrational behavior for a very long time. Particularly if that behavior doesn’t carry the seeds of its own destruction. If your irrationality doesn’t cause you to starve to death or overdose (which it very well might) or something equally fatal, then it has no natural endpoint. This is particularly true given all of the things we’ve implemented to prevent irrationality from being fatal. But everything I’ve said so far applies only to internal destructive tendencies, not external destructive actors. Once those enter the equation, in the form of war, and if the sides are fairly evenly matched, as they generally are, irrationality will be quickly revealed. As </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1631867/characters/nm0000200" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Master Sergeant Farell</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (played by the late, great </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000200/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bill Paxton</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in the criminally underrated movie </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1631867/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Edge of Tomorrow</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) said:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Battle is the Great Redeemer. It is the fiery crucible in which true heroes are forged. The one place where all men truly share the same rank, regardless of what kind of parasitic scum they were going in.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m mostly interested in the “fiery crucible” part (though I think “parasitic scum” may have some bearing here as well). And the associated idea that if there is anything present in you or your civilization which doesn’t help you survive, it gets burned away. I realize I am once again making survival the primary value, but I think this is one area where it is definitely justified. Not only is survival directly threatened by war, but if your ideas won't help you survive than there's a good chance they won't continue past your death.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We may not know where our irrationality lies until the moment we’re put to the test. But I can think of some candidates. One of the bitterly fought battles of the culture war has been expanding who can serve in combat, and in the military in general. In </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Ask,_Don%27t_Tell_Repeal_Act_of_2010" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2010</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed allowing LGB’s to serve openly. Then in </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_combat" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2013</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the ban on women serving in combat was lifted. And of course just recently we’ve seen the fight over </span><a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/courts-order-trump-to-reveal-internal-talks-on-militarys-transgender-policy" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">transgender individuals serving</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I am not saying that any of these expansions are definitely irrational, though they certainly could be if, when the time comes, they make our military any less effective at its core responsibility of killing the other guy before they can kill us. Or as Hanson alludes to, if it reduces our </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">support for military action and our tolerance for military losses.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They could be a great idea. I could be that if another big war comes our military will fight more effectively than they would have otherwise.</span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: decimal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It could be that it doesn’t matter, because we’re done with big, existential-level wars.</span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: decimal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It could be that it has no effect either way.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It could be that these policies were irrational, and when put to the test they will have some negative impact on our ability to wage war effectively.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One seems unlikely to me. If it’s a good idea why hasn’t it been done historically? When wars were much more common why did no one arrive at this competitive advantage? Two, kind of seems to be the underlying argument of a lot of people I’ve talked to about this, who seem to consider the expansions more akin to ending job discrimination than anything which impacts military readiness. As far as three, it’s hard for me to imagine that it has zero effect, which leaves only the idea that, if put to the test, it will prove to have been a bad idea. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If it is it won’t be the first bad idea which was only uncovered in the heat of battle. Nor will it probably be the last. But what happens if we no longer have battle to uncover these bad ideas? Hard to say. I hope that we can uncover bad ideas without people dying. That we can decide important issues without the shedding of blood. But I don’t think the trends point in that direction. And this takes me to my concluding point.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another example of irrationality (though one which anyone can uncover) would clearly be </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to a marginal blog, specializing in esoteric musings, in an forgotten corner of the internet. Nevertheless I hope you’ll do it anyway. </span></div>
Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-88221351747131736792018-09-08T08:50:00.002-07:002018-09-08T08:53:52.692-07:00Burning Man, Dreamtime and Dragons<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like many people I went on a short vacation over the Labor Day weekend. Mine took me out to the Bay Area, where I attended the </span><a href="http://www.thescottishgames.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pleasanton Scottish Festival</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> with my family. I should mention that the festival was gigantic. It’s supposed to be the largest Scottish Festival west of the Mississippi and after being there, I can believe it. But the marvels of caber-tossing, bagpipe competitions, and sheep-dog trials (exclusive to the Pleasanton Scottish Festival as far as I can tell) are not what I want to talk about.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I did not realize, until we were on our way back, that the Labor Day weekend is also when </span><a href="https://burningman.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Burning Man</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> ends. My first clue was when we checked into a hotel in Reno on Sunday night, and I overheard someone talking about it, only to then realize that basically the entire lobby was filled with </span><a href="https://journal.burningman.org/2012/04/philosophical-center/tenprinciples/who-the-hell-are-burners-anyway/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">burners</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, as they’re called. Their presence continued to make itself felt on the drive home on Monday. As we drove east on I-80, I would estimate that half of the cars sharing the road with us were on their way home from Burning Man, so much so that my wife and I made a game of pointing them out. It wasn’t necessarily a hard game, people coming back from “The Burn” are pretty distinctive. If nothing else, there’s the distinctive dust of the </span><a href="https://burningman.org/culture/glossary/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">playa</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the dry lake bed in northern Nevada where Burning Man is held. This dust would generally be covering the entire vehicle, though sometimes just the bikes the person had strapped on to the back of their old RV and sometimes just the wheels, as in the case when my wife identified a burner I had missed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, then, Burning Man is what I want to talk about? No, or at least not directly. And before I get any farther, there are probably some of you who have never heard of Burning Man, or if you have heard of it, you’re not sure what it is. Well this is not the place to find out, but I have found that this quote from an </span><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/welltraveled/features/2011/why_would_anyone_go_to_burning_man/its_just_unshowered_vegans_jetsetting_art_freaksand_me.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">old article</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about the phenomenon from Slate, does a pretty good job of encapsulating the weirdness, while also finally making the connection to the subject I do want to cover:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A good friend who's been to many Burns but (to his tremendous disappointment) couldn't make it out to the desert this year insisted that I visit him at his New York apartment to receive some pre-Burn instruction and advice. "Burning Man is an effort to reinvent the culture of Earth," he told me, in dead serious tones. "If you go, you must surrender to the spirit of the endeavor. You have a duty to participate. You can't just observe. You'll bring everybody down." He then solemnly handed me a white fur vest, a spangly blue cowboy hat, and a pair of ski goggles. I wasn't sure what I was meant to do with them. He assured me all would become clear soon enough.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve never been to Burning Man, though I have several friends who’ve gone, and I get the impression that the tagline “Reinventing the Culture of the Earth in a White Fur Vest and a Spangly Blue Cowboy Hat” would not be very far from the mark. Alternatively the Slate article also described Burning Man as a collection of “unshowered vegans [and] jet-setting art freaks” which also seems pretty accurate from what I can tell. (If you detect some disdain at this point, it might be due to the fact that a group of very loud burners decided to have a conversation right outside my hotel room at 3:30 am when I was in Reno.) But as I said I’ve never gone, so it’s entirely possible that I’m misrepresenting it. But that line about reinventing the culture of the Earth always stuck with me, and it suggests that there are some people who think that a thousand years from now, “Burning” will be viewed as a movement similar in impact to Christianity or Buddhism. Put me down as someone who thinks this is very unlikely, but I do think that even if Burning Man specifically doesn’t end up deserving a special place in history, that this era more generally will. And here, finally, is what I want to talk about.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If humanity is around in a thousand years (and I certainly hope they are, in one form or another.) What place will this era hold in our history? Well first, it might be interesting to ask how how people of the future will demarcate this era. Will it be the era of American dominance? The era of hedonism? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Will they draw a line after World War II because that will have been the last big war? Will they draw a line at the start of the enlightenment? At the invention of the steam engine? At the fall of the Soviet Union?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could see a case being made for any of the above, but I would vote for a line drawn after World War II. And not necessarily because it was the last big war (I’m on </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/01/predictions-spoiler-no-ai-or-immortality.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">record</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as saying that it won’t be) but because it was the era when all the rules changed. Previously democracy was rare, now it’s common. Previously hierarchies were explicit, now equality is expected (if not always realized). Previously </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">war was diplomacy by other means</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, now war is apocalyptic. Previously someone’s rights were abstract and rarely considered, now they’re central and frequently referred to. Now, obviously, this all didn’t happen instantly at the end of World War II, it was a gradual process, and as I said I can see drawing a line at any number of places, from the Civil War to the French Revolution to the impeachment of Trump (should it happen). But I think World War II was (at least for America) when it became apparent that the road ahead was clear, and it was time to put on the gas.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All of which is to say, even if I’m not sure where they’ll draw the line, I think it’s clear that when people look back they will see our time as a distinct era, and an important one as well. Mostly because of all the changes I just mentioned. Though, saying that this is an important and distinct period is not particularly revolutionary or even noteworthy. The real question I’m curious about is, a thousand years on, what will the impact of this era have been? Will I be wrong and people will call it the “Era of Burning Man?” There are apparently some people who think so, but, as I said I don’t think that’s one of the likely scenarios. And, of course, if I’m speaking of likely scenarios for something a thousand years in the future I can only speak very broadly. But in very broad terms here are a few likely scenarios:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Beginning of Utopia:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Though humans a thousand years from now might not give a place a pride to Burning Man, they may still view this era as the time when humanity passed from brutishness to true enlightenment. When the Long Peace started, the peace that eventually turned into the Forever Peace. When the initial faint promise of Transhumanism and AI turned into the Singularity and humans turned into gods. When all the hate and cruelty and inhumanity was done away with and when the era of tolerance and love, and individual flourishing began. Here, I offer my usual caveat. I would love it if this were the case, but even if I thought it were likely I would still argue that all of the rest of the items on this list are bad enough that we should still spend a significant amount of effort hedging against them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Large Scale Nuclear War Happens</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: If this ends up happening then people a thousand years in the future will look back on this era as one of unmitigated folly. As the time when we had developed nuclear weapons but went blithely along, unconcerned by how destructive they were and how certain (in retrospect) their eventual use was. (This also would be a powerful argument for starting the era at the end of World War II.) I assume they would also view it as a time of vast hedonistic excess as well, considering everything we did between developing nukes and the eventual war as the worst trade-off of long-term responsibility for immediate pleasure in the history of humanity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Some Other Negative Black Swan</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: I could have included nuclear war in this category as well, but I think it’s special enough that it deserves it’s own section. In this scenario we manage to avoid large scale nuclear war, but there is some other large negative event that we should have seen coming, but didn’t. I’ve talked about this a lot in past posts, including </span><a href="http://rwrichey.com/2018/08/25/how-much-ruin-is-in-a-nation/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this one</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> from just a few weeks ago, so I won’t go into a huge amount of detail here. Particularly since the list of potential swans is nearly endless, and even if it’s one no one thought of, I imagine that the people of the future, much like ourselves, will not cut us much slack if we overlook our eventual doom, no matter how unlikely it seemed at the time.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Adolescent Idealism</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Some people have put forth the theory that humanity is passing through something resembling college or maybe high school. A time when you feel like you know everything and the traditions and rules of your parents (and society in general) seem hopelessly antiquated, needlessly repressive and entirely unimportant in light of all the new knowledge you’ve just gained. Oftentimes this is accompanied by the belief that they’re going to change the world through social justice, equality, and radical redistribution. Sometimes these feelings last, but in general people discover that it’s all a lot harder than they thought. People a thousand years from now might look back on this as just such an era of “youthful” idealism. This view could exist alongside of possibilities two and three, or it could be that we avoid major negative events, and yet still appear hopelessly naive to our descendents.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dreamtime</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Many years ago Robin Hanson wrote </span><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">an article</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> where he speculated that our descendents would look back on this era as something of a “dreamtime”. He mentions many differences which will probably exist between us and our descendants, but he calls it dreamtime because of one huge difference, “our lives are far more dominated by consequential delusions: wildly false beliefs and non-adaptive values that matter.” Why is that? Well he offers seven reasons in the original article, but all of them basically boil down to the idea that we are adapted to live in a world very different from the one we live in now. For 99.9% of human history we lived in a world with far fewer people, hardly any wealth, and almost no ongoing technological advancement. This difference is something I’ve mentioned many times in the past, and Hansen hits on many of the same things. The part where it gets interesting is when he points out that these are differences which not only existed between us and our ancestors, but which will exist between us and our descendents as well. Something I’d like to dig into a little bit more.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The idea of far fewer people may be where Hanson is on the shakiest ground. It certainly doesn’t feel, at this point, that this is likely to be that different for our descendents. But if you toss in the idea that we will eventually spread to the stars than this assertion makes perfect sense. Right now humanity is as global and connected as it has ever been, and possibly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">as it ever will be</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I could, in theory, drop everything, hop on Skype and talk to anyone in the world. If, in the far future, the average descendent ends up on a planet light years away from Earth or any other planet, then this will obviously no longer be the case. Also whatever planet that is, it’s unlikely to have seven billion people on it. Now whether this will happen in a thousand years or not, I don’t know, but you can see where the tiny, widely separated colonies Hanson envisions for the future will be more similar to the world of yesterday than the world of today.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When someone says there was hardly any wealth in the past, no one is inclined to argue very much, but when Hanson points out that there will be hardly any wealth in the future, there are plenty of people willing to argue. But as I pointed out in a </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-harvest-is-past.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">previous post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, The current level of growth cannot continue forever, eventually it has to fall back to the level of “barely above zero” it was for most of human history. Hanson says it this way:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If income only doubled every century, in a million years that would be a factor of 10</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 6.6pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap;">3000</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/limits-to-growth.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">which seems</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> impossible to achieve with only the 10</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 6.6pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap;">70</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> atoms of our galaxy available by then. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally there’s the idea of almost no ongoing technological advancement. This is another area where things can’t continue forever. Or rather if it can continue forever than this era definitely does represent the beginning of utopia, and we can cease to worry about basically anything else. More likely there are still many things to discover, but the pace of discovery will start to slow, and discovering anything truly new will become rarer and rarer, until eventually we reach, a permanent technological plateau. This ends up being one of the key reasons for Hanson’s claim that future generations will view us as delusional. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our knowledge has been growing so fast, and bringing such radical changes, that many of us see anything as possible, so that nothing can really be labeled a delusion.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So what should we be doing?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I said, it may be that this era will be viewed by people in the future as the beginning of utopia, and what we should really be doing is rushing towards it as fast as possible. But I also listed four other likely scenarios which indicate that perhaps we should be exercising both more caution and more humility. Now I don’t claim that because there are four bad scenarios and only one good one that this means that the bad scenarios are more likely by a factor of four to one (though they might be, it’s impossible to know.) On the other hand, I think dismissing those scenarios, as so many people are quick to do, is equally, if not more foolish. The argument I’m making is that we live in a unique era, which, above all else, calls for unique caution. And this takes me to another, </span><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/08/spaceship-earth-in-culture-space.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">much more recent article</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Robin Hanson.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He theorizes that one of the things that’s unique about this era is that rather than exploring new physical spaces, that we have moved to exploring new </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">cultural</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> spaces:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I want to suggest that Spaceship Earth is in fact a story of a brave crew risking much to explore a strange new territory. But the space we explore is more cultural than physical.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">During the industrial era, the world economy has doubled roughly every fifteen years. Each such doubling of output has moved us into new uncharted cultural territory. This growth has put new pressures on our environment, and has resulted in large and rapid changes to our culture and social organization.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This growth results mostly from innovation, and most innovations are small and well tested against local conditions, giving us little reason to doubt their local value. But all these small changes add up to big overall moves that are often entangled with externalities, coordination failures, and other reasons to doubt their net value.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So humanity continues to venture out into new untried and risky cultural spaces, via changes to cultural conditions with which we don’t have much experience, and which thus risk disaster and destruction. The good crew of Spaceship Earth should carefully weigh these risks when considering where and how fast to venture.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is a great way of framing what I’ve been saying from the very beginning. And when I assert, as the theme of this blog that, “We are not saved.” One of the reasons for making that assertion is that rather than moving cautiously and slowly into this new cultural space, we appear to be moving faster and getting less cautious with each passing year. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My guess is that there are two reasons why this is happening. First, as I just said, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">if people believe that this is the start of a future utopia, then it makes sense to be rushing towards it as fast as possible. But, as I have argued, not only is this not a given, it may not even be likely. And paradoxically, rushing into it, may make it less likely rather than more. Second there is the inertia of the status quo, which has had a bias towards “progress” for decades if not centuries, a belief that there is no level at which progress becomes bad, and faster progress is always better than slower progress.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This metaphor of the current era as a ship engaged in risky and rapid (cultural) exploration was the primary thing I wanted to pass along from the article, but Hanson does tie it into the culture war (as you might imagine) and gives the usual plea for more reasonable debate:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The most common framing today for such issues is one of cultural war. You ask yourself which side feels right to you, commiserate with your moral allies, then puff yourself up with righteous indignation against those who see things differently, and go to war with them. But we might do better to frame these as reasonable debates on how much to risk as we explore culture space.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This got me to thinking, people always offer up reasonable debate as a potential solution to this problem. And it does seem eminently sensible, things would probably go better if there was more talking and less war. I have certainly also advocated for this position, particularly in preference to </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/01/godzilla-trudges-back-and-forth.html?m=0" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Godzilla trudging back and forth</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. But I have </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/09/making-sure-culture-war-is-fought-fairly.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">also pointed out</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that there were decades of reasonable debates before the current crisis, and yet it had very little effect on the speed of cultural exploration. Also, in a certain sense, the cultural war is a debate, particularly given that, even using very extreme estimates, there have been almost no fatalities in this war (so far). The problem we’re facing is not that we need to have more debates or that the debates need to be more reasonable (though neither would hurt). The problem is that our policies don’t do a very good job of reflecting the uncertainty we are (or at least should be) experiencing.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have definitely covered many areas where we should be less certain than we are. This is well covered territory (in this blog and a few others, though not much outside that.) But perhaps framing it as the idea of risky exploration, or of a unique era calling for unique caution makes it clear to some people in a way that previous explanations didn’t. Also, once we realize that humanity is engaged in cultural exploration we can go on to realize that this exploration is proceeding at a faster rate than ever.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What does the future hold? How will this era be viewed a thousand years from now? I don’t know, but I think the next few decades could be very consequential to that future view. The old maps used to mark unexplored areas of the world with pictures of dragons, or sea serpents: </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">here be dragons</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #353537; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, as they say. As it turns out there weren’t any dragons, but as we explore the space of culture, we may find out, that this time, there are.</span></div>
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Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-63013230541154077602018-09-01T05:43:00.000-07:002018-09-01T05:52:41.626-07:00The Conspiracy Against Gawker: Things Have to Be More Than Just True to Be Newsworthy<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A couple of posts ago I </span><a href="http://rwrichey.com/2018/08/18/review-bad-blood-theranos/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">reviewed</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (in my own idiosyncratic fashion) </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/152473165X" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bad Blood by John Carreyrou</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This was a book about the many crimes and falsehoods of Theranos, a healthcare startup which got away with the aforementioned crimes and falsehoods for far longer than they should have. They accomplished this mostly through a combination of influencing powerful people and intimidating anyone who tried to expose them. As a country (and a civilization) we take a dim view of this sort of behavior and have set up various failsafes to protect us against it. In the case of Theranos all of our failsafes… failed… (I’m pretty sure that despite the name that’s not what they’re supposed to do.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, this failure didn’t last forever. Theranos was eventually exposed, by the press. Though even this exposure took a lot longer than it should have, given that Theranos was around for more than a dozen years. Now, it wasn’t the hottest startup in the valley, with a valuation of nine billion dollars for all of those years, but the red flags started appearing as early as 2006 when Elizabeth Holmes (the Theranos Founder) fired the CFO for questioning her ethics. (And if there’s any moral of the Theranos story it’s that Holmes did have questionable ethics.) Also from the very beginning Theranos was claiming to have technology which was </span><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/science-of-elizabeth-holmes-theranos-update-2015-4" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">entirely too good to be true</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It really shouldn’t have taken as long as it did for Theranos to be exposed. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I mentioned in my previous post that Theranos was very liberal with the threat of lawsuits, and that this went a long way towards keeping their various misdeeds secret for so long. Also Silicon Valley is a weird place for news. You have hundreds of startups who want coverage, but probably only a few who actually deserve to be exposed in the way Theranos deserved to be exposed. Given this, I assume it takes a certain amount of specialization to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. What was really needed during those years that Theranos was at the height of its wickedness was a Silicon Valley specific publication, with zero fear of being sued. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If only such an outlet existed...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A few days ago I was browsing the </span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Slate Star Codex subreddit</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, as I sometimes do. And I started reading a post by </span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/youcanteatbullets/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">youcanteatbullets</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> where he mentioned that he had just finished reading Bad Blood (“Much like me,” I thought) and that the book he had read just before that was </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-Peter-Gawker-Anatomy-Intrigue-ebook/dp/B07637TDJJ" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by </span><a href="https://ryanholiday.net/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ryan Holiday</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (“Interesting, that’s the book I’m currently reading,” I thought) and that his big question was if Gawker was so intent on uncovering Silicon Valley gossip that they felt the need to </span><a href="http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">out Peter Thiel</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, (as gay in case that isn't clear) which then led to the whole vendetta which eventually lead to the </span><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/peter-thiel-got-his-revenge-on-gawker-he-may-yet-regret-it" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lawsuit that brought down Gawker</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, how is it that they completely missed the Theranos story? (“That is an a terribly interesting question!” I thought. “One which never occurred to me.” I thought.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As it turns out such an outlet did exist, it was Gawker. One of the major takeaways from Conspiracy, is that they viewed lawsuits with total disdain, going so far as ignore the </span><a href="http://gawker.com/a-judge-told-us-to-take-down-our-hulk-hogan-sex-tape-po-481328088" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">explicit orders of judges</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. As scary as David Boies is, I’m guessing that he wouldn’t have made much headway with Gawker had they decided to publish a Theranos expose. And as part of the Gawker network there was a site, Valleywag, specifically devoted to Silicon Valley news. Or as youcanteatbullets puts it, a little more directly:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nick Denton also liked to say that “todays gossip is tomorrows news”. SO WHY THE HELL DIDN’T GAWKER BREAK THE STORY OF THERANOS?! Their dedicated silicon valley beat Valleywag had its ups and downs but was active from 2013-2015; certainly other Gawker properties covered SV as well. The Carreyrou story was published in October 2015. I checked the Gawker site, the only stories I could find on Theranos were after that original WSJ piece. If Gawker played any socially valuable role at all, it would be exposing a company like Theranos.</span></div>
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Denton" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nick Denton</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was, of course, the owner of Gawker (and Valleywag) and a specific target of Thiel’s anger. And to understand things we need to backup a little bit. Particularly if you’re not familiar with all the details surrounding the lawsuit and the vendetta. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It basically all started in 2007 when, as I mentioned, Valleywag/Gawker outed </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Peter Thiel</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. You may or may not know who Thiel is, but you’re far more likely to know who he is now than you were to know who he was then. For those that still don’t, Peter Thiel is a billionaire investor who was one of the founders of Paypal, and one of the earliest investors in Facebook. Even now it’s a stretch to call him a public figure, but back then it would have been especially difficult to make that argument. But if there’s one thing you should know about Gawker, such fine distinctions rarely troubled them. Also I know even if he wasn’t a public figure that doesn’t automatically make what Gawker did illegal, I’m just saying, it’s clear from the book, that the question almost certainly never crossed their minds.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thiel was not especially closeted at the time, but it still annoyed him because he wanted to be known as a great investor, not a great gay investor. (Also if you have followed Thiel at all, you’ll know he’s pretty conservative, which almost certainly plays into it.) But beyond the annoyance he felt at the violation of his personal privacy, he also felt that an organ specifically dedicated to spreading gossip about the valley was bad for the health of the startup ecosystem, and at one point he compared Gawker to terrorists. (I suppose this means he would have been opposed to Gawker using gossip to bring down Theranos. And I’ll get to that.) These feelings hardened until eventually Thiel decided to figure out a way to take Gawker down. Eventually forming the conspiracy from which the title of the book is taken.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After some years of working at it, the conspiracy finally got their chance to strike when Gawker made the ultimately fatal error of publishing the Hulk Hogan sex tape in October of 2012. At this point I should mention that if you’re anything like me, you might have heard that in addition to all of the embarrassment associated with a sex tape, that this was a sex tape involving Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) and his best friend’s wife. As it turns out, that’s true, but incredibly misleading. His best friend apparently had an open marriage, and the best friend was the one who suggested it, and filmed it. Also Hogan’s wife had, that very day, finally, and irrevocably ended their marriage. This information isn’t necessary to the point I want to make, but I thought it was interesting. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When the tape was posted, Hogan had his attorneys immediately send a cease and desist letter. When Gawker not only ignored the letter, but sent a disdainful response, Hogan said he would sue. Thiel offered to fund the suit. Of course this was a conspiracy, so Thiel didn’t make this offer directly. In fact Hogan doesn’t find out about Thiel’s involvement until after the verdict. Essentially at the same time as everyone else.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The lawsuit drags on for several years before finally going to trial in March of 2016. And in the end the jury delivers a $140 million dollar judgement against Gawker and Denton, which drives both Denton and Gawker into bankruptcy. (</span><a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/two-years-after-buying-univision-wants-to-sell-its-gawker-onion-portfolios/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gawker ends up being sold to Univision</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in the bankruptcy sale.) As part of the bankruptcy proceedings Hogan ends up with $31 million. And </span><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/nick-denton-in-line-for-15-million-from-gawker-liquidation-1485554315" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Denton actually ends up with $15 million</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, so it could have been a lot worse. But one assumes, if nothing else, that people are going to be more careful about posting sex tapes. Or outing people as gay. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In retrospect it’s easy to look at things and point out all of the mistakes Gawker made. Many of them driven by pure arrogance on their part. But if you peel away all the arrogance, there’s an argument to be made that Gawker fought for a somewhat noble and idealistic reason.They fought because they had a philosophy that the “truth” was an absolute defense. Of course as it turns out, it wasn’t, and Conspiracy is mostly a story of the limits of that ideology. Though, I can certainly see its attraction. It’s clean, easy to understand, and the </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GflKh9jlCg" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">first priority of Superman</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">! It’s hard to imagine prioritizing something above the truth, and I confess, particularly when I was younger that I probably held a very similar ideology to Denton, but as I’ve gotten older, and as Holiday points out, I’ve realized things are more complicated. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This kind of purity is childish, the domain of people who live in the realm of theory and words and recoil from the real world where someone can punch you in the face if you say the wrong words to the wrong person. There is always a defense necessary; discretion is the responsibility of freedom, the obligation that comes along with rights. If not in court, then in life. If not to other people, then to yourself. But that’s only part of it—Nick was the leader. He had allowed that to happen. He had allowed them to proceed closer and closer to trial without really bothering to think through these hard issues, without facing the hard truths about his company. Even the hard truths about how </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">other people would see his company.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If truth isn’t an absolute standard, what should the standard be? I plan to spend most of the space remaining to me examining that question. (To be clear, I’m not sure I have an answer.) But, before I do, I’d like to go on a brief tangent.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When one reads about Thiel’s conspiracy, the obvious question is why don’t more people conspire in this fashion? Thiel is certainly not the only individual with money and power. Nor does he come across as particularly machiavellian. (Though Machiavelli is referenced a lot in the book.) There have to be people more conniving than him. Leading to the obvious question, is Thiel an outlier for engaging in a conspiracy? Or is he only an outlier for having his conspiracy exposed? When you think about it, Thiel’s conspiracy was (comparatively) legal and benign, and while the people involved did take steps to keep things a secret, you got the feeling they could have done more. The stakes if they were found out weren’t enormous, i.e. they weren’t going to go to jail or anything like that. You would imagine that if conspiracies are common that the stakes for most of them are a lot higher, and consequently the incentive to keep things secret is much greater as well. This line of thought inclines me to believe that Thiel is more likely an outlier for having been exposed, than for having done it in the first place.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course there are people who see conspiracies everywhere. We call them conspiracy theorists. And I happen to know a few of them. I was talking to one just the other day, and he said that he wasn’t necessarily sure of anything, but that, preceding from the idea that you can’t trust the government, and that people do conspire, you would expect there to be government conspiracies, and further you would expect word of them to leak out. I don’t see any obvious weaknesses in any of these assertions, though also, I should hasten to add, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and would have a hard time offering up a “conspiracy” that I thought had a greater than single digit chance of being true.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The reason I am not a conspiracy theorist is </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hanlon’s Razor</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I prefer to replace the word stupidity with the word incompetence, and I also like the theory that Hanlon is a corruption of Heinlein, who had </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_of_Empire" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">one of his character’s</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> say, “You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.” In any event, when I mentioned this, the conspiracy theorist admitted that was a pretty strong rebuttal (though one he had heard) but that he detects more malice, perhaps, than I do in the world. And perhaps the story of Thiel and his conspiracy should lead me to update my own assessment of the probability that certain conspiracy theories are true.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The existence of conspiracy theories was a tangent, but it also gets back to this idea of what should be our standard for saying something, or more accurately publishing something? As I’ve mentioned I don’t think we can rely on a pure standard of “anything that’s true”. (In addition to everything I’ve already mentioned there are significant difficulties in even determining what is true.) Instead it appears the courts have, in part, pivoted instead to a standard of newsworthiness. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I should make it clear up front that this isn’t a horrible standard, I know how hard it is to come up with standards in the first place, and as standards go this is not bad. That said, it has some definite weaknesses. First it’s mostly only applicable to news making organizations. It doesn’t help very much with the current crisis, which seems to largely concern big companies kicking individuals off of their platforms. I’m not necessarily saying that a company should never be able to kick someone off their platform, I’m saying that I don’t think applying a standard of newsworthiness helps very much in making the determination of who should stay and who should go.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Second, newsworthiness can easily devolve into a tyranny of the majority or of money. If ten million people want to see something does that automatically make it newsworthy? Gawker seemed to be advocating for essentially exactly this position. And both Bad Blood and Conspiracy illustrate that with enough money you can make something not newsworthy. To be clear I’m far more sympathetic to Thiel than I am to Holmes and Theranos. Also, while Thiel probably changed the definition of newsworthy going forward, it’s difficult to say exactly how. Further, I assume that the inverse, making something newsworthy through money is probably even easier.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, newsworthiness let’s us know what we can cover, but I’m not sure it does a very good job of telling us what we </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">should</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> cover. This is of course part of the reason it devolves into a popularity contest or an auction. Those both seem to be telling us what we should cover, but I think at best it’s a skewed signal, and at worst it may lead us in completely the opposite direction, which takes us back to the story of Gawker and Theranos.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Imagine for the moment that there are things which it would be beneficial for the public to know. (Perhaps this is the definition of newsworthiness?) But the public isn’t aware of them. Someone has to uncover them, probably an organization we would think of as “The Press”. I would argue that Theranos is a perfect example of this, but beyond that I’m sure there are other things being done by big corporations or especially the government, which also fit this criteria. (Watergate is the classic example of this, and I’m sure many people would argue that the current president is doing things which also fit this criteria.) As we consider this we need to ask two questions.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First, are there more of these things now than there were in the past? Are corporations and governments doing more things which need to be revealed, the same amount or less? My sense is that they’re probably doing more. Government is bigger. Corporations are bigger. There’s also simply more people, period. On the opposite side, it may be that these things are harder to hide and easier to expose, but this takes us to the second question.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Are we better at finding out about these things now than we used to be? Or are we worse? This question is both harder to answer, but also more important. I’m not sure what the answer is, but part of the reason why Gawker completely missing the Theranos fraud is so interesting is that it’s one large data point in favor of the argument that we’re worse at it. Gawker was the quintessential new media company. They were a news organization built for the internet. If “The Press” was going to be more effective when moved to the internet than Gawker should be the number one example of this increased effectiveness, and yet what important news did they end up breaking? Their motto was that today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news. And in the book it mentions that this was sometimes the case, but unless I missed it, it never provided an actual example of this transition. I’m sure if you talked to Denton, he would have a list, but I also assume if there was something of the level of Watergate or </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(film)" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Spotlight</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or Theranos, that it would have been mentioned prominently in the book. If there was such a thing I missed it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All of this is to say that Gawker certainly used a newsworthiness standard (a very, very broad one) in terms of what they </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">could</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> cover. But appeared to have a skewed view of newsworthiness when it came to what they </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">should</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> cover. In fact the book makes the point, repeatedly, that Gawker was almost exclusively driven by page views. (The Hogan sex tape ultimately racked up seven million.) And I think we can all agree that whatever the definition of newsworthiness (or whether it should even be our primary criteria) that it is not a concept which can be directly exchanged for page views. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, what Gawker was really optimizing for was even worse. They were optimizing for page views/hour of effort. And salacious, but ultimately unimportant gossip ends up being very high on that measure. Which is why they missed the one piece of Theranos gossip which would have been right up their alley. The fact that Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos President Sunny Balwani were in a secret relationship, despite the fact that he was 20 years her senior. Would this have broken open the story by itself? Probably not, but it does illustrate that they weren’t driven to get gossip </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">per se</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. They were only interested in gossip that required very little effort to get. (Recall that the post that started it all, outing Thiel, was a revelation of something a lot of people already knew.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The biggest example of Gawker’s weakness was that they were unable to uncover the conspiracy to destroy them. A story that held existential importance for them. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think the lesson we can draw here is that if we do want to be better at uncovering things that are actually newsworthy, then the centralized, page-view driven model of Gawker is the wrong way to do it. Obviously we can’t put the genie of the internet back in the bottle, we can only work with the wishes we’ve already been granted. One of which is the sheer number and diversity of voices on the internet. (Arguably the opposite of Gawker’s emphasis.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I said earlier that it’s naive to use the fact that something is true as an absolute standard for what can and can’t be said. I also mentioned that Gawker missed the most important story at all. Perhaps newsworthiness is truth, combined with importance. And on both measures I think that by encouraging a diversity of opinion we stand the greatest chance of encountering both those things. Does this mean we allow people to post (seemingly) crazy conspiracy theories? Well let’s look at those for a second through the lens of importance. Does it matter at all that Hulk Hogan had sex with his best friend’s wife? Not really. Not to anybody beyond the few dozen people directly involved. Does it matter if Theranos was giving out wildly inaccurate test results? Yeah, it does. It doesn’t imperil the country, but it’s important to the thousands of people who did blood tests using their technology. Does it matter if the government was behind 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden had nothing to do with it? Definitely. It matters a huge amount. It might be the most important story of the century. Now, for reasons I already explained, I give that a very, very low chance of being true. And I certainly don’t agree with any associated harassment. But if they just want a forum to make their case, I kind of think they should have it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, to be clear, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I also think people should be given a space to air their seemingly outrageous theories about Trump’s crimes as well. (Though, honestly, I think we are in less danger of any censorship there.) All of which is to say, I understand there are trade-offs, and I understand most people aren’t trying to optimize for newsworthiness or truth or importance. But, if you take nothing else from this post, remember, in theory Gawker was trying to do all three, and, as far as I can tell, they kind of sucked at it, and it might be important, if we want to understand where things are going, if we figure out why.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Long time readers will know that sucking at something is no impediment to doing it repeatedly, every week even. If you want to encourage this ongoing experiment in… suckiness? Consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-12319235560358224402018-08-25T14:02:00.002-07:002018-08-25T14:24:29.197-07:00How Much Ruin Is in a Nation?<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It </span><a href="https://spectator.org/a-lot-of-ruin-in-a-nation/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is said</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that after </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saratoga_campaign" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">General Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> during the Revolutionary War that a young nobleman, named Sinclair, came to Adam Smith, and declared that the surrender would be “the ruin of the nation.” To which Adam Smith reportedly responded, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Meaning, one supposes, that nations are sturdy things, and it takes more than you probably think to kill them off, or even cause them long term inconvenience. And certainly the UK remained a great power for many, many years after this. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In our own day we have a lot of Sinclairs running around saying that this or that will be the ruin of our nation. In the past I think it’s fair to say that most of the Sinclairs came from the right side of the political spectrum. But, lately, global warming and the election of Trump, among other things, have given the Sinclairs on the left greater visibility. Despite all this panic from both the right and left, I think Smith’s statement is still essentially correct, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” And I think we’re a long way away from the US collapsing in spectacular fashion, if indeed it ever does. Most nations go out with a </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Men" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">whimper, not a bang</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is one possible exception to this: nuclear weapons. As usual they’re a huge wild card. I don’t think some limited exchange would cause the nation to collapse (though given the extreme reaction to 9/11 who knows.) But certainly if there was all out war between the US and Russia you’d be shocked if the US wasn’t fundamentally altered in some critical aspect. (Loss of territory, change in system of government, etc.) And to be fair to the people panicking over Trump, we have foolishly given the current president absolute control over the nuclear arsenal. All of this is to say, that I’m not going to rule it out, but that’s a subject for a different post (one I’ve </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/08/nukes.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">already written</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On top of this, there are also of course natural disasters, the eruption of the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yellowstone super volcano</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, a new </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Carrington Event</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, etc. But I want to talk about what might happen in the normal course of things, in fact I want to talk about what might happen without any huge black swans. Which is not to say there won’t be black swans, there definitely will be (positive and negative) but to look at how bad things can get even if without them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was prompted to write on this topic when I read a recent Bloomberg article by </span><a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tyler Cowen</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: </span><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-30/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-american-empire" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Decline and Fall of the American Empire</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, where he essentially takes the same approach. He lists numerous challenges America will soon be facing. None of these challenges are surprising, or especially dramatic, but neither are any of them simple to solve, or easy to avoid. I’ve decided to go through his list, make some of my own comments, and then, at the end, add a couple of my own items as well.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He starts off by assuming that we get through the Trump presidency without a major constitutional crisis. I think that’s the way to bet, but he’s already assuming a rosier outlook for the future than many people, who can’t see farther than 2020. And it’s after 2020 when things start to get difficult, because it’s only then that recent financial trends really start to reach a tipping point. Cowen’s summation of the problem is excellent:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In recent years, the underlying rate of productivity growth often has been about </span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/productivity-interest-rate/519522/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1 percent</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and rates of economic growth are </span><a href="https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=13039" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not even half</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of what they used to be. Meanwhile, America will have to increase taxes or reduce spending by about $2,200 </span><a href="http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/the-fiscal-gap-jumped-30-and-nobody-noticed/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">per taxpayer</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> per year to keep the national debt-to-GDP ratio from rising ever higher, and that figure predates the Trump tax cuts. To fund that shortfall, the U.S. will cut back on infrastructure maintenance. At least one-third of this country will end up looking like — forgive the colloquial phrase — “a dump.” The racial wealth gap will not be narrowed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This takes us back to the question of whether national debt matters. I have </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-nation-debt-in-three-lists-of-six.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">argued strongly</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that it does, and Cowen seems to think so as well. Though as he mentions, if economic growth was better this might not be a problem, and indeed GDP for the second quarter of this year was a </span><a href="http://fortune.com/2018/07/27/us-gdp-growth-trump/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">blistering 4.1%</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Which Trump took credit for of course, and maybe he should, I don’t see many other great explanations for it out there, and certainly it’s the </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/krugman-trump-global-recession-2016-231055" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">opposite of what many economists predicted</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> would happen after Trump was elected. But for the majority of people who don’t believe Trump is going to usher in a new era of consistently high growth, and who also believe that the debt does matter, then the problems Cowen point out appear to basically be inevitable. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What effect will this have? Well it depends on what ends up getting cut. Cowen already mentioned infrastructure maintenance, but even if we cut that to zero it wouldn’t get us very far. To make any significant dent you have to cut spending from military or entitlements. Cowen is of the opinion that entitlements will mostly survive, meaning most of the money will come from the military. I generally agree with this assessment, though I’m not sure it’s the right choice, at least from the perspective of avoiding big negative black swans. Allow me to explain.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you cut entitlements, then you have a lot more poor people, and presumably these people suffer more than they would if they were not as poor. More alarmingly you might end up with people dying who otherwise wouldn’t have. So it is bad, potentially very bad. Though I think in the end it wouldn’t be quite as bad as people predict. And I would even predict there would be some long term positives in there as well. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you cut the military, then suddenly rather than having the umbrella of US global hegemony keeping regional conflicts below a certain level, you end up with a re-ordering of regional spheres of influence. Here’s how Cowen imagines it playing out:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over a period of less than five years, China will retake Taiwan and also bring much of East and Southeast Asia into a much tighter sphere of influence. Turkey and Saudi Arabia will build nuclear weapons and become dominant players in their regions. Russia will continue to nibble at the borders of neighboring states, including Latvia and Estonia, and NATO will lose its credibility, except for a few bilateral relationships, such as with the U.K. Parts of Eastern Europe will return to fascism. NAFTA will exist on paper, but it will be under perpetual renegotiation and hemispheric relations will fray.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m not sure where Cowen starts his five years. From today? From the minute we start cutting the military? Regardless, the China scenario he outlines is becoming increasingly likely regardless of what the US does, and a reduction in our military would only hasten it. But it’s his next claim that’s more alarming, that Turkey and Saudi Arabia will build nukes. Though, once you assume the decline of American hegemony, than the rise of regional powers would seem to naturally follow. And it’s hard to imagine how someone can be taken seriously as a regional power if they don’t have nukes, particularly if their rivals do. People always talk about India and Pakistan in the same breath and yet India is eight times as wealthy and has seven times as many people. Yet they both have nukes, which gives Pakistan an equality it could otherwise never hope to claim. On top of the two countries Cowen named, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, I would add the usual suspect of Iran, but there’s also a good possibility Japan would develop nukes.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here, we can finally see why I’m not sure that cutting the military in preference to cutting entitlements is the right choice. Yes, cutting entitlements would almost certainly cause some suffering, but it’s hard to imagine how a nuclear war, even a limited one wouldn’t cause a lot more. Though in reality the end of American hegemony has to come eventually, I’m sympathetic to people who think it might be replaced with some kind of global government which will keep the peace. But nothing in the current geopolitical landscape leads me to think that has the remotest chance of happening. All of this is to say that there doesn’t appear to be a lot of good options.