Mill On Liberty (I) : Free-ish Speech

Having recently managed to write a very short review of a very bad book, can I achieve the same concision for a very good one ? Let's find out !

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is, needless to say, a thoroughly excellent essay. Though full of wonderful quotes, it's best read in its entirety. Frequently I wanted to say, "yeah, but" and then Mill would immediately clarify things such that it put the discussion in an altogether more watertight context. Not only is it commendably rigorous, but it also seeks to lay out general principles and conditions  - rather than saying, "fuck yeah, liberty ! machine guns for children ! racism on TV, woohoo !", Mill instead sets out the principles as to when we should expect extreme personal freedom and when we can't.

To me there are three main themes in the work : speech, government, and society. It's probably too ambitious for me to reduce the whole thing to one short post, so let me try and aim for three short posts instead.

Throughout the work, Mill makes an impassioned plea for freedom of speech. And there's very little I can find fault with his argument. True, I'm firmly against free speech as an absolute - but so was Mill. His most important point comes midway through :

No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated in the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed out among the same mob in the form of a placard.

Mill says that there are indeed times when society must intervene even with the expression of opinions. These cases, though, are the exception rather than the rule. So long as an opinion only affects the mind of whomsoever holds it, so far must it be granted extreme toleration. It is only when that opinion ventures further, to incite action or else harms others by any means, that the rights of the individual are curtailed - precisely because they infringe on the rights of other individuals.

Alas Mill does not present a more detailed discussion as to how this applies to specifically to speech. What if the press were to constantly demonise corn-dealers, such that the presence of the mob could clearly be attributed to newspaper headlines ? Would this not then also constitute incitement ?

I believe such a discussion is urgently needed. We need not fall into the hellish trap of unbridled censorship, were we only to devise a clear set of principles for the circumstances and substance of permitted speech : the venues and the freedoms going hand in hand. No-one would sensibly suggest banning discussion of the Holocaust in a history class, but everyone ought to be entirely comfortable with the censorship of unsound social-media based medical advice like injecting oneself with bleach. Abject lies with intent to cause harm are surely different than unfounded but sincerely held assertions; a discussion in good faith between those of different perspectives is not the same as a propaganda war between idiots.

Overall, I would certainly describe myself as less liberal than Mill - but not all that much less. His core principles of freedom of discussion are utterly sound. So long as you do have genuine discussion and uncertainty, not promotion and conviction, so far do you have the prospect of benefitting from debate rather than be quashed by it. Mill summarises :

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.

Second, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions, that the remainder of the truth has nay chance of being supplied.

I particularly like this second one. By default we assume ourselves and our experiences to be normal, so while our opinions may be valid to ourselves, formed as a result of perfectly correct observations, there is no guarantee they apply more broadly. This is often forgotten when ideological values are at stake.

Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only truth, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds... the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled.

And I strongly agree. I just think that what's needed is a more... economic perspective, an attempt to understand the conditions which genuinely fosters the maximum diversity of legitimate ideas, that truly productive discussion rather than the case where everything is swamped under inescapable bullshit. As the saying goes, the energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it. It only takes a very little bad-faith attempts at persuasion or derailment for the whole prospect of an argument-based search for truth to slide into the mud. Surely Mill would not have approved of that, which would be so manifestly opposed to his goal.

If I had to construct a hierarchy of ideals for speech it would be as follows, in descending order from best to worst :

1. A society with universal high levels of critical and analytic thinking, such that outlandish nonsense couldn't propagate or was at least rendered impotent (e.g. the Daily Mail would be read largely for comedy value)
2. Business models enacted which would make the formulation of monopolies of opinions very difficult, and/or greatly reducing the level of clickbaity hyperbole and sensationalism, but without any explicit restrictions on particular content or authors (e.g. rebalancing media outlets to be more dominated by public bodies than private corporations) 
3. State censorship employed to a limited and carefully controlled degree, forbidding specific sorts of discussion (e.g. promoting racism or other unjustified discrimination) and specific people from specific platforms - explicitly only banning, to a very limited and transparent extent, and never promoting anything
4. A totally unregulated market with no oversight by any external entity at all
5. An entirely state-controlled market in which the state has unchecked powers to both promote and restrict material according to its own interests.