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cowen moves on to talk about drugs, and while he thinks the opioid crisis will eventually abate, he worries a lot about drugs which can be whipped up in a “home lab”. I’m not sure I share his optimism about the opioid crisis, I agree it’s hard to imagine that it will continue at the same rate. Overdose deaths from Fentanyl increased at an </span><a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/stop-calling-it-opioid-crisis-its-heroin-fentanyl-crisis" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">annual rate of 88%(!!!) from 2013 to 2016</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Were that rate to continue the entire country would be dead by 2030. But even if everything were to freeze where it is we’re still looking at 64,000 deaths from overdosing on drugs per year, which is now nearly twice as many as </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">die in car accidents every year</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. As far as “home lab” drugs, also called </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designer_drug" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">designer drugs</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, I’m not sure how big of a problem they will be. Obviously I’m inclined to caution, but my initial impression is that so far they (fortunately) haven’t lived up to the hype. A search on </span><a href="https://www.google.com/search?num=20&q=designer+drug+danger" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">designer drug danger</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> turns up a lot of articles from 2013, and the number three hit is from 2003, so I’m not sure what to make of that. At a minimum it doesn’t seem like we’ve reached a crisis point yet.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was an </span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/americas-invisible-pot-addicts/567886/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">article just recently in the Atlantic</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> claiming that marijuana is a lot more addictive than people claim. And I feel like I should mention it in this section. Though fortunately it’s basically </span><a href="https://www.leafscience.com/2017/10/17/overdose-marijuana/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">impossible to overdose on marijuana</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, it does seem like when you pull all of this together that there’s a real danger that we’re turning into a nation of lotus eaters. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cowen goes on to talk about technology, but rather than talking about benefits of it, he chooses to focus on the potential downsides. Many people are optimistic about the future precisely because of technology, but Cowen points out that in the near term we’re more likely to see technology being used to create a dystopian police state, than a transhumanist paradise. He doesn’t mention China in this context, but that’s an example worth considering.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Those, like me, who were around during the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tiananmen Square protests</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of 1989, can probably remember thinking that the fall of the Chinese communists seemed inevitable. Recall that 1989 also saw the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, the fall of all Eastern European communist regimes and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Change was definitely in the air. (Negotiations to end South African apartheid began the next year in 1990). And yet amidst all that change the Chinese Communists hung on. How they did that is a post unto itself. (One I’m almost certainly not qualified to write.) The important point is that somehow, despite all the technology that has come along since 1989, in particular the world wide web, the Chinese communists have continued to hold on.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s unclear how much technology has hindered the ability of the Chinese communists to hang on to control up until this point, but going forward there is a lot of technology which promises to greatly assist them in that endeavor. And here we turn back to Cowen:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Artificial intelligence and facial and gait surveillance will lead to unprecedented invasions of privacy, causing another 1 or 2 percent of Americans to decide to “live off the grid.” The impact of assassin drones will be curbed — by filling the skies with police drones. Public crimes will plummet, but public spaces in major cities will have a depressing sameness, due to the near-total absence of spontaneous behavior. Advances in recording technologies will make most conversations in public, and many in private, remarkably bland.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As you may have noticed, he’s talking about America, but you know that however bad it is here, it will be ten times as bad in China.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From there he goes on to touch on global warming, and </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/03/how-do-you-solve-problem-like-global.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">much like myself</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, argues that “The very worst fears about climate change won’t come true.” Though, he argues that it will still be a significant drag on the economy, making the growth necessary to avoid cutting the military (or, less likely, entitlements) that much harder to achieve. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cowen decides to end the article by tossing in some of his own petty gripes. Which include the fact that as more and more of current media is being driven by what is or isn’t available to stream, that fewer people are going to end up seeing classic movies. (Though one would think that once the copyright expires everyone will have old movies available for streaming, but maybe the cost of digitizing say, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_Potemkin" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Battleship Potemkin</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, is prohibitive.) He also predicts that live performance of classical music will become less and less common. I can certainly sympathize with both of these complaints, though if I were to list my own petty annoyances I would probably come up with something like the proliferation giant ear gauging, or the vacuity of social media, or how the hollywood regurgitation loop just keeps getting smaller and smaller. But that’s just off the top of my head (and my first annoyance is almost certainly due to some giant gauging I saw just yesterday.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The point of all of this, as I mentioned at the beginning, is that there are a lot of current trends which suggest ways in which the future could go poorly, without being catastrophic, and Cowen has done an admirable job of explaining many of the ways this could happen, but he did miss a few. This is entirely understandable. He made no claim to being comprehensive. But there’s one in particular that I think deserves a mention, and it’s one which might end up being as, if not more consequential than the things he did mention.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is the population growth trend in Africa. Most people will automatically translate this into a a claim that there are “too many Africans”, which is not the sort of thing one talks about in polite society (and probably one of the reasons why Cowen didn’t mention it.) For myself, I certainly hope that how ever many people there end up being, both living in Africa and elsewhere, that they will grow up happy and well fed, and that they will all be blessed with the same opportunities and advantages as people born in the United States or Europe. But, I also hope that I’m wrong about the dangers of the national debt and that medicare and social security and Pax Americana will last forever. And, unfortunately, just because I hope for all these things doesn’t mean they’ll happen, though of course they might.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All of this is to say that Africa might have problems with overpopulation, just as all the things Cowen mentioned might happen as well. And this is certainly the way the trend is pointing. if you look at the </span><a href="https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">official UN predictions</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for the </span><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/experts-be-damned-world-population-will-continue-rise" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">population of Africa</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> their most conservative estimate still has Africa reaching a population of just over 3 billion (up from 1.2 billion right now) with the most extreme estimate being that it will north of 5.5 billion (both estimates are for 2100). Now there has already been a lot of panic about overpopulation which didn’t end up coming to pass. And I hope that my fears will prove to be overblown again, but there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong and only one way for them to go right.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As far as ways for things to go wrong, well we’ve already gotten a first taste of one way they could go poorly with the recent European refugee crisis. Whether the Europeans should have been more welcoming is somewhat beside the point. Their welcome was what it was, which was somewhat mixed to say the least. And if that’s their reaction to the flow of refugees when the population of Africa is 1.2 billion what will it be like in 30 years when the best guess of the UN is that it will be twice that?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The reaction of Europeans and other people in the developed world to the refugees is what many people are focused on at the moment, and will probably be the thing most people are interested in for the foreseeable future, but in the long term what I’m really just trying to show is that we probably can’t assume that the “riches” of the developed world will be redistributed in such a fashion that all of the additional people will be taken care of. It might be nice if they could all come to America and Europe, find a place to live and a job, or if we could just increase our foreign aid, but that seems very unlikely. The people living in Africa are going to have to figure out a way to support themselves, specifically they’re going to have to figure out how to grow enough food to feed a lot more people, potentially three or four times as many people. I’m going to be honest, that seems like a hard problem, even if all of the energy of science and technology is brought to bear on the problem.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Accordingly, another way in which the future could go poorly just based on current trends (though catastrophic may be a better word) is for there to be widespread famine in Africa. As I said, it may not happen, everyone thought there would be widespread famine in India before the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Green Revolution</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and there wasn’t. I hope that essentially the same thing happens with Africa. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’d be nice if at the end of it all I could point out some simple things that we could do to solve the problems Cowen mentioned, but there aren’t any, which is of course why he’s worried about them. In fact one would be inclined to think they’re unavoidable. They may be. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I can offer only two pieces of consolation. First, there is of course the advice of Adam Smith, which I started the post with. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, or in a continent or in a civilization, and I’m sure we’re all farther away from catastrophe than people think. Though that’s part of the point, catastrophe may be far away, but a situation where things are just kind of “sucky” (if you need an example think, the 70s) might not be that far away.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Second, the technology optimists, of whom Steven Pinker is the best example (particularly his book Enlightenment Now, which I talked about in a </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/04/steven-pinker-and-fragility-of.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">previous post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) will argue that technology has solved all of the problems we’ve had so far (this is debatable, but also not the time to get picky.) This has often happened through means we couldn’t even imagine a few years beforehand, and there’s every reason to think that technology will do so again. I certainly hope that it creates another Green Revolution and that there isn’t widespread famine in Africa or anywhere else. I’m less clear how technology will solve regional conflict in the absence of American power, or the related problem of US government spending, but despite that I hope it solves those problems as well. As I have often said, I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that I’m not. Or as Cowen says in closing his article:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So what in this description sounds so implausible? Is it that you think productivity growth will come in at 3 percent? That it will all be worth it because advances in medicine will allow us to stick around in decent form until age 135? That technological breakthroughs will extend the reach of the U.S. military further yet? That the Mars colony will be awesome?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Just how lucky are you feeling?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In answer I would say, I think our luck might be running out. Or to put it a different way. The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You may be thinking, “But there must be something I can do? Maybe I could contribute to something? Maybe something which calls attention to these problems? Maybe a blog or something like that?” Well you’re in luck. You may not have heard, but I just drew attention to it, and I accept </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donations</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">!</span></div>Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-52746019300130664442018-08-18T12:39:00.004-07:002018-08-18T12:46:39.140-07:00Review: Bad Blood (Theranos)<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I just finished reading </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/152473165X" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carreyrou" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">John Carreyrou</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Actually, I should correct that, I didn’t read it, I listened to the audiobook. Which, now that I’ve decided to do a review, is kind of unfortunate, because it makes it a lot more difficult to go back and find passages I might want to quote. For that reason, and others, the review I’m going to write will be more focused on the broad lessons of Theranos, than a recap of the story or an examination of specific events. If you’re looking for that, here are some </span><a href="http://andrewgelman.com/2018/08/09/bad-blood-secrets-lies-silicon-valley-startup/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">other</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="https://histalk2.com/2018/06/06/book-review-bad-blood/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">excellent</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="https://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/bad-blood-book-review/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">reviews</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> which you might want to check out.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the reviews I just linked to starts off by mentioning a quote from the back of the book, “No matter how bad you think the Theranos story was, you’ll learn that the reality was actually far worse.” I can say, having finished the book, that was definitely my impression as well. I first heard about Theranos in 2015 from of friend of mine who works at a clinical laboratory (</span><a href="https://www.aruplab.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ARUP</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which was actually mentioned in the book.) He was very suspicious of Theranos’ claims, but it was still several months before the scandal broke. Still, his suspicions stuck with me, so when the story did break, I followed along as it happened. What I’m trying to get at, is that I already thought I had a pretty good idea of what Theranos had done. But no, the quote is right, in reality it was “far worse”.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So the book paints a disturbing picture, but to truly know how disturbed we should be we need to know whether Theranos was some kind of extreme outlier. Something entirely unique, and not similar at all to other Silicon Valley startups, or if it was broadly similar to every other startup, and it was unique just in that it happened to be the one that got caught. The fact that Theranos was more of a healthcare company than a software company, certainly contributed to the way things played out, but this shouldn’t make us complacent, there are more and more non-software startups, for example Uber and Airbnb.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At this point, I should mention that I do have some experience in the startup world. I spent over a year trying to raise money for my own startup, and I worked for three years in a startup that had raised several million dollars.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the first case, we were 16 hours away from signing the paperwork on our initial round of funding when a key angel dropped out and the deal collapsed. This was in the middle of 2008, a couple of months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when the country was already in a recession, so I’ll let you guess how well things went after that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As disappointing as it was to work like crazy on something for a year only to have it ultimately amount to nothing, the experience of working at a startup which had actually raised money was a hundred times worse. It was bad for basically all the reasons Theranos was bad, enough so that reading the book (okay technically listening) was somewhat uncomfortable. Now this is not to say that the startup I worked for was anywhere near as big as Theranos. Also, as I said, Theranos was a healthcare startup, which added a level of craziness and potential harm above and beyond the craziness of a software startup. But I would nevertheless say that the difference between the startup I worked for and Theranos was more a matter of scale than of kind. (Don’t worry, there will be examples.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On top of this, I’ve had friends who did startups and their experiences were also broadly similar (i.e. horrible). When all of this is put together (and I admit it’s not a huge dataset) it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Theranos was not unique. That there are lots of companies operating in a very similar fashion. That if, as Mark Zuckerberg said, startups should </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Move-Fast-Break-Things-Undermined/dp/0316275778" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">move fast and break stuff</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, that Theranos’ mistake may have just been moving slightly faster and breaking slightly more stuff (and, being in healthcare, the stuff they did break was more consequential.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Determining an answer to this question is important, because if Theranos was unique than we can marvel at the story of their mendacity and subsequent downfall and then go back to business as usual. But if Theranos was not unique then there are probably other startups who are similarly playing fast and loose with the law, and most especially the truth, and we need to worry about what the consequences will be when it eventually comes to light. In support of the argument that it’s a broader problem, in addition to the points I’ve already made, there is a history of corporate hubris occurring in clusters. I’m sure everyone’s familiar with the hubris which lead to the 2007-2008 crash, and the hubris associated with the dotcom bubble. Going farther back you have junk bonds in 1989, and the savings and loans crisis in the early 80s. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By this am I implying that Theranos is just the first taste of an eventual startup apocalypse? Perhaps, and if you’re in a position to do so I would recommend making financial hedges against that possibility, but that’s as far as my prediction extends. Rather what I’m more interested in is how the various, what you might call, hubris failsafes, built up in response to past blow-ups and crashes, performed in the case of Theranos.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To begin with you would assume that the founders and company executives themselves act as a failsafe on things, at least to a certain degree. You might expect that they’d be concerned with whether they actually have a product that will work. You might further expect that they would be wary of lying or doing something illegal, because they don’t want to get caught in those lies and they definitely don’t want to go to jail. And as it turns out both of those things did happen with Theranos, not only were the lies eventually exposed, but Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani (Theranos President and Holmes’ boyfriend) have been </span><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-founder-elizabeth-holmes-and-sunny-balwani-charged-with-wire-fraud-2018-6" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">charged with wire fraud</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and could conceivably spend 20 years in jail. And yet this possibility seemed to have not deterred them in the slightest. This seems to be the trend recently and maybe I’m imagining that it used to be different, that leaders used to admit wrongdoing, even if they weren’t directly involved, and resign. But now everyone seems to fight in the most vicious fashion possible and to the bitter end. Certainly Trump would appear to be an excellent example of this.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of politics, I think founders and politicians suffer from a similar problem, in that the type of people who are attracted to being a startup founder or executive, are not necessarily the kind of people you want to be a startup founder or executive. It takes a level of rapacious greed and delusional confidence to believe that you’re going to be the next Steve Jobs, as Elizabeth Holmes clearly did. And, of course, Holmes’ story is the heart of the book, but Balwani’s involvement is, if anything even more interesting, and where things resonated the most with my experience. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the most interesting things about Balwani’s involvement, which I already mentioned, but which basically very few people knew about (not the board, not the investors, and not even many of the employees) was that he was Holmes' boyfriend. This is in spite of a 20 year age gap (and recall Holmes was pretty young). This is creepy on its face and many people have tried to spin the narrative that Balwani was some sort of svengali figure for Holmes, but Carreyrou points out that many of the most egregious acts committed by Holmes were committed before Balwani came on the scene. In any event, a creepy May-December romance is not something I experienced during my time in startup land. But Balwani did remind me of some other things I encountered.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First, you’re going to run into a lot of people with money in the startup world: Angels, VCs, entrepreneurs with a previous successful exit, etc. And most of them are going to assume that they got that money by being skilled. Sometimes that’s the case, more often they got it by being in the right place at the right time, or as most people would say, they got it by being lucky. As you might imagine those who were lucky tend not to think of it that way. They assume their money is a direct result of their skills, skills which other people don’t possess. Balwani was apparently a great example of this and the CEO of the startup I worked for also fit this profile, and based on the stories I’ve heard from others it’s pretty widespread. I won’t go into the details of my CEO lest I get sued (again, but I’ll get to that.) But Balwani made his money by creating an unremarkable company and selling it for a bunch of money at the height of the dotcom boom. That’s luck, not skill.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the people I’m talking about, imagining that they acquired all this wealth via skill rather than luck goes a long way towards creating the delusional confidence I mentioned earlier. As far as the greed part of it, while you might expect having a lot of money to reduce that, on the contrary it appears, rather, to inflame it. If they made 10 million in a single year, then surely, someone of their evident talent can be a billionaire, if they just put in a few more years.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I said, you might hope the founders or the executives themselves would be one of the failsafes, but clearly we have created a process which basically selects, as founders, the people least likely to have any inherent checks on their ambition. This is not to say all founders are bad, but we should be more surprised when they’re not than when they are. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, the company is more than it’s founders and executives. There is also the board of directors, who have, as their primary job, keeping an eye on the, aforementioned, executives and founders. In other words they are designed to be yet another failsafe. How did they do in the case of Theranos? Not great. The story of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Shultz" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">George Shultz</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the former Secretary of State and his grandson Tyler was particularly fascinating. Tyler went to work at Theranos, saw how bad it was and tried to become a whistleblower, his initial hope being that his grandfather would back him up. But in the end, the elder Shultz essentially took Holmes’ side over his grandson’s. As an aside this does illustrate Holmes’ significant charisma, which as long as we’re talking about the board of directors, allowed her to change corporate by-laws to give the shares she held 100x the voting power of normal shares. Meaning, even if by some miracle the board had turned against her they would have had no power to do anything even then.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As you may have already heard, George Shultz was not the only former politician, or politically connected individual on Theranos’ board. Here’s how Fortunate Magazine </span><a href="http://fortune.com/2015/10/15/theranos-board-leadership/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">described it</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We have former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Frist (who, it should be noted, is a surgeon), former Navy Admiral Gary Roughead, former Marine Corps General James Mattis, and former CEOs Dick Kovacevich of Wells Fargo and Riley Bechtel of Bechtel. There is also one former epidemiologist—William Foege, and, in addition to Holmes, one current executive, Sunny Balwani, who is Theranos’ president and CEO.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s quite an impressive group, isn’t it? But here’s what it’s not: an appropriate board of directors for a company that is valued at $9 billion. There are no sitting chief executives at other companies—a basic tenet of board best practices. There is but one still-licensed medical expert, Bill Frist (Foege, age 79, is retired). And while it’s probably useful to have a retired government official or two to teach and offer good leadership skills, when there are six with no medical or technology experience—with an average age, get this, of 80—one wonders just how plugged in they are to Theranos’ day-to-day activities.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Interestingly Fortune was the same magazine who put Holmes’ on their cover the year before this. And at that point they called the Theranos board of directors, “the single most accomplished board in U.S. corporate history.” And this illustrates the problem, not only was the board not equipped to act as a failsafe on Holmes’ and Theranos, but until Carreyrou broke the story, no one took the obvious step of pointing out that Holmes’ board was great if you wanted to skirt regulation and intimidate people, but awful if you were actually interested in designing an effective medical device. The article I just quoted from was only published after Carreyrou’s initial WSJ Piece. But it is only in light of that reporting that Fortune finally makes the same point I just made. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[The Theranos board] was assembled for its regulatory and governmental connections, not for its understanding of the company or its technology. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course now it’s arguably far too late. Interesting how quickly people decided that what was once thought of as a major strength of the company should have been regarded as an early warning sign that something was very wrong. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To be fair, there wasn’t much evidence of Holmes using the board to directly subvert regulations. (Though I suspect indirect influence played a large role.) But regulations are, of course, another failsafe, and eventually laws and regulations are what killed Theranos, the question is should they have done that sooner? A discussion of regulations will often devolve into a partisan fight over whether Republican antipathy towards regulation is really at the root of the whole problem. I don’t think that argument can be made here. Lots of very prominent Democrats were big supporters of Theranos, and this support extends beyond the board of directors. (Obama made Holmes one of his </span><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/02/elizabeth-holmes-quietly-stepped-down-from-obamas-business-ambassador-program/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">business ambassadors</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and Biden was </span><a href="https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/07/23/vice-president-joe-biden-visits-biotech-firm-theranoss-newark-production-facility/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">visiting and praising</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the Theranos facilities just a few months before the scandal broke.) Meaning I don’t think it would have made any difference which party was in power, nor is there some repealed law one could point to as a smoking gun which enabled the whole disaster.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Actually if there was any single thing which empowered Theranos to continue for as long as it did, that thing was lawsuits, and more broadly the threat of lawsuits. And if there was any person to hold responsible for that it was </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">David Boies</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, known for </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bush v. Gore</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (he was on Gore’s side) and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp." style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">US v. Microsoft</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. For my money Boies is easily number three on the Theranos villain list and given that he escaped relatively unscathed (his role at Theranos is barely mentioned in his Wikipedia article.) And that of all the people involved he’s the one who really should have known better. Perhaps he deserves to be number one on that list. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I alluded to earlier, my experience working for a startup also led to me being sued. The case has been settled and dismissed with prejudice. Also you can see I’ve tried to be careful to not mention any names, but it still makes me nervous to talk about. At the time I was sued I kind of figured that it was exceptional, that the guy paying for the lawsuit had made a bad decision based on bad information. But having read the story of Theranos, I get the feeling that lawsuits are more common than I thought in Silicon Valley.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The lawsuit side of the equation is interesting for several reasons. First it’s interesting to speculate how it interacts with the failsafe of government regulation. Would having more laws just give Boies more laws to sue people under? Or would it have made it easier for the government to crack down on Theranos. I strongly suspect the former, particularly given that once the appropriate agencies were made aware of what was happening, they had no problem shutting them down via the laws that were already on the books. But getting to the point where they were aware of the problems took a lot longer than it should have because of Theranos lawyers. Second, as far as I can tell, lawsuits have way more to do with how much money you have than whether you’re right or wrong. This is not to say that the side with the most money always wins, but to even play the game costs tens of thousands of dollars (in my case) and hundreds of thousands of dollars (in Tyler Shultz’s case).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally lawsuits, as I already alluded to, act as the opposite of a failsafe. In that they make all the other failsafes more difficult to trigger. As it turns out, despite however unethical the people at the top of Theranos were, Carreyrou tells the story of dozens of employees who wanted to make the world aware of what was happening, but were kept from doing so by the fear of a potential lawsuit. The story of Tyler Shultz facing down David Boies was one of the most gripping parts of the whole book, and if he hadn’t been the grandson of a member of the board and had parents who were willing to spend $400k to keep them at bay, it’s unlikely that he would have persisted either. Also once Boies turned on Tyler, even $400k was not enough to allow him to continue to talking to Carreyrou. He had to immediately shut up AND pay $400k.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This takes us to the failsafe which finally brought Theranos down, the press. One would imagine that once the Wall Street Journal got ahold of the story that it was all over. But it’s surprising how much effort Holmes, Balwani and Boies put into trying to quash the story even then. Carreyrou was constantly hounded by attorneys (and followed everywhere he went by private investigators). More interestingly, Holmes, aware of the story, managed to convince Rupert Murdoch (the owner of the WSJ) to invest $125 million in Theranos, and then proceeded to use that to try to leverage him into killing the story. I know lots of people don’t like Murdoch, but to his credit he apparently not only refused to kill the story, but refused to involve himself at all, and eventually lost the entirety of his investment (a drop in the bucket for him, but still.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The final failsafe is supposed to be the most reliable of all, money, and by extension self-interest. How did </span><a href="http://fortune.com/2018/05/04/theranos-investment-lost/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Theranos raise $700 million dollars</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and secure lucrative contracts with both Walgreens and Safeway despite not having anything close to the technology they claimed? Carreyrou’s answer was FOMO, or fear of missing out, which of everything I’ve mentioned so far may be the most modern phenomenon of all. And also the one I’m the least sure how to solve. It’s clear that FOMO is a major driver of bubbles, as everyone sees the upward spike and rushes in, never pausing to think if the growth is sustainable or if they’re just the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">greater fools</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. But what should be done about it? It’s a big problem, but in the very specific case of startups, I think it needs to be much easier to bet against them. And one of the things that has made that harder is the </span><a href="https://a16z.com/2017/06/19/ipos/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">decline of the IPO</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All of this is a fairly large topic, and I’m out of space, but I will say that if I was one of the investors in Theranos, or one of it’s board members, or Walgreens or Safeway, that I would be taking a long hard look at how I ended up being so thoroughly duped and how to prevent it in the future.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I said in the beginning, it’s not clear if Theranos is an extreme outlier, but I suspect it’s not, and I further suspect that if the many lessons of Theranos are not learned, we’re in for a lot more of this sort of thing, and I predict some of it will make Theranos seem quaint by comparison.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Much like Theranos, there are many areas where I’m incompetent. In their case it was worth $700 million. I’m not expecting my incompetence to be worth that much, but if you think it’s worth anything consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-12555092661598096882018-08-11T10:21:00.001-07:002018-08-11T10:28:48.757-07:00Pornography and the Time Horizon of Uncertainty<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As technology advances, new innovations are periodically introduced. Sometimes these innovations are so obviously beneficial (think the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">smallpox vaccine</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) that there is very little objection to them. On other occasions, the innovation might encounter significant resistance. A group of people may assemble who feel that this new innovation is harmful, or potentially harmful. And, if the influence of this group is large enough, this resistance might get classified as a moral panic.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Past examples of this include birth control pills, television and even heavy metal music. (You may not think that technology had anything to do with panic over music, but I think you’ll find it had more to do with it than most people think.) And of course there are plenty of panics happening right now, as just one example many people are intensely concerned about the potential negative effects of social media.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reading this introduction one might almost assume that I’m preparing to dismiss the current panics by pointing out that past panics didn’t amount to anything and thus current panics probably won’t either. And certainly there is something to that, but I think if you look deeper at past panics, and current panics, you’ll find that the people who panic aren’t so misguided after all. What do I mean by this? Well, I would argue that many, if not most, of the things people feared did come to pass, it just took a lot longer than they predicted, their very worst fears did turn out to be unfounded, and, most importantly, by the time they did come to pass, very few people cared anymore. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To use an analogy, you might say that the kick was accurate, but that the goalposts were moved. And true, a miss is a miss, but most people end up, incorrectly, blaming the kicker without mentioning that the goal posts were moved. Which is to say that people assume all of these panics were misguided. That over and over the forces of reactionary intolerance are always being proved wrong. And that anyone who worries about something like, </span><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/social-media-contributing-rising-teen-suicide-rate-n812426" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">social media increasing teen suicide risk</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, is just a neo-luddite puritan who blindly opposes all progress. Rather than someone who will turn out to be, on the whole, correct, just not quite as dramatically as they would have hoped and long after anyone cares enough to do something about it</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At this point examples would probably be beneficial. Of course the problem is that, as I said, while I believe a lot of the predictions have come to pass, they rarely come to pass in a dramatic, undeniable fashion. Also, as I mentioned, to the extent that they have come to pass, people may no longer view it as a bad thing, and in some cases, people will even think it’s a good thing. For all of these reasons, I confidently predict that people are going to quibble with the examples I provide, which is fine. But I think if you start by setting aside your modern prejudices and really try to get into the head of historical people and their moral panics. You’ll realize that most of them, upon seeing the world of today, would not only feel entirely vindicated, but probably, that they had not panicked enough.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To start with, let’s look at one of the items I mentioned above: birth control pills. At the time of this panic, people confidently predicted that widespread availability of birth control pills would lead to more extra marital sex. Is there any doubt that this is exactly what happened? Now you can argue that it was not as bad as they thought, or that it’s actually a good thing, or that this came to pass, but some of the other things didn’t, but this is exactly the goalpost moving I was talking about. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There have been countless government programs passed on the idea that, whatever the costs associated, they would not end up being excessive. And since at least the days of Ross Perot, people have predicted that the costs would end up being much greater than the politicians said, that the debt would just keep growing, with an associated panic about what happens if it gets too big. Now we can argue (as </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-nation-debt-in-three-lists-of-six.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">we have in this space</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) about how harmful the deficit/debt is, but is there any doubt that it is WAY bigger than any politician could have imagined even a few decades ago? As one example of this process, Social Security was never envisioned to be a pay as you go system. From an article in the Washington Post titled, </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/would-roosevelt-recognize-todays-social-security/2012/04/08/gIQALChd4S_story.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Would Roosevelt recognize today’s Social Security?</span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Roosevelt proposed Social Security in 1935, he envisioned a contributory pension plan. Workers’ payroll taxes (“contributions”) would be saved and used to pay their retirement benefits. Initially, before workers had time to pay into the system, there would be temporary subsidies. But Roosevelt rejected Social Security as a “pay-as-you-go” system that channeled the taxes of today’s workers to pay today’s retirees. That, he believed, would saddle future generations with huge debts — or higher taxes — as the number of retirees expanded.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Discovering that the original draft wasn’t a contributory pension, Roosevelt ordered it rewritten and complained to Frances Perkins, his labor secretary: “This is the same old dole under another name. It is almost dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress . . . to meet.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A great example of a prediction which came to pass, but by the time it did the goal posts had been moved.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We’ve covered examples of morality and bureaucracy. This next example combines them. People have long argued that you “get what you pay for”. Leading many people, stretching all the way back to the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">New Deal</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, to predict that welfare might act as an incentive for various behaviors we don’t want to encourage: joblessness, a decline in marriage, etc. and disincentivize things like being resourceful and personal ambition. I understand there’s an argument to be had about how much welfare contributes to the current levels of all of those things, or if welfare and these trends act entirely independently. But imagine showing someone who opposed the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">War on Poverty</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the current figures on the </span><a href="http://media.nj.com/njv_impact/photo/poverty-trends-1959-2010jpg-9840e8fac5c81968.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">number of poor</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2012/05/20120503_FedBudgSpend12.png" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">welfare spending</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and the </span><a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2011/07/09/president-obama-admits-welfare-encourages-dependency/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">increase in single mothers</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Can you imagine this person experiencing any emotion other than vindication? Particularly when you consider our society’s relative affluence. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could go on, but at this point you’re either nodding your head in agreement, or you’ve already dismissed me as a hopeless reactionary, attempting to disingenuously fight battles which were already long ago decided against me.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For those of you nodding along, (and those who are inexplicably still reading despite dismissing me) all of this is leading to a discussion of a current panic, one which is being dismissed in the same fashion as all the previous panics. But one where I think, eventually, the predictions of harm being made will once again, turn out to be true.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The battle in question is over pornography, and I was inspired to </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/05/is-pornography-supernormal-stimuli.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">revisit</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> this issue by a recent article in Slate, </span><a href="https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/why-are-we-still-so-worried-about-watching-porn.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> subtitled: “Decades of fearmongering almost got porn addiction added to the International Classification of Diseases. Thankfully, the World Health Organization got it right.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To begin with I should point out that they’re not dismissing all worry. But they seem to think that harcore porn videos should engender about as much worry as watching TV. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even if sex-film viewing has been grossly exaggerated as a national problem, might it still be a problem for some people? Of course, just as there are excellent interventions to help reduce television viewing without invoking mental illness labels, you might want to reduce your sex-film viewing in favor of other activities you value more. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I read that as, sure it might be nice if people didn’t watch five hours of porn every day in the same way that it might be nice if people didn’t watch </span><a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watches-5-hours-tv-day-article-1.1711954" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">five hours of TV every day</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but there’s nothing which makes pornography worse than binging </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4574334/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stranger Things</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I would disagree.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As you can tell from the subtitle the article was prompted by a recent decision by the WHO to not add porn addiction to the list of official diseases. Right off the bat the article talks about, “...the shock when journalists learn that ‘pornography addiction’ is actually not recognized by any national or international diagnostic manual.” My immediate question is why are they shocked? Surely no journalist would be shocked to be told that there’s no entry in the DSM for being addicted to broccoli, and they probably wouldn’t be shocked to find out there’s no entry for TV addiction, and yet according to the authors of the article it would be basically the same thing, and yet one is obviously shocking and the other isn’t.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I would argue that they’re shocked because they know people who consider themselves addicted to pornography, and have heard stories about behavior that certainly seems like addiction. That they are shocked because it does not match what they’re seeing with their own two eyes and hearing with their own two ears. This is why it makes sense that they’re shocked, and in fact within the article they mention that a non-trivial percent of people consider themselves addicted.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Amazingly, the first nationally representative peer-reviewed study on sex-film viewing was only </span><a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1191597" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">just published</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in 2017 in Australia. This study found that 84 percent of men and 54 percent of women had ever viewed sexual material. Overall, 3.69 percent of men (144 of 3,923) and 0.65 percent of women (28 of 4,218) in the study believed that they were “addicted” to pornography, and only half of this group reported that using pornography had any negative impact on their lives. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Several things jump out from this quote. First, 3.69% is not 0%, and certainly as a percentage of males it has to be higher than some of the other things which did make it into something like the WHO disease guidelines or the DSM. On top of that I think the numbers from the study are low. You’re saying, in this day and age, that 16% of men and nearly half of all women have </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">never </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">viewed sexual material? That doesn’t pass the smell test. And other numbers disagree with the Australian study. </span><a href="https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/new-survey-of-porn-use-shows-startling-stats-for-men-and-women" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This survey</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (admitted conducted by a Christian group) claims that 13% of men admit to being addicted to porn, with another 5% are unsure (they did interview both religious and non-religious individuals). Add those numbers together and you’re in the ballpark with the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_tobacco_consumption#United_States" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">number of men who smoke</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (16.7%).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally and most interestingly, they mention that this is the “first nationally representative peer-reviewed study on sex-film viewing” and that it was only published in 2017. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">replication crisis</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and the other problems with social science studies of exactly this kind, but I’m loath to take a single study and carve it into stone, as they appear to be doing. Also the self-reported aspect of this study raises a lot of red flags as well. We have one self-reported study with a male addiction rate of between 13-18% and one with a male addiction rate of 3.69%. Yes, you can certainly point out the bias of the first, but how sure are you that the second is bias free? Also, how likely is someone to self-report that they’re addicted to porn and that it’s having a negative impact? It would make sense for all the bias to be towards under-reporting on those questions.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why would this be? Because people are ashamed of course. Why are they ashamed? Well according to the article:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking to the heart of the issue, one of the biggest problems for some porn users is shame. Shame about viewing sex films is heaped on the public by the sex-addiction treatment industry (for profit), by the media (for clickbait), and by religious groups (to regulate sexuality). Unfortunately, whether you believe porn viewing is appropriate or not, stigmatizing sex-film viewing may be contributing to the problem. In fact, an </span><a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-016-0772-9" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">increasing number of studies</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> show that many people who identify as “porn addicted” do not actually view sex films more than other people. They simply feel more shame about their behaviors, which is associated with growing up in a religious or sexually restrictive society. Further, </span><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215036618300956" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">labeling behaviors as a mental disorder is often stigmatizing and harmful in itself</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, so it should only be done when strongly warranted by evidence. If we really wanted to help such people, one of the most direct ways to do it would be to normalize and validate their sexual desires, including their interest in sex films.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They appear to be suggesting that shame would be nearly non-existent without unscrupulous external organizations. Who create shame for their own selfish reasons. From this they go on to say that the elimination of shame is the best way to deal with the issue, or as they say it, we should, “normalize and validate their sexual desires, including their interest in sex films.” But if this is really what we should be doing, why is shame so deeply embedded on this issue? Even if we believe the authors and grant that there are bad actors out there using shame for their own ends (The vast sex-addiction treatment/religious-industrial complex </span><a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Eisenhower warned us about</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">!) why is shame so easy to invoke? Is it all cultural? A left over from the Victorian era, which, somehow, 50 years into the sexual revolution we still haven’t gotten rid of? Or is it more deeply embedded? Perhaps genetic? And if so, could it be that it’s been built in for a reason? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I would argue that it is genetic or common to all humans through some other mechanism. (For example, how many societies can you name where individuals have sex in public without any attached shame?) Maybe it is cultural and not genetic, just particularly tenacious culture. But in any event, from this, it follows, shame is probably there for a reason.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have talked in the past about pornography being a </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/05/is-pornography-supernormal-stimuli.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">supernormal stimulus</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. To refresh your memory, supernormal stimuli are phenomena where a species’ evolutionary preferences are unbounded in a certain direction, allowing technology to create a situation where this preference becomes counterproductive. The classic example is a species of bird which prefers large eggs, and scientists were able to get the bird to incubate artificial eggs almost as big as the bird itself, eggs which couldn’t possibly be natural. And most alarming, to prefer these eggs to the eggs they’d actually laid, eggs which might actually produce chicks.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The big question is, why would the bird do something so counterproductive? Well the bird could never lay an egg as big as she was, so there was no reason for evolution to cap this preference. (</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasite" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Brood parasites</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> are obviously a possible exception to this, but outside the bounds of this post.) Turning this to humans, it obviously increases our evolutionary fitness if we have a strong urge to have sex. One aspect of this appears to take the form of an urge to see people naked or engaged in sex acts. In the millions of years humans and proto-humans wandered the African savanna there was a limit on how much of this someone might have access to. This is no longer the case. We have created giant eggs, and it’s not inconceivable that people will incubate these eggs in preference to incubating eggs with actual offspring. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I said the big question is why do the birds do this? Obviously if this became common enough you would expect them to eventually adapt. Through language, memes and culture humans have the means to adapt to things more quickly than other species. Is it possible that shame is humanity’s adaptation to this supernormal stimuli? Recall that things like prostitutes and similar erotic “technology” has been around for a very long time. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To be clear about all this, I’m not saying that pornography is definitely a supernormal stimuli. I am saying I think that’s the way to bet. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m not saying that porn addiction is definitely a thing, and equivalent to smoking in its harmful effects, and something which should be included in the DSM and the WHO’s lists of diseases. I am saying that I am very doubtful that pornography isn’t a problem for a lot of people, even after you eliminate the supposed effects of externally generated shame.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m not saying that the authors of the article aren’t trying to be genuinely helpful. I am saying that they overlook several very large factors, which should make them far more cautious in jumping to the conclusion that “pornography” is essentially harmless.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve already mentioned several factors they’re overlooking. First there’s the issue of the shifting goalposts. People say something will happen, it does, but it takes so long that no one cares anymore. We touched on how important this goalpost shifting is, which is a big topic, but if nothing else, in the here and now, we should give more weight to the predictions of those who are alarmed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I also mentioned how little data there is. The article admits that one of the first studies done (certainly the first study they find credible, there was the other survey I mentioned) was done in 2017. Viewed in light of things like the replication crisis and the other problems currently affecting social science I don’t think their data is as ironclad as they want you to believe.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This all leads into another issue I think they’re overlooking. Not only was the first study done in 2017, but the entire phenomenon is incredibly recent. They specifically mention “sex films”. Well as I argued in </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/05/should-all-incels-be-killed-immediately.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">another post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the ubiquity of “sex films” is basically 10 years old. Are they really saying that they can accurately predict the long term consequences of a technology that’s been around for less time than </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey%27s_Anatomy" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gray’s Anatomy</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCIS_(TV_series)" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">NCIS</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? And speaking of TV, what would predictions made after it’s first 10 years of existence look like? How closely would those predictions match what TV actually became? The answer is, “not very close at all.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think in the case of pornography our predictive power is going to be even worse, when you consider things like </span><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-real-boom-in-virtual-reality-its-pornography-1531320180" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">VR pornography</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and sex robots (which came up during the </span><a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/5/4/17314260/incel-sex-robots-sexual-redistribution-ross-douthat-history" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">recent discussion of incels</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.) And to be clear, I personally have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of sex robots becoming very common, but it is a wildcard, and if the authors get their way and manage to banish all shame, maybe that’s all that stands in the way of their widespread adoption.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When you consider all of these things, it takes an exceptional amount of hubris to dismiss all of the concerns about pornography as groundless. And all of the associated shame around the topic as counterproductive and existing only because of external actors with harmful motivations. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the final analysis it comes back to a consideration of costs. What does the situation look like on the balance? Does the pornography status quo, with the ubiquity of porn on one side, and the shame on the other side cause more net harm or more net benefit? The article appears to be making the argument that there’s no downside to the ubiquitous porn and only the current and potential harm that comes from the associated shame. First, as I argued, I don’t think we should be so quick to assume that shame is a useless, entirely negative emotion, with no long term</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> benefits. And I’m inclined to believe further that even if there is some short term limited harm, that in the long run there could be big benefits. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe there are some people who react negatively to shame and instead of improving their life they just sink into a deeper funk, but my guess is the number of people who don’t do a bad thing because of something like shame vastly exceeds the number of people who just get worse. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the end what I urge most is caution. I understand that eliminating pornography from the internet is beyond quixotic, but I think that declaring all activities related to “sex films” to be “normal and healthy” (as the article does) after a scant handful of years is similarly insane. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Just like all those people in the past, eventually I’m going to be right. And yes, by that point people might not care, and also, I may no longer be around. So if you suspect that I’m right, you’re only choice is to </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donate</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> now. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">COMMENTERS! I'M IN THE PROCESS OF MOVING TO <a href="http://rwrichey.com/">RWRICHEY.COM</a> PLEASE COMMENT THERE. (But also be sure to let me know if there's a problem...)</span></div>
Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-2259981315039412462018-07-28T18:51:00.001-07:002018-07-28T19:08:41.354-07:00Random Stuff Tossed Together at the Last Minute<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I mentioned, this week on Thursday and Friday, I gave two presentations at the </span><a href="https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/2018-salt-lake-summer-symposium/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sunstone Symposium</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and when the week began, I was not quite as prepared for those presentations as I would have liked. What this meant is that time I would normally have spent on my weekly post ended up getting spent on preparing my presentations instead. Accordingly, I considered skipping this week’s post, but I’m skipping next week to go to </span><a href="http://www.gencon.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GenCon</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and also skipped a week not that long ago, so as a compromise I decided that I won’t skip this week, but I will take the somewhat easier option of putting together a few short pieces on some things I’ve been thinking about recently, rather than taking the time to construct a single, more involved piece.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Also, related to that, I apologize that I didn’t engage at all with the comments from last week’s post. It was a good discussion, but I didn’t have the time to contribute to it, which is sometimes how it goes.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With the grovelling apologies out of the way, let’s move on to the actual topics.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Sunstone Symposium</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Obviously it would be odd if I went to something like the Sunstone Symposium and then had nothing to say about it. But before I get into that I imagine some people are curious about my presentations, and might even appreciate a link. Unfortunately the presentations weren’t filmed, though they were recorded, but buying a recording is $12/presentation, which may be an entirely appropriate price for the other presentations, but it’s way too much to pay for mine. However, I did the presentations in Google Slides and I made pretty extensive notes to go along with them, so I will link to that. Here are the links for the AI Presentation (</span><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10Ls3Ss5CBjlrAlqzP5C9dsJsk5xSs3LRADwuMz8Ilso/edit?usp=sharing" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">slideshow</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fzkfI0jUhAR2Tz5qA0B0AQFtDtSzGkDKf4S28RgF7WY/edit?usp=sharing" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">notes</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) and for the Fermi’s Paradox Presentation (</span><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18wM9kRj6EAXQesVZxUFbRZRDyj6DMQB9Q6E4FKUC0pY/edit?usp=sharing" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">slideshow</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iN5Ja4jipkJKEJv8ldpLITlC1kOpdfCVTz63Ddq1Rzc/edit?usp=sharing" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">notes</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). Also, you should put the slideshow into presentation mode for the full effect.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With that out of the way, what about the rest of it? I don’t think I’m going to do a blow-by-blow of things, though there were a couple of moments of note which I’ll mention at the end. Instead, what I mostly want to focus on is a higher level discussion of things. I want to start with discussing ecclesiology. As with so many things I first </span><a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/14/ecclesiology-for-atheists/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">encountered this term in a blog post by Scott Alexander on SlateStarCodex</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, though it’s one of those things I should have known about earlier. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Technically it’s the study of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "roboto"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">theology as it applies to the nature and structure of the Christian Church. But Alexander was using the term in a somewhat broader sense, as a study of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">trade-offs between the level of agreement you have in a group, and the number of people in that group. Basically, if you require that everyone agree about absolutely everything you’ll have a very focused and ideologically united group with exactly three members (if you’re lucky). If, on the other hand, you have very few requirements for what someone should believe before they join your group (or religion). Then you’ll have a very large but very unfocused group. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every group has to deal with this problem, and religions are no exception. Though if you came up with a score based on multiplying the number of adherents by the strength of their beliefs. You would find that religions generally score higher than any other kind of group. Additionally the relationship between the rigidity of beliefs and the number of adherents is not entirely linear. After a certain point, the further watering down of a religion’s beliefs leads to fewer adherents rather than more. Otherwise Unitarian Universalism would be the world’s largest religion. All of which is to say that there’s a bunch of factors which go into getting a high “score”. Further you’re perfectly within your rights to argue that the score doesn’t matter. And if it does matter, it’s still probably not a direct correlation to power and influence, but it is nevertheless something all groups and religions are going to be affected by.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All of this is a long-winded lead-in to saying that Sunstone is an example of what gets created at the intersection of this trade-off between strengthening (or in this case holding fast) to beliefs and having more adherents. As an aside, talking about ecclesiology in this context ignores, of course, whether the religion is actually true, because if it’s true, then this mostly shouldn’t matter (though I suppose there some wiggle room around the edges where it still would.) But it’s hard to get a read on how much truth the average Sunstone attendee feels is contained in the Mormon Church (and all of its various offshoots), which is why I choose to focus on the question of ecclesiology. And what I find interesting about this question is that despite Sunstone being right in the middle of it, all of the presentations I went to either entirely ignored it, or came out 100% in favor of watering down the doctrine in order to attract more adherents, without speaking at all about how this might affect the overall cohesiveness and unity of the church.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To be fair watering down some of the prohibitions is a strategy, and a straightforward one at that, but it’s not without its consequences, even if you set aside any claims of truth. The world already has one Unitarian Universalist church, it doesn’t need another one, and even if it did that’s not some guaranteed path to success. Essentially every religion (particularly in the developed world) is bleeding members, and it’s not clear that the LDS Church is bleeding members at a faster rate than other churches, in fact it might even be slower…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I mentioned these are all going to be short topics, so I’m not going to say anything beyond that, but maybe in a future post I’ll circle back and talk more about Sunstone, or the subject of ecclesiology. Though, before I leave the subject of Sunstone entirely, I did say there were a couple moments from the Symposium that were worth relating.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first was Thursday night. The program suggested that people might be eating at Joe’s Crab Shack. I didn’t necessarily have anyone to go to dinner with, but I thought I’d wander over to Joe’s and see if I could crash someone else’s group. I arrived at the same time as a couple of gentleman, and asked if I could join them, they said sure, and we sat down for dinner along with four other individuals. It was only after I was seated that I found out that I was with a bunch of Community of Christ leaders including two Apostles and one of the Presidents of the Seventy. If you don’t know much about the various sects of Mormonism (according to them I’m a </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_denominations_in_the_Latter_Day_Saint_movement" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Brighamite and they’re Josephites</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) this won’t mean much to you, but trust me it was a big deal. It was also delightful. I had a great time chatting with them about all manner of things. And it it ended up being a fantastic bit of serendipity. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second moment was Friday morning. I decided to go to a presentation entitled “Transfeminist Critique” (in this case it was a Transfeminist Critique of the LDS Church). I obviously assumed that I would disagree with the presenter on just about everything, but I was interested in the current arguments going around in this space. That said, I confess I didn’t listen as closely as I might have. Partially that was my fault. I had my computer open and I was catching up on all the email I’d neglected while doing last minute prep on my presentation (this presentation immediately followed mine). But in part it was because the presenter just read her paper (she was a transwoman) without any accompanying slides or even standing up, which, I’m going to be honest, made things somewhat monotonous. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Those caveats aside, the overwhelming impression I came away with was that this person was putting forth a worldview completely incompatible with reality as I understand it... I know that’s a strong statement, and as I said it was just an impression. Also I hope I’m wrong, I hope there is some way to peacefully integrate her worldview with all the other world views out there. World views which have existed for an awfully long time and don’t have much room for extreme and widespread gender ambiguity. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this presentation was another example of the world fracturing into numerous groups with competing values that appear entirely irreconcilable. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which takes us directly to our next point.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Irreconcilable Values </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve already mentioned Scott Alexander and SlateStarCodex in this post, and it’s somewhat embarrassing to mention him again, but recently one of the interesting debates which has raged over there (actually does Alexander ever rage? Maybe “simmered over there”?) is whether there are </span><a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/fundamental-value-differences-are-not-that-fundamental/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">values</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> which are </span><a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">completely</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/24/value-differences-as-differently-crystallized-metaphysical-heuristics/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">irreconcilable</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Whether when everything is said and done it’s as Justice Holmes said, “</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Between two groups that want to make inconsistent kinds of world I see no remedy but force.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alexander, ever the peacemaker, argues that they’re aren’t. And I mostly agree with him. And I think the point he makes that tradition, and evolution are actually better at accomplishing certain things than being really intellectual about it, is exactly the point I’ve made over and over again. And his example is worth quoting:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A natural interpretation: people with explicit modeling are smart and good, people who still use metaphysical heuristics are either too hidebound to switch or too stupid to do the modeling.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think this is partly right, but since our goal is to </span><a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/fundamental-value-differences-are-not-that-fundamental/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">make value differences seem less clear-cut and fundamental</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, I want to make the devil’s advocate case for respecting metaphysical heuristics.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First, the heuristics are, if nothing else, proven to be compatible with continuing to live; the explicit models often suck.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Soylent uses an explicit model of nutrition to try to replace our vague heuristics about “eating healthy”. I am mostly satisfied with the quality of its research; it generally avoids stupid mistakes. It does not completely avoid them; the product has no cholesterol, because “cholesterol is bad”, but the badness of cholesterol is controversial, and even if we grant the basic truth of the statement, it applies only at the margin in the standard American diet. If you eat only one food item, you had better get that food item really right, and it turns out that having literally zero cholesterol in your diet is long-term dangerous. This was an own-goal, and a smarter explicit modeler could have avoided it. But explicit models that only work when you get everything exactly right will fail 95% of the time for geniuses and 100% of the time for the rest of us.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And even if Soylent had avoided own-goals, they still risk running up against the limit of our understanding. Decades ago, doctors invented a Soylent-like fluid to pump into the veins of patients whose digestive systems were so damaged they could not eat normally. These patients tended to get a weird form of diabetes and die. After a lot of work, the doctors discovered that chromium – of all things – was actually a really important dietary nutrient, and nobody had ever noticed before because it’s more or less impossible to run out of chromium with any diet except having synthetic fluids pumped into your veins. After years of progress on nutritional fluids, the patients who need them no longer die; we can be pretty sure we’ve found everything that’s fatal in deficiency. But these patients do tend to feel much worse, and be much less healthy, than people eating normal diets. How many mildly-important trace micronutrients are left to discover? And how many of these are or aren’t in Soylent?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This all relates to a discussion where certain people seem like hateful bigots, but are really just following a heuristic. And they don’t differ in values with those who have an explicit model as much as we think. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay, so I agree with Alexander, enough to include a huge quote from him. (Though partially that’s me padding my word count.) Why did I even bring this issue up? Well first, it’s an interesting debate, and it wouldn’t be a horrible use of your time to read the three posts I linked to above. But second, because I think he misses two things:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First, technology lets us refine things to a degree we never could before, meaning that while previously, humanity was a giant mishmash of values which mostly evened out in practice. These days we can take a naked value and turn it up to 11. Alexander points out that even people who are adamantly against foreign aid, might still donate to tsunami relief for Japan after the 2011 earthquake. This is probably not the case with a naked value turned up to 11, there would be no room for exceptions. I’ve talked about the tension between </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/05/antinatalism-and-happiness-vs-survival.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">survival and happiness</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. As Alexander points out, no human is going to entirely ignore either, but we could create systems which do. And even if the system is set up not to ignore a value, by explicitly defining values, as is the case with Soylent, you could overlook some critical part of how that value actually works in practice.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Second, Alexander could be entirely correct, but it may not matter, because people think there are irreconcilable differences. The perception of those differences may be all that matters. It is conceivable that in this day and age people might not put in the hard work to understand the other side. Speaking of which, let’s move on to discuss Trump, the greatest current flashpoint of irreconcilable values, whose summit with Putin was very much in the news recently.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are people who think Trump is a master strategist, despite the fact that to all appearances he looks like a bumbling, mercurial, ill-tempered oaf. That rather, this apparent oafishness is all part of a master strategy playing out at a level most people (including myself) can’t understand. That Trump is playing </span><a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/trump-is-playing-4d-chess" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">4D chess</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Interestingly enough, it’s apparently not just his supporters who think this, it’s also the Chinese according to a </span><a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/07/chinese-sentences-day-another-view-trump.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">recent article in the Financial Times</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by [Trump’s] skill as a strategist and tactician…He [Yafei] worries that strategic competition has become the new normal and says that “trade wars are just the tip of the iceberg”.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">…In Chinese eyes, Mr Trump’s response is a form of “creative destruction”. He is systematically destroying the existing institutions — from the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement to Nato and the Iran nuclear deal — as a first step towards renegotiating the world order on terms more favourable to Washington. Once the order is destroyed, the Chinese elite believes, Mr Trump will move to stage two: renegotiating America’s relationship with other powers. Because the US is still the most powerful country in the world, it will be able to negotiate with other countries from a position of strength if it deals with them one at a time rather than through multilateral institutions that empower the weak at the expense of the strong…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My interlocutors say that Mr Trump is the first US president for more than 40 years to bash China on three fronts simultaneously: trade, military and ideology. They describe him as a master tactician, focusing on one issue at a time, and extracting as many concessions as he can. They speak of the skillful way Mr Trump has treated President Xi Jinping. “Look at how he handled North Korea,” one says. “He got Xi Jinping to agree to UN sanctions [half a dozen] times, creating an economic stranglehold on the country. China almost turned North Korea into a sworn enemy of the country.” But they also see him as a strategist, willing to declare a truce in each area when there are no more concessions to be had, and then start again with a new front.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am still inclined to think he’s an oaf, but this seemed worth sharing. Though I still haven’t talked about Russia. Well, I bring up the report from China to introduce the idea that even if you think he’s an oaf (as I do) that things still might not be as catastrophic as you’ve been lead to believe. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you go back far enough into my archives, you’ll encounter the idea that what we should really be paying attention to at the level of the Federal Government is </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/08/sports-sack-of-baghdad-and-upcoming.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">preventing big black swans</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and I gave the example of the Sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols. In the current world our Sack of Baghdad would be a war involving nuclear weapons. Accordingly if we strip away all the talk of Trump as traitor, and what he may or may not have said about Russian election interference or however much he may have stabbed the American intelligence agencies in the back, did the Trump-Putin summit increase or decrease the chances of this particular black swan?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I haven’t spent as much time as I probably should have reading about the summit, part of the problem is that the anti-trump hysteria is so widespread that it’s hard to wade through. But my impression is that very few people are focused on this angle. And that those who have mentioned it can’t agree on whether the summit increased or decreased the chances of nukes being used. People who think it’s made the problem worse argue that the summit increased Putin’s confidence, which makes him more expansionist, which leads to wars which leads to nukes. People who think it’s </span><a href="http://takimag.com/article/trump_calls_off_cold_war_ii_patrick_buchanan#axzz5MZJDWIio" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">made the problem better</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, think that the friendlier we are with Russia, the less likely they are to nuke us, and that this policy is definitely better than the policy of encirclement which preceded Trump and almost certainly would have continued had Clinton won. (Specifically I’m talking about the policy of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">continuing to add more nations to NATO</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.) Which boils down to: is a confident, expansionist Russia or fearful, hemmed in Russia more likely to used nukes? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m going to argue strongly for the latter, that if you’re worried about nukes, creating a fearful Russia through encirclement is worse. Sure in the past, expansionist impulses have often led to war, but recall that nuclear weapons are a completely different type of weapon. You don’t nuke someone and then take over their territory, because once you’ve nuked them you probably don’t want it. You nuke someone when you don’t care anymore, when you’re out of other options.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now to be fair, reasonable people could disagree on this point. And insofar as Trump has empowered Putin to be worse to the people in Russia than he already was, that’s unfortunate, but when just considering whether the Trump policy of being buddies with Putin, or the assumed Clinton policy of encircling Russia is better at avoiding that which must be avoided at all costs. I think I’m going to have to go with Trump. Maybe the Chinese are right...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Moving to Word Press</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, I’m not sure if you noticed, since I am posting this in both places. But I have started to move everything over to a new domain: </span><a href="http://rwrichey.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rwrichey.com</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This, is as people say, my real name (more or less).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I start blogging under the handle Jeremiah, first because I fancied I was a modern day Jeremiah (maybe I am, maybe I’m not, certainly if I am then I’m not the only one or the best). Second because of the theme of the blog (which I’m mostly still keeping). And finally because I was worried something I posted would end up being controversial and inflammatory enough that it would bleed over into my business or personal life, and I could limit the chances of that happening if I blogged under a pseudonym. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That could still happen obviously, and maybe I’ll look back on this switch with bitter regret, but I’ve decided it’s a huge hassle to maintain anonymity, and that even if you do a really good job, if someone goes to enough effort, they’re going to figure it out.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The big upshot of this is that if you have a comment you should post it at </span><a href="http://rwrichey.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rwrichey.com</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And of course let me know (via email or the blogspot comments) if you run into any problems. I am definitely going to move all the posts over, hopefully very soon. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to move the comments over, we’ll have to see, but if it’s not too difficult I will. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, I probably don’t say this often enough, but for all those reading this, I really appreciate it. And I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I mentioned I’ll be at GenCon next week. You know how some websites ask you to buy them a </span><a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">cup of coffee</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? Well being Mormon I don’t drink coffee, but if you would be willing to by me a pentagonal dodecahedron (d12) then consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-48085502019349472202018-07-21T12:20:00.004-07:002018-07-21T12:29:51.903-07:00Humanity on the Cusp of Eternity<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nietzsche claimed that, “</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">God is dead</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” (or for the purists “Gott is tot”). When I first heard this (I’m guessing in high school?) I assumed that it was just a particularly direct version of what atheists have been saying for decades. Notable only in that it was an early example of this sentiment, but not otherwise especially unique or interesting. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Since then I have come to understand that Nietzsche was making a deeper point. Though in claiming this I am wandering into the deep weeds of philosophy and it’s entirely possible that I am about to vastly over simplify Nietzsche’s point, or mis-represent it entirely, similar to Otto in a </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095159/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fish Called Wanda</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, though this possibility has never stopped me before, so with that caveat out of the way...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I understand it Nietzsche was saying that progress and technology and the enlightenment had ruled out the possibility of God, and in doing so had removed one of the central pillars of Western-Christian Civilization. And without that pillar, which includes God as a source of absolute morality, that we were inevitably doomed to nihilism. I think you get a sense of this just from considering a more extended selection of what Nietzsche said, which is frankly pretty powerful.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These are all important, if heavily metaphorical questions, and, of course, to that last question the transhumanist would reply, “Maybe so, maybe we do have to become gods, fortunately that’s exactly what we intend to do.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Two of the topics I come back to over and over again, Artificial Intelligence and Fermi’s Paradox, relate to this question of the absence of God. And next week I’m going to be doing an hour long presentation on both of them at the annual </span><a href="https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/2018-salt-lake-summer-symposium/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sunstone Symposium</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(If you happen to be attending the symposium, I’ll be doing my AI presentation at 11:30 am on Thursday the 26th in room 200-B, and I’ll be doing my Fermi’s Paradox presentation at 10:15 am on Friday the 27th in room 200-D. Please stop by and say, “Hi!”)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Given that I was already doing a bunch of work to prepare for these presentations, I had initially thought that this week’s post would be on AI and then next week’s post would be Fermi’s Paradox. But as I got into things, I realized that for those who have actually read the blog there’s not much point in posting the stuff I’m preparing to present at Sunstone, which is understandably going to be more introductory, and probably a repeat of a lot of things I’ve already said, and which you’ve already read. I’m still hoping they film both presentations, and put them online, so that I can post links to them. I guess we’ll see. It’s my first time so I’m not sure what will happen.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Instead I thought I’d look for a subject which combined the two topics in an interesting way, and I believe the quote from Nietzsche does exactly that, though at a pretty high level (which is to be expected when combining these two subjects.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It may not be apparent what the quote from Nietzsche has to do with Fermi’s Paradox. Well, if Nietzsche is correct and we have metaphorically killed the traditional Christian God, (and given the similarities probably the Muslim God as well.) Then there’s still the possibility that there might be other god-like beings out there, specifically god-like extraterrestrials. I have not encountered any evidence that Nietzsche considered this possibility, but his statement obviously doesn’t preclude it, and for obvious reasons even if Nietzsche didn’t consider it, we should. One could imagine that if the two main things that Christianity supplied were morality and salvation, that sufficiently advanced aliens could provide both, or perhaps just one or the other.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first thing that’s evident once we turn to consider this idea is the possibility that if god-like extraterrestrials are going to provide morality it may not be a morality we particularly like. Many people, when considering Fermi’s Paradox have come to the conclusion that the </span><a href="https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-dark-forest-theory-a-terrifying-explanation-of-why-we-havent-heard-from-aliens-yet" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">universe is a dark forest</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. A place of incredible danger. This theory takes its name from the </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Remembrance-Earths-Past-Three-Body-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B01N198VU5" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Remembrance of Earth’s Past</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> trilogy by Liu Cixin where it was the title of one of the books. Here’s how it’s described there:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds another life—another hunter, angel, or a demon, a delicate infant to tottering old man, a fairy or demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Liu is not the only person to put forth this theory (he just gave it the catchiest name). Years before Liu wrote his books other people were arguing that we </span><a href="http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/shouldsetitransmit.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">shouldn’t engage in Active SETI</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for very similar reasons (</span><a href="https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2010/04/stephen-hawking-repeats-his-view-that.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this included the late Professor Hawking</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). For myself I wrote a </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/02/fermis-paradox-and-dark-forest.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">whole post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> explaining why I didn’t think the Dark Forest explanation of the paradox was very likely, but for those that do think it’s likely, it entirely undermines the idea of a universal morality, or at least posits that if there is a universal morality, it’s a morality of universal violence. Which takes us to a place not that much different than Nietzsche’s original thought. Instead of being alone, bereft of morality and adrift in an uncaring universe, we could be surrounded by genocidal aliens, gifted with a morality of unceasing violence, and adrift in a malevolent universe. I think most people would actually prefer the first option. But either way, the eventual nihilism Nietzsche predicts is just as likely, if not moreso.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course there are a broad range of possible moral codes which extraterrestrials might possess. But within all the speculation it’s very hard to find anyone arguing that there is some universal system of morality which all aliens must, by necessity embrace. And of course my argument is, that if such a system exists, Occam’s Razor would suggest that we already have it, even if we’ve been given the basic, “early reader” version of this morality. And, once we add Fermi’s Paradox to Nietzsche’s observation. If we take that further step and place ourselves outside a human frame of reference, universal morality, or a morality which easily replaces Christianity, becomes impossible to imagine. With this in mind, what makes atheists and similar individuals so certain that there is morality outside of the concept of God? Certainly Nietzsche didn’t think so:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nietzsche argues that even if you maintain the rest of Christianity (and certainly it could be argued that we mostly did, at least initially) that without “faith in God...nothing necessary remains”. And indeed, it certainly appears to me that once people abandoned the lynchpin of “faith in God” that it began a slow erosion of everything else which was once considered Christian morality. Further, as I pointed out, while there’s no evidence that Nietzsche considered the possibility of god-like extraterrestrials, even if we add them to our consideration, there’s no reason to think that they would halt this erosion. Aliens, at least as they are typically imagined, don’t solve the problem of God’s absence, or at least I think we can conclude that they don’t solve the problem of morality. That still leaves us the problem of salvation. Will god-like extraterrestrials come along and save humanity?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here, before going any further we have to acknowledge that salvation looks different to different people. In its most minimal sense it’s just a synonym for survival. Being saved just entails not ceasing to exist. On the other side of the spectrum salvation is used interchangeably with exaltation. Not only do you survive, but you achieve a state of perfect happiness. On the survival end it makes sense to talk about humanity surviving, and that being a good thing, regardless of whether any individual human survives. But on the exaltation end of things, it’s much more common to look at things from the level of an individual, is any given person immortal and happy. Is that person saved?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a world which largely acts as if God is dead, it’s interesting that as the rest of Christian morality has eroded away, the two remaining pillars of moral high ground, of terminal value, end up falling into these same two categories with survival on one end and happiness (or technically hedonism) on the other. I </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/05/antinatalism-and-happiness-vs-survival.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">discussed the tension between these two values previously</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and argued, that if we were going to try to construct a morality in the absence of God that it’s better to build it around the value of survival, if for no other reason that happiness is impossible in the absence of survival. I’ve already hopefully shown where aliens are unlikely to be able to help us with morality, and it seems equally unlikely they would be able to do much for our happiness, leaving only helping us to survive. This idea has appeared in science fiction, though far less often than the opposite trope of aliens looking to exterminate humanity. That said, there are </span><a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BenevolentAlienInvasion" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">still plenty of interesting examples</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. For myself I quite enjoyed the book </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Spin-Robert-Charles-Wilson/dp/076534825X" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Spin</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Robert Charles Wilson.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, if being rescued from extinction by aliens is a possibility, then, as I pointed out in </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/06/fermis-paradox-mistake-of-dramatic.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">another recent post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, they need to have either saved us already (perhaps through means we can’t detect?) or they probably aren’t going to save us. And of course this applies to everything I’ve said thus far. If god-like extraterrestrials are going to step in and take the place of Nietzsche’s dead god, in any capacity, they need to have done so already.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thus far we’ve been looking at what the ramifications would be if god-like aliens do exist, but more and more people feel that’s the wrong way to bet. That odds are we’re entirely alone. As examples of this, </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/06/fermis-paradox-mistake-of-dramatic.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I just talked</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about the paper which claimed to “dissolve Fermi’s Paradox” and previously I </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/12/75-solutions-to-fermis-paradox-but.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">discussed a book dedicated to the paradox</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> which concluded, after offering up 75 potential explanations, that the most likely explanation is that we’re all alone in the visible universe. If this is the case, then it would appear that Nietzsche was entirely correct about the essential emptiness of existence despite completely ignoring potential god-like extraterrestrials who could step in and fill the gap. Accordingly, we are left with two possibilities. There are aliens, but they almost certainly won’t provide either morality or salvation, and definitely not both, or there are no aliens, god-like or otherwise. Meaning that after a long detour through Fermi’s Paradox, the reality of Nietzsche’s claim has not been significantly altered. We’re still in the same situation we were before, and possibly worse, since, in my opinion, if it did nothing else, the detour provided good reasons for doubting that any sort of universal morality exists in the absence of God.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I should interject here, again, that personally I think there is a God, and I think assuming his existence, along with the existence of religion and all that entails, is the best way to answer all of the issues we’ve covered so far, but I think this puts me in the minority of people with an interest in the paradox.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The main thrust of Nietzsche’s argument, from my limited understanding, is that people have not sufficiently grappled with the implications of there being no God. Now, </span><a href="http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/belief-in-god/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">according to polls</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, this doesn’t necessarily apply to most people, who still believe in God, and would therefore, presumably, be exempt from any need to “grapple”. Rather, Nietzsche appeared to mostly be talking to intellectuals. In his day and age they occupied the salons and drawing rooms of Europe, and discussed things like evolution and emancipation. In our day and age they occupy the internet and discuss things like Fermi’s Paradox and artificial intelligence. And just as Nietzsche accused the intellectuals of his day of not coming to terms with the ramifications implied in their discussions, I’m accusing the intellectuals of our day of the same thing. Particularly those people who believe that Fermi’s Paradox has been dissolved, who believe we are all alone in the universe. Which, let’s be clear, is a pretty big deal.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you are one of those people who don’t believe in God, and who further believe that we’re all alone in the universe (or if that we’re not alone that it doesn’t help.) What do you do now? This is where Nietzsche may be at his most impressive. Lots of people pointed out that the decline of religion was going to cause unforeseen issues, though perhaps with less panache than Nietzsche, but when he goes on to say, “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” He manages to precisely describe the transhumanism movement a century or more in advance of its appearance. (Interestingly, his big prediction, a descent into nihilism, has mostly not happened. But maybe it just hasn’t happened… yet.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I mentioned up front that I was going to be discussing AI, which is the subject we turn to now. And which is less us becoming gods than us creating gods, but the basic principle remains the same. And the question I had with Fermi’s Paradox remains essentially the same was well. If there are no god-like extraterrestrials to step into the gap Nietzsche noticed, is it possible we could create a god-like AI to fill that gap?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Once again those who have abandoned a belief in God are looking to this “substitute god” to provide them with morality or salvation or hopefully both. Though in this case they do have one very important advantage, instead of being required to accept what the universe offers, as is the case with aliens (should they exist), in the case of artificial intelligence we get to design our deity. (I’m actually a little bit surprised no one has started an AI company with the name “Designer Deities”.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This means, first off, that we’ll almost certainly combine the morality part with the salvation part. Or, to put it another way, we’ll do our best to make sure that whatever morality the AI ends up with, that one of the values is human salvation (definitely in the survival sense and if possible in the exaltation sense as well.) Which means that a century after Nietzsche pointed out the problem, we’ve come up with a straightforward solution: All we have to do is figure out how to teach computers to be good. (They would, of course, also need a certain amount of power beyond that, but most people assume that this is just a matter of time.) All of the problems Nietzsche describes can be reduced to the single problem of AI morality. Unfortunately even though it’s only one problem it’s an extraordinarily difficult problem.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As you may know from reading other posts of mine, or from following the subject in general, no one is exactly sure how you get a computer to be good. In fact no one is entirely sure what good means in this context, and there are lots of things which seem like a good way to implement morality, which could, in practice, turn out to be very bad. I’ve given numerous examples </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/07/returning-to-mormonism-and-ai-part-2.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">elsewhere</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but let’s briefly consider Asimov's three laws of robotics, which are often mentioned in this context. The first of these is:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s not hard to see where taking all humans and locking them up in a padded room with a set number of optimally healthy calories delivered every day would conform with this rule, and fit the survival definition of salvation. This is one of the reasons why some people contend that it’s not enough for our AI deity to ensure our survival, they really need to exalt us.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(It’s interesting to note here the general principle, that survival is easy, exaltation is tough. Which may end up being the subject of a different post…)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We’ve once again arrived at a place where it becomes apparent that no one is 100% confident that we can formulate a universal system of morality, particularly if it needs to be defined with enough precision to feed into a computer. Now I’m sure there are some atheists out there that will scoff at the idea that religion provides a universal system of morality, but they’re missing the point. Religious people don’t think you can just give the Bible (or the Koran) to your new AI and grant it instant perfect morality. In other words, they don’t think it provides a perfect system of morality applicable in all times and all circumstances. (Though maybe some do.) It’s that they have faith that religious belief combined with God’s omnipotence, creates a perfect system. Which is why, I believe, Nietzsche felt that “</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands.” </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That faith is the critical component. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I understand people who don’t have faith, or think they shouldn’t have to have faith. Or who scoff at the very idea of faith. But I think these people will also find that it’s difficult to universalize morality without it. That becoming gods or creating gods is a difficult project.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not too long ago, someone close to me came and told me that he had decided to leave the Mormon Church. The person said that he was now an atheist, or at least an agnostic. (I suspect the latter term is closer to the truth.) And he mentioned that one of the turning points was when he encountered something Penn Jillette had said, that you could be an atheist and still be good. I agree with this statement, and I would also agree that the horrible nihilism Nietzsche predicted would accompany the decrease in religion has also largely not come to pass either. But I think, as we examine the various developments in the realm of replacing god (if he is in fact dead, remember I argue that he’s not) it becomes clear that there isn’t some alternate system of morality which slots into the spot once occupied by Christianity. That when Penn says that you can be good and be an atheist, he’s largely saying that you can continue to maintain religiously derived morality without believing in God. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But, the neo-christian morality which seems to dominate these days, and which I assume Penn is referring to, is obviously getting farther and farther away from its core, and when it comes both to morality and nihilism it’s entirely possible that all of Nietzsche’s worst predictions will come true, it’s just taking longer than he expected. That people really haven’t grappled with the Death of God, and that as morality continues to erode, as it becomes more difficult to define, as we seek to replace God, that the reckoning is coming. Yes, it’s slower than Nietzsche expected. And yes, it’s very subtle, but the reckoning is coming.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You may think that it’s easy doing a cursory and ill-informed survey of one philosophical statement, taken out of context, but it’s not, it takes a certain bull-headed determination, and if you appreciate that determination, regardless of how misguided it is, then consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-57041777300999070522018-07-07T14:47:00.000-07:002018-07-07T14:48:59.567-07:00Divorce Is Better Than Murder<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fdfeff; color: #001320; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15.333333333333332px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Recently there was an article in the Wall Street Journal by </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_F._Hayward" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steven F. Hayward</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, titled, </span><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-has-run-its-course-1528152876" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Climate Change Has Run Its Course</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The article starts off by clarifying that: </span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-9dd093c5-76b5-80af-b590-81b9378fdb9e" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible. I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay, so it hasn’t run its course as a phenomenon, it’s run its course as something that politicians care about. The obvious next question is, why? I have seen no evidence that the underlying problem is getting any better. (At least not from any source a politician is likely to pay attention to.) Public attitudes seem all over the place, but not especially low. I found </span><a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/190010/concern-global-warming-eight-year-high.aspx" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">an article </span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">from 2016 which says that concern in the US is at an 8 year high, so it’s not like public worry has cratered. (Which is not to say the public isn’t </span><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21345116" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fickle</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.) So why has it run its course? The article offers the following speculation:</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A good indicator that climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The ‘non-binding’ pact declares that climate action must include concern for ‘gender equity, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity,’ as well as “the importance for some of the concept of climate justice.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This assertion immediately put me in mind of a </span><a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">quote from Scott Alexander of Slatestarcodex</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, discussing something very similar (</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Roboto; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">h/t</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to </span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Escapement" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Escapement</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> over on Reddit for </span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8vsd1c/looking_for_a_specific_post_something_about_the/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">helping me track this quote down</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.) </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I like the Jewish idea of the Noahide Laws, where the Jews say “We are not going to impose our values on anyone else…except these seven values which we think are incredibly important and breaking them is totally beyond the pale.” Sometimes I wish universal culture would just establish a couple of clear Noahide Laws – two of them could be “no slavery” and “no eye-gouging” – and then agree to bomb/sanction/drone any culture that breaks them while leaving other cultures alone. On the other hand, I also understand universal culture well enough to know that two minutes after the first set of Noahide Laws were established, somebody would propose amending them to include something about how every culture must protect transgender bathroom rights or else be cleansed from the face of the Earth by fire and sword. I’m not sure how to prevent this, or if preventing it is even desirable. This seems like the same question as the original question, only one meta-level up and without any clear intuition to help me solve it. I guess this is another reason I continue to be attracted to the idea of Archipelago.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ll be returning to his idea of the Archipelago later, but for now, let me just say I’m not nearly as conflicted about the benefits of preventing the sort of value creep Alexander and Hayward describe. Stripped of the emotion and contention people normally attach to these issues the diffusion of focus they describe is exactly the kind of thing that can undermine any effort, from creating change on a global scale to an individual working on a project for his boss. And if we add emotion and contention back in, losing focus is even more fatal, since the lack of focus is precisely the thing any opposition will seize on. (Which is almost certainly what Hayward is doing with his article.) And it is exactly this lack of focus that I want to talk about, not whether there’s any political will left in the fight against climate change. But insofar as we started with the subject of climate change it’s worth examining how a lack of focus could be undermining that effort.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s certainly possible that the very best way of reducing climate change, is also the way which does the most to “empower women” and also includes perfect “gender equity”. And it’s also possible the very best way of ensuring the elimination of slavery as a global value is to include the value of “transgender bathroom rights” as well. But it’s far more likely that including those principles involves some sacrifices in effectiveness elsewhere. That an initiative to reduce climate change while also paying attention to female empowerment is less effective than one which only has to worry about reducing climate change. </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As part of the WSJ article Hayward ends up citing political scientist </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Downs" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anthony Downs</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">' 1972 article for Public Interest, </span><a href="https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/articles/Downs_Public_Interest_1972.pdf?mod=article_inline" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Up and Down With Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Which describes five stages of a political movement:</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stage 1: Experts and activists call attention to a public problem.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stage 2: The "alarmed media and political class discover the issue" and often stir up "euphoric enthusiasm ... as activists conceive the issue in terms of global peril and salvation."</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stage 3: The "hinge," characterized by "a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed."</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stage 4: The "gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem."</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stage 5: A "prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest," which often involves "painful trade-offs" that activists simply aren't willing to make.</span></li>
</ul>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was particularly struck by that last bit, the painful trade-offs that activists aren’t willing to make. With climate change, we see this most clearly with the issue of nuclear power, which I’ve already </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/05/nuclear-power-and-winning-through.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">discussed in this space</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but I think Hayward is correct to include things like “gender equity” language in this category as well.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, it’s unfair to place all the blame on activists for their inability to make painful trade-offs. As Alexander points out, it’s more accurate to describe this as a near universal trend of our day and age; People in general and politicians in particular are less and less willing to make trade-offs, even trade-offs which aren’t particularly painful. </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At this point I’m going to pivot to another, related news item. Last Wednesday Justice Anthony Kennedy announced that he would retire at the end of the current session, and of course things immediately got kind of crazy. The Republicans wasted no time in moving to replace him with someone who is even more reliably conservative, and the Democrats, even more quickly, declared that it was </span><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/with-justice-kennedy-leaving-the-supreme-court-could-end-the-right-to-abortion-and-same-sex-marriage" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the literal apocalypse</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. In particular they seem worried by the possibility that Roe v Wade will be overturned.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To be honest I think this is unlikely, first there’s still a long road between where we are now and the nomination and they need Collins and Murkowski to get anyone on the bench and Collins is already </span><a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/susan-collins-supreme-court-roe-v-wade" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">making noises</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about voting against anyone who she thinks might overturn Roe v Wade. On top of that, my prediction is that </span><a href="https://www.weeklystandard.com/jack-goldsmith/the-post-kennedy-supreme-court-isnt-likely-to-be-as-conservative-as-liberals-fear" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Roberts gives too much deference to precedent</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for him to vote to overturn Roe v Wade (have you seen how </span><a href="http://wlrn.org/post/are-narrow-rulings-supreme-courts-new-normal" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">narrow many of the recent rulings have been</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">?) Thus my prediction, absent Ginsberg dying or being forced to retire, is that Roe v Wade will not be overturned. However much I might want it to be. (Also see my posts on the </span><a href="https://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-cultural-war-and-overton-window.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">inevitable leftward drift</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of society.) </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Leaving aside the fact that I don’t think it will happen, let’s imagine that it was overturned. It’s important to remember that if Roe v Wade is overturned that doesn’t mean that abortion is suddenly illegal everywhere. It means the legality goes back to being decided on a state by state basis. (Which is not to say that the Supreme Court couldn’t make it illegal everywhere and in all cases, but I would REALLY bet against that.) Now for people who support the right to abortion, this still seems pretty apocalyptic. In other words they would argue that overturning Roe v. Wade has no upside. Now as I said I don’t think it is going to get overturned, but I’m here to argue that if it was that might be a good thing, even for those people who support abortion rights.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My claim is that you have to prioritize things, and that some things are more important than others. Alexander talks about having seven immutable values/laws. Given the philosophical morass of morality that is abortion, if it is necessary to prioritize things, if it is really better to have five or seven or ten core values, is access to abortion really so important that it needs to be one of those core values?</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To get more pragmatic, let’s replay the 2016 election, but imagine that this time we’re in an alternate reality where some of the things which are currently decided at the federal level are instead decided at the state level. Imagine if abortion rights had always resided with the states. Imagine that there was no Obamacare, that each state had come up with it’s own solution for out of control healthcare spending. (And out of 50 solutions surely there has to be one that works, right?) On the other side, imagine that, at the federal level, they had really focused on things that can only be done at the federal level, like borders and immigration. Also, with so many things decided at the state level, in this alternate reality, the Supreme Court doesn’t end up being the de facto rulers of the country.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Given all of this, does Trump still win? I don’t think he does. Not only are people who might vote for him less angry, and less energized, but he also loses all the people who held their nose and voted for him strictly on the basis of the Supreme Court. (Because, for these people, whatever else you may say about Trump, his Supreme Court nominees were going to be way better than Clinton’s. ) On net is this a better world? I would argue that it is. </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Similarly to turn to the topic we began things with, does the Paris Accord get more support, is it more effective if they remove the “social justice” language? I certainly can’t see how it could have been made less effective by the removal of that language...</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now of course I could be wrong, and also it’s somewhat pointless to speculate like this. We live in a world where Trump did win and where the fight over who will replace Anthony Kennedy is going to be one of the defining moments of his presidency. But we also live in a world that is increasingly in the grip of a cold civil war between various competing ideologies, and the fact that the Federal Government generally and the Supreme Court more specifically is the ultimate battleground for this civil war makes the battles at that level, metaphorically, very bloody, and I worry ultimately it won’t be a metaphor.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fortunately, for now, other than a few isolated incidents here and there, things have not gotten bloody, but they have started fracturing, we see examples of nascent fracturing all over on the internet, but you can also see it in things like Brexit, and Catalonia, and of course the </span><a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-split-three-states-20180612-story.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ballot initiative to make California into three states</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Obviously this last bit is the least likely to happen, but increased polarization and fracturing are everywhere you look these days. So what happens now?</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There appears to be three ways for things to go at this point:</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1- We can figure out how to get along</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2- One side can utterly triumph</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">3- We can separate</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let’s take them in order:</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is entirely possible that, similar to the period just before the Civil war, and more promisingly the late 60s and early 70s, that what we’re in right now is a phase. Specifically it’s a phase that will eventually pass. Trump will lose in 2020. Roe v. Wade will not be overturned, or it will be and people will realize that most states have the abortion policy their citizens want. Dialogue will become more respectful. The internet will calm down. Economic growth will continue, and people will stop being enraged by politics because everything else is so great. Some kind of compromise will be reached on immigration which everyone can agree on. Both sides will pull back from their extreme positions, and peace and harmony will triumph over all the face of the land…</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t see anything on that list that doesn’t seem incredibly unlikely (except, perhaps Trump losing in 2020, but I wouldn’t even count on that). And if they’re individually unlikely when you add them all together, you start to enter the realm of the impossible. Meaning I’m not very hopeful that we’re going to figure out how to get along anytime soon.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next is the possibility that one side will utterly triumph. I’ve already mentioned the rancor which was present before the Civil War, rancor far worse than what exists currently. And it did go away, but not because they figured out how to get along, but because one side utterly triumphed. Both sides took up arms, hundreds of thousands of people died, and one of the sides said, “Uncle!” </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t know that hundreds of thousands of people are going to have to die again in order for one side to utterly triumph in the current cultural war, but neither is it inconceivable. And even if one side or the other wins in a comparatively bloodless fashion, that doesn’t mean there won’t be significant pain. Finally, even if you’re on the side that wins, I’m positive it’s not going to be as awesome as you imagine, and if you’re not on the side that wins? Then it’s really not awesome.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Many people assume that if the right utterly triumphs it will look like the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Handmaid’s Tale</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. (I am </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/06/which-side-is-really-losing-in-politics.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on record</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as doubting both that the right will ever utterly triumph or that if it does that it will be that bad.) But these same people assume that if the Left utterly triumphs it will be awesome. I doubt it. I think the rest of my blog entries identify why, but if you want one clear example of the potential awfulness, then I would direct you to look at any of the many stories of the </span><a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">left eating it’s own</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally there’s the possibility of separation, a subject I’ve already alluded to and what I’ll be spending the rest of the post discussing. There’s obviously many ways this could play out, but to start with we have the example I already used, the idea that we don’t try to decide all values and laws at the highest level possible. That it’s okay for abortion to be decided at the state level. That if Anthony Kennedy’s replacement is instrumental in overturning Roe v Wade that it’s not the end of the world. That it may in fact serve to calm things down a little bit. That people who are opposed to abortion will congregate in states where it’s illegal, and contrariwise people who are in favor of the right to an abortion will congregate in states where it’s legal. And people who don’t care will stay where they are. And people who want to change the law will petition their local representatives, rather than engage in a metaphorical fight to the death every time the balance of power on the Supreme Court looks like it’s going to change.