I believe 1 is impossible due to human nature, but 2 or 3 ought to be entirely achievable. As it is, at least on the internet we generally fall into the trap of 4, thinking ourselves free when actually we're largely imprisoned by nonsense.

Where it comes to 5, I'm in full agreement with Mill. I found his descriptions of the formation of dogma and the need to understand the counter-arguments the most interesting. The latter seems to be quite well-known, as exemplified by quote :

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no-one may be able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no grounds for preferring either opinion.

Which nicely links to the lesser-known idea that this is how dogma develops : through a lack of challenge. Even the truth can succumb to passivity and blind acceptance; that something is treated as doctrine has no bearing on whether it is true or not. What's more important to Mill is that we evaluate everything critically and carefully, and have as few dogmatic beliefs as possible - or at least, I suppose, when new evidence comes to light, we are fully prepared to wake from "the deep slumber of decided opinions". We can't very well get by with making no casual assumptions at all : it's the difference between being prepared to question anything and actually questioning everything. One of those is sensible, the other... isn't.

It's important to remember that Mill was writing very much from a perspective of there being, quite unambiguously, too much censorship :

In the year 1857, at the summer assizes of the county of Cornwall, an unfortunate man, said to be of unexceptionable conduct in all relations of life, was sentenced to twenty-one months' imprisonment, for uttering, and writing on a gate, some offensive words concerning Christianity. Within a month of the same time, at the Old Bailey, two persons, on two separate occasions, were rejected as jurymen, and one of them grossly insulted by the judge and by one of the counsel, because they honestly declared that they had no theological belief; and a third, a foreigner, for the same reason, was denied justice against a thief.

These kinds of actions are obviously gross infringements of civil liberties. He also notes that the suppression of ideas in itself carries dangers, beyond the crude case of physically harming those with whom the law disagrees :

With us, heretical opinions do not perceptibly gain, or even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true or a deceptive light. And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought.

Which is another variant of "broken toaster syndrome", whereby society is not quite broken enough that it needs a full-blown revolution, and so is able to persist in its dysfunctionality. 

And yet, while not denying any of this, I'm not sure Mill had experienced the real effects of a fully unfettered arena of debate. He'd never even seen the comments section on a BBC article about incandescent light bulbs, much less ventured into the sewers of 4chan or the like. A totally free market of ideas is no better than a totally free market of products, because people like crap that isn't actually good for them. Mill makes an excellent point :

If either a public officer or any one else saw a person attempting to cross a bridge which had been ascertained to be unsafe, and there were no time to warn him of his danger, they might seize him and turn him back, without any real infringement of his liberty; for liberty consists in doing what one desires, and he does not desire to fall into the river. Nevertheless, when there is not a certainty, but only a danger of mischief, no one but the person himself can judge of the sufficiency of the motive which may prompt him to incur the risk: in this case, therefore... he ought, I conceive, to be only warned of the danger; not forcibly prevented from exposing himself to it.

This seems broadly fine. Where you risk only your own self and no other, you have the right to take that risk (though Mill does discuss that there can be grey areas wherein your own harm may indirectly affect others, and to his great credit admits that this is a difficulty). But on the specific example of the sale of poisonous materials, I'm less than convinced :

Such a precaution, for example, as that of labelling the drug with some word expressive of its dangerous character, may be enforced without violation of liberty: the buyer cannot wish not to know that the thing he possesses has poisonous qualities. But to require in all cases the certificate of a medical practitioner, would make it sometimes impossible, always expensive, to obtain the article for legitimate uses.

Certainly the material should be labelled, but Mill does not advocate any restrictions on who could obtain it (except for mad people and children), only that the sale should be registered and documented :

The seller, for example, might be required to enter into a register the exact time of the transaction, the name and address of the buyer, the precise quality and quantity sold; to ask the purpose for which it was wanted, and record the answer he received... Such regulations would in general be no material impediment to obtaining the article, but a very considerable one to making an improper use of it without detection.

This I think is highly inadequate. Now when we're talking "poison" as in "delicious but unhealthy burger", only a minimum degree of regulation is required, and none at all when it comes to recording who bought it and why. You can't poison someone with just a burger except in a very long-term and marginal sense. Likewise the situation is clear enough for cigarettes, since passive smoking infringes on the liberty of anyone nearby (or indeed, no-one desires to die of lung cancer, so they have the right to be both warned of and able to avoid the danger). So in both cases you provide a label and warning of some sort, and in the latter you also restrict where they may be consumed.

(I personally would go further and happily ban cigarettes entirely, just as it's mandatory to wear your seat belt in a car even though not wearing one doesn't risk anyone but yourself. This minor infringement of liberty is more than compensated for by the much greater overall gain in liberty as a result of decreasing the risk to life. While I think people can mainly be - and indeed actually should be - trusted to make their own judgements with regards to their own safety, I don't think this is such an absolute as Mill did. Often they complain bitterly about some new proposal and then immediately accept it as normal once it's enacted. When the restrictions are minor, such as wearing masks in public places, there is no great difficulty here.)

But things which you can use to murder other people, especially by a mechanism that may be difficult to detect... hang on, giving people that level of liberty is plainly silly*. Regulating information here is insufficient, slapping on a warning is not enough. Poisons in this sense are different to medication that may be dangerous in an overdose. No, we regulate different substances in very different ways. Some we sell freely, others carry warnings, others are released only under authorisation, and some are kept under the utmost safeguards. Personal liberty matters, a lot. But it is not the only factor to consider.

* Okay, knives and pillows we simply cannot do without. Guns ? No. Using a gun for self-defence is Flat Earth level of an absurdity, with the only possible justification for that peculiar American fetish being their utterly crappy social welfare and policing strategies.

Still, broadly I think Mill had the right of it. What affects only one person should by and large be left to his own judgement, so long as he is of sound mind and properly informed. Only, I think that this is no more than a good, sensible default position, not a complete instruction as Mill did : it is anyway difficult to decide when someone is indeed properly informed, or even if they're in full possession of their faculties. Conversely, when an individual acts to directly affect others, there society has the right to intervene. As Mill passionately believed in free speech but not absolutely, so he believed strongly in individualism but not unreservedly. And that I'll look at further next time.

Review : The Silk Roads

Well ! Here is that rarest of things : a short review of a long book.

Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads : A New History Of The World is a pretty dreadful, and as such not much need be said about it. I've already mentioned his absurd comment about the EU; the book as a whole is generally better than that - but not much more.

There's little enough silk in this book, even less about roads, and as a "world" history it's limited in the extreme. Ostensibly it's about those countries between Europe and the Far East, but actually it's about nothing of the sort. Although in the first half he does make a half-hearted stab at this, in the second half (which is pretty much entirely about the 20th century, and it's extremely clear that this is the part he really wanted to write) it's very specifically about Western interference in the Middle East. Not the Middle Eastern countries themselves, or the European countries themselves, but very specifically their meddling interference.

To be fair, this is an important topic. But his only real conclusion, "Western imperialism was a bad thing" could easily have been described in some considerable and persuasive detail in ten pages or less. Not two hundred and fifty. Even I could be more concise than that. That length is just plain depressing.

And as a format, this simply doesn't work. Everything is incredibly superficial, shallow, and utterly soulless. Characters appear and disappear as and when needed, frequently appearing for no more than a paragraph or two. Even the most important people who ever lived are reduced to bland, meaningless footnotes. This is exemplified by an incident he describes in which American hostages were being held by Iranians, wherein Frankopan doesn't feel the need to tell us anything so mundane as, oh, I don't know... whether they were ever frickin' released.

Aarrrgh.

The whole thing is profoundly disjointed, unfocused, and incoherent. After raging against imperialism in the Middle East, his conclusion chapter jumps abruptly into the stans of Central Asia. They're barely mentioned in the rest of the book at all, but suddenly we're told repeatedly how wonderfully well they're doing, often repeating the phrase, "the Silk Roads are rising again" (which is anyway a strange turn of phrase and not the eloquent rhetorical flourish the author thinks it is) without justification. Frankopan is clearly unaware of his own point.

And his audience too. It's not at all obvious who the target should be here. It's far too cynical to persuade any modern-day Western nationalists of its main message, so it's not for them. Nor is it for anyone from the Middle East, reducing the entire region to the status of permanent victimhood, with no life or agency of its own. Nor is it for anyone from India, China, South America or Africa - all of which are barely mentioned. Nor does it have anything much to say about ideologies, being materialistic and resource-oriented in the extreme. The only real target audience I can think of are people who want to know about the reasons for fluctuating oil prices in the twentieth century. In terms of everything else, it's remarkably uninformative for a 500-page tome.