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s entirely possible that I’m being hopeless naive about all of this, but option three seems far easier to pull off than option number one, and far less violent than option number two. Is there some reason why it’s relegated to obscure blogs, and crazy initiatives? I understand that breaking up California is unlikely to happen, but we already have 50 states in place. How hard would it be to devolve a little bit of power back to them? Particularly if our other options are unlikely (everyone suddenly getting along) or violent (one side utterly triumphing). </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At this point it’s useful to recall that when the framers wrote the Constitution that separation was something they went out of their way to encourage. You can find it written into three of the initial ten amendments (four if you’re really hardcore about the second amendment). Now, of course this doesn’t prove my point about the value of separation, but, at least, you can’t say I’m the only one who’s had the idea. In fact the most </span><a href="https://www.ecosophia.net/the-alt-right-the-ctrl-left-and-the-esc-center/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">recent post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> from John Michael Greer on Ecosophia, who I’ve mentioned in this space before, makes a similar argument. And I already mentioned Alexander’s idea of a </span><a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">political Archipelago</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which, as promised, I’m returning to.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the full nitty gritty of his idea I suggest you read the post, but in short Alexander puts forth a plan of radical freedom of association. If the objectivists want an “island” of their own where they can practice pure Randian selfishness they can have one. If the communists want an island where the workers own the means of production they can have that to. And even the white separatists can have island free of minorities if that’s what they want. He includes some rules to prevent abuse in his system like one that requires children raised in the Archipelago to be informed that there are other “islands”, but beyond that if you want to live in a community with a certain culture, and with laws to enforce that culture, then you can.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alexander’s proposal is the most radical example of the separation I’ve been talking about, and consequently, unlikely to be implemented, but even less radical proposals, like Greer’s or the one </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">actually baked into founding document of the country</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> have largely been cast aside. The trend towards less separation marches ever onward, in spite of things like Brexit (which in any case is more notable for what it hasn’t accomplished than what it has.) So where does that leave us?</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t know, but here at the end I’d like to offer a few observations, some more radical than others.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First, I do think that more separation is the only option that keeps things from ending badly. As I said in the title, divorce is better than murder, particularly since I’m reasonably certain the marriage is over. But I agree it’s going to be tough.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Second, there is value to high level coordination. There are things that can only be done at the level of a large nation or at the level of the entire world. But there are not many of these things. And much like Alexander I think they need to be narrowly defined, few in number, and mostly reserved for eliminating massive, clear injustices, or existential threats. Taleb talks about barbell investing, where 80-90% of your money is in super safe investments, and 10-20% is in high risk stuff. This is a similar idea and you might call this Barbell governing, where 80-90% of everything happens at the state and local level, and 10-20% of stuff happens between international bodies… With nothing in the middle.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, and this is my really radical observation, and I toss it in here because it’s been on my mind for awhile, and it hasn’t really fit in to any of the other posts I’ve done.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I’ve said there’s a trend towards less separation, but one place has bucked the trend, one place has remained separate, with it’s own culture and it’s own eccentric way of doing things despite </span><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">enormous</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> pressure. Of course, I’m talking about North Korea. How has it done this? The answer would appear to be, “It has nuclear weapons.” Will this end up being a model for other countries? Is this a way in which the trend is reversed? In the future are we going to have many little nations that can do what they want because they each possess a handful of nuclear weapons? </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think it’s conceivable, and we might call this separation the hard way. Which leads to the possibility that we may be choosing between a voluntary archipelago with a few, very important high level values or a horrible archipelago carved out with weapons of mass destruction, and with only one value, that of the mushroom cloud.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ll be taking next week off to go to the Utah Shakespeare Festival with my wife. and in honor of that:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donate</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, or not to </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donate</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, that is the question:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to contribute to</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The posts and diatriabes of an outrageous talent,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Or to take arms against a sea of horrible writing</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And by not donating, end it. </span></div>Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-27362908494886138992018-06-30T08:15:00.000-07:002018-06-30T08:18:08.279-07:00Fermi's Paradox: Mistake of Dramatic Timing and Other Errors <div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I just finished the </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse-Book-ebook/dp/B01LWAESYQ" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bobiverse Trilogy</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. If you haven’t heard of the trilogy it’s a relatively new science fiction series by </span><a href="http://dennisetaylor.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dennis Taylor</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The premise is that the consciousness of a guy named Bob is put into a </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">self-replicating spacecraft</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (also known as a Von Neumann Probe), and sent out to explore nearby stars. As I said it’s self-replicating, meaning he can make more Bobs, thus the Bobiverse. </span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-0e801ce6-5141-16cb-53c0-bdc54dfc07db" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like most current science fiction it has to grapple with Fermi’s Paradox, and, if I’m going to be honest, it did not do a very good job of this. Now this is not to say these aren’t good books. I thoroughly enjoyed them, they’re a quick, fun read. And despite having some major problems with how he approaches the paradox, he does tackle some other big ideas in an interesting fashion, just not that one. Also, he is not the first to make the mistake I’m about to describe, but he is the example I encountered most recently, so I’m going to be picking on him a little bit. I’m going to call the mistake that he, and others, have made, the “Mistake of Dramatic Timing”.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m not going to be able to discuss this mistake without a few spoilers, but I’ll try to keep them as mild as possible. In the books, the Bobs encounter aliens, and as it turns out the tech level of these aliens is basically within a few hundred years of human tech, and perhaps more importantly the aliens were within a few hundred years of encountering Earth regardless of what the humans did. This is the Mistake of Dramatic Timing, and it’s present all through science fiction. I’m sure you can probably think of numerous examples. Though once again, to be honest, I’m not sure I can immediately summon an example as egregious as the Bobiverse. (It’s actually worse than it looks, but I’d have to get deeper into spoilers to explain why, feel free to email me if you’ve read the books, but aren’t sure what I’m talking about.) Which is one of the reasons I felt compelled to point it out.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hopefully the term “dramatic timing” is descriptive enough that people already know what I’m talking about, but even if that’s the case, putting some percentages to things helps clarify how unlikely it would be to encounter aliens in the exact fashion the Bobs did. Though, for the benefit of those who haven’t read the book, and in order to avoid more spoilers, let’s switch to one of the other examples of this mistake, the </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116629/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">movie Independence Day</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. In Independence Day the aliens are after our natural resources. You can make an argument, given the insane logistics of space that this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Regardless, the point is, with this goal they don’t care if there are humans around or not. In fact it would have been much better if they had shown up 50 years earlier (</span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TitzK3hlLv0" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">before the Macbook</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">…) </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This means the only reason for the aliens to show up when they did was dramatic. They (and any other potential aliens) could have conceivably visited Earth at any point during its existence. Meaning the chances of them coming during any specific 500 year period (roughly the period from Galileo to the present day, the period during which we’ve actually cared about astronomy) is 0.00001% (500/4.543 billion). </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The further probability that when they arrive, their technology will be only a few hundred years in advance of ours, is a little less straightforward to calculate, since it’s unclear whether technology will stagnate, or whether, on the other hand, it will continue to grow exponentially, but either way you’re looking at another very tiny number. For the sake of the example let’s once again use 500 years as our window of matching, and assume a modest average lifetime for a civilization we encounter of 250,000 years (it could in reality be in the billions). If we then assume that they would contact us on average 125,000 years into their existence, then we’re still looking at only a 0.4% chance of having technology that’s within 500 years of the aliens, and a 500 year difference is still pretty bad. I doubt Renaissance Florence would be very eager to fight the US Sixth Fleet. What this means is that the chance of both happening is so improbable as to be effectively impossible. Particularly given how conservative I’m being on the estimates in the differences in our technology.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m sure that some people are going to argue that using the entire existence of the Earth as the denominator in our equation is unfair, since there are certain conditions which need to be met before intelligent life could could arise anywhere. In particular most people argue that it’s limited by the metallicity of the universe, and because that takes time to build up (through supernova) and because that limits the number of terrestrial planets on which life could evolve. But as it turns out, terrestrial planets don’t depend nearly as </span><a href="https://www.space.com/17441-universe-heavy-metals-planet-formation.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">much on metallicity as we thought</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, In fact, somewhat ironically, it actually appears to have more of an effect on gas giants. The upshot of all this is that we’ve recently discovered rocky planets that are </span><a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a13726/oldest-known-rocky-planets/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more than twice as old as the Earth</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Meaning that life on another planet would have as much time as life on Earth has had before Earth even came into existence. Accordingly, without bringing other factors into play, there’s every reason to believe that there should be civilizations out there which are billions of years ahead of us. Whether it’s exactly 4.543 billion or just a couple of billion doesn’t materially affect the percentages above.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now of course we know exactly why Roland Emmerich (director of Independence Day), and Dennis Taylor, and all of the others did it, because despite being a mistake it’s a dramatic mistake. Having the aliens show up and stomp the living daylights out of us before we’re even aware of what’s happening (imagine the Sixth Fleet vs. Renaissance Florence only worse) doesn’t make a very good story, and consequently very few people decide to write that story. This would be fine except that everyone has absorbed these stories as the way it’s most likely to happen, and so when they imagine contact with some kind of extraterrestrial it’s science fiction aliens with better, but not ridiculously better technology (and ideally an </span><a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AchillesHeel" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Achilles’ Heel</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.) This thinking is the most obvious distortion, but as I have </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/08/fermis-paradox-as-proof-of-existence-of.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">argued in other posts</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, I believe it distorts even the thinking of those scientists and academics who are paid to think deeply about this problem. In any case the key thing I want you to take away from the “Mistake of Dramatic Timing” is that IF aliens were going to show up, or more technically if aliens are ever going to be aware of us, than it’s almost certain that it’s already happened, that nothing dramatic will happen in the next few hundred years.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We have to deal with one final argument before we move on. The point I’m making is that nothing has changed in the last few hundred years as far as what aliens might be out there and what they might want from us. However, to be fair, some things have changed recently in terms our ability to detect potential aliens. And it is possible that this is a place where something might change soon. But with every year that passes this becomes less and less likely. Also as I have argued before, if aliens are out there and they want to be detected they could almost certainly figure out how to make that happen. Much harder is not being detected, and that task is much easier if you’re aware of what’s trying to detect you, which takes us back to where we were. Either aliens are aware of us now, or very probably they never will be.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I said I enjoyed the Bobiverse, (I even enjoyed Independence Day, probably because I was less jaded back then) and they are fiction, so I entirely forgive them for getting this wrong. But fiction is not the only place where people are proposing solutions to the paradox. There are academic papers doing the same thing, and recently one was released which claimed to </span><a href="http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/media/eps/jodrell-bank-centre-for-astrophysics/news-and-events/2017/uksrn-slides/Anders-Sandberg---Dissolving-Fermi-Paradox-UKSRN.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dissolve the paradox</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Obviously this is the sort of thing that needs to be taken more seriously.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The paper doesn’t actually center on the paradox. It takes as its focus </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Drake’s Equation</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which will hopefully be familiar to readers of this blog. If not, basically Drake’s Equation attempts to come up with a guess for how many communicating extraterrestrial civilizations there might be by determining how many planets might get through all the hoops required to get to that point (for example all planets, multiplied by the percentage with life, multiplied by the percentage of that life that’s intelligent, etc.). And it turns out that if you multiply the average of all the terms in the equation, that you get an expected average of quite a few communicating civilizations, and yet there aren’t any, which then brings in the paradox.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The authors of the paper point out that if the distribution of the estimates is narrow, and if it looks like a bell curve, multiplying the averages would give you a pretty good idea of what the overall probabilities are. You could say something like, “We think with 68% certainty, that the number of communicating civilizations in our galaxy is between 1 and 11. With an average of 6.” Which would imply that there probably is a paradox. But if the distributions are ridiculously wide (they are) and on top of that not normally distributed (and apparently they’re not that either) then you can end up in a situation where the most probable situation is that we’re alone, even though the average number of expected civilizations is greater than one. </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If we are alone, that means that there’s something which keeps other civilizations from getting to the point where they can communicate. This has come to be called the</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Great Filter,</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and what this paper and other’s claim is that, “Good News!” the filter is most likely behind us. I don’t have the time to digest all the math in the original paper, but I’m inclined to take it’s conclusions with a large grain of salt, for a few reasons:</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reason 1- As uncertainty decreases it almost always points to life being more common</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The authors point out that there’s a large degree of uncertainty for all of the terms in Drake’s Equation, fair enough. But one assumes that as time goes on and our knowledge increases that uncertainty will get less. One great example of this are the exoplanets that have been discovered by the </span><a href="https://www.space.com/24903-kepler-space-telescope.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kepler Space Telescope</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This has vastly reduced the uncertainty in the number of stars with planets. (Which is the second term in the equation.) The question is, as uncertainty is reduced, in which direction will things head? Towards a higher estimate of communicating civilizations or towards a lower estimate? The answer, so far as I can tell, is that everytime our uncertainty gets less it updates the estimate in favor of communicating civilizations being more common. Let’s look at three quick examples of this:</span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s the one I just mentioned. According to Wikipedia when Frank Drake first proposed his equation, his guess for the fraction of stars with planets was ½. After looking at the data from Kepler, our current estimate is basically that all stars have planets. Our uncertainty decreased and it moved in the direction of extraterrestrial life and civilizations being more probable.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I also talked about number of rocky planets, which relates to the term in the equation for fraction of total planets which could sustain life. As I mentioned above we used to think that rocky planets would only appear seven billion years or so into the lifetime of the universe. Now we know that they appeared much earlier. Once again our uncertainty decreased, and it went down in the direction of life and civilizations being more probable.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally there’s the existence of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">extremophiles</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. We used to think that there was a fairly narrow band of conditions where life could exist, and then we found life in underwater thermal vents, in areas of extreme cold and dryness, in environments of high salinity, high acidity, high pressure, etc. etc. Yet another case where as we learned more, life became more probable, not less.</span></li>
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<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The trend is clear and I think it will continue.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reason 2- The wildcard of panspermia</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The next area where I have reason to doubt that the paradox has been “dissolved” is the idea of panspermia. And from where I sit, it appears that the evidence for that is increasing as well. On the off chance that you’re unfamiliar with the term, panspermia is the idea that life, in its most basic form, started somewhere else and then arrived on Earth once things were already going. Of greater importance for us is the idea that if it could travel to Earth there’s a good chance it could travel anywhere (and everywhere). In fairness, there is some chance life started on say, Mars and travelled here, in which case maybe life isn’t “everywhere”. But if panspermia happened and it didn’t come from somewhere nearby, then that changes a lot.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Further, it’s important to remember that panspermia is not accounted for in Drake’s Equation, and that makes it a wildcard for this entire question. Given the tenacity of life I’ve already mentioned above, once it gets started, there’s good reason to believe that it would just keep going. This section is more speculative than the last section, but my gut says that panspermia is probably more likely than people think. That said, I’ll lay out my reasons and you can decide for yourself.</span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Certain things double every so many years. The most famous example of this phenomenon is </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Moore’s Law</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which says that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. A while back some scientists </span><a href="https://phys.org/news/2013-04-law-life-began-earth.html" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wanted to see if biological complexity</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> followed the same pattern. It did, doubling every 376 million years. With forms of life at the various epochs fitting neatly onto the graph. The really surprising thing was that if you extrapolate back to zero biological complexity you end up at a point ten billion years ago. Well before the Earth was even around (or Mars for that matter). Leaving Panspermia as the only option. Now the authors confess this is more of a “thought exercise” than hard science, but that puts it in exactly the same category as the paper which “dissolves the Fermi Paradox”. (I would actually argue that the Moore’s Law analogy is probably less speculative.) </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s a significant amount of material travelling between planets and even between star systems. I mentioned this in a </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-apocalypse-will-not-be-as-cool-or.html" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">previous post</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but to remind you. Some scientists decided to</span><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/427474/the-amazing-trajectories-of-life-bearing-meteorites-from-earth/" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">run the numbers, on the impact</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> 65 million ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. And they discovered that a significant amount of the material ejected would have ended elsewhere in the Solar System and even elsewhere in the galaxy. Their simulation showed that around 100 million rocks would have made it to Europa (a promising candidate for life) and that around a 1000 rocks would have made it to a potentially habitable planet in a nearby star system (</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_planetary_system" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gliese 581</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). Now none of this is to say that any life would have survived on those rocks, rather the point that jumps out to me is how much material is being exchanged across those distances. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, and I put this last because it might seem striking only to me. I came across </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/science/first-animal-genes-evolution.html" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">an article</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> recently that said the very first animal had 55% of the DNA that humans have. They ascribe this to an “evolutionary burst of new genes”, but for me that looks an awful lot like support of the first point in this list. The idea that life has been churning along for a lot longer than we think, if the first animal had 55% of our DNA already half a billion years ago.</span></li>
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<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, of course, even if panspermia is happening, that doesn’t necessarily make the dissolving-the-paradox guys wrong. You could have a situation where the filter is not life getting started in the first place, the filter is between any life and intelligent life. It could be that some kind of basic life is very common, but intelligence never evolves. Though before I move on to the next subject, in my opinion that doesn’t seem likely. You can imagine that if life itself has a hard time getting started, in any form, that out of the handful of planets with life, that only one develops intelligence. But if panspermia is happening, and you basically have life on every planet in the habitable zone, a number estimated at between 10 and 40 billion, then the idea that out of those billions of instances of life that somehow intelligence only arose this one time seems a lot less believable. (And yes I know about things like the difficulty of the prokaryote-eukaryote transition.)</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reason 3- To little accounting for the data we do have i.e. Earth</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The final reason I have for being skeptical of the conclusion of the dissolving-the-paradox paper is that as far as I can tell they give zero weight to the fact that we do have one example of a planet with intelligent life, and capable of interstellar communication: Earth. In fact if I’m reading things correctly they appear to give pretty low probability to even the Earth existing. My sense is that when it comes to Fermi’s paradox this is the one piece of evidence that no one is quite sure what to do with. On the one hand, the history of science has been inextricably linked to the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">mediocrity (or Copernican) principle</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The idea that Earth and humanity are not unique, we’re not the center of the universe or of the solar system or what have you. Humans are not special, we’re just another monkey, etc. And yet on this one point we are currently unique. We are the only example of intelligent life for which we have any evidence.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You might think there is no, “On the other hand”, but there is. It’s called the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">anthropic principle</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And let’s just say I’m not a huge fan. This is not the first time I’ve talked about the anthropic principle and I would point you at one of my </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-secular-answer-to-fermis-paradox.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">previous posts</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for a more detailed criticism, but basically it says that </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">conscious life will only be found in places where conditions allow it to exist, therefore when we look around and find that things are set up in just the right way for us to exist, it couldn’t be any other way because if they weren’t set up in just the right way no one would be around to do the looking. </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I said, I’m not a fan. I think it’s a cop out. And in order for us to be as unique as this would imply, there would have to be something entirely unique about Earth, or a series of very improbable things that combined to create an entirely unique Earth. And so far while there’s a lot of speculation, there is no smoking gun. And, again, remember, every other time we thought we were unique, we ended up being wrong. It’s my firm belief that this time isn’t any different.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In case you’ve missed my central point, which is entirely possible, since I’m not sure I actually mentioned it, and it’s more of the central point that runs through all of my posts about Fermi’s Paradox. The point is, there’s numerous, very good reasons to think that there should be other intelligent species out there, despite people claiming to dissolve the paradox. And if there are aliens out there then there should be some evidence of it. This is unlikely to change in the next 100 years. We either already have the evidence or we never will. Based on all of this, the simplest explanation which fits everything we do know, is that we do have evidence of something beyond this earth, and we have labeled it God. </span></div>
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<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Life isn’t the only thing that can get spread really far in tiny amounts. Money can do that as well. Perhaps if instead of asking for donations, I should ask for </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">money panspermia</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. That makes it sound awesome!</span></div>Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-86385019247255613362018-06-23T14:03:00.000-07:002018-06-23T14:05:33.795-07:00The 100th Post<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span>
<iframe style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/6736912/height/90/theme/custom/autoplay/no/autonext/no/thumbnail/yes/preload/no/no_addthis/no/direction/backward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/a4a4a4/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe>
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<span style="background-color: #fdfeff; color: #001320; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15.333333333333332px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://traffic.libsyn.com/wearenotsaved/The_100th_Episode.mp3">Or download the MP3</a></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fdfeff; color: #001320; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15.333333333333332px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Many, many years ago, someone described a framework for categorizing knowledge about an individual. As with so many of these things there are two axis and four quadrants. The X axis is what the individual knows about themselves, with one column for things that are known and one column for things which are not known. The Y axis deals with what other people know about us and, similarly, there’s one row for the known and one for the unknown.</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-43ea4ff9-2e74-56d2-9c88-252b1f9abfe2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A little googling revealed that this framework is called the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Johari Window</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And each of the quadrants apparently has a label:</span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Known Self: Things both the individual and others know about themselves. A preference for sarcasm for example...</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Hidden Self: Things the individual knows about themselves which other people don’t know. Deep dark secrets are obviously in this category.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Blind Self: Things others know about the individual which the individual is unaware of. Spinach in the teeth is the classic example. But I assume that lots of self-sabotaging behavior also falls into this category.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Unknown Self: Things that neither the individual or others are aware of. I once watched a whole movie which was essentially all about this. It was called </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Majeure_(film)" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Force Majeure</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and it involved the fallout after a father runs away from an avalanche, abandoning his wife and children. (They ended up being fine.) His cowardice had previously been part of the unknown self, and when it was revealed it surprised both the individual and his family.</span></li>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I mentioned I heard about this framework quite a while ago, but I hadn’t thought about it in many years. But as I was thinking about my topic, I was reminded of it. And what is that topic you might ask?</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, this is the 100th post and it will be published within a few days of the two year anniversary of my </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/06/we-are-not-saved.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">first post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And thus it seems like this would be a good time to step back somewhat and take a look at where I’ve been and where I’m going. Do something of a meta-post, so to speak. My suspicion is that it will mostly end up being unreadable navel gazing (more so!) but I think I can manage, at a minimum, to move some things out of the “hidden self” category into the “known self” category. Even better would be if this post ended up moving something out of the “blind self” category. My ideal would be if someone came into the comments section and said, “Actually you’re fantastic at X! You should do more of that!” (On the other hand someone telling me I’m terrible at everything and should just give up, would also count, though it might be less useful.) </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay now that we’re done with the psychobabble, I know that many of you are already well aware that a meta-post is a post about posting. But I actually want to go a little bit deeper. At the most basic level, the first question I have to grapple with is what does someone do who has some discretionary time on their hands? What’s the best use of that time? (For the curious the time directly involved in creating both the blog and podcast every week averages out to around 9 hours.) </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Obviously I could use this time to read more, though I already read quite a bit. Another option would be to use it to play more video games. Unlike reading, this is something I actually don’t do that much of, though lately I have been thoroughly enjoying </span><a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570/Slay_the_Spire/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Slay the Spire</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Still another option would be to watch more TV. Certainly I’m </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/business/media/nielsen-survey-media-viewing.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">below average</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in my TV viewing. The list of really good TV that I haven’t watched is extensive. (I have not seen Breaking Bad, Veronica Mars, The Wire or The Sopranos.) To a greater or lesser degree, all three of these options provide very little value, particularly for people other than myself.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reading, playing video games or watching TV aren’t my only options (though sometimes it appears that way when I look at how other people spend their discretionary time) there are, of course, more impactful options. Things like exercise, spending more time with my family, volunteering at a worthwhile charity, or doing genealogy (something which is obviously big for Mormons). If I was greedy (or maybe just prudent) I could use the time to work another job (it wouldn’t be hard to find something that paid better than blogging). Or, I could spend all of that time expanding my current business, or seeking investment opportunities. </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could go on and on but I assume that you get the idea. I have lots of options for how to spend the nine hours of discretionary time I currently spend on maintaining a weekly blog. Accordingly out of all the things I could be doing with this discretionary time, why did I decide that I should start a blog? (Eventually deciding to record that blog and release it every week as a podcast.) What was it that made me decide that this would be the best use of that time and if, in the course of this post I decide to re-examine that decision am I going to end up making the same decision again? </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before we get too far we need to establish some criteria for making a decision. Perhaps I really do want to make the best use of my time, but best according to what standard? Of course there’s the utilitarian standard, what could I do with my time that would bring the greatest benefit to the greatest number? If this is the standard I’m going for then I evidently possess that special sort of hubris which leads one to think that the greatest total benefit they could bring to the world is to let everyone know what they think, and by extension how utterly wrong they are if they don’t think the same way. We should not discount the possibility that I had exactly this much hubris, but for the moment let’s set that aside.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Instead of a utilitarian standard I could be going for a hedonistic standard. Perhaps I felt that writing a blog is what would bring me the most pleasure. There have been a couple of posts recently where I criticized people for prioritizing hedonism, so if the value system I ultimately used to decide to start a blog consisted of what made me feel good there would be a certain amount of irony there. But if it was just one factor among many, then perhaps I could be forgiven.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In what might be viewed as something halfway between the first two standards. I could be doing it because I felt an internal compulsion to do it. Many writers talk about being driven to write without necessarily getting </span><a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/14/writing-bleed/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">much enjoyment out of it</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Thus I may feel compelled to write but without the hubris of thinking that the world would be hugely benefited by listening to what I have to say. And I may experience relief from giving into my compulsion to write, but this relief isn’t necessarily me hedonistically seeking out the greatest amount of pleasure. This standard being that I started a blog because, ultimately, it was easier than not starting a blog. And I should mention that the pressure to start something is of an entirely different flavor than the pressure to continue something. </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Possibly rather than experiencing internal compulsion, the impetus was actually external. Maybe I was feeling pressure from something or someone. And my standard was, “I just need to get these people to stop bugging me!”</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t want to turn this into a list of 30 reasons why I write, there are </span><a href="https://medium.com/personal-growth/30-reasons-why-i-write-a924eabeedfc" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">enough of those out there</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, And as you may have guessed I write for all of the reasons I just listed, or at least I started writing for all of the reasons just listed, but as I alluded to, the reasons someone might have for starting something may be completely different than the reasons someone might have for continuing something. Also out of the four reasons I listed, I’m the only person who can judge the success of three of them (well maybe two and a half of them). And in the spirit of unproductive navel gazing this post was always going to descend to, it’s appropriate to briefly examine whether, in my own judgement, those reasons still apply. Whether I have met any of these standards.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As far as the first standard that’s the one thing I can’t judge, so we’ll return to it once the navel gazing is over.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second standard for starting a blog was enjoyment. Do I still enjoy it? I’d have to say that I do. In fact, I think in the long run it might actually be the most enjoyable way I can spend my discretionary time. (There are things with more short term enjoyment, but they make me feel guilty over the long run.)</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The third reason was that I felt compelled to do it. Here is where there’s the biggest difference between a reason for starting and a reason for continuing. I do not feel as compelled to continue as I felt to start. Doing 100 posts has definitely lessened the compulsion. That said it’s not entirely gone, and in fact I would say that it’s stronger than I would have thought at this point. In the past I’ve had a real problem getting bored with things, and while that has happened, it’s happened to a much lesser extent then I would have thought.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The fourth standard/reason was the external one. In my case it kind of felt like a commandment. There has been a fairly consistent theme in many of the recent statements by LDS leaders (specifically </span><a href="https://www.lds.org/general-conference/?lang=eng" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">General Conference talks</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) that Mormons need to be more active in announcing and espousing their beliefs, particularly on social media. These statements always struck me with quite a bit of force. (Though I think I may have come up with one of the least straightforward ways of following that counsel.) This is the one where, technically, I can only judge the success of my half, do I feel like I followed the counsel of the brethren? To which I would answer mostly. The other half would be whether the brethren (or just other Mormons in general) feel that I’ve followed it. That I’m less sure about.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well then, what about the first standard? As I already said, if my standard for writing a blog is that I have decided that it’s the way in which I can be the most help to the world, then there’s a significant amount of hubris involved in that. This is somewhat mitigated by my other reasons, but not something I can ignore, so do I feel that this is really the most impactful thing I can do with my time? Is this really my area of greatest contribution to humanity?</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To which I guess I’d answer, “Maybe?”</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I do feel that I have something novel to say: I do think there’s some weird intersection of religion, antifragility, rationalism and futurism where there’s an enormous amount of untapped wisdom. Which is not to say I’m any good at imparting it, or even that I’m necessarily correct about its existence. And those are the two issues in a nutshell, how do I know whether I have anything worthwhile to say? To say nothing of whether spending my time in this fashion represents my area of greatest leverage? And if it is how do I get better at it? What’s the best way to spread this wisdom? (If, as I said, that’s what it is.)</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I decided right at the beginning to do a weekly blog, and I wouldn’t claim that I gave these two questions much thought when I did. Fortunately, it turns out that an ongoing weekly blog is not a horrible way to go about answering those questions. If I don’t have anything worthwhile to say. If, as the expression goes, I’m “full of it.” Then putting my crap out there is the best way to have someone come along and smell it and tell me it stinks (okay this is not my greatest metaphor, I admit). As to the other question, at a minimum, I assume the more I write the better I’ll get at it.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course what I’m describing is basically just practice, practice in public, but if there’s one thing that’s come out from all recently in self-help literature, it’s that there are different kinds of practice, and that to get better you really need deliberate practice, and if there’s any point to this post other than naval gazing, it would probably be something along the lines of deciding that I need to be more deliberate in what I do.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What then, does deliberate practice look like when you’re talking about blogging? When I Google the term I’m informed that:</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which I must say, seems to strike pretty close to home, and not in a good way. It is certainly possible that a weekly blog is more in the “mindless repetition” category than the “purposeful and systematic” category. </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s not like I haven’t thought about doing something different. Many of the blogs I admire the most, post when they feel like it, and only post when they have something really worthwhile to say. It’s not hard to imagine that there have been a few times (many times?) when I would have posted something better if I had posted it when it was ready rather than posting it because it was Saturday. </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That said, I’m honestly worried that if I allowed myself the freedom to post when I feel like it, that I won’t feel like it very often. Also I have this Idea that perhaps someday, some publication which works on the principle of having a given writer post on a given day every week, will express interest in my stuff, and the thing that will interest them the most is that I have a steady track record of posting every week. (Perhaps rather than imagining this as some far off possibility I should start approaching these people now, particularly now that I have 100 articles under my belt.)</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Also there’s this whole school of thought which says it’s better to produce day in and day out (or at least week in and week out in my case.) Then to wait for inspiration to strike. So perhaps I’m not being as mindless as it seems…</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course whether I could be more deliberate in my writing “practice” that’s almost certainly not the place where there’s the largest room for improvement, particularly if we’re talking about “getting it out there”. The area with the most room for improvement is certainly marketing, for lack of a better term, and I’m actually pretty awful at it. Accordingly if there’s any place where I’m open to suggestions this is it.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Part of the problem surely lies in the enormous number of options for drawing attention to something, and I’m sure there’s a whole blog post to be written about how attention is now the major currency in the world (at least the first world.) I’m not sure if there’s much point in reviewing those options, but maybe doing so will spark something (either for me or for my readers.)</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One thing I’ve meant to do for quite a while is create a Facebook page for the blog and cross post everything there, with perhaps some pithy observations thrown in. The primary problem there is that I kind of hate Facebook. And I’m trapped in something of a purgatory where it’s necessary for some things and yet at least once a week I think I should delete my account and never return. A possible middle option would be to go on Facebook and then spend the bulk of my time talking about how awful it is. But I can’t decide if this is edgy or a transparent and overused ploy by people who think they’re edgy .</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could say something similar about Twitter. Though I guess if I had to rank them I would rank Twitter as slightly less awful than Facebook. Or perhaps awful isn’t the right word, maybe Twitter is slightly more useful. More the sort of thing I should be doing as someone with a blog. But of course regardless of how I decide to use them both seem to require quite a bit more time and attention than I really want to spend on them. Or rather they seem exactly like the kind of constant interruption that anyone with anything to say about productivity warns you about.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The concept of time has brought us full circle. If I have nine hours a week to spend writing, why can’t I spend seven hours writing and two hours on social media, or whatever the ideal balance would be? Well first based on what I’ve seen of some people’s social media habits, it might take all nine hours and then some, but also certain things are easy to do and certain things are hard. There’s a </span><a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/25/apologia-pro-vita-sua/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">post on SlateStarCodex</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that talks about how heroin addicts can find $200+ a week to support their addiction, but can’t find $100 to pay for treatment if they’re off heroin. He compares that to finding time to write, if you want something bad enough you find the time (or the money). And while I don’t think I have nearly the “addictive drive” that Scott Alexander does, I assume that something similar is going on here. Finding nine hours to write is comparatively easy, finding any time to promote that writing on social media is impossible. Which is not to say that I’m going to ignore the problem, just it’s obviously not something that comes naturally.</span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay, maybe I can’t summon the motivation to play the social media game, but I do have nine hours a week of writing, maybe I could use that more effectively, or differently? Maybe I could write shorter posts more often, with really long posts once a month? Or maybe I could shift some of my writing from blog posts to books? Or maybe my thematic focus could be tighter? </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Changing things up is interesting to think about, but honestly, I’m probably not going to do any of those things, at least not soon. In fact my guess is that you won’t notice much difference between the posts which preceded this one and the posts following it. That said, to return to the topic of deliberate practice, I should be more deliberate, I should experiment more. Be more adventurous. Try some new things, even if they’ll probably fail. And hopefully you will see some of that going forward. To begin with while not a huge thing (</span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3JPa2mvSQ4" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">baby steps!</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) I think it is time to move this blog to wordpress and a custom domain. I’m hoping to do that within the next 30 days. It’s not much, but perhaps it will shake some things up.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally to return to Johari’s Window. If you have anything to contribute to this discussion, any suggestions, criticisms, ideas, things I appear to be overlooking, etc. Please don’t hesitate to drop me an email or leave a comment. </span></div>
<b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For those of you reading this whether it’s your first post (which would be weird) or if you’ve actually, and inexplicably read all 100, thanks. I still have much more to stay, and the world continues to provide things to comment on even if I didn’t so hopefully we’ll both still be around for post 200 and maybe post 500 and maybe even post 1000. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One wonders if I’m going to run out of clever ways of asking for donations before I get to post 200, to say nothing of post 1000. (One could argue that I already have.) One way to ensure finding out the answer to that question is, you guessed it, to </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820/posts" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">donate</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">!</span></div>Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-2017747864711437052018-06-16T17:11:00.002-07:002018-06-16T17:12:35.080-07:00Things We Cannot Get Wrong<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Michael Crichton</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, the author of </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jurassic-Park-Novel-Michael-Crichton/dp/0345538986" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Jurassic Park</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and the </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Andromeda-Strain-Michael-Crichton/dp/1101974494" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Andromeda Strain</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, along with a bunch of other great books, and who, for my money, died too soon at the age of 66 from lymphoma, said many very astute things (and probably some dumb ones as well) and I’d like begin this post by relating something he said about the limits of expertise, what he labeled </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Gell-Mann Amnesia</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I have certainly experienced this effect and I imagine the rest of my readers have as well to one extent or another. Crichton’s larger point is about the danger of speculation, but for our purposes the key takeaway is that no matter how authoritative something sounds, there’s a better chance than you think of it being mostly wrong and it may, in fact, advance a point which is the exact opposite of the truth. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I bring this up because we appear to have an example of this happening, and in an area I’m very much interested in. Just recently a </span><a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d9aaad_8b76c6c86f314d0288161ae8a47a9821.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Detailed Critique</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> of the “Existential Threats” chapter of Pinker’s </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Enlightenment Now</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> was posted online. It was written by Phil Torres, a noted scholar of existential risk, and having spent several of the </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/04/steven-pinker-and-fragility-of.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">last</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/05/nuclear-power-and-winning-through.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">few</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/06/skin-in-game-survival-religion.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">posts</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> discussing the book, and in particular Pinker’s dismissal of existential threats (combined with my </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-apocalypse-will-not-be-as-cool-or.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">larger interest</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> in that topic). This seemed right up my alley. The critique is quite long, so I’m mostly going to focus on areas where I have something to add, or where I disagree. In particular, though this may not be an addition or a disagreement, I want to emphasis, that of all the subjects Pinker discusses, the one he (and really all of humanity) can least afford to be wrong about is the subject of existential risk. We can survive if the murder rate is much higher than he thinks, or if we got it wrong on same sex marriage, we can even survive </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/03/how-do-you-solve-problem-like-global.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">most of the predicted outcomes of climate change</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, but if we get existential risk wrong, nothing else we got right is ever going to matter.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The key findings of this critique are:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Two quotes being used by Pinker in the chapter are in the “wet streets cause rain”</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">category (my words) in that, their original meaning is not what Pinker claims and ma</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">in fact be “outright contradictory”.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The chapter spends most of its time attacking straw men.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pinker’s citations are poorly vetted, and largely non-scholarly, but presented as scholarly.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And from those sources, Pinker ignores content which undercuts his arguments. Meaning</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the sources themselves are far more equivocal than Pinker represents.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Finally:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Overall, the assessment presented below leads me to conclude that it would be unfortunate if this chapter were to significantly shape the public and academic discussions surrounding “existential risks.” In the harshest terms, the chapter is guilty of misrepresenting ideas, cherry-picking data, misquoting sources, and ignoring contradictory evidence… Because, so far as I can tell, almost every paragraph of the chapter contains at least one misleading claim, problematic quote, false assertion, or selective presentation of the evidence.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Torres then goes on for an additional 20,000 words, and yet, in the end, Pinker’s errors are so dense, at least in this chapter, that he only manages to cover the first third of it. Obviously I have even less space available, so to start with I’d like to focus on the role of pessimism and religion. And to do that I need to identify some of the different groups in this debate.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pinker opens the chapter by framing things as a battle between those who are entirely optimistic (like himself) and those who are entirely pessimistic. These are the first two categories. What’s interesting is that for all Pinker disparages religion, believers technically don’t fall into the category of those who are entirely pessimistic. To find people who are entirely pessimistic you have to look at people like the </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/05/antinatalism-and-happiness-vs-survival.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">antinatalists</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, who I recently discussed or really hard-core environmentalists. Believers are optimistic about the future, particularly over a very long time horizon, they may just be pessimistic in the short term.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Torres takes immediate issue with framing the issue of existential risks in this fashion, and he points out that many of the people Pinker talks about are very optimistic about the future:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pinker’s reference to “pessimists” is quite misleading. Many of the scholars who are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the most concerned</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> about existential risks are also pro-technology “</span><a href="https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/values.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">transhumanists</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">” and “</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-progressivism" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">techno-progressives</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">”—in some cases, even Kurzweilian “</span><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=0d8oDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+singularity+is+near&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjiitrH_dDaAhVKVd8KHdrCC3wQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=promise%20and%20peril&f=false" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">singularitarians</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In other words these people all firmly believe that a technological utopia is not only possible but likely. They just believe it’s even more likely if we can</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> eliminate potential existential threats.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The fact that Pinker simplifies things in this fashion is emblematic of his entire approach to this subject. And frankly represents some pretty appalling shoddiness on his part, but that’s not the point I want to get at.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As I said I want to identify the various groups, so let’s get back to that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As I pointed out, the first group is composed of the entirely or mostly optimistic, and I think it’s fair to put Pinker in this category. The group of people who believe that things have never been better and in all probability these improvements are going to continue. To put it in terms of my overarching theme, these are people who believe that technology and progress have definitely saved us.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Our second group is the entirely or mostly pessimistic. I already mentioned the antinatalists, but I would also include people who are convinced that the earth will be made </span><a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">uninhabitable by climate change</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, or that the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">holocene extinction</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> could lead to some sort of </span><a href="http://climatechange-theneweconomy.com/biodiversity-destruction-lead-global-tipping-point/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">global tipping point</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Pinker puts people concerned with AI Risk and those concerned with the possibility that genetic engineering could make it easy to create superbugs in this category, though Torres argues he probably shouldn’t. That said, there are certainly people who believe that technology has definitely doomed us (and that there is no religious salvation around to mitigate this doom) it’s just not clear how large this group is.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As Torres points out in the quote above, there is a third group which contains those who experience a mix of optimism and pessimism. Those who feel that the future is incredibly promising, but caution must be exercised. They believe that technology can save us and hopefully will, but that if we’re not careful it could also doom us. Given that the majority of these people don’t expect any religious salvation you could see why they’re particularly worried about getting it right. For myself, despite not falling into this group it seems clearly superior to group one. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The fourth and final group also contains those who see reasons for both optimism and pessimism, but in this category the optimism is primarily based on faith in a divine being rather than being based on faith in technology and progress. Here, I imagine that Torres and Pinker might set aside their disagreements to declare this group the worst of all. Obviously I disagree with this. And before the end of this post I’ll get around to explaining why.