While other reviews have said that all Frankopan does is shift the focus from Europe to the East, this is simply not the case. That would have been very welcome. No, it's an excessively cynical view of imperialistic meddling and nothing else : everyone is either an avaricious imperialist or a luckless victim suffering at the hands of said imperialist. Not a single decent thing has, according to this heartless diatribe, ever happened to a single person in all of history ever. Literally. I don't have a good word to say about it because this book doesn't have a good word to say about anything.

It's like he's cherry picking, except he's only picking the rotten cherries and none of the good ones. It's just as fallacious as picking the nice ones, only much more miserable.

There isn't even any kind of interesting new perspective here. Frankopan makes a laudable effort to connect the Great Game to WWI, but shoots himself in the foot. First, he stresses how important India was to the British, but neglects any explanation as to why it was apparently left so badly defended - why so much focus on distracting Russia in central Asia instead of defending India directly ? Then, he downplays the Anglo-Germanic rivalry to a point where Britain siding with Russia simply doesn't make any sense : having spent entire chapters on describing how badly Britain wanted to thwart Russian expansion, for them to suddenly band together against Germany comes completely out of the blue. I'm not saying it's wholly without merit - it's a a potentially interesting connection between disparate world even - just that Frankopan wastes all his efforts and it left me feeling completely unconvinced.

In short, this book is soulless, plodding, dull, uninformative, materialistic and cynical to an absurd extreme, and basically a complete waste of everyone's time. I'm only going to give it 2/10 just so I don't feel completely swindled. 

The Silk Roads To Nowhere

I'm currently grinding my way through a hugely over-rated book, The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. It's just barely good enough to keep me reading, but I've come close to giving it up a couple of times. At this stage, I think I'm continuing only because I tend to fall for the sunk cost fallacy.

But one particular comment demands a response. One of the better chapters is on the Holocaust. At the end of this description of horrific genocide, Frankopan sees fit to finish with... a dig at the EU.

Blink.

Really ? 

Yes, really. 

Instantly my estimation of the author has plummeted from cynical mediocre writer to borderline loony. He begins not at all unreasonably :

One result of this was that Hitler's oppression was deemed worse than that of Stalin. The narrative of the war as a triumph over tyranny was selective, singling out one political enemy while glossing over the faults and failings of recent friends. Many in central and eastern Europe would beg to differ with this story of the triumph of democracy, pointing out the price that was paid over subsequent decades by those who found themselves on the wrong side of an arbitrary line. Western Europe had its history to protect, however, and that meant emphasising success – and keeping quiet about mistakes and about decisions that could be explained as realpolitk.

Which doesn't seem outlandish to me. All I could raise here would be that Frankopan doesn't present any alternative as to what would have been better course of action : war with Russia hardly seems like a credible option and a certain amount of realpolitik in disastrous situations is inevitable. If it wasn't, they wouldn't be disasters. Still, nothing crazy here. 

But he follows this with one of the dumbest comments I've ever read in a serious history book :

This was typified by the European Union being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 : how wonderful that Europe, which had been responsible for almost continuous warfare not just in its own continent but across the world for centuries, had managed to avoid conflict for several decades.

Righto. The European Union isn't the same as Europe, you twit, any more than Germany is the same as Prussia or Italy is the same as the Roman Empire. With Europe indeed having been a hotbed of nation-state conflict for much of the previous millennium, the EU was founded in part with the ideal of preventing this. Through economic interdependency, it has, again in part, at the very least played a key role in fostering better internal relations. So we went from one state of affairs (intracontinental warfare between independent states) to another, markedly different one (intracontinental economic and political cooperation under the auspices of a multi-national organisation). To deny the success of this new, previously non-existent entity, to confuse it with the wholly different state of affairs that existed before it, is not just cynical - it's plain wrong.

Frankopan is having none of it, however. Immediately he continues :

In late antiquity, the equivalent would have been giving the prize to Rome a century after its sack by the Goths, or perhaps to the Crusaders after the loss of Acre for toning down anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Christian world. 

Umm, no, no it wouldn't. Neither of those comparisons makes a lick of sense. The rise of an organisation deliberately fostering mutual assistance and cooperation is in no way comparable to the conquest and submission of the Roman Empire of the loss of a colony in the Middle East. The things simply do not equate. At all.