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I suppose it’s not entirely accurate to label that last category as the final group, since there is, of course, the largest group of all: people who never really give much thought as to whether they should be optimistic or pessimistic about the future. Or rather, they may give some degree of thought to their own future, but very little to humanity's future. The big question is how much influence do they wield? Part of the reason why Pinker writes books and why Torres writes rebuttals, is that it’s hoped that the future will not be determined by this group, that it will be determined by people who have taken the time to read books like Enlightenment Now (and even better people who might have read rebuttals like Torres’) though that’s by no means certain. Still, I guess I too will make the same assumption as Pinker and Torres and say no more about this group.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pinker wants to frame things as a battle between groups one and two, and while I agree that there is a group of hardcore technology pessimists, I don’t think they’re that large. Also, all (or at least the majority) of the people Pinker call out more accurately belong in group three. Which is another way of saying that this is a good example of the strawmanning Torres is complaining about.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If we set group two aside, both because it’s too small, and also because of its relative lack of influence then we end up with most of the attention being focused on the contest between groups one and three. As I said I think group three is clearly superior to group one, but it’s useful to spend a moment examining why this is.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first big question is what are the risks? I mentioned that this is one thing I want to focus on, in fact it’s the point of the title. The risk of being wrong about existential hazards, are, from a certain perspective, infinite. If we make a mistake and overlook some risk which wipes out humanity, that’s basically an infinite risk, at least from the standpoint of humans. If you’re not comfortable with calling it an infinite risk, then it’s still an enormous risk as Torres points out:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">...This is not an either/or situation—and this is why Pinker framing the issue as an intellectual battle between optimists and pessimists distorts the “debate” from the start.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(i) given the astronomical potential value of the future (literally </span><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/the-astronomical-consequences-of-an-existential-catastrophe_uk_5ad76893e4b0d6cc69cc7328" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">trillions and trillions and trillions of humans living worthwhile lives</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> throughout the universe), and (ii) the growing ability for humanity to destroy itself through error, terror, global coordination failures, and so on, (iii) it would be extremely imprudent not to have an ongoing public and academic discussion about the number and nature of existential hazards and </span><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328717301957" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">the various mechanisms by which we could prevent such risks</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> from occurring. That’s not pessimism! It’s realism combined with the virtues of wisdom and deep-future foresight.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is the position of group 3, and as I said I think it’s pretty solid. The risks of not paying attention to existential hazards is enormous. On the other side what is the argument for group one? What are the risks of paying too much attention to existential hazards? Here’s Pinker explaining those risks:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But apocalyptic thinking has serious downsides. One is that false alarms to catastrophic risks can themselves be catastrophic. The nuclear arms race of the 1960s, for example, was set off by fears of a mythical “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified by the uncertain but catastrophic possibility that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons and planning to use them against the United States. (As George W. Bush put it, “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun-that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”) And as we shall see, one of the reasons the great powers refuse to take the common-sense pledge that they won’t be the first to use nuclear weapons is that they want to reserve the right to use them against other supposed existential threats such as bioterror and cyberattacks. Sowing fear about hypothetical disasters, far from safeguarding the future of humanity, can endanger it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Honestly this seems like a pretty weak argument. And Torres points out several problems with it, which I’ll briefly recap here:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There’s a big difference between, for example, the warnings about AI provided by Elon</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Musk and Stephen Hawking and whatever it was Bush was doing.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This overlooks all the times when people warned of catastrophe, and it turns out we should</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">have listened. Exhibit 1 for this is always Hitler, but I’m sure I could come up with half a</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">dozen others.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This also overlooks times when warnings were acted upon, and the problem was fixed,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">sometimes so well that people now dismiss the idea that there was ever a problem in the</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">first place. Pinker offers the Y2K bug as an example of techno-panic, and Torres goes to</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">show it really wasn’t, I don’t have to time to get into that, but Pinker seems to assume that</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">warnings of catastrophe are never appropriate and always bad, which is almost certainly</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">not the case.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To this list I’ll point out that neither of his examples are particularly good.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Iraq War was bad, and in hindsight, almost certainly a mistake. But it wasn’t a</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">catastrophe, certainly not compared with other potential catastrophes throughout history.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Perhaps when considered only from the perspective of the Iraqis themselves, it might be,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">but I’m not sure even then.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If the nuclear arms race had lead to World War III, then Pinker would certainly have a</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">point, but it didn’t. However mistaken you think the arms race was, we avoided actual war.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This despite the fact that many people were pushing for it. (I think the number of people</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">who thought it might be okay went down as the numbers of nukes went up.) How sure are</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">we really, that a world where the arms race never happened would be better than the</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">world we currently have?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pinker brings up other risks, which Torres covers as well, but none of them, when set in the balance, outweigh the colossal risks of potential existential hazards.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Before we move on there’s another argument Pinker makes that deserves to be mentioned. One of the key points which determines how risky technology has made things, is the ease with which an individual or a small group can use it to cause massive harm. Pinker claims that technology’s interconnectedness has made it harder. He makes this claim primarily based on the increase in the number of intersecting technologies, all of which would require separate areas of expertise in order for an individual to cause any harm. He concludes that this makes harm less likely than in the past, and that we have been mislead in this respect by the hollywood image of a loan genius. That, rather, it would take a whole “team of scientists” and that maybe they wouldn’t be able to do it either. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This certainly doesn’t match my experience of things, and Torres take serious issue with it as well and goes on to provide nine counter-examples of small groups either causing massive harm or having done all of the work necessary to cause massive harm but stopping in advance of any actual harm. If you read nothing else from the original paper, I would at least review these nine examples. (They start on </span><a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d9aaad_8b76c6c86f314d0288161ae8a47a9821.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">page 31 and go through page 33</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.) They’re quite chilling.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The overall feeling I came away with after reading Pinker’s chapter on existential risks, a feeling Torres appears to share, is that Pinker thinks that people who are pessimistic about technology aren’t acting in good faith to prevent some disaster, but rather they’re doing it as part of some strange intellectual exercise, a weird game perhaps. Here’s an example of Pinker expressing this sentiment:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The sentinels for the [old] horsemen [famine, war, etc.] tended to be romantics and Luddites. But those who warn of the [new] higher-tech dangers are often scientists and technologists who have deployed their ingenuity to identify ever more ways in which the world will soon end. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Torres joins me in thinking that this makes it sound like people who are concerned with existential risk, are: “devising new doomsday scenarios [as] a hobby: something done for the fun of it, for its own sake.” and goes on to state, “That’s not the case.” So far Torres and I are in agreement, but I would venture to say that Torres makes a similar claim about people who are worried about some sort of apocalypse for religious reasons, and in a couple of places in his paper he goes out of his way to put as much distance as possible between his worries about existential risk and the apocalyptic worries of traditional religions. And here’s where we finally turn to group four: the religious pessimists (who nevertheless hope for divine salvation). </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m not an expert on the status of apocalyptic beliefs among all the world’s religions, but I get the impression that it’s pretty widespread. Certainly it’s a major element Christianity, the religion I am the most familiar with, but regardless of how widespread it is, Torres wants to make sure that his worries about existential risk are not lumped in with the apocalyptic concerns of the religious. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The question is why? Why are the religious fears of an apocalypse different than the fears Torres is defending? Torres takes objection to the idea that researchers in existential risk, are “devising new doomsday scenarios [as] a hobby” but where does he suppose that religious apocalyptic fears come from? Is he copying Pinker now, and assuming that this was the hobby of early Christians? Something to spend their free-time on while undergoing persecution and attempting to spread the gospel?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I suppose that’s possible. That if it was, not exactly a hobby, that it at least, served no useful purpose, that it was just pointless baggage which for some reason accumulated within Christianity and did nothing for either the religion in which these ideas accumulated or for the followers of that religion. As I said, this is possible, but it seems unlikely.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Another possibility is the Talebian possibility, that there was something in these beliefs which made those who held them less fragile. It’s not hard to imagine how this could be the case, if apocalyptic beliefs led those who held them to be more prepared for eventual (and historically inevitable) disaster, then it’s easy to see where those beliefs came from and how they might have persisted. This possibility would appear to make a lot more sense than the first possibility.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Of course there’s one final possibility, that there is in fact a religious apocalypse on it’s way, and John of Patmos was actually warning us of something real. But if you reject this possibility, as I assume Torres does, then the second possibility still makes a lot more sense than the first. Which is to say, that it could be argued that it’s a huge support for Torres’ point.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The central argument between Torres and Pinker boils down to a question of whether it’s a net negative to worry about future apocalypses (Pinker’s view) or whether it’s a net positive (Torres’ view). To which I would argue that historical evidence suggests that it’s definitely a net positive, because that’s basically what people have been doing for thousands of years, and it’s safest to assume that they had a reason for doing it. Particularly given the fact that, as I’ve been saying, this is one of those things we cannot get wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In closing I have two final thoughts. First, I think one of the benefits of bringing religion into the discussion, is that it allows us to tap into thousands of years worth of experience. Contrast this with Pinker (and to a lesser extent Torres), who are arguing about a world that has only existed for the last few decades. It’s really difficult to know if we’ve recently reached some new plateau where existential risk is so low that worrying about it causes more harm than good. But if you bring in religion and tradition more broadly the answer to the question is, “probably not”. We probably haven’t reached some new plateau. There probably is reason for concern. The last 70 or so years are probably an anomaly.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Second, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Torres ends his paper by referencing The Great Silence, which is another name for Fermi’s Paradox, and points out, as I have on many occasions, that if we don’t have to worry about existential risk, then where is everyone else? Sure, we all agree that there are lots of potential explanations for the silence, but one of them, to which we have no counterfactual, is that Pinker is horribly, fantastically wrong, and that technology introduces a level of fragility which will ultimately and inevitably lead to our extinction, or in any case will be inadequate to save us.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If you think there’s some point to religion, consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. If you think there’s some point to being worried about existential risk, consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. If you think Pinker could use more humility consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. And finally if you think it’s a tragedy that the Netherlands is not in the World Cup, consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Because it is...</span></div>
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Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-15684946046265668482018-06-09T18:16:00.002-07:002018-06-10T05:42:58.106-07:00Crime in 2018 (Or Why Are There so Many Homeless People?)<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Last week I decided to order some pizza for the family to eat while we watched </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379557/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Touching the Void</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Before going any further I should say that Touching the Void is far and away my favorite documentary, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly, though there is a significant amount of swearing, albeit in contexts where swearing is entirely appropriate. In any case the pizza…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I ordered pizza from Papa John’s (not sure in </span><a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/22/572779230/papa-johns-ceo-steps-down-following-controversial-remarks-on-nfl" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">this day and age if that’s important or not</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.) When it arrived I took the pizzas from the delivery driver and handed them to my son. From there he handed me the credit card slip so that I could sign it. As I was signing it I noticed that a car had pulled up next to the car of the delivery driver (who had parked across the end of my driveway). I didn’t think much of it, there was another car parked across the street and I assumed the recently arrived car was just squeezing in between the two before parking in the driveway across from me.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When I next glanced up the car of the delivery driver was in motion, at which point I figured something weird had to be happening and I said, motioning towards the car, “What the heck is happening there!” The delivery driver turned and said something along the lines of “Hey bro! Don’t steal my car!” and began running after him. A second earlier and he might have got in front of him because the thief had to turn the car around to get out of my neighborhood, but by the time I pointed it out the thief had already backed into my driveway and from there he roared off. (I wonder what would have happened if I’d paid with cash? Maybe the delivery guy could have stopped it, or maybe he just would have gotten run over?)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I assume the delivery driver left his keys in the car or left it running, I honestly don’t remember if it was the latter. He also left his phone in the car, along with another order of pizzas he was supposed to deliver after mine. Anyway, I lent him my phone and he called the police. He unfortunately couldn’t remember his license plate number, and I assume one of the first things the thief did was take off the Papa John’s topper, since if he had left that on he would have been pretty easy to catch.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A police officer showed up pretty quickly, fast enough that the driver was still on the phone with Papa John’s explaining to them that they were going to have to make some more pizzas. But once he got off the call and gave me my phone back the policeman told me I was good and I went back inside to eat. I’m a little bit annoyed that I’m not in the loop on things. I’d like to know how it ends up getting resolved, though I’ll definitely be asking the next Papa John’s driver who shows up about it. (Assuming they don’t put me on some kind of blacklist.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In any event all of this got me to wondering about the state of crime and other social indicators, like the number of homeless people. This particular crime seemed fairly brazen and unusual, and also the delivery driver assured me that he had been doing pizza delivery for a long time (though to be fair he looked like he was at most in his late 20s) and had never heard of this sort of thing happening. And one assumes that if he had, he wouldn’t have left himself in a position for it to happen to him. I had certainly never heard of it happening, nor do I know anyone who’s even had their car stolen, period, that I can think of, at least not anyone I know well. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In other words you have an unusually brazen crime, happening right in front of my house. Is it just an exceptionally rare thing that I just happened to witness by chance? Or is it part of some larger trend of increasing lawlessness. You probably already know where my biases lay: towards it being part of some larger trend. And, of course being biased, I immediately started looking for something else that might be an example of that trend. The thing that immediately came to mind was homelessness. Which seems to be getting worse and worse despite the New York Times apparently </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/upshot/we-ran-out-of-words-to-describe-how-good-the-jobs-numbers-are.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">running out of words</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> to describe how good the jobs numbers are.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Most of the time when I start one of these posts I have a pretty good idea of what my conclusion is. Either because I’ve already come across some piece of evidence which represents a smoking gun, or I have some point of my own that I’m hoping to arrive at. That is not the case with this post. Having just read Pinker’s </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Enlightenment Now</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, I’m predisposed to think that crime, like most things has been getting better. (I’m guessing that the hapless delivery driver would disagree with me.) Is crime getting better along with everything else? If so, then what’s up with the increasing number of homeless people? And shouldn’t homelessness and crime track pretty closely? These are the questions I’m setting out to answer, and at the moment I’m not sure how it’s going to fall.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Speaking of Pinker, I thought I might as well start with him, and I would have thought that among his 75 figures that there would be one on the decrease in crime, though I had no specific memory of one. And it turns out the reason that I have no specific memory of one is because he didn’t include one. He covers murder, but he doesn’t get into property crime. In fact there is no entry for crime in the index at all. I’m not sure if I should be surprised by this or not. The </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">graphs one does find in this area</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> definitely show a decrease in all sorts of property crime, though since Pinker likes to credit “enlightenment values” with the decrease I think he prefers to be able to show that the decrease started at around the time of the enlightenment. As such many of his graphs start in the 1700 and 1800’s, with some going back much further (with one graph on GDP going all the way back to 1 AD).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Of course not all of the things he wants to talk about have data available going that far back so oftentimes his graphs start much later, but only because he doesn’t have the data to go back any further. In this case he has the data, but it doesn’t show the nice smooth downward slope of most of his charts, a chart of property crimes starts off really low in 1960, then rises steadily before reaching and staying at a peak through the 80’s and then starting to decrease around 1990, though even after a decrease of over two and a half decades things are still not to the level they were in 1960. In other words, this graph does not quite fit the narrative Pinker is going for in his book, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he didn’t include it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Besides not fitting his narrative, one additional reason for not including it might be that </span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/what-caused-the-crime-decline/477408/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">no one is entirely sure</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> why crime has been falling since 1990. Certainly Pinker can’t easily map “enlightenment values” to this data as an explanation, though that may be only explanation that hasn’t been offered. Vox.com ran an article listing </span><a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/2/13/8032231/crime-drop" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">16 possible reasons</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> for the decline in crime everything from an aging population, to video games, to abortion, and lead are suggested. I know that lead has been a favorite of many people, though just recently </span><a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/no-lead-homicide-connection-eastern-europe.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">someone pointed out</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> that despite horrible lead pollution in Eastern Europe under communism there appears to be no evidence of increased criminality there. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In any case, whatever the cause for the decrease in crime, the graph doesn’t fit Pinker’s narrative, but it also doesn’t fit my narrative very well either. I find no evidence that there has been a recent surge in car thefts, Car thefts have in fact been falling, though at this point it’s important to talk about the role of technology in preventing car thefts. Cars are, in general, much more difficult to steal these days than they have been in the past. With stuff like locking steering wheels, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immobiliser" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">immobilizers</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, GPS tracking, and similar, the only way they were able to steal the delivery drivers’ car is that they had the keys. So technology has made car theft much more difficult, but that may have nothing to do with the “base rate” of criminality in society. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Okay, so it appears, despite the dramatic nature of my own experience, that there hasn’t been any increase in property crimes, or car theft. Which takes us to the next questions, has there been an increase in the number of homeless people and if so why has there been no corresponding increase in the amount of crime?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Here again, I’ll once again start out by describing my own experience. My memory is that homeless individuals and panhandlers in general were pretty rare when I was growing up. In 2000 I moved into my current house, and I don’t remember seeing any homeless panhandlers in the area, that is until the financial crisis of 2007-2008, at which point I started seeing them everywhere, especially on a particular corner near my house. My initial assumption was that the sudden increase was due to the housing crisis and the economy cratering. This would make sense of course, if unemployment shoots up and people find themselves suddenly unable to make their mortgage payments, then it’s only to be expected that the number of homeless would increase. But when the economy improved, there didn’t appear to be any corresponding decrease in the number of homeless. Just this month the current period of economic expansion </span><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/30/news/economy/us-economy-boom-history/index.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">hit nine years</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and on top of that I recently saw that the number of job openings exceeds the number of people looking for employment for the </span><a href="https://twitter.com/wesbury/status/1004006266614767616" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">first time since 2000</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. And yet, despite all this, there appear to be as many homeless people and panhandlers as ever, if not more. Why is that?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Of course the first step is to see if my observations match reality. It’s entirely possible that I’m just suffering from confirmation bias, that I’ve developed this theory of an increase in the number of homeless people and consequently I pay particular attention to them. Or maybe Salt Lake City just has it especially bad for some reason. Obviously we need some hard numbers, but as it turns out even when we look at the data the picture is mixed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">First up we have a </span><a href="https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/3031/pit-and-hic-data-since-2007/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">report from HUD</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> which says that the number of homeless, after falling from 650,000 in 2007 to 550,000 in 2016, rose for the first time in 2017. (Good summary </span><a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42248999" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">here from BBC</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.) And apparently much of the gain is in LA because a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">booming</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> economy has increased the cost of housing. Unfortunately the numbers only go back to 2007, so it’s impossible to say if the numbers are still historically high, or if we’re back to the level of homelessness which existed in say the mid 90s…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">On the other side there are reports of homelessness increasing among </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Homeless_children_in_US_2006-10.png" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">children</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and </span><a href="https://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/112_fig1.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">students</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. We could certainly reconcile the decrease mentioned above with these numbers, but only by assuming that children and students are becoming a greater percentage of the total homeless population, while the number of homeless adults is declining, which isn’t exactly great news.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">New York City appears to have the best data on homelessness of any source and here the situation is unambiguous. The rate of homelessness in New York is skyrocketing. There were 12,000 homeless people in NYC in 1984 and </span><a href="http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/state-of-the-homeless-2017/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">now there’s 63,000</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Five times as many, even though 1984 was in the middle of New York’s </span><a href="https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-new-york-became-safe-full-story-13197.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">crime</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and </span><a href="https://qz.com/162289/217-years-of-homicide-in-new-york/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">murder</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> epidemic. Additionally much of that increase has come just since 2012, when we were already three years into the recovery. Now of course when speaking of New York (or anywhere really) you can have an argument about to what extent the leadership at the time was responsible. Many people feel that Bloomberg was horrible for the homeless and De Blasio has done much better. But you’re still looking at a huge increase in the numbers no matter how you slice it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Moving farther afield there are numerous stories about the increasing problems with homelessness from all over the country:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt;">Starting in my own backyard, we have conflicting reports:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Here’s an article saying that Salt Lake City has reached a </span><a href="https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865664486/Critical-mass-How-did-Salt-Lake-get-to-this-state-of-homelessness.html" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">critical mass</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;"> of homeless people and wonders how we got into this state. This was written in 2016.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Here’s another article written 10 months before the first one, claiming that SLC had reduced the population of the chronically homeless </span><a href="https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">by 91 percent</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">. (Certainly that’s not my impression, though the chronically homeless are only 20% of total homeless.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Then we turn to </span><a href="http://www.ktuu.com/content/news/Police-look-at-clearing-up-grids-of-illegal-camps-instead-of-individual-campers-484911311.html" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">an article</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> about Anchorage’s homeless problem. One feels like Anchorage could just buy all their homeless people a bus ticket,<br /> and have that problem solved, who wants to be homeless in Alaska, particularly in the winter?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Next, here’s an article from just this week about a neighborhood in Las Vegas that’s </span><a href="https://www.ktnv.com/news/investigations/neighborhood-overrun-with-homelessness-clark-county-has-stepped-in-10-times" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">overrun by homeless people</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, despite numerous attempts<br /> to deal with the problem.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Speaking of stories from this week I found the following stories about Seattle. First Seattle voters are </span><a href="https://crosscut.com/2018/06/new-poll-shows-seattle-voters-are-fed-homeless-spending" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">fed up with homeless spending,</span></a><br /><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> homelessness in Seattle is </span><a href="http://www.realchangenews.org/2018/06/06/homeless-seattle-each-year-numbers-keep-rising" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">increasing</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> and it has reached a </span><a href="http://www.realchangenews.org/2018/06/06/directors-corner-homelessness-seattle-horrific-tipping-point" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">horrific tipping point</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">. Perhaps voters are fed up with spending because it doesn’t appear<br /> to be doing anything to solve the problem?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Finally there’s the situation in LA. The report I mentioned earlier, about homelessness increasing for the first time in 2017, placed much of the<br /> blame on LA. The number of homeless in LA jumped a </span><a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-count-20170530-story.html" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">staggering 23% in just the last year</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, and this is despite </span><a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-housing-gaps-20180217-story.html" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">billions</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> in taxes which have<br />been earmarked to fight the problem.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt;">After working through all of the above, it would appear that the only real outlier to a picture of increasing homelessness is the HUD report, and even it shows a recent uptick. What would have been really useful is if their data went back farther than 2007. Is the 2016 number of 550,000 still really high from a historical perspective, or is that number actually as low as it has ever been? If so homelessness should be added to Steven Pinker’s list of things that are perpetually improving, but all of the other evidence suggests that this is probably not the case. That whatever else can be said about the number of homeless people in 2016, one can not say that it represents some sort of historical nadir.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt;">This seems particularly borne out by the NYC data, which has the advantage of going all the way back to the end of 1984. Having this additional historic data, allows us to see not only that the current rate is five time the rate back then, but also that the “Great Recession” didn’t seem to have much of an effect on homeless rates. That rather than going up during that time and then falling back down once the economy improve that instead, homeless rates, for some reason have skyrocketed during the last few years even though the economy has been expanding.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt;">Pulling this all together it appears that it’s going to be difficult to say what the true number of homeless people is, and whether that number has recently increased slightly, increased dramatically, or decreased slightly (I see no reason to believe it’s decreased dramatically). That said, it does seem safe to conclude that it’s extremely high. Certainly higher than it’s been for many decades. (I could certainly imagine that it was higher during the Great Depression.) And this is all happening during a time with very low unemployment, an expanding economy, and presumably, more money being spent directly on the problem than at any point in history (and this does include the Great Depression.) How do we explain this apparent paradox?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt;">Honestly I don’t know. Though I can certainly speculate. Here are some possibilities:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt;">Maybe homelessness is inversely correlated with the economy. Homelessness isn’t bad in spite of a good economy it’s bad because of a good economy. As I mentioned with respect to LA, some people think that this is the problem. That robust economic growth has increased the cost of housing. So, perhaps homelessness always increases when the economy is booming because “homes” are more expensive. Certainly this could be a contributing factor, but if you look at the New York numbers, I don’t see any obvious correlation between, for instance, the annual increase in GDP and the homelessness rate.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Alternatively, perhaps this is just the far left end of the advancing spread in inequality. That, yes the economy is doing well, and there are lots of job openings, but that most of the economic gains and most of the jobs have gone to the top 5% and things just keep getting worse for the bottom 5%, which is reflected by the increase in the number of homeless people. That not only are the poor getting poorer, but also, despite more jobs than job seekers, there are no entry level jobs. There is some marginal evidence for a </span><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/want-an-entry-level-job-youll-need-lots-of-experience-1407267498" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">decline in entry level jobs</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">, but as far as I can tell McDonald’s is almost always hiring. At least in my neck of the woods.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Of course, we shouldn’t overlook the opiate crisis. Perhaps the increase in the homeless rate is just an increase in the number of people who are addicted to heroin or meth and consequently can’t hold down a job. Once again I’m sure it’s a factor, but I’m also not sure how big of a factor it is. </span><a href="https://www.michaelshouse.com/drug-abuse/study-homelessness-addiction/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">This page</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;"> claims that only 26% of homeless people abuse a drug other than alcohol. (To be honest that sounds low.) If the number of homeless people had only increased by 26% over the last few years and previously no homeless people were addicted to drugs other than alcohol, then this might make sense, but neither of those things are very likely to be true. The homeless rate in NYC more than doubled from 2006 to today, and I’m reasonably certain that the homeless have have been abusing drugs as long as there have been drugs and homeless people.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt;">Finally, it may just be that people don’t have the support structure they used to. Families are smaller, single mothers are more common. All of this means that there are fewer people to catch you “on the way down.” I saw this process play out with my college roommate. He had bad health and couldn’t keep a job. This was unfortunate, but on top of that he was an orphan with no siblings. He stayed with some friends for awhile, and he stayed with his uncle for awhile, he even got the Mormon Church to pay for his apartment for a while (despite not being Mormon). Somewhat tragically, he actually died of alcoholic hepatitis before actually becoming homeless, but my guess is that at that point it was only a few months away, and even if it had taken longer, I think he surely would have eventually ended up homeless if he hadn’t died. I think if his parents had still been alive, or if he had had any brothers and sisters, the story would have been quite a bit different.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt;">To conclude, I’ll repeat again, I don’t know why homelessness is so high despite an economy that by all appearances is doing great. Of the four things I mentioned, I suspect that inequality, the opiate crisis, and lack of support all contribute, but I don’t think they’re sufficient. Also I’m going to say it doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with the strength of the economy and high housing costs. And I’m willing to predict that if the economy does start tanking, that the situation will only get much worse.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">I am not in any danger of becoming homeless, but if you want to help me avoid that danger anyway, no matter how tiny it is, consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820/posts" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donating</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></div>Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-16877457001940089612018-06-02T11:26:00.000-07:002018-06-02T11:41:59.272-07:00Skin in the Game, Survival & Religion<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I mentioned in the past couple of posts that I was working my way through </span><a href="http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> latest </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Skin-Game-Hidden-Asymmetries-Daily/dp/042528462X" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Skin in the Game</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Well I just finished it. As long time readers of this blog might guess it would be difficult to overstate the impact of Taleb’s ideas on my thinking, and knowing that, you might be surprised it took me this long to finish his new book. I’m not sure why I didn’t read it the second it came out, certainly I had a copy of it on it’s release date, but I guess I already had a queue, and it got placed at the end. But perhaps more importantly, I had read a </span><a href="https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/02/22/nassim-taleb-explains-the-power-of-skin-in-the-game" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">review of it in the Economist</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> which began by claiming that there were two Taleb’s one who was “idiosyncratic and spiky, but with plenty of original things to say” and one who “indulg[es] in bad-tempered spats with other thinkers”. Going on to say that:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A list of the feuds and hobbyhorses [Taleb] pursues in “Skin in the Game” would fill the rest of this review. (His targets include Steven Pinker, subject of the lead review.) The reader’s experience is rather like being trapped in a cab with a cantankerous and over-opinionated driver.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Thus part of my delay was that after reading this, I was a little bit nervous, and of course the question is: Was the Economist correct? Was it “like being trapped in a cab with a cantankerous and over- opinionated driver”? I would say no, at least not for me. For me it was like sitting down to dinner with an old friend who was getting increasingly fed up with the world, but fed up about things we both were dismayed by. Did he seem more cantankerous than usual? Probably, but I’m feeling pretty cantankerous about the world myself, and Taleb seemed appropriately cantankerous, if not maybe a little bit restrained.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That said, if I’m being honest, Skin in the Game didn’t feel quite as tight, or quite as full of “original things” as his previous books, but then again he’s covered a lot of ground already and the original things he has said are some of the most original things I’ve ever read (and also ironically some of the most traditional.) Would I recommend Skin in the Game? Absolutely. If you’ve never read any Taleb should you start with Skin in the Game, absolutely not. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(If you’re going to only read one of his books it’s a toss up between </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">The Black Swan</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Antifragile</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, if you think you might eventually read all his books, then just start at the beginning with </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Markets-Incerto/dp/0812975219" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Fooled by Randomness</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">,) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I would argue that nearly all of the problems people have with Taleb is that it’s so rare these days to see someone that actually has unshakeable principles. I think for most people principles are vague things they don’t think about very much and which in practice do very little to guide their actions. (Assuming they haven’t abandoned principles entirely as something quaint and outdated which might restrict their ability to have unlimited sex.) But for Taleb his principles really do guide his actions and one of his core principles, his motto in fact, is, "If you see fraud and don't shout fraud, you are a fraud". And let’s be honest, there is a lot of fraud out there right now, accordingly Taleb shouts, a lot.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Economist review mentions Steven Pinker as one of Taleb’s many feuds. Given that Pinker wrote the last book I </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/04/steven-pinker-and-fragility-of.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">reviewed in this space</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (though I’m not sure if you can call what I do a review), the same book the Economist mentioned, </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Enlightenment Now</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, you might reasonably expect that I would be able to comment on the feud and whether Pinker is a fraud. Well, if you read that review or my </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/12/reframing-pinkers-better-angels-of-our.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">review of one of his other books</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Better Angels of our Nature</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, you know I have a lot of problems with Pinker. Whether he’s a fraud is a level beyond saying that he’s wrong about things, and as far as I can tell it largely comes about because Taleb thinks Pinker’s math is crap while Pinker thinks Taleb’s math is crap, and my math, while okay, is not so good that I can tell at a glance which one is correct. In fact, I think it would take hours and hours for me to approach knowing who’s math is better, and at the end it might still not know. Rather I’ve decided to take a different approach, one I feel that I borrowed from Taleb to begin with. What if Pinker is right and Taleb is wrong? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Well, then as I said when I reviewed Enlightenment Now, there’s not much for me to do, except defend enlightenment values, which if you’ve read my posts on </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-value-of-free-speech.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">free speech</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/11/freedom-of-religion-in-2016.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">freedom of religion</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> I already do. However if Taleb is right and Pinker is wrong, then we don’t merely need to avoid breaking the current system, we have a system which is already horribly broken and nearly everything anyone is doing is making it worse. All of which is to say, as I have so many times, if Taleb is wrong, no big deal, but if Pinker is wrong it’s a very big deal, thus I take any claims that Pinker is wrong much more seriously.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But that doesn’t exactly answer the question of whether I think Pinker is a fraud. Though insofar as that question hinges on completely understanding the math, I would argue that I’m unqualified to say. Beyond that I guess I would not say that Pinker is a fraud, I would say that he is less objective than he thinks and blinded by a very specific and hard to see set of biases. These include having a bias against religion and a blindness for black swans. They also include, the intellectual echo chamber he inhabits as a member of a particular elite group. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it includes the point I made a couple of posts ago, that he prioritizes happiness over survival. I suppose all of those together might make him a fraud, but I think “fraud” implies a level of hypocrisy I haven’t really seen, though, as I said if he’s calling Taleb’s math bad and it’s his own math that’s bad, then that would probably count.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In any case back to Taleb and the book. Taleb is cantankerous, and my guess is that self-important people who are used to be treated as barely less than divine find him to be nearly intolerable, but from everything I’ve heard he’s very nice to average people, doormen, cab-drivers, etc. My one interaction with him, which somehow I have never mentioned in this space (at least that’s what a search says…) consisted of me sending him a short email asking if I could write a book on the subject of antifragility (guess I still need to do that) and his reply was: “Of course it is an open topic I am flattered.” I understand that’s a single data point, but it’s a good one, also I have no reason to doubt any of the above. And, in the final analysis, it’s much more important from the standpoint of morality to be kind to the average person than it is to be kind to Steven Pinker, or Ben Bernanke, or, especially, Paul Krugman.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I already covered one of the key messages of Skin in the Game in a previous post: survival as a core value. Though I think it’s important enough to reiterate. Taleb (and to a much, much, lesser extent, myself) represents one of the many idealogic camps of the modern world, and you could do worse the defining this camp by that point, that much of the issues of modernity come from ignoring survival in favor of something else. From this there are three possibilities:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We have passed the point where we need to worry about survival. Our intelligence and technological prowess is such that we can focus on other things without worrying about how it will impact our chances of survival.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We may need to worry more about survival, we may be living on the accumulated “survival capital” of those who came before. And maybe certain things (like enlightenment values in Pinker’s case) need some buttressing, but a most there will be a small correction.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We need to worry a lot more about survival. Not only are we living on accumulated “survival capital”, but by the time it’s run out we will have gone so long without focusing on survival that we will have forgotten how to, leading to the possibility of a very large correction.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">My impression is that people like Pinker are strongly in camp 1, with a toe in camp 2 (as I pointed out). While Taleb is pretty solidly in camp 3, or at least in the camp of, we should definitely worry about 3, even if the chance is low because the consequences of it happening would be so great.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If we all should be in the third camp or at least worried about it, how does that play out? What is the rational thing to do? As it turns out that final word, “do” is the key. Taleb says over and over again, not only in this book, but in all his books, that talk is cheap, talking about something does not represent “skin in the game”, it’s easy to say nearly anything, where it counts are someone’s actual actions. Along these lines he asks us to consider the following three maxims:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Judging people by their beliefs is not scientific.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There is no such thing as the “rationality” of a belief, there is rationality of action.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The rationality of an action can be judged only in terms of evolutionary considerations.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That first maxim talks about </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">revealed preferences</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. This is the idea that if you ask someone about something they may say one thing, but if you then observe what they actually do they may end up doing something entirely different. For some reason an example that always comes to my mind when I think about this phenomenon is the story of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_America" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Al Jazeera America</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. I don’t know if you remember this but Al Jazeera the Qatari based news station decided to try and break into the American market. Before doing so they decided to conduct some market research and based on that research they determined that </span><a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/01/13/why_al_jazeera_anglish_was_destined_to_fail.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Americans were starving for sober, “unbiased” hard news coverage.</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Think the opposite of CNN. So that’s what they did and then, as might have been predicted by someone who had met an actual American, they promptly went out of business. This is because, when you ask people what kind of things they like, they imagine the person they want to be, which is someone who watches a three hour in depth documentary on the situation in the Gaza Strip, but when they actually get home from a long day at work, what they really want is an update on the Kardashians. Which is why Kim Kardashian has a </span><a href="http://time.com/money/4950313/kardashian-net-worth/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">net worth of $175 million</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and Al Jazeera America is out of business.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The second maxim is a point I’ve made on several occasions, though perhaps in a slightly different form. The best example was my post on </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/12/review-of-rationality-ai-to-zombies.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">religion as a framework as part of my review of Rationality: AI to Zombies</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. In that post I explained that it doesn’t matter if your philosophy has considered all possibilities, if it’s completely rational, and basically the best thing since sliced bread. If no one can understand it, let alone act in the matter it recommends, then it’s not going to, in the end, accomplish much good. I pointed out that this was a particular problem with modern rationality. Religion says things like love one another, if you screw up, you can repent, etc. Things anyone can understand. Rationality says things like, you need to win and the best example of that is to one-box the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Newcomb problem</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, or that the </span><a href="http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">second virtue is relinquishment</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Taleb instead approaches this same issue from the idea of revealed preferences. In other words, when looking at people who claim to be rational it’s far more important to look at what they do, than what they say. This is particularly the case if rationality is tied to survival. To return to my recent post on anti-natalism, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Benatar" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">David Benatar</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> may think that once you’ve decided that there is zero utility to future happiness then it’s rational to wish for the instantaneous extinction of all human life, but for anyone who ties rationality to survival, or as Taleb puts it, to “evolutionary considerations”, would say that’s the least rational thing ever, and interestingly enough, the vast majority of people even with no training in rationality, would agree. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Which takes us to the third maxim, that rationality should be judged in terms of “evolutionary considerations”. I have thus far been using survival and “evolutionary considerations” almost interchangeably, though there are obviously some differences, for example the continued survival of someone who’s past the point where they can reproduce has a different value than the continued survival of someone who is still reproducing if you’re just considering things from an evolutionary perspective, which is to say not all survival is equal. (Taleb has an entire hierarchy in the book, which I don’t have time to get into.) But I don’t think these small differences change the argument to any great extent.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The only possible argument against rationality being judged based on a standard of evolutionary considerations is if evolutionary considerations no longer apply. This can only the case if:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We decide it’s better to not exist at all (antinatalism).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We decide that evolution no longer has any bearing on our continued existence, That we are post-evolutionary, for example.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I think I have talked about the problems of antinatalism enough. (At a minimum I can’t imagine further discussion would change anybody's mind on the subject.) Which just leaves possibility number two. As I do so often, let’s for the moment assume that it’s true. That evolutionary pressure no longer applies to humans. This is a pretty bold claim to make, particularly given the fact that at its most basic evolution is basically tautological. But even if we ignore that, being post evolution would carry all manner of second order effects, most of which would be difficult to predict, and many of which would be very bad. But just look at it from a high level view, life has been engaged in the “game” of evolution for billions of years. If we assume that this game no longer applies to us at the macro level, then we’re saying that the game has changed, or possibly gone away entirely. Meaning that we have this entire bundle of skills, attitudes, biases, and compulsions which have suddenly become entirely pointless. I can’t imagine this being anything other than catastrophic. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As an analogy imagine the NBA finals, which started this week. Now imagine that the Cavaliers and the Warriors showed up to the Oracle Arena on Thursday to find out that instead of playing basketball, they were playing water polo. Not only would it be a ridiculous spectacle, but it’s not inconceivable that someone would die. (Are there any NBA players who don’t know how to swim?) But even if there weren’t any fatalities you would certainly expect lots of very strange and unexpected things to happen. I would imagine that post evolution humanity would be in very similar position. As a species we are highly trained in one sort of game, and switching that around would lead to lots of flailing around at a minimum, and it just might result in death. So far I think we’ve avoided an increase in deaths, but I can’t help but notice a lot of flailing around currently. I certainly hope that I’m wrong about the cause, that we have not already moved into some world in which the rules of evolution changed, because if we have, I think we’ve got a pretty rough transition ahead of us. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I hope the rules of the game have not changed, that we’ve just gotten really good at playing it. That survival is important, but we’re just so smart that it we don’t have to pay attention to it anymore, or to extend the metaphor, we may have a bad season or two, but once we start re-emphasizing the fundamentals we’ll be right back on top. If, on the other hand, technological progress has led us to a completely different game than certain of the most basic qualities will transfer (overall fitness for example), but many things are going to have to be learned from scratch, particularly if we don’t know how to swim. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Of course there is the option that the game has ended, not changed. But I’m not sure that’s any better. Returning to our metaphor, can you imagine the reaction of all the players and fans if they showed up at the arena to find out that there were going to be no finals, or worse yet that basketball was no longer a game anyone played? Of course that may be stretching the metaphor too much, the key point is that if evolution is still happening than survival is still important, and if it’s not still happening we may have bigger problems. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">After all of this we are left with four possibilities:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Survival isn’t important at all. We should be devoting all of our attention to some other value, like happiness.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Survival is important, but technology has taken us past the point where it needs to be the most important value, i.e. we have conquered the old challenges to survival and no new ones have arisen to take their place.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Survival continues to be just as important as it always has but technology has caused the rules to change (global warming and nukes vs. famine and disease).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Survival is and always has been the most important value, and to the extent that we’ve started to minimize things that have traditionally helped us survive, that’s bad.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Number one is the example of the game being entirely over, and I don’t think it’s as good a thing as people might imagine, and to this add all of the other problems I’ve mentioned with an exclusive focus on just happiness.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Number two is where Pinker and similar individuals are. Personally, I disagree strongly that no new challenges have arisen. And will once again reiterate that deprioritizing survival is not something we can afford to be wrong about.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Number three is the example of basketball being replaced by water polo, and I worry that if this is what’s happening that no one is paying any attention to it. That those in the best position to do something, all feel like we’re actually in situation number two.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As far as number four, It would be nice if this were the case, that it’s the same game it’s always been we just need to reemphasize the fundamentals. Unfortunately there seems to be even less attention being paid to this than to possibility number three. Of course I’m talking about religion, and this takes us to the final topic from Skin in the Game I want to cover.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Taleb says this about religion:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It is therefore my opinion that religion exists to enforce tail risk management across generations as its binary and unconditional rules are easy to teach and enforce. We have survived in spite of tail risks; our survival cannot be that random.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We’re out of space to argue over whether this is actually how religion works, and in any case I’ve made the argument </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/07/taboos-and-antifragility.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">many times before</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. This quote is important for several reasons beyond that:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1- It was obvious that this argument followed from all of Taleb’s previous books, but I don’t think he ever made the point as clearly as he did in Skin in the Game.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2- The point about “easy to teach and enforce”, is huge, and something that 99% of people miss when they talk about standards for human behavior. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">3- As he points out the alternative to viewing religion as a tool of survival is to view survival and religion as totally random, which doesn’t make any sense at all. And, of course, some people go even farther towards viewing religion as actively harmful which makes even less sense.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In conclusion, if you haven’t you should definitely read Taleb, if you have read some Taleb, you should definitely read this book. And if you take nothing else away, remember that survival is important and having skin in the game is necessary because it assists with survival. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It may be that many of the things that helped us to survive up until this point, like skin in the game and religion are no longer valid, because the rules have changed, but I suspect there’s some overlap. I suspect that being entirely in shape to play basketball, makes water polo easier. And that assuming we can let ourselves get fat and out of shape (i.e. abandon religion) because the game is changing or ending, is actually the worst possible strategy of all.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Donating to this blog is a very minor example of skin in the game, and we just heard that having skin in the game is good, therefore donating to this blog is good. Check and Mate!</span></div>
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Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-32728156260908228772018-05-26T09:40:00.000-07:002018-05-26T09:41:55.245-07:00Religion vs. Atheism vs. Transhumanism vs. Apathy<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Every single person alive today makes a choice about how to live their life, specifically whether to believe in God and an existence beyond this one or not. Though, rather than being two choices I think it’s best to think of there being four possible choices.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first choice, and still by far the most common, though declining every year, is to identify with a religious ideology. Of course there are various levels of religious belief and adherence, but currently </span><a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2012/dec/23/84-percent-world-population-has-faith-third-are-ch/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">84% of people worldwide</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> identify as a member of a religion. That sounds high, but it is down from the 99-100% it was </span><a href="http://time.com/4283975/god-belief-religion-americans/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">just 50 years ago</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. As far as an existence beyond this one, it is assumed that people in this group hope that their religious belief will provide them with that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The second choice is the choice of the traditional atheist, Bertrand Russell </span><a href="https://users.drew.edu/jlenz/br-free-mans-worship.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">described it thusly</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Russell’s case is unambiguous, and one I agree with, if you’re going to reject religion and embrace atheism, then this is what you have to confront, but not every traditional atheist agrees with Russell’s point about “unyielding despair”. I believe I’ve mentioned Carl Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan before in this space. Ann believed just as much as Bertrand Russell in the finality of death. But she </span><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ann_Druyan" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">fell in a different camp</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful...</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In any case regardless of whether they view the world with despair or wonder, the traditional atheist acknowledges both that death is unavoidable, and also that there is nothing beyond it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The third choice is one that has only lately come on the scene, the choice of transhumanism. Most of these people (though not all, thus my fascination with the </span><a href="http://transfigurism.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Mormon Transhumanist Association</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">) are also atheists, but rather than reacting to the prospect of death with despair like Russell, or just being grateful for the extreme improbability of the life they did get, the transhumanists desire immortality without involving God (again, with the notable exception of the MTA.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I suppose you could argue that, were they to achieve immortality, they would not be entering into an existence separate from this one. That rather they are extending the existence we already have. This may be technically true, but for tens of thousands of years (at least) human existence has involved death, creating an existence without death should surely count as something different, even if technically it may look very similar. And of course this assumes that transhumanism takes the form of simple immortality and doesn’t involve things like transferring consciousness to one of </span><a href="https://ageofem.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Robin Hanson’s EMs</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, or something even more futuristic. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The fourth choice is the choice of apathy and inaction. All the people who aren’t declared atheists (or agnostics) or transhumanists, or who are religious, but other than attending church once to be baptized, have never attended since. Depending on how you define this group it’s possible it’s even bigger than the first group, at least in America and Europe. I’m probably not the best person to talk about this group because, despite their numbers, these people honestly baffle me. I understand the appeal of dealing with what’s right in front of you. Of enjoying what you have without thinking too much about what does or doesn’t happen when you die, which is anyway decades away. But at some point you have to grapple with it, don’t you? Perhaps this is just a difference in </span><a href="http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/belief-in-god/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">levels of belief between the old and the young</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> or to put it another way, those who are about to die and those who are a long way from death, though I don’t think it’s as simple as that. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In any event why do I bring these choices up? As long time readers will know, this isn’t the first time, and if I haven’t made any impact on groups two through four already, what makes me think it will be different this time?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Very likely it won’t be, but I intend to persist anyway, in part because I’m hoping that this blog will become a resource for Mormon apologetics and more broadly Christian apologetics. Though to be clear, I’m not sure how good of a job I’m doing. In part, I’m sure it’s because the apologetics I do engage in are not always easy to recognize as such. If you’re trying to increase people’s engagement with religion, there are a couple of well-trod paths, and my stuff has a tendency to fall into the no-man’s land between those two paths.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">On the one hand, you can talk about spiritual experiences, relate faith promoting stories and discuss people whose lives have been changed through their religious belief, or through Jesus Christ or through reading the Book of Mormon.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">On the other hand, there are those apologetics who spend most of their time rebutting specific arguments, explaining historical events in a way which is favorable to the church or answering pointed criticism. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Given that I do almost none of the former and very little of the latter I don’t think my blog is what most people expect. If you were being charitable you could say I’m working at a higher level, but it might be more accurate to say I’m just esoteric. That said, I do aspire to comment on things from a high level view, to show how religion is integral to civilization, how the latest ideology is not as revolutionary as people think, how current philosophy and ideology has not left religion behind, but only made it more important, and so on. In an effort to be less esoteric, in this post I want to get into the nuts and bolts, numbers and figures that really show how beneficial religion is even if we set aside the promise of potential salvation offered by most religions. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m going to take much of what I say from a talk given at the 2017 Fair Mormon Conference, by Dan Peterson, titled </span><a href="https://www.fairmormon.org/conference/august-2017/what-difference-does-it-make" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">What Difference Does It Make?</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> I’ve already stolen the Russell quote from the speech, and as I say so often you should read the entire thing, or possibly better yet, in this case, you can </span><a href="https://www.fairmormon.org/blog/2018/03/19/fairmormon-conference-podcast-4-daniel-peterson-difference-make" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">listen to it</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Also before I get into things, as I mentioned in the last post I’ve been reading </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Skin-Game-Hidden-Asymmetries-Daily/dp/042528462X" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Skin in the Game</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> by Taleb, and he makes the very valid point that not all religions would be considered religions in the classic “freedom of religion” sense, which is to say not all religions accept the division between church and state. Meaning that, going forward, I’m going to be talking about benefits of religion in the American Judeo-Christian context, and these benefits may not exist outside of the context. It’s certainly possible that the points I’m about to make apply to other religions in other places, but Peterson’s data all comes from America and Europe.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">With that out of the way, as I said at the beginning, everyone is making a choice between one of four options (or perhaps not choosing in the case of option 4) and the position that Peterson champions is that the first option is the best choice even without considering whether it leads to some sort of existence after this one. To begin with he argues that it improves a person’s health, particularly their mental health. And of course the irony is that so many people in groups 2-4 actually make the opposite argument, that religion is something of a mental illness. (Peterson offers up quotes from both Dawkins and Sam Harris in support of this.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s easy to make that claim, and I’m sure it plays well with the sort of people who like Dawkins and Harris, but is there any truth to it? Here we turn to Peterson:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Harold Koenig, a psychiatrist on the faculty of Duke University, has established himself as a premier authority in this area. He and his collaborators argue that religious involvement is correlated with better mental health in the areas of depression, substance abuse and suicide, and, somewhat less certainly, with better results in the treatment of stress-related disorders and dementia.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Moreover…Tyler VanderWeele, professor of epidemiology at Harvard University…confirms the links that previous scientific investigation had identified between attendance at religious services and enhanced health. Regular attendance is associated, for example, with “a roughly 30 percent reduction in mortality over 16 years of follow-up; a five-fold reduction in the likelihood of suicide; and a 30 percent reduction in the incidence of depression”...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Regular participation in communal religious worship [also] appears to be associated with “greater likelihood of healthy social relationships and stable marriages; an increased sense of meaning in life; higher life satisfaction; an expansion of one’s social network; and more charitable giving, volunteering, and civic engagement,” says VanderWeele.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One might perhaps conclude that it’s the social support afforded by religious participation that confers such benefits. VanderWeele, however, says that social support accounts for only about 20-30 percent of the measured results. The self-discipline encouraged by religious faith and the optimistic worldview that it supports also appear to be important contributing factors to physical health and longevity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The “five-fold reduction in the likelihood of suicide” is particularly interesting. First, because the effect is so large. Second, because, just in the last few days I’ve seen several articles reporting that the rate of hospitalization for attempted suicide and suicidal ideation has more than </span><a href="https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/child-teen-suicide-attempts-more-than-double-in-7-years-0521181" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">doubled among teens and children</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and third because Peterson opened his talk with a story of someone who committed suicide after leaving the Church, seemingly because of his anger at the Church for, what he perceived to be, its many lies. To say that this particular individual would still be alive if he had never left the Church, is both callous and unwarranted, since it’s impossible to say what would happen with any given individual, but if VanderWeele’s claims are to be believed, and we instead look at the aggregate, there might be thousands of people if not more who would be alive today if they had been active in a religion.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Peterson goes on to quote Dr. Andrew Sims, former president of the United Kingdom’s Royal College of Psychiatrists and professor of psychiatry at the University of Leeds:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The advantageous effect of religious belief and spirituality on mental and physical health is one of the best-kept secrets in psychiatry, and medicine generally...If the findings of the huge volume of research on this topic had gone in the opposite direction and it had been found that religion damages your mental health, it would have been front-page news in every newspaper in the land! Churches are almost the only element in society to have offered considerate, caring, long-lasting and self-sacrificing support to the mentally ill… [which is one of the reasons why] religious involvement results in a better outcome from a range of illnesses, both mental and physical.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">At this point you may want to argue that there are other confounders that were missed by VanderWeele and Sims, and maybe there are, but I think Sims makes an excellent point that if the research (a “huge volume” recall) had gone in the opposite direction it would have been front-page news, and my guess is that very little attention would have been paid to possible confounders in that case. Instead it’s mostly ignored, and my sense is that such research is becoming rarer. Possibly this is because the conclusions are solid enough to not require further support. More likely it’s because in this day and age no one wants to engage in the study of religion at all, particularly if that study is going to force them to arrive at a conclusion they don’t like. If you still have your doubts Peterson goes on to further summarize Sims’ findings:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the majority of scientific studies...religious involvement correlates with enhanced well-being, happiness and life-satisfaction; greater hope and optimism, even when facing serious diseases, such as breast cancer; a stronger sense of purpose and meaning in life; higher self-esteem; better responses to bereavement; greater social support; less loneliness; lower rates of depression and faster recovery from depression; reduced rates of suicide; decreased anxiety; better coping with stress; less psychosis and fewer psychotic tendencies; lower rates of alcohol and drug abuse; less delinquency and criminal activity; and greater marital stability and satisfaction.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Indeed, correlations between religious faith and improved well-being “typically equal or exceed correlations between well-being and other psychosocial variables, such as social support.” And, he adds, this substantial assertion is “comprehensively attested to by a large amount of evidence.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“The nagging question we are left with is, why is this important information” — “epidemiological medicine’s best-kept secret,” [Sims] calls it — “not better known?”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“If it were anything other than religious belief or spirituality resulting in such beneficial outcomes for health, the media would trumpet it and governments and health care organizations would be rushing to implement its practice.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Here I diverge somewhat from Sims and Peterson, I don’t know that health care organizations and governments could successfully duplicate the positive benefits of religion. In particular, it doesn’t seem that forcing someone to join a religion probably gives the same benefits as someone voluntarily joining a religion, or staying in the religion of their parents. But even if these benefits can’t easily be duplicated, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be done. To begin with, these results certainly point to a policy of not mocking the people who are religious. Modern atheists are an obvious target for this policy, but I think it extends to a lot of the modern left in general. Recall Obama’s </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/04/obama-on-small-town-pa-clinging-to-religion-guns-xenophobia-007737" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">statement</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> about bitter people who cling to their religion, and here’s a </span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/democrats-have-a-religion-problem/510761/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">whole column</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> in “The Atlantic” talking about the Democrats religion problem.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I think the quotes also strongly argue against policies which are anti-religious. Unlike some people I don’t think there’s a “War on Christians”, but neither do I think that the current political environment is particularly friendly to Christians at the moment either. Just today I </span><a href="http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2018/may/at-risk-kids-suffer-needlessly-from-phillys-ban-on-faith-based-adoption-foster-care-nbsp" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">read</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> that the city of Philadelphia had ended its association with two Christian foster care and adoption organizations because they won’t place kids with gay parents. I might be sympathetic to the city if these were the only organizations in the city providing this sort of service, or if there was no need for additional help with foster care and adoption, or if these organizations did not offer referrals to other organizations who do work with same sex couples. But none of those conditions is true. And in fact at the same time this was happening Philadelphia </span><a href="https://twitter.com/PhiladelphiaGov/status/971853160359825408" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">tweeted</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> about the urgent need for foster parents. I understand this is just one story, and I’ve already talked at some length about </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/11/freedom-of-religion-in-2016.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">freedom of religion</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> in another post, so I’ll leave it there.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I find that I am most of the way through this post and I’ve only covered the first of several points Peterson makes about the value of religion. Perhaps I’ll cover the others in a future post, but for now I need to talk about group three, the transhumanists. While, Peterson did an excellent job of covering groups one and two (and to a certain extent to group four) he understandably didn’t spend any time talking about transhumanism. Therefore this is one area where I thought I might be able to add something to the discussion.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To begin with, one of the advantages of religion is that it seems to work even for the very poorest and most disadvantaged people. In fact, it may be that among those people is precisely where it’s the most useful, particularly when compared with other “interventions”. In contrast, the transhumanist ideology is almost entirely restricted to affluent first worlders with a predilection for technology. Now it is possible that combining the two gives the best outcome of all, which is the entire point of the MTA, but it is also possible that the combination results in something which abandons the caution of either in favor of something that is far too optimistic and utopian. Regardless, at the moment the idea of combining the two has an influence far too small to make much of an impact either way. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If we consider the route to “salvation” provided by transhumanism on its own it has the advantage of potentially providing immortality and eternal happiness even if there should turn out to be no God, this is counterbalanced by the disadvantage I already mentioned of, at least initially, only being available to a select few. Also it’s unclear if the transhumanist ideology would create any of the advantages I mentioned above as far as mental and physical health. Unless we assume that all the benefits of religion come because of its promised immortality, which I strongly doubt, transhumanism is unlikely to act as a substitute. But maybe I’m wrong, there is unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, no data comparing outcomes between the religious and the transhumanists. Also to be fair the Effective Altruism movement is pretty big in that space, and it has the very religious sounding rule of giving 10% of your income to charity. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Also, the reason I talk about transhumanists so much is not because I dislike them, but because, they appear to be doing the best they can in the absence of religion. That said, I think they overstate the advantages (immortality is going to be ridiculously difficult, and yet it’s child’s play compared to ensuring eternal happiness) and understate the disadvantages, particularly the small number of people for whom it has any effect at all. And it is a small number, I mentioned at the beginning that the number of religious people in the world has fallen from essentially 100% to around 84%. As the number of religious individuals has decreased every other category I mentioned above has increased, though I would argue that the biggest increase has not been among atheists and transhumanists, but among category 4, the apathetic and inactive. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To conclude, let’s for the moment imagine that being an atheist or a transhumanist is a good thing, that somehow it replaces all of the benefits of religion with something as good or better. I very much doubt this is the case, but for the sake of argument let’s assume that it is. We still have the problem that the vast majority of people have not left religion for atheism and transhumanism. The vast majority of people have left religion for nothing. Thus we have not replaced believers, with all the benefits attached, with intellectually courageous atheists, or futuristic transhumanists, but with a vast and increasing mass of shallow, materialistic, status seeking people who have lost the benefits of religion without any compensation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I repeat again, the harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Is there any benefit to </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> to a religiously themed blog? Maybe… There’s only one way to be sure.</span></div>
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Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-83817158317393747002018-05-19T12:14:00.001-07:002018-05-19T12:19:26.863-07:00Antinatalism and Happiness vs. Survival<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There are many people who claim that in the future everything will be better. As an example of this I will point out Steven Pinker’s, </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Enlightenment Now</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, which I </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/04/steven-pinker-and-fragility-of.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">just covered</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and which is most notable for having lots of graphs which all go up. As you may recall, Pinker (along with many others) claim that we’ve mostly eliminated war and famine, and that we’ll soon eliminate disease. Leaving death as the only remaining horseman of the apocalypse. But if we go farther and bring transhumanists into the discussion, then even death will shortly be eliminated through things like cryonics, brain-uploading and cool cyborg enhancements.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Despite these upbeat predictions of a brilliant future where humanity will either be gods, or at a bare minimum live in a super awesome society, (as best as I can tell you should picture a place like Norway only even better) anytime someone writes about the future, they generally end up creating something strongly dystopian. Now I have said before this is more a reflection of the art of a good story, and to a lesser extent Tolstoy’s observation that, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, than any sort of actual divination. Accordingly it would be misguided to use the existence of science fiction dystopias as proof that actual dystopias are inevitable. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That said, Tolstoy did make a good point in what has come to be known as the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Anna Karenina Principle</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. For things to go the way you want everything has to go right. Thus happy families are alike because they all have the same set of things going well. On the other hand any number of different things could be causing the unhappiness of an unhappy family. In the same way, there are any number of things that could go wrong which would derail the predictions of Pinker and the transhumanists, and, on the other hand, everything has to go right for those predictions to come to pass. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">However, all of this is tangential to my real point. As I said, there are numerous science fiction dystopias, and along with that, for the most part, there is widespread consensus that we should do what we can to avoid these dystopias, however unlikely they might be. I said “for the most part”, I imagine that there are some transhumanists who would prefer the world of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Neuromancer</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> or </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series)" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Altered Carbon</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> to the current world. Which is not to say they wouldn’t tweak some things if they had the chance. But this is not the sort of thing which concerns me. What concerns me is that there is at least one dystopia out there, which is actually viewed as a utopia by some. What is this dystopia and who are these people? The dystopia is </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Men" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Children of Men</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> by P.D. James and the people are </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">antinatalists</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, people who are opposed to humans reproducing.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is one of those posts where everything seems to be pointed in the same direction. To begin with over a month ago one my readers sent me a </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uuI2bonis0&t=9s" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">video</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> about antinatalists which started me thinking about the subject. Second, one of the things which I failed to cover when I was talking about Pinker’s book, is his lack of any discussion about the importance of reproduction and survival, which I feel is one of the major weaknesses of the book. Finally there’s </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/05/should-all-incels-be-killed-immediately.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">last week’s discussion</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> of incels, which, regardless of your personal feelings on the movement itself, touches on this issue as well. And then of course there are </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/04/children-overpopulation-and-tommy-boy.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">previous</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-depressing-limitations-of-salvation.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">posts</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> in this space which touch on the issue. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Let’s start with the video I got sent. It’s a presentation by </span><a href="http://publish.ucc.ie/researchprofiles/D003/tmoore" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Dr. Tom Moore of University College Cork, Ireland</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> where he discusses </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Benatar" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">David Benatar’s</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> book </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Better-Never-Have-Been-Existence/dp/0199549265/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. His discussion starts with a skeptical air (probably reflecting the attitudes of his audience) before ultimately coming to the conclusion that despite antinatalism appearing ridiculous on its face, that there are no successful counter arguments to Benatar’s version of it (at least not that he’s aware of.) As you might gather I am not an antinatalist, so either I must have taken that position on faith (which is not the worst thing in the world) or I must believe that I have a successful counterargument. In the end it’s a little bit of both, but I assume my readers are more interested in a successful counter argument. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Obviously, it would be inappropriate to launch into a counter argument without first presenting the argument itself. To begin with antinatalism can be divided into three sub-ideologies:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Antinatalism as a solution to overpopulation, and as a tool in the prevention of a Malthusian catastrophe. I.e. being alive is good, but better if it’s limited to a “privileged” few.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Humans are bad, they ruin everything and “things” would be better, particularly for other species if humans weren’t here. I.e. Being alive is bad, but not for humans, for everything else.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Being alive is so bad that it’s better to have never lived at all. I.e. Suffering sucks, and that’s what being alive is all about.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first two positions are easy to understand even for those people who don’t agree with them. It’s the third that Benatar advocates for, and which requires some explanation. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For Benatar there are two possibilities, being born and not being born. If someone is born they experience some happiness and some suffering. If the happiness is greater than the suffering then being alive was a good thing. On the other hand if someone isn’t born, they can’t experience any suffering. We have prevented it. And the prevention of suffering is obviously a moral good. Of course we have also prevented them from experiencing happiness, which most people would count as a bad thing. But Benatar argues that non-existent individuals cannot have regrets, accordingly rather than counting the missing happiness as a bad thing, we should assign it a value of zero. Something that is neither good nor bad. To put it another way no one imagines the anger of the children they didn’t have (well actually I know some religious people who do, but I think they’re an edge case.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What this means is that unless the net happiness of those who are alive completely swamps the prevented suffering of those who were never born (which will be difficult, since the number of people who could have been born but have not could be in the trillions) then it would be better for all of humanity to go extinct. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is the argument Dr. Moore found so compelling, and I agree, if you accept all of the assumptions, the logic is essentially irrefutable. But should we accept all of the assumptions? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The most critical assumption in this chain of logic is that the happiness of those who are unborn have zero value. That if, say for instance, Shakespeare had never been born that it wouldn’t have been a loss to humanity, because we would never know what we were missing. I might grant Benatar’s point, but only when evaluating one life at a time. As productive and consequential as Shakespeare was we still probably wouldn’t notice the space where he would have been. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There are in fact very few individuals whose lack would be noticeable, even if we could compare the reality in which they were present against the reality in which they are not. Particularly on a time scale of hundreds or thousands of years. Even without Shakespeare we would still have Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, and Sir Walter Raleigh, and later Keats, and Byron and Shelley. But what if we eliminated England in its entirety? Is it possible we might notice a lack then? That we might decide that however bad life is, that this was not a trade worth making? Maybe, hard to say. And some anti-colonists might argue that the world in fact would be better without the English. But I am positive that they in turn would be appalled if I suggested that we wipe out all Africans. Why is that? Perhaps they just don’t understand Benatar’s iron-clad logic. Or perhaps there’s something else going on, if despite all the suffering they claim for the continent and its inhabitants and those who were carried away as slaves, they still wouldn’t want Africa to cease to exist.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But Benatar doesn’t just want to eliminate all the English or all the Africans, he wants to eliminate everyone. I think at this point it’s hard to argue that we would be oblivious to the positive contributions of all those who would not be born under this plan. It may be hard to model the contributions of the sibling you might have had, but didn’t. It’s a lot less difficult to model the contributions of all of humanity. In other words Benatar isn’t merely assigning a value of zero to one hypothetical unborn life. He’s assigning a value of zero to all of the happiness, art, science and other achievements for all of humanity from the point of extinction forward.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That phrase, “point of extinction” brings us to another interesting inflection in Benatar’s ideology, at least as it was explained by Moore (I may eventually read Benatar’s book, but you can imagine why it’s not very high on my list.) Given that Benatar views human extinction as a way of reducing suffering, he doesn’t want to do anything to cause any more suffering even if it’s in furtherance of his ideology. What this means is that he doesn’t advocate suicide (because of the suffering it causes to those around you). Nor does he advocate homicide, forcible controls on reproduction or even euthanasia. Additionally, any anticipation of the extinction would also cause suffering as well. Meaning that Benatar’s ideal solution would be an instantaneous extinction which was completely unanticipated.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As regular readers know I have my disagreements with Eliezer Yudkowsky, but on this issue he made an excellent observation. There are people who would be horrified at the murder of a single individual, who would never in a million years consider killing someone, but yet, when you wrap it up in enough philosophy will calmly contemplate, and even advocate the murder of everyone who’s currently alive or who ever will live. In Benatar’s case the only condition is that it needs to be sudden and painless. But let’s not overlook the fact that he advocates murdering </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">everyone.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Benatar’s argument has one further assumption, and this is an assumption which is made by Pinker as well. They assume that happiness/pleasure/lack of suffering is the thing we want to be optimizing for. And as long as I’m mentioning Yudkowsky, he had something interesting to say on this subject as well. When talking about rationality he made the point that people can get so caught up with the idea of what is or isn’t rational, that they overlook the key thing, which isn’t rationality for rationality’s sake, but overall success, or as he phrases it: </span><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ARtkT3EYox3THYjF/rationality-is-systematized-winning" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Winning</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Which is to say, even if by some logic, Benatar is being completely rational, the extinction of all of humanity is probably not winning. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As I said a lot of this comes back to whether or not happiness/pleasure/reduction of suffering is our terminal value. If it’s not, then what is? I’m half way through </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Skin-Game-Hidden-Asymmetries-Daily/dp/042528462X" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Skin in the Game</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (post coming soon) and he speaks to this issue and how it connects to rationality on multiple occasions:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Reality doesn't care about winning arguments; survival is what matters. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What is rational, is what allows the collective--entities meant to live for a long time--to survive. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Rationality does not depend on explicit verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, what avoids ruin.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Along with Taleb, my argument would be that survival should be our core value, and by mentioning survival, we can no longer avoid the elephant in the room: evolution and Darwinian natural selection. As far as I can tell every, even somewhat rational, antinatalist admits that our survival instinct is far too strong for voluntary extinction to work, which leaves only murder (which Benatar at least opposes) or some sort of instantaneous extinction, which appears to be impractical. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">From a certain point of view, this is the best counter-argument of all, “It’s absolutely impossible.” And for my own part it adequately answers the second form of antinatalism (Humans ruin everything). And we’ve already covered the third form of antinatalism, but what about the first form of antinatalism, avoiding the Malthusian catastrophe? This is where, I would argue, all of the various threads come together. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As I pointed out when I originally brought it up, the first kind of antinatalists believe that life is grand, but that it should be reserved for a select few. As it turns out there’s a logical proof concerning this as well, though it comes to the exact opposite conclusion. It’s called the </span><a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Repugnant Conclusion</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and while there’s a fair amount going on with it, in essence, it says that if everyone is experiencing at least some amount of net happiness, that maximizing happiness requires as many people as possible. I don’t really have strong feelings one way or the other on the Repugnant Conclusion as a guide to action (though it does support the religious injunction to </span><a href="https://www.lds.org/manual/the-eternal-family-teacher-manual/lesson-17-the-commandment-to-multiply-and-replenish-the-earth?lang=eng" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">multiply and replenish the earth</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">). Rather, I bring it up at this point for three reasons:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1- It’s a compelling and logical counter-argument of the sort that Moore said he was unable to find. And it directly speaks to the first form of antinatalism.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2- However “repugnant” this conclusion is, I can’t imagine anyone arguing that it’s more repugnant than the extinction of all of humanity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">3- The first form of antinatalism at least pays some attention to the issue of survival.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">At this point the common thread, from Benatar to the Repugnant conclusion, up to and including even Pinker, is a debate over whether happiness or survival should be our guiding value. On the one side, to use the technical term, Pinker and Benatar and Dr. Moore, are all hedonists. Now I don’t know about you, but for me, and I think most people, hedonism has a negative connotation. One I think it’s earned. I know there are hedonists who will argue that their philosophy is more nuanced and complex that just doing whatever is the most pleasurable in any given moment. And I’m sure they’re correct, but I don’t think it matters.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m not sure what to call those people on the other side of the hedonists. Maybe the survivalists? But on this side, in addition to myself, and Taleb, you have all humanity, and indeed all life back to the beginning. It’s only in the world of the last few decades, that one could argue that happiness is so good, or suffering so bad, that it should override survival.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To put it another way, there are really only two logical positions. You can either think being alive is preventing happiness (by causing suffering) in which case you’re allied with Benatar, or you can think being alive is a necessary precondition for happiness. I don’t think it’s a stretch to argue that the vast majority of people reject the first position almost as soon as they hear it, and if not I’ve provided several counter arguments. Leaving only the second position, being alive is necessary to being happy. In which case survival precedes and takes priority over happiness, by virtue of the obvious: you can’t be happy if you don’t exist.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If it’s down to a battle between happiness and survival, what does that mean? At this point maybe you’re convinced that survival should be the ultimate value or maybe you’re not. But for the moment let’s move past that and assume that it is. I mean sure “The Children of Men” is a bleak future, and you may still have a hard time imagining that there are people pushing for just that future, but we’re surely not in any danger of that, right? Well I definitely hope not, but if we do avoid it it won’t be because we’ve taken any precautions against it. In fact much of what Pinker and people like him find so great about modernity are precisely those things which nibble away at our chances for survival. And this is a problem.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Why is it a problem? Well, the essential danger of having incorrect priorities is that we are getting better and better at pursuing our priorities. With this in mind the question becomes how much does the pursuit of happiness overlap with ensuring that we survive? I’m becoming increasingly convinced that they don’t overlap at all. Thus prioritizing happiness has nothing to do with prioritizing survival.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m reminded of this everytime I see an article by someone explaining that people without kids are </span><a href="https://www.womenshealthmag.com/life/a19977766/childless-people-happier-in-us/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">way happier</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> than people with kids. How is it that we’ve reached a point where our urge to survive is so weak that the combined strength of all of our selfish genes put together is not enough to outweigh the pursuit of slightly increased happiness? Even if there is some overlap between survival and happiness, to the extent that they diverge (and as this example shows, they don’t even have to diverge by very much) survival is going to increasingly be left behind, as we put more and more effort into pure happiness and less and less effort into pure survival.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I would argue that the accumulated survival efforts of all those who have gone before us have created a surplus which masks the extent of the problem. In reality, if you were to take a snapshot of modern society, say take 1000 individuals, and remove them from the rest of civilization, your only conclusion would be that they were in a lot of trouble. If you were to apply the same standard you use for </span><a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/6927330/Top-10-most-endangered-species-in-the-world.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">pandas, tigers and mountain gorillas</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> you would definitely classify them as endangered, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">not</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> because of their numbers. You would be way more concerned about their below replacement birth rate. The significant and increasing minority who don’t even engage in sexual activity that results in procreation. And the fact that when children are conceived there’s a non-trivial chance that the child will be aborted in-utero. You might even conclude, that somehow, evolution has stopped working with this species. And yet everything I just listed is considered progress by people like Steven Pinker. It is progress towards some definition of happiness. It is not progress towards ensuring our survival.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The point I’m trying to get at is that when taken to its logical conclusion, prioritizing happiness over survival leads to things like Benatar’s antinatalism. But even when not taken to such extremes, such as the case Pinker makes in “Enlightenment Now” it can still end up emphasizing the wrong thing, emphasizing a soft but nevertheless toxic hedonism while completely ignoring stagnation and decline in the only thing that matters, our very existence, itself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">My survival is contingent on eating, eating is contingent on money, money is contingent on your donations, thus my very survival is contingent on you </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. If you’re experiencing any guilt at all right now, then, mission accomplished!</span></div>
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Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-81613323803779054462018-05-12T09:05:00.002-07:002018-05-12T09:07:55.666-07:00Should All Incels Be Killed Immediately or Just Banished Forever?<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’d like to dive into a controversy you might be familiar with. It began when Alek Minassian </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_van_attack" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">drove a rented van</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 and injuring 16. It came out shortly thereafter that Alek identified as an “incel”, and at a stroke the latest group of </span><a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2018/4/25/17277496/incel-toronto-attack-alek-minassian" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">modern</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/toronto-incel-van-attack/558977/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">villains</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/page/ct-perspec-page-incel-men-sex-toronto-van-murders-0506-20180504-story.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">was</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/04/what-do-incels-fascists-and-terrorists-have-in-common-violent-misogyny" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">discovered</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. For those unfamiliar with the term, incel is short for involuntarily celibate, though to identify as an incel you have be especially angry about your involuntary celibacy. Thus Alek’s murderous rage was brought on by the fact that no girls would have sex with him. As you can imagine, anything that even hints at a demand for women to provide sex or to do </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">anything</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> they don’t want to do with their body, did not go over well with the vast majority of people. But this is not the controversy I want to talk about.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The controversy I want to talk about came when </span><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/bio" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Robin Hanson</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, a George Mason economist, (and </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/04/mormon-transhumanists-so-close-but-yet.html?showComment=1524231210123#c4312360053046231284" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">recent commenter</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> on this very blog), </span><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/04/two-types-of-envy.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">posted a question on his blog</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. The question amounted to, “Why are we concerned about income inequality, but not concerned about inequalities in access to romance and sex? Especially given that most people would say the latter matters more to their happiness?” But that post is not the post I want to cover, the post I want to cover is at least three levels deep (maybe more?) The post I want to cover is </span><a href="https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3766" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Scott Aaronson’s response</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> to Robin Hanson’s post on the original news. In most cases I would suggest reading the original in its entirety. In this case, before doing so I offer a couple of caveats. First the post is directed at those already familiar with the Robin Hanson controversy, if you aren’t a lot of it will be wasted. Second it’s pretty long, around 6000 words. If the length doesn’t bother you, then I would definitely recommend it. I would particularly recommend it if you came to this post hating Robin Hanson, because Robin Hanson does not deserve your hate.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Despite Aaronson’s defense of Hanson, who he knows very well, his advice to him would have been “DON’T DO IT!” Perhaps the reason for this advice is obvious, but I’ll let Aaronson explain it:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">My view is this: the world in which a comparison between the sufferings of the romantically and the monetarily impoverished could increase normal people’s understanding of the former, is so different from our world as to be nearly unrecognizable. To say that this comparison is outside the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Overton window</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is a comic understatement: it’s outside the Overton galaxy. Trying to have the conversation that Robin wanted to have on social media, is a little like trying to have a conversation about microaggressions in 1830s Alabama. At first, your listeners will simply be confused—but their confusion will be highly unstable, like a Higgs boson, and will decay in about 10</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 6.6pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super;">-22</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> seconds into righteous rage.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For experience shows that, if you even breathe a phrase like “the inequality of romantic and sexual fulfillment,” no one who isn’t weird in certain ways common in the hard sciences (e.g., being on the autism spectrum) will be able to parse you as saying anything other than that sex ought to be “redistributed” by the government in the same way that money is redistributed, which in turn suggests a dystopian horror scenario where women are treated like property, married against their will, and raped. And it won’t help if you shout from the rooftops that you want nothing of this kind, oppose it as vehemently as your listeners do. For, not knowing what else you could mean, the average person will continue to impose the nightmare scenario on anything you say, and will add evasiveness and dishonesty to the already severe charges against you.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I guess I’m weird in that certain way (though to the best of my knowledge I’m not on the autism spectrum…) Because I can see a lot of ways in which this statement could be read other than treating women like property. For example when there was a greater emphasis on monogamy and marriage, sexual inequality was lower, these pro-marriage policies are probably a form of this redistribution (and in fact people have </span><a href="https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/marriage-solution-income-inequality" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">offered marriage as a solution to income inequality</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> as well.) I might even go so far as to add sexual and romantic inequality to the list of problems attendant to the generalized disintegration of traditional institutions. That said, I would have probably also given Hanson the same advice, though I hope the impossibility of floating somewhat crazy and transgressive ideas like this, is not quite as great as Aaronson makes it out to be. Though I think it probably is.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">From there, Aaronson goes on to bring up </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opinion/incels-sex-robots-redistribution.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Ross Douthat’s column in the New York Times</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> about the controversy (the Hanson one, not the original.) I don’t intend to spend a lot of time on Douthat’s column, particularly since this one I would recommend you just read. But I found this section to be particularly interesting:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As offensive or utopian the redistribution of sex might sound, the idea is entirely responsive to the logic of late-modern sexual life…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">First, because like other forms of neoliberal deregulation the sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Second, because in this new landscape, and amid other economic and technological transformations, the sexes seem to be struggling generally to relate to one another, with social and political chasms </span><a href="http://theweek.com/articles/715794/how-single-men-women-are-making-politics-more-extreme" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">opening between them</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and not only marriage and family but also sexual activity itself in recent decline.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Third, because the culture’s dominant message about sex is still essentially Hefnerian, despite certain revisions attempted by feminists since the heyday of the Playboy philosophy — a message that frequency and variety in sexual experience is as close to a summum bonum as the human condition has to offer, that the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated, and that virginity and celibacy are at best strange and at worst pitiable states. And this master narrative, inevitably, makes both the new inequalities and the decline of actual relationships that much more difficult to bear …</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">… which in turn encourages people, as ever under modernity, to place their hope for escape from the costs of one revolution in a further one yet to come, be it political, social or technological, which will supply if not the promised utopia at least some form of redress for the many people that progress has obviously left behind.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There is an alternative, conservative response, of course — namely, that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence and the special respect owed to the celibate.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But this is not the natural response for a society like ours. Instead we tend to look for fixes that seem to build on previous revolutions, rather than reverse them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There are two parts to this, the first is a defense of Hanson’s idea, and the second, a description of how we ended up with a sexual underclass. I think we’ve covered the first part enough (though I think Douthat lays it out with admirable clarity) and I’d like to spend the rest of the post talking about this sexual underclass. And this is where the Aaronson article really shines by laying out the brutality of the situation. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Before I get to that, it should be clear that when people talk about incels they aren’t necessarily talking about the sexual underclass in its entirety. There’s some </span><a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">motte and bailey</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> stuff going on in both directions which I don’t have the time to get into. Aaronson updated his original post to address it, so if you’re curious that’s a good place to start.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aaronson’s commentary on Douthat’s column, rather than dwelling on the section I pointed out, revolves around the part where Douthat compares Hanson’s article with an article by Amia Srinivasan called </span><a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Does anyone have the right to sex?</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Srinivasan covers much the same territory as Hanson, but decides to focus on disabled people, minorities, and the overweight. Aaronson describes the reaction:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">All over social media, there are howls of outrage that Douthat would dare to mention Srinivasan’s essay, which is wise and nuanced and humane, in the same breath as the gross, creepy, entitled rantings of Robin Hanson. I would say: grant that Srinivasan and Hanson express themselves extremely differently, and also that Srinivasan is a trillion times better than Hanson at anticipating and managing her readers’ reactions. Still, on the merits, is there any relevant difference between the two cases beyond: “undesirability” of the disabled, fat, and trans should be critically examined and interrogated, because those people are objects of progressive sympathy; whereas “undesirability” of nerdy white and Asian males should be taken as a brute fact or even celebrated, because those people are objects of progressive contempt?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To be fair, a Google search also turns up progressives who, dissenting from the above consensus, excoriate Srinivasan for her foray, however thoughtful, into taboo territory. As best I can tell, the dissenters’ argument runs like so: as much as it might pain us, we must not show any compassion to women and men who are suicidally lonely and celibate by virtue of being severely disabled, disfigured, trans, or victims of racism. For if we did, then consistency might eventually force us to show compassion to white male nerds as well.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s hard to know which is worse, the hypocrisy of the first group or the cruelty of the second, probably the latter. Though it gets worse. Aaronson continues:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Here’s the central point that I think Robin failed to understand: society, today, is not on board even with the minimal claim that the suicidal suffering of men left behind by the sexual revolution really exists—or, if it does, that it matters in the slightest or deserves any sympathy or acknowledgment whatsoever. Indeed, the men in question pretty much need to be demonized as entitled losers and creeps, because if they weren’t, then sympathy for them—at least, for those among them who are friends, coworkers, children, siblings—might become hard to prevent...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">So where are we today? Within the current Overton window, a perfectly appropriate response to suicidal loneliness and depression among the “privileged” (i.e., straight, able-bodied, well-educated white or Asian men) seems to be: “just kill yourselves already, you worthless cishet scum, and remove your garbage DNA from the gene pool.” If you think I’m exaggerating, I beseech you to check for yourself on Twitter. I predict you’ll find that and much worse, wildly upvoted, by people who probably go to sleep every night congratulating themselves for their progressivism, their egalitarianism, and—of course—their burning hatred for anything that smacks of eugenics.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As a white cis male (I thought the autocomplete suggestions for that term </span><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/44k55aumugbu4p1/Screenshot%202018-05-10%2017.06.11.png?dl=0" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">were interesting</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, second result: “white cis male shitlord”) who’s also clearly something of a nerd I find these threats somewhat alarming. I myself am married with kids, but I have plenty of friends who aren’t and likely never will be, who fall into the involuntary celibate category even if they aren’t part of the incel movement. But if we’re going to treat this subject with less emotion than what’s been described so far we need to answer a few questions:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1- How big is this sexual underclass? I suspect, like me, most people know people in this category, but if we move beyond the anecdotes how big is it really?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2- Is Aaronson accurately describing the reaction?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">3- Is the reaction Aaronson is describing appropriate to the situation?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">4- If it’s not appropriate how large and powerful is the group engaged in this inappropriate response? How much do we have to worry about it?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">5- If it is worrisome, what can we do about it?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">On the first question, the size of the sexual underclass, fortunately we have an answer for that. @lymanstoneky tweeted the following graph:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As you can see things are more or less flat from 1989 to 2008, and then suddenly start a steady climb during which the number of unmarried, sexless men doubles in the space of eight years. Also like most graphs of this sort it doesn’t go nearly far enough back. Recall that this graph starts 20 years after the sexual revolution, so it’s possible that the long term rate is really 2% and it was already pretty bad in the 80’s and 90’s. Finally, while the male percentage has almost always been above the female percentage, that the divergence recently is pretty stark. Meaning that while everyone is having less sex, the problem is particularly acute for males.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Later in the Twitter thread, Stone speculates that pornography may be having something to do with it. A subject I’ve </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/05/is-pornography-supernormal-stimuli.