The silence of the guns, perhaps, owed more to the reality that there was nothing left to fight for than to the foresight of a succession of supposedly brilliant peace-makers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, or to the wonders of an unwieldy international organisation of European state whose accounts have not been signed off by its own auditors for years.

Whut ? Yes, seriously, end the chapter on genocide by critiquing the financial imperfections of the European Union. That's definitely a sensible thing to do and not at all in bad taste. Let alone that yes, in the first years after WWII there wasn't much left to fight over, but - bloody hell ! - things have improved a very great deal since then. In terms of pure resources (which Frankopan tends to obsesses over to the enormous detriment of everything else), things are much better now than they ever have been. Yet do you see any hint - any at all - of any of the major European powers even considering military force as a solution to diplomatic difficulties between themselves ? No, you don't.

They say a cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. I'm not sure Frankopan knows either. True, the world and even Europe isn't a perfect, peaceful, harmonious Utopia - hardly ! Look, I'm not even saying there isn't a case to be made here (although I very much doubt that any argument along Frankopan's lines would ever hold up). But this kind of casual, throwaway comment with no substance whatever to back it up, this mingling of cynicism and stupidity... that's something I'd expect from a UKIP supporter, not a professional historian.

Aaargh.

(If you're wondering, Frankopan isn't a nationalist. If anything the opposite : he hates everyone and everything equally. His version of history is nothing but one long sequence of horrible events with not a single good thing ever happening to anyone, ever. But more on that in a fuller review.)

Towards Xanadu

Unless you've actually be following me online so closely that I ought to be a bit worried, you might not be aware that I'm rather fond of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (not to be confused with the composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor). Kubla Khan is my all-time favourite. I don't know why exactly. I suppose it's the romance of a vision of paradise lost forever by an interruption, along with the mysterious, other-worldly imagery and the pleasingly melodic rhyming structure.

Anyway, I wasn't aware that Coleridge was also a philosopher. Unfortunately, the Aeon essay leaves me so confused about what his ideas actually were that I'm going to skip over them completely and come at this from a totally different angle. What I like is the sentiment :

This inclusive attitude is one of the strengths of Coleridge’s approach, which grew from his celebrated powers of synthesis. Seeing polarised debates as revealing an interdependent whole, he tried to embrace the views of his philosophical opponents, rather than simply dismiss them. He saw dichotomous or binary thinking (B versus C) as merely disputative, whereas a broader trichotomy (B versus C within a broader unity of A) presented a unified whole as the higher ideal that fierce yet dependent polar opposition imperfectly represents. The view of a higher union of opposites leads to reasoning, while binary thinking leads merely to arguing.

This is considerably more interesting than Richard Dawkins quote that the truth is not necessarily midway between two positions, since one side may simply be wrong. I agree with this quote too; some options are mutually exclusive. But how much more productive to consider that both viewpoints usually don't emerge fully-formed from the head of Zeus, but have some solid (if often flawed) reasoning behind them.

For an example, quite separately I also read the following on social media :

“The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Martin Luther King Jnr. I think that this means something like: “It’s taking a long time for humans to become more just and fair, but it will eventually happen.”

And all that weirdness of H.G. Wells' (who was also strongly in favour of synthesis) strange views on women have been stuck in my head. I posited that maybe his views related to the higher infant mortality rates of the time. So in a discussion with Shirley, we took this to extremes. Suppose that centuries or millennia ago, you lived back when infant mortality was very high indeed. Not only that, but female mortality in childbirth was also very much higher than in the modern West. You also have no real birth control. Doesn't this necessitate that your moral values be rather drastically different than today ?

We think yes. If your population is small, and every pregnancy carries a serious risk of infant mortality, raising children is not an optional extra you can eventually get around to, otherwise your tribe or village or whatever is all the more likely to die out. Unless you breed, you will go extinct (albeit locally). And lacking much in the way of anything other than mother's milk as a food source, it follows that the bulk of a woman's time, when of breeding age, is going to be spent not only in making babies but also in childcare - a not inconsiderable fraction of her whole life. After which, having little knowledge of anything else, she'll be a full-time grandmother. So the idea of "a woman's place is in the home" conceivably arises out not of patriarchal suppression, but of sheer necessity.

Or in other words : start plotting a women's liberation movement in such an environment, and you'd be roughly analogous to being an anti-masker today. What is fair and just is strongly dependent upon context. The morality of a rule cannot be separated from the reason for that rule.

The flip side of this is that demanding to keep women at home today is equally immoral. Today, we have vastly improved medical treatments and a massively larger population enabling childcare to be outsourced to specialists. In this environment, denying women a choice, insisting that child-rearing is the sum total of their existence and an essential duty, shaming them if they opt out, is ludicrous. A would-be mother has every right to either take up the bulk of the responsibility or to minimise it; equally, there is no longer any necessity for any individual to have children if they don't wish to do so. Denying choice today would be abhorrent, but in the distant past... not so much.

Given the importance of context, the moral arc may not bend so much as it becomes wibbly-wobbly; morality adapts to fit the circumstances of the day. Often, technological progression facilitates greater resources which can enable greater freedoms and equality, but there is no law that says this must be so. 

Of course context is not the whole of it. Some countries today are considerably more free and equal than others despite roughly equal levels of technology and resources. Moral judgements are also self-perpetuating : there is not an equivalent of the "efficient market hypotheses" whereby society tends to be the most moral it can be. It clearly does not. If context lays the ultimate boundaries, then it is entirely optional choices which determine the direction.

What society deems to be moral can be self-perpetuating, such that there can be a strong mismatch between what is possible and what is chosen. That is, while patriarchal suppression may initially have been the consequence, not the cause, of gender roles in society, it could also be a symptom in the viral sense of the word, spreading itself from generation to generation. We could already have had had far greater levels of gender equality centuries ago, but actively chose not to. With women having a moral duty to raise children, it's a short step to keeping them at home. And it's another short step to not bothering to educate them - what would they need an education for since they'll never have the chance to use it ? And then inductive-based learning takes over into a vicious circle : all these women don't know anything, hence they must be stupid, so there's no point even trying to educate them. So amazingly enough a lack of education leads to half the population being, well... they wouldn't do well on Mastermind, that's for sure.

We could have broken the cycle. As populations grew and medical technology improved, we could have had greater division of labour. But we were stuck in the grip of circular reasoning. Only in the last century or so does there seem to have been any real shift towards true equality. Perhaps in part this is due to the pressure to change becoming unbearable : infant mortality is close to zero, schooling is ubiquitous, contraception is affordable and available. Under such conditions there is no need or desire for women to spend half their lives raising children and doing bugger all else, though we have still hardly escaped the misogynistic grip of our ancestors.

Of course, this is a simplification. Gender equality hasn't shifted linearly or uniformly and the history of gender roles is massively more complex than this brief outline. The point is that any model of how morality changes in society must use multi-scale thinking, a broad brush that paints with fine strokes. The constraints of circumstance limit the decisions which can be made, but the details of how they're expressed is far more optional. And there is a feedback between the two, with the nuances of the choices made affecting what choices are possible.

I don't think synthesis is possible between all viewpoints, let alone between all people. Plenty of people make contextually immoral choices out of pure malevolence, of sheer desire to inflict harm even at their own expense. I just think if we took half the energy we do on making clever memes to disparage everyone who disagrees with us, and instead used that to figure out the reasons for each other's conclusions (even some of the really awful/weird ones), the world might be a happier place.

Coleridge the philosopher

Though far more often remembered as a poet, Coleridge’s theory of ideas was spectacular in its originality and bold reach.

Eat your heart out Thomas Nagel

My recent piece on John Locke and consciousness generated some interesting discussion, which I'll try and collate here soon. In the meantime, a piece on Ian Wardell's blog got me thinking along quite different lines : what if disembodied consciousness were possible ? What would it be like to be a ghost ?

A ghost is popularly depicted as a floating white sheet with eye holes transparent person. Typically they have essentially the same attributes as real people, usually with rich memories, perfectly ordinary senses like sight and touch, and are often subject to strong emotions. They differ in that they interact with the physical world rather differently to ordinary mortals, but basically they're just see-through people.

I think a true disembodied consciousness, if it were even possible, might be something else entirely.