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">covered in this space</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. And indeed if you were looking for something which happened around that time, the late aughts was when bandwidth was finally sufficient for streaming to start taking off. (Youtube was </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">founded in 2005</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Netflix’s streaming service </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">started in 2007</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and in that same year </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornhub" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Pornhub was launched</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.) But regardless of the cause of the sexless male phenomenon there’s clearly a strong recent upward </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-terrible-power-of-tiny-trends.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">trend</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As far as the second question, the accuracy of Aaronson’s description, that one is a little bit more difficult to evaluate. Certainly this is exactly how I expect things to play out in this day and age, and Aaronson himself does claim that, “If you think I’m exaggerating, I beseech you to check for yourself on Twitter. I predict you’ll find that and much worse, wildly upvoted...” I followed this advice and I found plenty of pretty extreme tweets (try searching #incel scum) but I’m not much of a twitter user and it’s hard to aggregate the numerous anecdotes into actual data (particularly given the number of </span><a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/new-study-says-almost-15-percent-of-twitter-accounts-are-bots/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">fake and sock puppet accounts</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> on twitter). In other words, on the issue of size it may be difficult to say conclusively how large the “just kill yourselves already, you worthless cishet scum” group really is. It might be more useful to ask whether the reaction is a bad thing, and how much power these people have, which takes us to the third and fourth questions. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The answer to the third question, “Is it appropriate?” would seem to obviously be, “No, of course not.” I can’t imagine that saying the sorts of things Aaronson reports would ever be appropriate regardless of the context or crime. But if it’s so obviously wrong, why are people doing it? I’m sure that part of it is the horror and shock they feel at the crimes of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Isla_Vista_killings" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Elliot Rodger</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and </span><a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/05/10/van-rampage-suspect-alek-minassian-faces-three-new-counts-of-attempted-murder.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Alek Minassian</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. But as Aaronson points out:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There really do exist extremist Muslims, who bomb schools and buses, or cheer and pass out candies when that happens, and who wish to put the entire world under Sharia on point of the sword. Fortunately, the extremists are outnumbered by hundreds of millions of reasonable Muslims, with whom anyone, even a Zionist Jew like me, can have a friendly conversation in which we discuss our respective cultures’ grievances and how they might be addressed in a win-win manner. (My conversations with Iranian friends sometimes end with us musing that, if only they made them Ayatollah and me Israeli Prime Minister, we could sign a peace accord next week, then go out for kebabs and babaganoush.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">My understanding is that it is a horrible crime, the kind of thing only terrible nazi racists do, to blame all muslims for the actions of a radical few. They have a name for it, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Islamophobia</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and we’re all strenuously instructed that </span><a href="https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2018/05/10/islamophobia-charge-rocks-michigan-governor-debate/34765749/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">only really bad people do it</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and yet once again it appears that what is and isn’t allowable depends a lot more on whom it’s being done to than what is being done. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The answer to the fourth question, how powerful are they? Might be the most important of the five, and the evidence here is that, like most flash-in-the-pan outrage cascades, they’re loud and angry, but their power at the level of policy is non-existent. In this case I can’t even point to individual victims. So that’s a relief, right? Maybe, but perhaps we should consider this tweet from </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Pao" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Ellen Pao</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> before we write things off entirely:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">CEOs of big tech companies: You almost certainly have incels as employees. What are you going to do about it?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pao was the CEO of Reddit and the plaintiff in a big sexual harassment case against </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Kleiner Perkins</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, so she’s not without her influence. One can hardly imagine what she expects tech CEOs to do about incels in their ranks, and it’s hoped, if only for logistical reasons that no one took her question seriously, but as Aaronson points out (and as I’ve </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-cultural-war-and-overton-window.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">pointed out</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/09/making-sure-culture-war-is-fought-fairly.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">repeatedly</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">) todays fringe leftist opinions become tomorrow’s company policy. All of which is to say, if nothing else, I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this issue by a longshot.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Which brings us to the final question, what should we doing about all this? Well I think understanding the situation is a good first step, which is of course part of the point of this post. Though understanding is one of those things which is easier said than done, particularly when your speaking about understanding at the highest levels. For my own part, I hope that at a minimum I’ve managed to convey some facts about the situation, and maybe, if I’m lucky, some sense of what’s at stake, what’s been happening and what kind of questions we should be asking. I doubt I’ve changed anybody’s mind on this subject, and I would be very surprised if I had changed anyone’s behavior. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But if I could advocate for a behavior and have it stick I would do much as Aaronson did and advocate for the behavior of compassion. This may be the post with the highest ratio of quotes to original content, but this is another area where Aaronson nailed it, so I’ll quote from him one last time.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But my aspiration is not merely that we nerds can do just as well at compassion as those who hate us. Rather, I hope we can do better. This isn’t actually such an ambitious goal. To achieve it, all we need to do is show universal, Jesus-style compassion, to politically favored and disfavored groups alike.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To me that means: compassion for the woman facing sexual harassment, or simply quizzical glances that wonder what she thinks she’s doing pursuing a PhD in physics. Compassion for the cancer patient, for the bereaved parent, for the victim of famine. Compassion for the undocumented immigrant facing deportation. Compassion for the LGBT man or woman dealing with self-doubts, ridicule, and abuse. Compassion for the nerdy male facing suicidal depression because modern dating norms, combined with his own shyness and fear of rule-breaking, have left him unable to pursue romance or love. Compassion for the woman who feels like an ugly, overweight, unlovable freak who no one will ask on dates. Compassion for the African-American victim of police brutality. Compassion even for the pedophile who’d sooner kill himself than hurt a child, but who’s been given no support for curing or managing his condition. This is what I advocate. This is my platform.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s a good platform. Maybe a little utopian. Maybe a little too idealist. Maybe compassion should work on a scale, with depressed white male nerds who can’t get dates being pretty low on that scale. Maybe you’d rather save your compassion for impoverished orphans in Africa, or for groups that have been historically oppressed, unlike white male nerds, regardless of how depressed they are. That’s okay, it’s okay to ration your compassion and the energy it takes to express it. If you don’t want to spend any energy on the suicidally depressed nerdy male demographic, I’m not sure anyone would care or even notice. Where it gets baffling is when you take this limited energy and use it to not merely refuse compassion, but to urge these individuals to “just kill yourselves already, you worthless cishet scum!” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If creating a post mostly composed of quotes from other people with little of my own original content is what you’ve been waiting for all along, then consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Though even I would find that a little bit weird, not as weird as discussing sexual inequality, but still pretty weird.</span></div>
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Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-35424446043964868212018-05-05T08:30:00.002-07:002018-05-05T08:38:21.188-07:00Nuclear Power and Winning through Intolerance<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/04/steven-pinker-and-fragility-of.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Last week</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> I talked about Steven Pinker’s book </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. As I mentioned at the time I probably wasn’t doing it justice because that’s just the reality when you try to cover a 500 page book using a 3500 word post. In contrast, this week, rather than trying to cover what amounts to Pinker’s grand unified theory of civilization, I’d like to focus on just one point he brought up. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As I mentioned in the last post, I enjoy Pinker’s books, and find myself largely in agreement with him on most things (long tail risk being my big disagreement) and one of the things I was glad to see him make a strong case for was nuclear power. As I pointed out, Pinker feels that there are really only two existential crises we need to worry about: climate change and nuclear war. As part of my disagreement with him about long tail risks, I would argue that there are a lot more than just these two, but they are interesting in that they are both issues which are entirely within humanities power to solve, it would just require a lot of coordination. Or rather, it would require a lot of positive coordination. Natural incentives have lead to significant, albeit selfish, coordination on the burning of fossil fuels and to a lesser extent on the building of nukes. But this is equivalent to both prisoners defecting, we need them to both cooperate. But as you might imagine, and as I assume even Pinker would admit, such coordination is hard, and takes a long time. Climate change is interesting because there is a step most countries could take, which requires no cooperation, no signing of any accords, no locking other countries, like China, into specific actions, and which wouldn’t slow down growth or significantly change the way we use energy. Of course I’m talking about nuclear power, and one of the highlights of “Enlightenment Now” was Pinker’s defense of it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As I said though, Pinker and I share a very different level of concern for long tail risks. Given that he worries less, his advocacy of nuclear power seems obvious. But what about me? How do I get off championing nuclear power? Certainly, it would be very ironic if using nuclear power to combat the potential existential crisis of climate change, lead to the very real existential crisis of full on nuclear war. Accordingly, the first thing we need to discuss is whether nuclear power increases the threat of nuclear weapon proliferation. The answer to that question is that it’s hard to say, this is particularly the case when you’re trying to compare these two separate worlds in their entirety. One where we continue much as we have, with haphazard development of nuclear power, inconsistent policies, and no real plan for the weapons grade plutonium and uranium we already do have (except for using it in weapons.) And another world where we focus on more advanced reactors with much </span><a href="https://www.thirdway.org/report/advanced-nuclear-101" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">less risk</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Proliferation" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">proliferation</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (particularly once you start talking about </span><a href="https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">thorium</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and </span><a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/02/23/23climatewire-a-reactor-that-burns-depleted-fuel-emerges-a-72189.html?pagewanted=all" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">depleted uranium</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> reactors) and with a pathway to </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">use weapons grade material</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> in places other than weapons. All of which is to say that the risks, are somewhat unknown. But if you really believe that climate change represents an existential crisis (</span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/03/how-do-you-solve-problem-like-global.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">I don’t</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, but I do think it’s worth taking precautions against) then some level of risk may be unavoidable, and that’s one of the themes I’ll be returning too.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s been awhile since I covered asymmetric risks, particularly in terms of fragility vs. antifragility. So as a reminder, one of the key points of this dichotomy is that both costs and benefits can have one of two sets of attributes, they can either be known and limited or they can be unknown and unlimited. If the benefits are known and limited, while the costs are the reverse, then that thing is fragile. If it’s the opposite, unlimited benefits with limited costs, then that thing is antifragile. In theory it’s straightforward, in practice it can be more complicated, particularly with situations where there are lots of competing costs and benefits, with varying levels of severity and probability. As, for example, in the situation I just described, deciding whether to use nuclear power to reduce the risk of climate change. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is the case even if we assume that nuclear power will entirely prevent climate change. You could argue (and I have) that the cost of climate change, even under the worst case scenario is not unlimited. (I have </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-apocalypse-will-not-be-as-cool-or.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">even argued</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> that the cost of nuclear war is not unlimited, ie that it won’t wipe out humanity permanently and forever.) That said, it would be pretty bad, bad enough that most people would place it the unlimited cost category. Additionally, while I think most people would place climate change in the “very high probability” category, there is still a lot we don’t know.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What about the other side, proliferation brought on by the increased use of nuclear power? On this side, there are two ways proliferation could happen. The first and most likely is that a non-state actor could get their hands on some weapons grade uranium or plutonium. In that case they would still have to use it to make a bomb, which is not impossible, but it’s definitely </span><a href="https://www.livescience.com/5752-hard-nuclear-weapons.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">not trivial either</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. How many bombs could they make and successfully detonate? I think most people would say one, if they’re lucky, but I guess if we’re looking at the worst case scenario it’s conceivable that they could build perhaps half a dozen. In any case, it’s hard to imagine the number would be more than a handful. And at best they’re equivalent to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (crude design, fission not fusion.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Okay, now let’s say they actually detonate them. Is this bad? Of course! It makes 9/11 into a historical footnote, but, does it end civilization? Not unless we enormously over-react (another comparison to 9/11). And, is the worst case nuclear terrorism as bad the worst case climate change? Probably not, and I think, probability wise, climate change is vastly more likely than nuclear terrorism to boot. Recall that we have had nuclear weapons for quite a while, they passed through the fall of the Soviet Union, and were kept secure for the last 20 years through the height of Islamic-extremism in Pakistan, a majority Muslim country. To return to Pinker, he apparently considers the possibility to be so remote that he doesn’t even bother to mention nuclear weapons in his chapter on terrorism. (At least as far as I recall, and the index backs me up.) As I have already pointed out I am more pessimistic than he is, but I still see multiple hurdles standing between a non-state actor and the acquisition of a nuclear weapon.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The other way proliferation could happen is that a state could use their nuclear power to create nuclear weapons, and they could use it to create far more than one, or six. Obviously this is a concern, and I’m already </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/01/predictions-spoiler-no-ai-or-immortality.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">on record</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> as saying that I don’t think the number of states with nukes will ever go below the number it’s currently at, and further, I think we might see states that previously relied on the US nuclear umbrella getting nukes of their own as Pax Americana fades. All this may happen (contra Pinker) but the question remains will the increased use of nuclear power have anything to do with it? The connection seems tenuous. On the one hand we have North Korea which has nuclear weapons, but </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_North_Korea" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">no working nuclear reactor</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. On the other hand we have Japan which has nuclear power, but no nuclear weapons. And if, someday, they decided they needed nuclear weapons, I doubt, at that moment, that the lack of nuclear power would slow them down very much, even if that were the case. At a minimum this seems to suggest that the technology and infrastructure needed to build nuclear weapons is less than that required to build nuclear reactors. And if reactor technology were to be imported I imagine it would be the kind of proliferation resistant reactors I already talked about.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Once we eliminate worries about proliferation, then the case for nuclear power (particularly for those most worried about climate change) becomes pretty solid. But people have concerns about nuclear power beyond just proliferation and as long as we’re on the subject I might as well address them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The next highest item on the list for most people (and the highest for some) is nuclear waste. And I admit that with my emphasis on </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/05/time-preference-and-survival-of.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">low time preference</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, creating something that’s dangerous for thousands of years is viscerally unappealing to me. But of course it’s important to look behind that initial visceral reaction (something far, far to few do, particularly with this issue) and consider the actual data. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">First, it’s not as if radioactive waste is unique in its longevity, we’re creating lots of concentrated </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_heavy_metal" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">heavy metal waste</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (eg cadmium, mercury, and maybe you’ve heard of the problems with lead?) which is dangerous essentially forever. Will the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Yucca Mountain Repository</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (should it ever be built, which seems doubtful) be as dangerous in 1000 years as </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/sep/15/norilsk-red-river-russias-most-polluted-city-clean" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Norilsk, Russia</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, or even Flint, Michigan, when you consider how inaccessible the waste will be?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Second, and related to the first point, the amount of high level waste created is </span><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-waste-management.aspx#ECSArticleLink5" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">tiny</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Enough so that you don’t need some giant site with armed guards and lasers. In fact one suggestion has been to take the small amount of waste and disperse it rather than concentrating it. For example, mix it with dirt and rocks and refill old uranium mines with it, diluting it enough that the background radiation is at the same level as it was before you mined the uranium. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Finally, one thing that most people don’t consider is that if we’re going to create pollution or waste anyway, it’s best to diversify. I first came across this point in one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s books (I don’t recall which one). He pointed out that it is far better to create small amounts of many pollutants than a large amount of only one. You may be wondering why this is. Well as it turns out the harm from toxicity is not linear. To use an example many people would be familiar with, alcohol. (Not me actually, </span><a href="http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/mobile-phones/understanding-your-bac-can-help-you-enjoy-a-drink-without-regret/news-story/6f3b1f777e0eb8ce434aea1fef12c260" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">I had to look it up</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, I’ve never had a drink.) A blood alcohol level of 0.1 is drunk, but not ridiculously so, twice that and you’re probably vomiting. Three times that and you’re probably unconscious. Four times that and you’re in a coma and possibly dead. As you can see the harm jumps a huge amount at each step, particularly between 3x and 4x where the harm jumps to infinity (if you’re the person who ended up dying.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now of course we don’t exactly know where the big jump is in carbon emissions, if a CO2 level of 500 ppm is 10x as bad as one of 400 ppm (where we are now) and if 600 ppm is 1000x as bad. And that if it ever hit 700 ppm we’d turn into Venus, and all life would be wiped out. But regardless it’s almost certainly non-linear, and since nuclear power (and by extension nuclear waste) would be removing CO2 “off the top” so to speak, you’re looking at trading a pollutant on the low end of the harm curve for the very top of the curve of another pollutant. All of which is another way to say the same thing which has been said since ancient times, that </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">the dose makes the poison</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Yes, nuclear waste is bad, but by removing the top end of our CO2 emissions it may be replacing something much, much worse. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Having covered proliferation and nuclear waste, we at last reach the concern potentially shared by the most people, but which has the least basis in reality: a nuclear reactor disaster, a Three Mile Island, a Fukushima or a Chernobyl. Here Pinker and I are entirely on the same page, so I’ll turn things over to him:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">[Nuclear power] has a lower carbon footprint than solar, hydro, and biomass, and it’s safer than them, too. The sixty years with nuclear power have seen thirty-one deaths in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the result of extraordinary Soviet-era bungling, together with a few thousand early deaths from cancer above the 100,000 natural cancer deaths in the exposed population. The other two famous accidents, at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Fukushima in 2011, killed no one. Yet vast numbers of people are killed day in, day out by the pollution from burning combustibles and by accidents in mining and transporting them, none of which make headlines. Compared with nuclear power, natural gas kills 38 times as many people per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, biomass 63 times as many, petroleum 243 times as many, and coal </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">387</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> times as many--perhaps a million deaths a year. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(emphasis on 387 in the original)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Perhaps you’re amazed by these figures or perhaps not, they’ve been available for a long time, and possibly, given the demographics of my readership, you are all entirely unsurprised, but when I look out at the broader world, I can detect nothing which would indicate a recognition of how safe nuclear power actually is. Certainly not among the general population, nor among the politicians, and despite the repeated pleas of desperate need, not even very much among self-professed environmentalists. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now to be fair even if Fukushima didn’t kill anyone it has proved to be tremendously expensive to clean up, with the latest estimate putting the figure at </span><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tepco-fukushima-costs/japan-nearly-doubles-fukushima-disaster-related-cost-to-188-billion-idUSKBN13Y047" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">21.5 trillion yen</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, or $188 billion, and I suppose an argument could be made against nuclear power solely from the perspective of cost, and indeed a quick search reveals that this is a </span><a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power#.WunFB9Mvx24" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">very common concern</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. The question is why is it so expensive to build new plants and to clean up Fukushima. Is it because if we spent $100 billion rather than $188 billion Fukushima would go from a situation where no one died, to a situation where 10,000 people died? If we spent less money on regulating and building nuclear reactors would we go from having two accidents where no one died and one where a few thousand died, to having dozens of accidents and tens of thousands of casualties? (Even if that were the case I think nuclear power would still be ahead of petroleum and coal, and probably even biomass.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I don’t actually think either of these things would happen, rather I think the word “nuclear” and “radiation” are in the same category as “racist”, words were the reaction engendered is sometimes dramatically out of proportion to the actual harm, and where, if the word sticks, it can make a topic completely off limits. Accordingly, Fukushima isn’t just a disaster, it isn’t another industrial cleanup, it’s a nuclear disaster, and a radioactive cleanup, and no expense should be spared in containing the dangerous waste. But maybe that’s a good thing, no telling what would happen if we just spent a couple of billion slapping some concrete and steel over everything and walked away, with some signs telling people to avoid the area.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Oh wait... that’s basically exactly what happened with Chernobyl which was objectively a far worse accident. Maybe by looking at what happened in the aftermath of that we can get some sense of what might happen if Japan decides to spend less than $188 billion to clean up Fukushima. It doesn’t take much searching to find articles talking in excited terms about the amount of wildlife found in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ). One article declares that it’s a </span><a href="http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclusion-zone-is-arguably-a-nature-reserve" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">nature reserve</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Another mentions that within the CEZ wildlife is </span><a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/wildlife-returns-to-radioactive-wasteland-of-chernobyl/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">flourishing</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. This was unexpected, in one article from </span><a href="https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">National Geographic</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> I came across, they quote a biologist who “studies chernobyl” (one wonders if his studies have included a visit) as predicting that when the author of the article goes to Chernobyl that he won’t “see any roadkill in the exclusion zone—and would be lucky to hear any birds or see any animals.” Instead the author reports:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Walking along sandy firebreaks used as forest highways...we found the tracks of wolf, moose, deer, badger, and horses. I counted scores of birds: ravens, songbirds, three kinds of birds of prey, and dozens of swans paddling in the radioactive cooling pond. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The article goes on to report that in a study of 14 species of mammals one scientist found no evidence that any of those populations were “suppressed” within the CEZ.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I am sure that there are some health impacts on this wildlife and positive that the CEZ is not without its negative effects. I’m sure that if people were allowed to live there, that there would be higher rates of cancer, among other things. But, also recall, that this is the worst of the disasters, combined with the least cost and effort at cleanup.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In addition to offering a defense of nuclear power, I wanted use this post to examine why it has faced so much resistance. Why haven’t we embraced it, given everything I’ve already mentioned? I would argue that nuclear power is among the best examples of one of modernity’s more distressing trends: veto through intolerance. Or as Taleb describes it, </span><a href="https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">the most intolerant wins</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. He describes how:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minority –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Let’s take </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Yucca Mountain</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> for example. Nearly everyone who’s aware of the problem of high level nuclear waste is in favor of it, and those who aren’t in favor of it can be divided up into two camps, those who don’t care either way, and Nevadans. And the opposition of the Nevadans, who represent less than 1% of the US population was enough to kill it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I assume much the same thing is happening when we look at the reaction of people to even the very mention of the words, nuclear and radioactive. There is obviously a small minority for whom these words are as garlic to vampires, if not worse. And then there’s the vast majority who really don’t care, but, as Taleb points out, appear, to the naive observer to be concerned as well, and then there’s a few people who actually understand the risk-reward tradeoff (like Pinker, probably) who are in favor of it. To put it in more concrete terms, how much of the $188 billion is being spent to calm the 1% of the population who is the least tolerant? I guarantee it’s far out of proportion to their numbers. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m guessing at this point that you can already see where this applies to various social justice causes. And what’s important to point out here, is not the old “Social Justice Warriors be crazy, yo.” But the fact that both the concerns about nuclear power and the concerns about social justice are based on real risks. In the case of nuclear power there is a real risk that expanding our use of it will contribute to proliferation, or that there will be a disaster involving high level waste, or that a nuclear reactor will suffer a meltdown. But for all the reasons I pointed to above, I think these risks are low and worth taking. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The intolerance towards certain kinds of speech, particularly speech related to social justice issues, comes from fear of risk as well. There is a risk it could lead to a recriminalization of homosexuality, or to violence and the resumption of things like lynchings, or we could even end up in a world that was indistinguishable from the Handmaid’s Tale. But all of these risks are tiny. The question is are there any compensating rewards if we continue to support free speech and free expression (even for the alt-right and neo-nazis)? I believe there are, but much like the benefits of nuclear energy, they’re diffuse, and will take a long time to fully be realized.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If we are at a point where the smallest of minorities can veto even the tiniest of risks, what does that mean going forward? We have already seen how this tactic has completely tabled one of the most effective precautions we could take against global warming. What other future risks are we going to ignore in order to address the short-term concerns of various minorities? I know that people like Pinker have basically argued that the future is just going to get increasingly less risky, but this is one of the points I disagree with him on. I think going forward, risks are going to be less frequent (lower volatility) but of greater impact when they do occur (higher fragility). Thus not only are the risks greater, but we will have much less experience in dealing with them when they do occur, add to all of that the ability of frightened minorities to derail the plans of the far-sighted, and there’s ample cause to once again claim, “We are not saved.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m trying to think of some way that I could win through intolerance, but even though the number of people necessary to do that is getting smaller and smaller, I don’t think it’s reached the point where one, slightly weird blogger with a fixation on clever appeals for </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donations</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> has any leverage, yet. </span></div>
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Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-38207763974201967812018-04-28T16:38:00.000-07:002018-04-28T16:44:56.112-07:00Steven Pinker and the Fragility of Enlightenment<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Imagine someone you know with a solid 9-5 job: they make great money working at a company that’s been around for a long time. In this situation have they solved the problem of money or not? They probably feel like they have, and at first glance we might agree, but to be sure you’d need to know a lot more. For example here are four different people who all fit that description, but who are, behind the scenes, very different.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Example 1: This person saves a portion of their income, lives modestly, has the recommended amount of retirement savings if not more, and is constantly seeking out new skills and making sure that their resume looks good. They don’t expect to be laid off, but if it should happen they’re prepared. All that said their current job looks good, and they’ve gotten a raise every year and a promotion every five years or so.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Example 2: This person basically spends what they earn. Has some debt, but not a crazy amount, contributes the minimum to their 401k, and could probably find another job if they suddenly had to, but hasn’t given much thought to it, because their current job looks good, and they’ve gotten a raise every year and a promotion every five years or so.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Example 3: This person spends more than they make. Their debt is on a steady upward trend, but they’re still several years away from being in trouble. They have no retirement savings, and they’ve pulled every ounce of equity they can out of their house. They’re not worried because, their current job looks good, and they’ve gotten a raise every year and a promotion every five years or so.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Example 4: This person has a job that’s going through a temporary boom. Say, someone working in the mortgage industry just before the crash, or one of Jordan Belfort’s traders at the height of his time as the Wolf of Wall Street. This is someone who spends every penny and then some, figuring that not only will this boom last forever, but that the curve will just keep going up, and why not? Their income has gone up by 50% if not more the last couple of years. People have told them that this is unsustainable, but they’ve just ignored them. “Who needs that kind of negative energy in your life?”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">By certain metrics every one of these individuals is doing great, the lines all go up, and in some cases (like example 4) </span><a href="http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/03/05/worldgdp10000_2003_2.gif" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">nearly straight up</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. On top of this, there’s every reason to think the lines are just going to keep going up. But under the hood these four examples, are of course, very different. I’ve just finished Steven Pinker’s book, </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and the way Pinker describes the world is very similar to the way you might describe someone with a very solid 9-5 job. The person with the job has solved the problem of money, and that problem is likely to continue to be solved (after all they’ve gotten a raise every year and a promotion every five years or so.) In a similar fashion, using reason and science humanity has solved the problems of deprivation and violence. Everything has been trending up for centuries and there’s no reason to suspect it won’t continue that way.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first half or so of Pinker’s book is all about describing how great this 9-5 job is. How consistent the raises have been, how much less time people have to work than in the bad old days when the company was a startup. All the perks the employees get, like catered meals and massages and great healthcare. And you know what? I agree with all of this. His case is very persuasive, and loaded with graphs and figures. Humanity has a great time of it the last several centuries by nearly every important measure. The question is what’s been going on behind the scenes. Is humanity the first example, living modestly with a nice amount of savings, well prepared for sudden black swans and other reversals? Or are we example two, in a situation where we could probably buckle down a little bit more, but not doing anything grossly irresponsible?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The argument I’ll be making in this post is that humanity is not the cautious person in the first example, or even the second person spending what we make and no more, with a manageable amount of debt. My argument will be that humanity is best compared to the person in the third example and there’s even reason to suspect that the fourth example might be the best description of all.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Before I get any farther I should say that I liked the book and I would definitely recommend reading it, particularly if your pessimism about the world is having a negative impact on your life. Pinker is a great writer and the case he makes for progress should cheer you up. If nothing else the chart on page 64 of lives saved by various modern scientists and their inventions is humbling. </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Landsteiner" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Karl Landsteiner</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is apparently at the top with a billion lives saved through his discovery of blood groups. Second is </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_Wolman" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Abel Wolman</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linn_Enslow" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Linn Enslow</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> with water chlorination which saved 177 million lives. And as I have said, as far as his initial point I have no argument with Pinker, humanity really does have a great 9-5 job. The time of being a poor college student is long gone. Things have gotten a lot better and are currently pretty fantastic. However...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In contrast to Pinker I do not think we have been very prudent with this 9-5 job. Also I think Pinker underestimates the chances of getting “laid off”. As I said when I </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2016/12/reframing-pinkers-better-angels-of-our.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">talked about</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> his book </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Better Angels of Our Nature</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Pinker seems to definitely be of the opinion that we are saved, and in “Enlightenment Now” he doubles down on that theme, a theme which directly contradicts the theme of this blog, namely that technology and progress have not saved us. If Pinker’s book so well researched and so full of graphs showing that progress has done all these wonderful things for humanity and will likely continue, then who am I to argue that he’s wrong?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Probably no one of any consequence. And in fact as I have said before I hope he’s right, and that I’m wrong. But I’m worried that he’s overlooked some things, things which are more consequential than he gives them credit for. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To begin with everything he says hinges on the idea that the historical trends he has pointed out will continue into the future, but why? Certainly we’ve seen reversals of progress in the past, why is this time different? I can think of two reasons.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1- There is something mystical going on. History has an arc. Progress is a cosmic imperative. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I spoke about this idea in my </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-religion-of-progress.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Religion of Progress</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> post, and to his credit, Pinker distances himself from it, at one point writing the following:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Social spending demonstrates an uncanny aspect of progress that we’ll encounter again in subsequent chapters. Though I am skittish about any notion of historical inevitability, cosmic forces, or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force. As they proceed, certain factions oppose them hammer and tongs, but resistance turns out to be futile. Social spending is an example. The United States is famously resistant to anything smacking of redistribution. Yet it allocates 19 percent of its GDP to social services, and despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians the spending has continued to grow.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the process of distancing himself from the first possibility he introduces the second possibility:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2- It’s not cosmic, but humanity has reached some sort of minimal threshold for collective wisdom which is sufficient to lock in progress even over strenuous opposition. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If this is the case, my question is, have we locked in progress or have we just locked in a leftward drift? In my post </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-cultural-war-and-overton-window.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">The Cultural War and The Overton Window</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> I argued it was the latter, and pointed out that progress, particularly as Pinker defines it, is not the same thing as becoming increasingly radical leftists. In fact if you were to look at Pinker’s body of work you’d find that he frequently sets himself up </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiRnbNT5uE" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">in opposition to the radical Left</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. (Which is one of the reasons why I like him.) Despite this it’s not entirely clear where Pinker falls on this issue. Certainly he seems to be saying in many places that progress is “locked in”. But if that’s so, why did he feel the need to write a book subtitled “The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress”. Why does he need to make a case for things that are going to happen regardless of whether we oppose them or not, like the aforementioned social spending in the US?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If we take Pinker at his word, then it can’t be the first possibility. It would therefore have to be something along the lines of this second possibility, but it appears that Pinker wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to make the case that things have never better and are only going to continue to improve. That progress is something of an unstoppable force. That humanities’ 9-5 job is entirely secure. While at the same time warning that if we’re too unreasonable, or too negative or even too religious that this unstoppable force will be derailed. The general sense one gets is that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Pinker</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> can be worried about threats to the modern world, but if anyone else worries about it, they’re engaged in progressophobia. In other words progress can be derailed but only by ignoring the things Pinker thinks are important. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The next obvious question is, what does Pinker think is important? What is he worried about? Well as you can imagine, like many people he’s worried about Trump and he has a list of 11 areas where he thinks that Trump and people like him threaten the onward march of progress. To be fair he does offer the following caveat to this worry:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Not even a congenital optimist can see a pony in this Christmas stocking. But will Donald Trump (and authoritarian populism more generally) really undo a quarter of a millennium of progress? There are reasons not to take the poison just yet. If a movement has proceeded for decades or centuries, there are probably systematic forces behind it, and many stakeholders with an interest in its not being precipitously reversed. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">By design of the Founders, the American presidency is not a rotating monarchy. The president presides over a distributed network of power (denigrated by populists as the “deep state”) that outlasts individual leaders and carries out the business of government under real-world constraints which can’t easily be erased by popuist applause lines or the whims of the man at the top. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">After laying out in exacting detail the 11 reasons for concern, his reversal comes across as hollow. I think he is correct about how it worked in the past but that was the past. Currently there is significant reason to be concerned that the power of the “deep state” to constrain the president is significantly weakened. And I believe it’s fair to say that a lot of that erosion came in the name of “progress” under people like FDR and Obama. Trump is dangerous not because he’s Trump (though that doesn’t help) he’s dangerous because technology and progress have created fragility, and in this case fragility consists of the progressive accumulation of power in the hands of a single individual, as an example of that power, immediately before the section I just quoted Pinker points out that:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Worst of all, the chain of command gives an American President enormous discretion over the use of nuclear weapons in a crisis…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I would argue that this is an example of a useful criticism of progress, of the kind Pinker either wants to minimize or not acknowledge at all. In our 9-5 example, you can certainly see where increasing centralization has lead to fragility which didn’t exist before. In other words, there’s a good chance that when you lose your job many people will have also lost their job at the same time. In similar fashion, as I pointed out in a </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/05/time-preference-and-survival-of.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">previous post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, a slowdown in China can cause pizza parlors to close in Chile. I saw very little if anything in the book which spoke to this sort of fragility. All of which is to say that if a single person can bring it all down, the eventually they will, Trump is not unique. I know Pinker tries to argue that Trump probably can’t bring it all crashing down, but “probably” isn’t good enough.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Another thing Pinker doesn’t want to talk about is government debt. (And of course there’s an increasing problem with debt at the </span><a href="http://time.com/money/5237776/pension-funding-record-low/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">state and local level</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> as well.) The words “debt” and “deficit” do not appear in the index. I know there are people who disagree with me on this point, (and I’m sure at least one of them will leave a comment to that effect.) But you cannot deny that the world is much more interconnected than it once was. And that one mistake (most recently the mortgage crisis) can reverberate across the globe. This is different. Historically, China could be going through a golden age while at the same time Europe languished. And no matter how bad or good of a leader Genghis Khan was, nothing he did could have any impact on what happened in America.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As you might imagine from the book’s subtitle, Pinker’s chief worries are that we will abandon the reason and science that got us here. That we will turn away from the wonder of The Enlightenment. First I would argue that things beyond reason and science got us here, second I think Pinker places too much weight on The Enlightenment. As one of the </span><a href="https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2018/02/20/enlightenment-and-progress-or-why-steven-pinker-is-wrong" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">reviews</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> of the book points out:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“The only major claim not supported by a graph (or indeed much evidence of any kind) is the assertion that all this progress has something to do with the Enlightenment.” Pinker seems wedded to the Enlightenment like some of kind secular creation myth, and this results in to two particular problems with the book.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first problem, which I’ll mention just briefly, is that Pinker seems to have engaged in an extended </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">No True Scotsman</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> fallacy: Or as the same review puts it:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">…[H]e seems incapable of acknowledging the Enlightenment’s complicity in any social ills. Science, he acknowledges, “has often been pressed into the support of deplorable political movements” and “is commonly blamed for intellectual movements that has a pseudoscientific patina”. But beyond that: it’s not me guv. As William Davies wrote in the Guardian, “With some deft intellectual moves, he manages to position “enlightenment” and “science” on the right side of every argument or conflict, while every horror of the past 200 years is put down to ignorance, irrationality or “counter–enlightenment” trends.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As I pointed out in a </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/02/how-i-almost-became-communist.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">previous post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> there was a time when nothing was more progressive than communism. Pinker largely breezes by this particular ugly historical example, essentially arguing that no TRUE example of “progress” involves killing 100 million people. But in doing so he relies too much on a definition of progress which only looks backwards. Of course it’s not progress to kill a bunch of people. But everything that lead up to those deaths seemed very progressive at the time.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Before leaving Pinker’s defense of reason and science, I have one final point to make. If reason and science are in danger who has the power to cause them harm? When was the last time you heard of a </span><a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/25/605668869/professor-who-called-barbara-bush-an-amazing-racist-will-keep-her-job" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">liberal professor</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> being fired? Or a </span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/a-dissent-concerning-kevin-williamson/484052/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">liberal columnist</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">? Give me a recent example of harm caused by conservative opposition to science. I imagine you’ll find it difficult because as far as I can tell there </span><a href="https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">aren’t any</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. All of which is to say reality is considerably more nuanced than Pinker’s story of rationality triumphing over faith and superstition at the dawn of The Enlightenment, it’s triumph ensured as long as we can keep the religious yokels at bay.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This brings us to the second problem the review mentions, his opposition to religion. Which also opens things up to the other side of our discussion. What kind of things does Pinker not worry about?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pinker definitely does not worry about a decline in religion, in fact he celebrates it. As I already mentioned, he takes several potshots at it in the course of the book. I intend to do a post soon on the value of religion (even if you remove the spiritual side of things) but for now it’s sufficient to point out that this is another example of Pinker’s lack of nuance. I think </span><a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlightened-thinking-steven-pinker-s-embarrassing-new-book-feeble-sermon" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">one review</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> described it best:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable.” Steven Pinker is fond of definitions. Early on in this monumental apologia for a currently fashionable version of Enlightenment thinking, he writes: “To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason.” Well, it’s good to have that settled once and for all. There is no need to trouble yourself with the arguments of historians, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists, who treat religion as a highly complex phenomenon, serving a variety of human needs. All you need do is consult a dictionary, and you will find that religion is – by definition – irrational.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is extremely reductionist, and if that’s where we’re at, for my own part, I might as well say that this argument is as silly as claiming that nothing which came before a given 9-5 job had anything to do with getting that job nor anything to do with keeping it. As far as I’ve stretched this analogy, this comparison contains at least as much useful knowledge as the idea that religion is by definition irrational, and probably more.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I find that I’m about out of space and I’ve only scratched the surface of things, so I want to return to the metaphor I began things with, the 9-5 job. I admit that humanity has a great 9-5 job. But if I’ve learned anything I know that employment can turn on a dime. And while I don’t expect western civilization to be quite as fragile as a 9-5 job. I do know that when you have a good job it doesn’t mean you should spend like crazy (see national debt, add to that energy usage), and it doesn’t mean that you should expand your lifestyle till you reach the limit of what your credit will support (virtually everything else humanity is doing), nor does it mean that there’s no chance of suddenly losing that job.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pinker seems to have a hard time distinguishing between preparation and pessimism. And maybe you can’t prepare without a certain amount of pessimism, especially about rare and potentially devastating events, or what are often called existential threats. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is the final thing I want to discuss, and it’s another subject, along with religion, that Pinker’s not worried about, devoting an entire chapter to discussing how such fears are overblown. And I understand that these are complex topics, but it sounds a lot like someone saying, “I could never get laid off, I’m too valuable!” or “Enron will never go out of business, it’s a $70 billion dollar company!”. And despite these being complicated topics his treatment of them is pretty blase. In his discussion of AI Risk he appears to be more interested in attacking straw men than in legitimately engaging with the arguments. Going so far as to present the </span><a href="https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">paperclip maximizer argument</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> as a genuine worry rather than as a useful shorthand. He covers a few more potential threats with similar terseness, and concludes the only thing we have to worry about is nuclear war and climate change, and not very much even about those two risks. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Maybe he’s right, maybe all of the worries about existential risk is just needless pessimism that detracts from a glorious future where we use science and reason and technology to leave this planet behind and spread to the stars in a perfect progressive future. But if that’s the case, then as with so many things I discuss in this space, we return to Enrico Fermi’s question, “Where is everybody?” (Pinker mentions Fermi’s Paradox, only once, parenthetically and dismissively.) If unlimited progress is as unstoppable as Pinker claims, if all it takes is sufficient veneration for reason and science to conquer the world and from there the universe, why hasn’t anyone done it already? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We’ve had a good run, and hopefully it will continue. There’s a lot of evidence that it won’t, and ignoring that evidence may be the least reasonable and scientific thing of all.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Somewhere way, way down the list of things that are both reasonable and scientific is donating to this blog. But you have to ask yourself, do you want civilization to end? If not, consider </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></div>
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Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-29729922337922748942018-04-21T12:07:00.003-07:002018-04-21T12:08:58.184-07:00Aryans, and Errors, and Indo-Europeans, Oh My!<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the presentations from the MTA conference, on which I have spilled so much </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/04/further-lessons-in-comparing-ai-risk.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">virtual</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/04/further-lessons-in-comparing-ai-risk.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">ink</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, was a presentation on anthropology. During that presentation </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Franz Boas</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> was mentioned, in approving tones, as someone who had done much to banish the racist notions of previous anthropologists. Now I don’t know much about Boas, but I had encountered his name recently, as someone peripherally connected to a new book getting coverage in most of the big newspapers: David Reich’s, </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Who We Are and How We Got Here</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. And, no I haven’t read it yet, (my copy arrived on Monday) but the book and it’s claims speak directly to a </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/08/a-potpourri-of-pedantry.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">subject</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> I covered in August of last year, after reading another book, </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/08/a-potpourri-of-pedantry.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">In Search of the Indo-Europeans</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, by J.P. Mallory.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">At the time I wrote this previous post, I had the strong sense that I was walking into a hugely controversial topic, one where I was definitely out of my depth, a topic which had been buried for awhile. But it wouldn’t have been the first time (or the last) so I didn’t let it deter me. My sense was that the subject was analogous to an old family scandal that no one talks about any longer, but simmers behind many intra-family interactions, and in this specific case, had something to do with Nazis and Aryans and the master race. Reich’s book, or at least the coverage and reviews surrounding it, have brought this “scandal” into clearer focus. At least that’s the impression I get from the coverage. I want to re-emphasis up front, that I’m definitely on the periphery of things. But, since Reich’s book appears to support several of the conclusions I drew in that last post, I thought it would be worth revisiting.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In that last post, I alluded to the fact that there is a debate between two anthropological schools of thought. (Again, as far as I can tell from the limited things I have read.) Both schools of thought agree that there was a nation or a race or what have you (maybe a loose confederation) of Indo-Europeans, or proto-Indo-Europeans (PIEs). The question that people have been grappling with every since Europeans realized that nearly all languages spoken on their continent stemmed from a single source, is how did one language become so widespread? The answer to this question is what divides the two schools.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One school, maintains that it was spread through violence and conquest. That sometime in the unrecorded past the PIEs spread out from Central Asia conquering as they went, and over the next few thousand years they and their descendents ended up dominating nearly all of Europe, Asia Minor and much of the Indian subcontinent. How great of an empire they actually possessed or how cohesive it was is a matter of pure speculation, but whatever the case, outside of the Far East and Arabic speaking countries, today nearly every nation has an Indo-Europeon language as one of its official languages.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The second theory is that there was no great conquering event, no horde of Indo-Europeans who surged out in a series of conquering waves thousands of years ago. That what you had rather was a very successful example of trade, and cultural exchange. That the Indo-European language spread as far as it did largely by peaceful means. Some people have called this theory </span><a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/tag/pots-not-people/#.Wtai6tPwZ25" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Pots not People</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, indicating that when artifacts of a similar design were found over vast distances (in this case the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corded_Ware_culture" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">corded ware</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> pottery) that it indicated trade in those pots, not that the people using these pots were all related to one another. That when you saw things being transmitted they were generally transmitted by culture not genetics.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It is my understanding, particularly in light of the abuse the first theory was subjected to by the Nazi’s, that the second theory has been dominate for many decades. I alluded to all of this in my last post and said that it seemed obvious to me that the spread of the PIEs was violent. (I used the term, “conquer everything in sight.) The point of all of this, is that Professor Reich’s book backs me up. As he basically claims that whatever indigenous populations existed before the PIEs, were almost entirely wiped out by them. Reich is a Harvard geneticist and he comes to this conclusion through conducting stunningly expansive DNA testing on ancient human remains. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Today, the peoples of West Eurasia—the vast region spanning Europe, the Near East, and much of central Asia—are genetically highly similar. The physical similarity of West Eurasian populations was recognized in the eighteenth century by scholars who classified the people of West Eurasia as “Caucasoids” to differentiate them from East Asian “Mongoloids,” sub-Saharan African “Negroids,” and “Australoids” of Australia and New Guinea…. [P]opulations within West Eurasia are typically around seven times more similar to one another than West Eurasians are to East Asians. When frequencies of mutations are plotted on a map, West Eurasia appears homogeneous, from the Atlantic façade of Europe to the steppes of central Asia. There is a sharp gradient of change in central Asia before another region of homogeneity is reached in East Asia….</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One doesn’t even have to read between the lines to see a road that leads us right back into the Nazi/Aryan camp. And in fact it’s my understanding that some German scientists withdrew from the study as the implications became clearer. Meaning we’re left with a giant dump of new science with potentially troubling implications. If we assume that everything that Reich says is correct (and I see no reason for doubting it) what should we do with it? Obviously there are people who will use it in a way most find distasteful, and by all accounts Reich has bent over backwards in an attempt to avoid having his book made into a weapon to be used in the current culture war, for example avoiding the word “race” and using “ancestry” instead. And who could blame him? Despite these efforts he’s definitely taken some heat, and I’ll let you be the judge of whether he deserved it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It is not my intention with this post to wade into that particular conflict, rather I want to look at how archaeologists and anthropologists like Franz Boas, who championed culture over conquest and genetic replacement, ended up being wrong about this issue. How articles on the spread of the Indo-European language could describe it as spreading </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">peacefully</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, when Reich’s research makes it clear that it was anything but. (Reich’s research actually reveals strong invasive male replacement, implying all the indigenous males were killed and all the indigenous females were raped.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Surely the error comes in part from the tension between our desire to find the truth and our desire to believe what makes us feel good, to believe what matches our prejudices. After World War II we were strongly prejudiced against anything the Nazis believed, and (selectively) finding evidence which disproved their favorite theory made us feel good. All of this is understandable and perhaps even expected, and mostly we just hope that, eventually the scientific method will work and that over a long enough time horizon truth will prevail over error. That said, this subject, along with things like </span><a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">doubts about human adult neuroplasticity</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and of course the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">replication crisis</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> in general show that science has by no means banished error even within its own walls. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(To say nothing of banishing it in the general population. We’re a long way away from eliminating all flat-earthers, and it’s my understanding that the </span><a href="https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/11/daily-chart-21" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">numbers have been increasing</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There’s several ways things could play out in the long run:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1- On balance we could end up with more truth than falsehood as errors are perpetually discovered and corrected. The trend line might be a little jagged but in the long term it always points up. Progress and enlightenment will continue until we reach our glorious transhuman future.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Many people who’ve thought about the issue deeply fall into this camp. Including Steven Pinker, whose book </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Enlightenment Now</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> I’m hoping to cover in this space next week. That yes, there are frequent setbacks, but if you look at things since the Enlightenment, everything has been getting much better and will continue to do so.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If this is the case there’s no need to worry. But in order for it to be the case, errors do have to be corrected, and therefore anyone who points out errors, or who even think they’ve spotted an error should be given space to speak. In other words we have to love truth so much that we’re willing to put up with a lot to make sure that it gets out there. That’s definitely not the way things seem to be going. In fact I’ve read reviews of Reich’s book where people make the claim that what he’s saying is true but that the potential divisiveness outweighs the scientific value.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2- We are at the end of the scientific era, and as science becomes less able to deliver material progress and change we’ll become less convinced of the need for this sort of error checking and the tide will turn so to speak.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This possibility relies on the idea that the scientific revolution is part of a cycle, a cycle which could be reversed. Obviously there are cyclical forces in history, and the question is whether an increased emphasis on science and rationality is one of them. If it is, then, while it seems that we have entered a period of permanent, ever expanding upward progress, we are just at the top of the wave. And yes it’s been the biggest wave in history, but it’s finally about to crest.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">On </span><a href="https://www.ecosophia.net/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Ecosophia</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, John Michael Greer’s blog, he has positited something </span><a href="https://www.ecosophia.net/the-twilight-of-authority/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">along these lines</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. In his estimation history cycles between eras of abstraction and reflection, and he is of the opinion that we’re nearing the end of an era of abstraction. In his words:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">An age of abstraction dawns when a handful of well-chosen abstract generalizations offer a sudden, startlingly clear glimpse at the shape of some corner of the cosmos. The first great triumphs of modern science played that role in kickstarting the era of abstraction now winding to its end, just as geometry did in ancient Greek times and scholastic logic did in the Middle Ages. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Then at some point the abstractions start to lose their value as they become increasingly unable to describe the messiness of reality, at which point an era of reflection dawns, where:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">...the achievements of the departed era of abstraction get sorted through and assessed, the good bits kept, the useless bits chucked, and the habit of letting some pompous windbag with credentials tell the rest of the world what the absolute truth is this week gets a well-deserved rest.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m aware of the fact that viewing history as an oscillation between high-level abstraction and inward-looking reflection, is itself something of a high-level abstraction, but I think it describes the world in a way that makes a lot of sense as I survey what’s going on and we’ll come back to it in a second. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">3- In general truth will accumulate at a faster rate than error, but one error will be big enough that it won’t matter.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The classic example of this is nukes. The error being that we thought it was safe to keep them around. Now it may be that given the fears and prejudices and game theory involved that there was nothing we could do to avoid or correct this error, but however true that is, it won’t matter if civilization ends because of it. Another example is global warming. As I said in a </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/03/how-do-you-solve-problem-like-global.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">previous post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, I personally do not think that global warming has the power to, entirely on it’s own, reverse progress. To say nothing of killing everyone, but some people do. If we decide to get more speculative, then we have all sorts of potential errors which people claim might be the error that overwhelms all of our accumulated truth.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ve covered many of these potential errors in past posts. And everything from job automation to AI are potential candidates, as is of course the one I’ve already mentioned, a reduction in the free exchange of ideas, though this is something of a meta-error. With all such errors (and I’m sure most people have their favorite) the key thing to remember is not the details or likelyhood of any one error, but the fact that it’s only in the last hundred years or so that option 3 has become possible. Somehow in our efforts to combat error we’ve reached a point where it’s conceivable that a single error could undo everything. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(One variant of this idea may be that we’re coordinated enough to create the error, but not coordinated enough to fix it.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">At this point it may seem that we’re pretty far afield from where we started, but even errors made by anthropologists about the distant past can be usefully examined in this context. First because even if they seem benign, it’s a useful snapshot of the current health of our error correction system, and by extension a snapshot of whether progress is continuing. Second, I’m not sure they’re as benign as you think. I know they seem inconsequential, but this is precisely what makes them so pernicious.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As to the first, my sense, is that the snapshot it provides is of a system not as healthy as I would like. Yes we found an error and now it’s corrected. The system worked as it should have. Or at least that’s one way of looking at it. But how sure are we that this is a correction which will stick? Given the controversy the book is already engendering, are we sure that anthropology departments will immediately switch to teaching based on Reich’s data? I really have my doubts about that. In fact if I had to make a prediction I’d say that Reich’s book will largely be ignored in anthropology departments (Particularly given that Reich himself is a geneticist) and that whatever errors Riech’s data could be used to correct will remain uncorrected.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Moving outward from this specific topic, what are we to make of the replication crisis? Is it an example of a healthy truth gathering system which quickly discovers error and exposes it? At first glance it would appear so, but once again I think if we dig deeper, it’s more emblematic of the problem then the cure. In my opinion the replication crisis isn’t happening because the world is full of bad scientists who are intentionally cooking the books (though there have been a few of those) it’s happening because we’re reaching the limits of what experimentation can tell us, particularly the kinds of experiments that can actually be pulled off by a college social science department.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Perhaps this is just a temporary mis-match between what we want to know and the resources available for finding those things out. And maybe if Mark Zuckerberg wanted to, Facebook could discover once and for all whether </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">ego depletion</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is a thing, whether </span><a href="https://jamesclear.com/body-language-how-to-be-confident" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">power poses</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> work, or whether </span><a href="http://psychfiledrawer.org/replication.php?attempt=MTU%3D" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">hearing old words makes you walk slower</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. (All things which have failed to replicate.) But my sense is that even if you throw more resources at the problem we’re still reaching the end of what we can know in several important areas, particularly those involving the study of humans, since they often present a moving target. Though to be fair even in chemistry and physics there is significant failure to reproduce with over </span><a href="https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">80% of chemists and nearly 70% of physicists</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> reporting that they had failed to reproduce someone else’s work.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If we have reached a state where additional truths get harder and harder to come by, then that’s bad news for the entire concept of progress. Because there's no evidence of a similar slowdown in the rate of error creation. We have been in a situation were one bad error could wipe out progress since at least the 50s, and we may be entering an era where truth can't even stay ahead of falsehood in the aggregate. Now obviously this is a strong claim, but also one that’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility either. Still, I wouldn’t blame you if you thought I’d gone too far. Thus let’s set that aside for now and return to the two schools of thought concerning the Indo-Europeans I began the post with.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As a reminder there’s expansion through conquest and genetic replacement, and there’s expansion through culture. As you might have guessed, the conquest school of thought came first. Meaning that we had it right, and then as people spent more time thinking about it they managed to dismiss the correct answer and talk themselves into the wrong answer. This is not how science is supposed to work, at least according to some of it’s more vociferous defenders. According to them humanity has been saddled with this large body of superstitions and myths, and science comes along and gradually wipes them all out, until pure reason has triumphed everywhere. Science is not supposed to go backwards. I could probably spend an entire post talking about this and maybe I will someday, especially since I don’t think that what we’re currently discussing is the only example of it happening. There appears to be a broader trend. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Returning to the reflection/abstraction cycle of Greer, in that model the replication crisis came about because we tried to over apply a useful abstraction. It may be that humanity is like a new college student who, being shown the power of a concept they’ve never heard of, immediately goes forward, flush with this new knowledge, and tries to apply it to everything. I understand the situation is complicated, but this also sounds like what happened in anthropology. New concepts like the power of culture, the Blank Slate ideology and a desire to distance themselves from the evil that had been done in connection with the older theory, lead scientist to reject the previous, correct theory, in favor of one that matched their current favorite abstraction. You can almost hear a college student talking about how now that they understand intersectionality, “Everything makes so much sense!” In my opinion something very similar happened to science, and specifically anthropology once they understood the power of culture and the evils of racism the non-violent spread of the PIEs became obvious! </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Where does all this leave us? If you’re anything like me you may have some concerns that pleasant and comforting abstractions have overwhelmed actual science and that even when scientists say, no, we had it right the first time, the reason we all speak an Indo-European language is because they murdered all the people who spoke other languages. Those scientists will be ignored because something...something… Nazis! But even if this precise error is rectified, it does not mean that in the larger scheme of things that truth will automatically triumph over error. And it’s becoming increasingly evident that the battle between the two is closer than I would like.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Am I on the side of truth? I hope so. If you agree consider donating. If you don’t agree consider commenting, you’ll have plenty of company.</span></div>
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Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-174331347027996342018-04-14T06:08:00.003-07:002018-04-14T08:22:40.731-07:00Mormon Transhumanists, so Close, but yet so Far<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m always looking for a way to take a break, and by that I mean, engage in some activity which recharges my batteries a little bit, but which simultaneously doesn’t derail me or take up a huge amount of time. As it turns out this combination is difficult to achieve, and by any objective standard it’s one I’ve largely failed at. My breaks either end up taking too long, or completely derailing me from being productive, or draining my energy rather than replenishing it, and most of the time, all three.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the few effective ways I’ve discovered to take a break is reading a webcomic. Doing so takes almost no time (unless Randall </span><a href="https://xkcd.com/1608/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">goes</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="https://xkcd.com/1190/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">crazy</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> on </span><a href="https://xkcd.com/1975/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">XKCD</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">), recharges my batteries (particularly on the all important scale of energy per unit of time) and mostly doesn’t derail me. (Though I’m still kind of working on that part.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">All of this is a prelude to talking about a specific webcomic: </span><a href="http://existentialcomics.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Existential Comics</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and I bring it up to illustrate my experience at the Conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) this last Saturday. The choice of this comic works on several levels. First the topic of existential despair came up several times. Second Existential Comics is all about philosophy, a subject which dominated the conference. Finally ,and most importantly, the </span><a href="http://existentialcomics.com/comic/231" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">most recent comic</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (at least at the time of the conference) seemed to really nail my relationship with the MTA.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The comic features Buddha and David Hume discussing philosophy in a bar. They quickly discover that they both agree that there is no “self”. No transcendental being separate from what’s experienced. After realizing this Buddha asks Hume what should be done as a consequence of this realization. Hume is sure, after being so in sync thus far, that their answers will be the same, and proposes that they respond simultaneously. And, on the count of three, Buddha responds, “Turn away from sensual pleasure and earthly passions into contemplation.” At the same time as Hume says, “Pursue only your sensual pleasure and passions over your reason!”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As it turns out, from the same premise Buddha and Hume reached exactly the opposite conclusion. This is kind of how I feel about the MTA. We both agree that technology has created an entirely new landscape, particularly with respect to religion, but they think it’s revealed how humans can assist in far greater measure with the project of salvation than was previously thought possible. While I think technology has gotten to the point where we can finally understand how truly impossible it is to assist with salvation, and more specifically our progress has revealed to a greater degree, that the limiting factor has always been our morality, not our abilities.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I should mention, at this point, before going any further, that I did enjoy the conference, perhaps because, as opposed to last year, there was more focus on the premise, where we are both in agreement, than on their conclusion, which is where we differ. But it’s also possible I enjoyed it more because I was presenting, which not only led to more interaction, but a greater feeling of control with the whole thing. I should also mention that no one brought up any of my previous criticisms. (I’m still not sure if they ever made the connection.) And everyone was kind and welcoming. And better than all that my presentation was very well received, which covers any number of other issues. (</span><a href="https://youtu.be/yK-Wo2db5-4?t=2586" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Here it is</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> if you want to view it.) All of this is not to say that I’m going to join the MTA, or that I don’t think they’re making some fairly serious mistakes in their interpretation of LDS Theology, but I came away from this conference more aware of where we agreed, and more convinced that they are aware of some of the issues with their conclusion. I’m sure there are also issues with my conclusion. Finally, if any MTA members read this and feel that I’ve misrepresented them, they should definitely point that out. Since the remainder of this post will be commentary on the conference. I’ve made no secret of the fact that one of the big reasons I attend the MTA Conference is to get material for my blog, and I should use that material while it’s fresh.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(For those uninterested in Mormonism in general and the MTA in particular, I will return with something of more general interest next week.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first two presentations of the day actually made me think that I should have waited until after the conference before posting last week’s entry, since both downplayed the importance of immortality, which I had made a major point of. That said, it is in </span><a href="https://transfigurism.org/about/affirmation" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">their affirmation</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and later presentations (including a keynote from the CEO of a longevity company) convinced me I wasn’t that far off. But, in any event, both of the initial presentations contributed to the positive feelings I mentioned above. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Turning our focus to just the </span><a href="https://youtu.be/1gmTPtKZbNE?t=280" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">first presentation</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, the speaker made the point that there is a danger in a purely technological approach to the world. That technology has a tendency to reduce everything down to a tool, and that it kills society and by extension humanity through this dissection. He mentioned the idea of turning humans into instruments and then referenced Robin Hanson’s keynote from last year’s conference where Hanson discussed his book the </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Age-Em-Work-Robots-Earth/dp/1536619590" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Age of Em</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. I suppose this is another illustration of humility, that you would use a presentation from last year as your prime example of what you don’t want to happen. And this is another thing I agree on, the world described in the Age of Em sounds kind of awful. But it does represent one of the potential logical end point of this instrumentalization he was talking about. Having said that what’s the solution? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The speaker’s solution was to complement technology with religion or at least a religious approach. Which is essentially another way of stating the philosophy and ideology the MTA and I both share. In other words, I couldn’t agree more, and, once again, this illustrates why I decided to engage with the MTA and even present. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Moving on, the first presentation was good, but it was really the </span><a href="https://youtu.be/1gmTPtKZbNE?t=2008" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">second presentation</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> that made me question whether I was misrepresenting the MTA in the post I had just published the very morning of the conference. The second presentation started out with the inevitability of death, and more than that, the presenter made precisely the point I made. That ethics and immortality were incompatible. That you can’t test something if the test never ends. And then to take it to the next level she illustrated this point with a clip from the Good Place. For those of you familiar with the show it was a clip from Season 2 where Chidi induces existential despair in Michael (Ted Danson) by finally bringing home the possibility of death. Which is what starts Michael on the path to understanding morality and ethics.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">From this example she made the point that most of the time we are in either one of these two states. Either we’re like Michael at the end of the clip and we’re completely overwhelmed with how short and pointless life appears to be, or we’re like Michael at the beginning, where we care very little about morality because we think we’re going to live forever. Into this later category she places some members of the Church. Contending that sometimes we don’t care enough about mortal suffering because we think that in the end, it will turn out okay. That when someone is suffering, say from a bad home environment or just from living in a less-developed country, that the average LDS response might be that their suffering will all eventually be to their benefit. Her main example was a gentleman who recently </span><a href="https://nypost.com/2018/04/05/man-dies-after-shirt-catches-fire-at-family-barbecue/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">caught on fire while barbecuing</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and died after several days of agony, but, she contended, the average Mormon might respond, “it’s fine he’s going to be resurrected.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Her contention is that these things are not fine, and that transhumanism is a virtuous middle ground between the two extremes. That it is better at solving existential despair than straight humanism and traditional technology and that it’s better at solving the actual suffering encountered in this life than straight religion. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I think this is an interesting argument in favor of transhumanism, but I’m not sure how far I buy it. If someone told me that certain Mormons are too blase about suffering, I wouldn’t argue with them. But I can’t imagine anyone, after being told the story of the man who burned to death, shrugging and saying “it’s fine he’s going to be resurrected.” I can imagine them drawing comfort in the midst of their despair and sadness from their hope that he will be resurrected, but I can’t imagine them declaring that sadness is inappropriate. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now one could certainly imagine that Mormons might be slightly less inclined to spend resources to minimize harm in this life. Particularly as you get to the further ends of the spectrum, that is large amounts of resources for increasingly smaller harms. For example if we ever conquer aging, such that people are immortal, but can still get into accidents, then you could imagine those immortals becoming increasingly concerned with even the rarest kinds of accidents, and you could further imagine religious people, who believe in an afterlife, not, for example, wanting to spend billions of dollars and millions of man-hours to take the chances of an airplane crashing from 1 in 20 million to 1 in 21 million. Particularly if there are other places to spend that money and time. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">All of which is to say that, as with so many things, there are trade-offs, which the presenter does a good job of pointing out, but as I have argued from the beginning, they frequently point out the pros of this tradeoff without giving much thought to the cons. If I may be so bold, I think one of the MTA’s arguments is that they can spend all this time focusing on the technology side of things (the T in the MTA) and be just as good a Mormon as everyone else, if not better (the M in the MTA). And my argument has always been that at a minimum there may be sacrifices they’re unaware of, and that, very likely, this focus creates a warping of the central Mormon Theology into something different. Which takes us to the third presentation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The title of the </span><a href="https://youtu.be/1gmTPtKZbNE?t=3157" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">third presentation</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> was “Being Christ in Name and Power” and it was largely about how the presenter viewed the role of Jesus. And it was a great example of the ideological warping that, in my opinion, comes from too much focus on the T part of the MTA. The first part of the presentation was dedicated to showing that the title of “christ” was used a lot more broadly than just to refer to Jesus. That since “christ” basically means “one who is anointed” that historically Jewish kings and Jewish priests and even Cyrus the Great all got the title of “christ”. From this he basically comes to the conclusion that Jesus was just one of many “christs”, and that we should aspire to be one of the “christs” in the same way that the ancient kings and priests and even Cyrus the Great were.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Leaving aside, for the moment, whether this is an accurate reflection of the gospel, let’s examine why the presenter might have come to this conclusion. Transhumanism involves taking a lot of the things that most Mormons (and for that matter most Christians) expect to be done by God and Jesus and instead doing them ourselves. If these things are reserved to God and Jesus than taking them on is, at best, misguided at best and, at worst, heretical. On the other hand, if we’re all supposed to be “christs”, if we’re all anointed to take on the work of salvation, up to and including, figuring out how to resurrect people( and possibly even beyond that) then taking on all of the transhumanist projects is enlightened and orthodox, more orthodox even than the main body of the church.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When speaking of the presenter’s ideas, it’s possible that his very broad reading of who could be a “christ” came first, and that his interest in transhumanism came second, but I suspect it’s the reverse. That he started with the transhumanism and then broadened his interpretation of LDS scripture looking for ways to justify the things he was already inclined to do. I suspect it’s this way because it’s a very rare human who doesn’t work this way. For my own part, I come to this discussion with a more pessimistic view and the way I read the scriptures is going to be similarly biased by that. And you, dear reader, are going to have to account for my declared bias and the presenter’s suspected bias, and decide for yourself which interpretation makes sense. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">With that out of the way we’re finally prepared to examine the merits of his argument. Which, as I said, begins with a broadening of the definition of “christ” and from there proceeds to the conclusion that we should be a “christ”. He suggests that we should do this in two different ways: that we should be Christ in name and that we should be Christ in power. He then gives several examples of being Christ in name which I mostly have no objection to. And then he gives several examples of being Christ in power. He says we need to love, console, forgive, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and raise the dead. This is an excellent list, and, really, I think the only aspect I disagree with, is how much of a role technology should play. But let’s start by looking at where we agree.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I don’t think anyone argues with the idea that we should become more Christ-like, that we should try to love as he loved, console as he would console, and forgive exactly as he would forgive. Further, everyone seems to agree that part of taking on his name consists of joining his Church, which carries his name, and which is where we are reminded of his commandments. Successfully doing all of these things comes from choosing a Christian morality and following a definite set of ethics. In short from choosing to be righteous.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In other words, being the kind of person who can be as forgiving as Jesus (which is super tough by the way) is, as far as I can tell, 100% about our morality and 0% about the technology we possess. Even healing the sick, if you believe at all in the power of prayer and priesthood blessings, comes about through the power of faith, with a definite dependence on our righteousness. It’s really only the last item on the list, raising the dead, where suddenly, at least according to the transhumanists, faith and morality aren’t enough, where you really want to bring technology into play. (I would contend that you can raise the dead with enough faith, merely that it requires a level of faith and righteousness which is exceedingly rare.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To be fair, the presenter mentioned feeding the hungry and clothing the naked as examples of technology, but we don’t produce food because we intend to feed the hungry, we produce food to feed ourselves and make money (</span><a href="https://hbr.org/2002/04/wealth-happens" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">queue Adam Smith</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">). It’s morality not technology that leads us to share it with the hungry. Meaning our list is all things we can accomplish almost entirely by just being more righteous, until we arrive at the last item. Where we transition from acts where morality is the critical component, to something where you don’t need much morality, but you need an awful lot of </span><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3328517/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">liquid nitrogen</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">All of this stems from the idea that we are all christs of a sort, and to a certain extent, I, and most people in the church, I imagine, agree with this. But when that extends to ditching morality for (or even hitching morality to) technology, that’s where the disagreement starts. And my discomfort only increases when you combine all this with downplaying the role of Jesus. Which takes things even farther away from, what I believe to be, foundational LDS doctrine. As an example of what I mean consider this quote from Joseph Smith:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The fundamental principles of our religion are the testimony of the Apostles and Prophets, concerning Jesus Christ, that He died, was buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven; and all other things which pertain to our religion are only appendages to it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And there are hundreds of similar quotes from other LDS Church leaders. Including Jesus himself </span><a href="http://biblehub.com/john/14-6.htm" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">saying</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">: </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m sure the MTA has a way of fitting all of this into their favored interpretation, but I think the plain reading (and coincidently, my presentation on AI) indicates that Jesus is critical to the entire thing, that his status as Christ is a difference not merely of degree, but also of kind from what we are being asked to do. Particularly when it comes to the atonement. The importance of which the presenter went out of his way to minimize as well. Mentioning, that it was only used in the New Testament once to refer to Jesus’ atonement and that every other time (69 in total) that it was talking about “other christs performing other atonements.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There are people who believe that Jesus has done everything and that there is nothing left for us to do. People who believe that salvation is entirely through the grace of God, and that our works have nothing to do with it. I don’t claim to be any expert on this branch of Christianity (is it fair to classify everyone that’s in this category as a Calvinist?) But insofar as my assessment is correct (and I know there are nuances that mostly get missed) I certainly have my objections to this ideology, and if that’s the ideology the MTA was objecting to I’d be totally on board, but instead the MTA appears to want to take the opposite side of that dichotomy, and rather than the grace of God doing everything they want the technology of humans to do everything. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is the spot where in previous discussions, someone from the MTA will show up and quote this part of their affirmation:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We believe that scientific knowledge and technological power are </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">among the means</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> ordained of God to enable such exaltation… </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(emphasis mine)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And, yes to be fair, they probably don’t expect humans to do </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">everything</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, but they certainly appear to want humanity to do more than any other christian religion, so maybe they’re not all the way to the edge, but they have claimed the territory which lies closest to it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">My original intention was to devote only part of this post to the conference, and here I am almost out of space and I’ve only covered the first three presentations. Accordingly I’ll skip to the end and briefly cover the </span><a href="https://youtu.be/yK-Wo2db5-4?t=19210" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">last presentation</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> because in some respects it illustrates the danger of the entire project and indeed of most such projects. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This final presentation was a criticism of the how God behaved historically, specifically in the Old Testament and the Book of Mormon. But also bringing in the Hindu gods and the Hellenic gods. From this, concluding that he wanted to “design” a “good” God. He contended that this design was particularly important because we definitely end up with gods one way or the other, and recently we have replaced the cruel and warlike gods of history with gods of distraction and consumerism. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The presentation called on people to worship better gods, gods who aren’t racist, gods who don’t “privilege male over female”, gods who have “compassion over bloodlust”. And I understand the appeal of this, and I have all the sympathy in the world for the presenter’s personal faith crisis which led him to this point, but either God exists or he doesn’t, and if he does we need to figure out what he wants from us, and do it. And any attempt (of which the final presentation is just the most blatant) to impose our own values on God is just delusional hubris. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m sure there’s some of that delusional hubris in me as well (and of course if there is no God the entire conference was delusional), and it’s certainly possible that I’m wrong about everything (and not merely in this post.) But I would end by urging everyone to focus more on righteousness than technology, and more on understanding what God wants of us than in making demands of him. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I never make demands, I prefer to cajole, wheedle and beg. Speaking of which, have you considered </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donating</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">?</span></div>
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Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3382060516692200627.post-89112119703524261102018-04-07T06:41:00.001-07:002018-04-07T06:42:45.621-07:00Further Lessons in Comparing AI Risk and the Plan of Salvation<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="color: #001320; font-family: "arial";"><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-saved/id1175122428">here</a>. Or if you want to listen to just this post:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">On the same day as this post goes live, I'll be at the annual conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA). You may remember my </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-view-from-inside-mta-conference.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">review</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> of last year’s MTA Conference. This year I'm actually one of the presenters. I suspect that they may not have read last year’s review (or any of my </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/02/building-tower-of-babel.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">other</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/03/why-i-hope-mta-is-right-but-also-why.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">critical</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/03/doom-vs-optimism.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">articles</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">) or they may have just not made the connection. But also, to their credit, they're very accepting of all manner of views even critical ones, so perhaps they know exactly who I am. I don't know, I never got around to asking.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The presentation I’m giving is on the connection between AI Risk and the LDS Plan of Salvation. Subjects I covered extensively in </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/07/returning-to-mormonism-and-ai-part-1.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">several</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/07/returning-to-mormonism-and-ai-part-2.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">past</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/08/returning-to-mormonism-and-ai-part-3.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">posts</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. I don't think the presentation adds much to what I already said in those previous posts, so there wouldn’t be much point in including it here. (If you’re really interested email me and I’ll send you the Google slide deck.) However my presentation does directly tie into some of the reservations I have about the MTA and so, given that perhaps a few of them will be interested enough in my presentation to come here and check things out, I thought this would be a good opportunity to extend what I said in the presentation and look at what sort of conclusions might follow if we assume that life is best viewed as similar to the process for reducing AI Risk.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As I mentioned I covered the initial subject (the one I presented on today) at some length already, but for those who need a quick reminder or who are just joining us. Here's what you need to know:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1- We may be on the verge of creating an artificial superintelligence.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2- By virtue its extreme intelligence, this AI would have god-like power. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">3- Accordingly we have to ensure that the superintelligence will be moral. i.e. not destroy us.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Mormons believe that this life is just such a test of "intelligences". A test of their morality in preparation for eventually receiving god-like powers. Though I think I'm the first to explicitly point out the similarities between AI Risk and the LDS Plan of Salvation. Having made that connection, my argument is that many things previously considered strong arguments against, or problems with, religion (eg suffering, evil, Hell, etc.) end up being essential components on the path to trusting something with god-like power. Considering these problems in this new light was the primary subject of the presentation I gave today. The point of this post is to go farther, and consider what further conclusions we might be able to draw from this comparison, particularly as it relates to the project of Mormon Transhumanism.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Of course everything I say going forward is going to be premised on accepting the LDS Plan of Salvation (more accurately, my specific interpretation of it) and the connections I'm drawing between it and AI Risk. Which I assume many are not inclined to do, but if you could set your reservations aside for the moment I think there’s some interesting intellectual territory to cover.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">All of my thinking proceeds from the idea that one of the methods you’re going to try as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher (AIR) is isolating your AI. Limiting the damage a functionally amoral superintelligence can cause by cutting it off from its ability to cause that harm, at least in the real world. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Now of course many people have argued that it may be difficult to </span><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fbekxBfgvfc7pmnzB/how-to-win-the-ai-box-experiment-sometimes" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">keep an AI in a box</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> so to speak, but if the AIR is God and we’re the intelligences, presumably that objection goes away.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s easy to get fixated on this isolation, but the isolation is a means to an end not an end in itself. It’s not necessary for its own sake, it's necessary because we assume that the AI already has god-like intelligence, and we’re trying to keep it from having a god-like impact until it has god-like morals. Accordingly we have three pieces to the puzzle:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1- Intelligence</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2- Morals</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">3- Impact</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What happens when we consider those three attributes with respect to humans? It’s immediately obvious from the evidence that we’re way out ahead on 3. That humanity has already made significant strides towards having the ability to create a god-like impact, without much evidence that we have made similar strides with attributes 1 and 2. The greatest example of that is nuclear weapons. Trump and Putin could separately or together have a god-like impact on the world. And the morality of it would be the opposite of god-like and the intelligence of the action would not be far behind. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now I would assume that God isn’t necessarily worried about any of the things we worry about when it comes to superintelligence. But if there was going to be a concern (perhaps even just amongst ourselves) it would be the same as the concerns of the AIRs, that we end up causing god-like impacts before we have god-like morals. Meaning that the three attributes are not all equally important. I believe any objective survey of LDS scripture, prophetic counsel or general conference talks would conclude that the overwhelming focus of the church is on item 2, morals. If you dig a little deeper you can also find writings about the importance of intelligence, but I think you’ll find very little related to having a god-like impact. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I suspect at this point, I need to spell out what I mean by that phrase. I’ve already given the example of nuclear war. To that there are a whole host of environmental effects I could add, on the negative side of things. On the positive side you have the green revolution, the internet, skyscrapers, rising standards of living, etc. Looking towards the future we can add immortality, brain-uploading, space colonization, and potentially AI, though that could go either way.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">All of these are large scale impacts, and that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Things historians could be discussing in hundreds of years. LDS/Mormon doctrine does not offer much encouragement in favor of making these sorts of impacts. In fact, if anything, it comes across as much more personal and dispenses advice about what we should do if someone </span><a href="http://biblehub.com/matthew/5-40.htm" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">sues us for our cloak</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, or the benefits of saving </span><a href="https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/18.10-15" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">even one soul</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, or what we should do if we come across someone who has been </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Good_Samaritan" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">left half dead by robbers</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. All exhortations which apply to individual interactions. There’s essentially nothing about changing the world on a large scale through technology, and arguably what advice is given, is strongly against it. Of course, as you can probably guess I’m talking about the Tower of Babel. I did a </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2017/02/building-tower-of-babel.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">whole post</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> on the idea that the Tower of Babel did apply to the MTA, so I won’t rehash it here, but the point of all of this is that I get the definite sense that the MTA has prioritized the impact piece of the equation for godhood to the detriment of the morality piece, which for an AIR monitoring the progress of a given intelligence ends up being precisely the sort of thing you would want to guard against.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As an example of what I’m talking about consider the issue of immortality. Something that is high on the </span><a href="https://reasonandmeaning.com/transhumanism-part-1-living-forever/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Transhumanist list</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> as well as the </span><a href="https://transfigurism.org/about/affirmation" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Mormon Transhumanist list</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Now to be clear all Mormons believe in eventually immortality, it’s just that most of them believe you have to die first and then come back. The MTA hopes to eliminate the “dying first” part. This is a laudable goal, and one that would have an enormous impact, but that’s precisely the point I was getting at above, allowing god-like impacts before you have god-like morality is the thing we’re trying to guard against in this model. Also “death” appears to have a very clear role in this scenario, insofar as tests have to end at some point. If you’re an AIR this is important if only for entirely mundane reasons like scheduling, having limited resources and most of all having a clear decision point. But I assume you would also be worried that the longer a “bad” AI has to explore its isolation the more likely it is to be able to escape. Finally, and perhaps most important for our purposes, there’s significant reason to believe that morality becomes less meaningful if you allow an infinite time for it to play out. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If this were just me speculating on the basis of the analogy, you might think that such concerns are pointless, or that they don’t apply we replace our AIR with God. But it turns out that something very similar is described in the Book of Mormon, in </span><a href="https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/alma/42?lang=eng" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Alma chapter 42</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. The entire chapter speaks to this point, and it’s probably worth reading in its entirety, but here is the part which speaks most directly to the subject of immortality.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">...lest he should put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever, the Lord God placed cherubim and the flaming sword, that he should not partake of the fruit—</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And thus we see, that there was a time granted unto man to repent, yea, a probationary time, a time to repent and serve God.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For behold, if Adam had put forth his hand immediately, and partaken of the tree of life, he would have lived forever, according to the word of God, having no space for repentance; yea, and also the word of God would have been void, and the great plan of salvation would have been frustrated.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But behold, it was appointed unto man to die...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">At a minimum, one gets the definite sense that death is important. But maybe it’s still not clear why, the key is that phrase “space for repentance”. There needs to be a defined time during which morality is established. Later in the chapter the term “preparatory state” is used a couple of times, also the term “probationary state”. Both phrases point to a test of a specific duration, a test that will definitely determine one way or the other whether an intelligence can be trusted with god-like power. Because while it’s not clear that this necessarily the case with God. With respect to artificial intelligence, once we give them god-like power we can’t take it back. The genie won’t go back in the bottle.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To state it more succinctly, this life is not a home for intelligences, it’s a test of intelligences, and tests have to end.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It is entirely possible that I’m making too much of the issue of immortality. Particularly since true immortality is probably still a long way off, and I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of medical advances which could improve the quality of life. (Though I think there’s a good argument to be made that many recent advances have extended life without improving it.) Also I think that if death really is a crucial part of God’s Plan, that immortality won’t happen regardless of how many cautions I offer or how much effort the transhumanists put forth. (Keeping in mind the assumptions I mentioned above.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Of more immediate concern might be the differences in opinion between the MTA and the LDS Leadership, which I’ve covered at some length in those previous posts I mentioned at the beginning. But, to highlight just one issue I spoke </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-trend-of-transgender-identity-part-1.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">about</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://jeremiah820.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-trend-of-transgender-identity-part-2.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">recently</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, the clear instruction from the church, is that it’s leaders should counsel against elective transexxual surgery, while as far as I can tell (see my review of the post-genderism presentation from last year) the MTA, views “Gender Confirmation Surgery” as one of the ways in which they can achieve the “</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">physical exaltation of individuals and their anatomies” (that’s from their affirmation). Now I understand where they’re coming from. It certainly does seem like the “right” thing to do is to allow people the freedom to choose their gender, and allow gay people the freedom to get married in the temple (another thing the LDS Leadership forbids). But let me turn to another story from the scriptures. This time we’ll go to the Bible.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the Old Testament there’s a classic story concerning Samuel and King Saul. King Saul is commanded to:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">...go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But rather than destroying everything Saul:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">spared...the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">He does this because he figures that God will forgive him for disobeying, once he sacrifices all of the fatlings and lambs, etc. But in fact this act is where God decides that making Saul the King was a mistake. And when Samuel finally shows up he tells the King:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And Samuel said, Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I feel like this Biblical verse might be profitably placed in a very visible location in all AIR offices. Because when it comes down to it, no matter how good the AI is (or thinks it is) or how clever it ends up being. In the end the most important thing might be that if you tell the AI to absolutely never do X, you want it to absolutely never do X. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">You could certainly imagine an AI pulling a “King Saul”. Perhaps if we told it to solve global warming it might decide to trigger massive volcanic eruptions. Or if we told it to solve the population problem, we could end up with a situation that Malthus would have approved of, but which the rest of the world finds abhorrent. Even if, in the long run, the AI assures us that the math works out. And it’s likely that our demands on these issues would seem irrational to the AI, even evil. But for good or for ill, humanity definitely has some values which should supersede behaviors which the AI might otherwise be naturally inclined to adopt, or which, through its own reasoning, it might conclude is the moral choice. If we can accept that this is a possibility with potential superintelligences, how much more could it be the case when we consider the commandments of God? Who is a lot more intelligent and moral than we are.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If we accept the parallel, then we should accept, exactly this possibility, that something similar might be happening with God. That there may be things we are being commanded not to do, but which seem irrational or even evil. Possibly this is because we are working from a very limited perspective. But it’s also possible that we have been given certain commandments which are irrational, or perhaps just silly, and it’s not our morality or intelligence being tested, but our obedience. As I just pointed out, a certain level of blind obedience is probably an attribute we want our superintelligence to have. The same situation may exist with respect to God. And it is clear that obedience, above and beyond everything I’ve said here, is an important topic in religion. The LDS Topical Guide lists 120 scriptures under that heading, and cross-references an additional 25 closely related topics, which also probably have a similar number of scriptures attached.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Here at last we return to the idea I started this section with. I know there are many things which seem like good ideas. They are rational, and compassionate, and exactly the sort of thing it seems like we should be doing. I mentioned as one example supporting people in “gender confirmation surgery” and the example of pressing for gay marriages to be solemnized in the temple. But we can also see if we look at AI Risk, in connection with the story of King Saul, maybe this is a test of our obedience? I am not wise enough to say whether it is or not, and everyone has to chart their own path, and listen to their own conscience and do the best they have with what they’ve got. But I will say that I don’t think it’s unreasonable to draw the conclusion from this comparison that tests of obedience are something we should expect, and that they may not always make as much sense as we would like.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">At this point, it’s 6 am the morning of the conference where I’ll be presenting, which basically means that I’m out of time. There were some other ideas I wanted to cover, but I suppose they’ll have to wait for another time.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’d like to end by relating an analogy I’ve used before. One which has been particularly clarifying for me when thinking about the issues of transhumanism and where our efforts should be spent. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Imagine that you’re 15 and the time has come to start preparing to get your driver’s license. Now you just happen to have access to an autoshop. Most people (now and throughout history) have not had access to such an autoshop. But with that access you think you might be able to build your own car. Now maybe you can and maybe you can’t. Building a car from scratch is probably a lot harder than you think. But if, by some miracle, you are able to build a car, does that also give you the qualifications to drive it? Does building a car give you knowledge of the rules (morality) necessary to safely drive it? No. Studying for and passing the driver’s license test, is what (hopefully) gives you that. And while I don’t think it’s bad to study auto mechanics at the same time as studying for your driver’s license test, the one may distract from the other. Particularly if you’re trying to build an entire car, which is a very time consuming process. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">God has an amazing car waiting for us. Much better than what we could build ourselves, and I think he’s less interested in having us prove we can build our own car then in showing that we’re responsible enough to drive safely. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I really was honored to be invited to present at the MTA conference, and I hope I have not generated any hard feelings with what I’ve written, either now or in the past. Of course, one way to show there are no hard feelings is to </span><a href="https://www.patreon.com/jeremiah820" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">donate</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That may have crossed a line. I’m guessing it’s possible with that naked cash grab that if there weren’t any hard feelings that there are now.</span></div>
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Jeremiahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08825248383924164055noreply@blogger.com19