If consciousness is allowed to exist outside the body, then this mandates some form of dualism. For this to be possible the world itself cannot be made of consciousness (idealism) but some distinct, physical stuff, some substrate in which our ghost shall exist. So we shall allow it to exist in the world but not be of the world. You cannot have ghosts in the idealist or materialist case, at least not in any meaningful sense. We must accept dualism for this exercise or there's no point to it.

Now Plato, at times, advocated for following the path of pure reason, arguing that the senses deceive us. If we want truth, he suggested, we have to abandon the senses and give ourselves over to pure thought. But if we did that, what would we perceive ?

We know that the structure of our eye and the corresponding nervous system play as much a role in what we see as much as what's actually there to observe in the first place. Qualia are not completely independent of reality or totally subjective either. As Locke said, you can't just imagine entirely new qualia. You can recall those you're already familiar with and modify them, but not create them. 

So would a ghost perceive anything at all ? Would it perceive realty directly, without any of the errors of the senses, or nothing whatsoever ?

I lean towards the latter. If reality is external, objective, and real, as it must be in our dualist scenario, then our perceptions are limited and flawed, but rarely can they be said to be wholly "wrong". So to truly know the world fully requires more perception, not less. But our disembodied consciousness must, by definition, have no senses or it is not disembodied - it would have a distinct physical connection to the world. If instead we want to imagine a being with perfect and complete perception, we are imagining God, not a ghost. And that's a different exercise altogether. No, our ghost shall have no perception, but it must of course have experience.

Our ghost is blind, then. It is a creature of pure subjective awareness.

Perception and the capacity for experiential awareness requires memory. In order to read the world you must have some understanding and knowledge of it, which is impossible without memory; the same applies to internal experience just the same. More fundamentally, existence demands continuity, which for our being of pure consciousness necessitates memory. A ghost, it would seem, must therefore have memory or it has nothing.

But this is awkward, since we know that memories are stored within the brain and body. Where then would our ghost store its memories ?

The subjective experience of the world is qualia. Does memory itself constitute a qualia, or does whatever prompts our memory only re-induce those same qualia in us ? I incline to the latter. As a book contains words which are themselves physical, objective, and real, but induce within us purely subjective experiences, so do the brain (and body) store memories. Qualia are not stored themselves (being non-physical in nature they perhaps cannot be), the brain only reminds us of what it experienced before. To recall a memory is, in a sense, to repeat an experience, albeit to a lesser and more imprecise degree than in the original conditions.

So would a ghost be able to comprehend and consider qualia ? What would induce them if it had no physical apparatus with which to sense ? What, if anything, could it remember for further assessment ? If it lacked memory entirely - if it existed only in the moment, with no ability to assign meaning to anything - then I do not see how it could be called conscious. Again, memory (though not memory of being a mortal human) would seem to be a necessity, otherwise a disembodied consciousness could not meaningfully be said to even exist. We must therefore accept for the sake of argument that the ghost has memory, after a fashion - presumably as pure qualia, with none of the neuronal heuristics of the physical brain. 

Which, without senses, must be how the ghost exists more generally also : a creature entirely of pure sensation, pure subjectivity, unbound by physical reality. If it did have senses, it would be able to interact with the world, and for all intents and purposes I do not see how we could really call it a "ghost" at all - it would instead be like someone "out of phase" in a science fiction show.

(And yet, perhaps not wholly without senses after all, though undeniably different from the senses we're used to considering.)

Without senses, but possessing memory, our ghost would akin to the proverbial brain in a vat. At best, if such a being of air and darkness could somehow be perceived, small wonder its actions would seem as if on a replay. It would have no new information on which to make choices, only rearrangements of what it already knew. At worst it would be incoherent, as though in a dream. In this mental state there are no constraints whatsoever, nothing to give the world structure and consistency but our own fancies. If the brain and the body are what provide limits and structure to our thoughts, our lone ghost would have nothing to provide it with the stability of a mental framework.

Unless, perhaps, there were other ghosts - reference points and sources of new information, new perspectives on which to act. Then this world of shadows and dust would not quite be one of pure imagination. While still radically different from ordinary reality, and far removed from the crude imagery of ghosts-as-transparent-people meme, it would yet be more similar to everyday life : each ghost responding to the others in new and unpredictable ways, a genuine afterlife of sorts, not an incoherent and nonsensical mass of useless sensation.

(An alternative view is that it is consciousness itself which provides structure to matter, that matter is shaped entirely by mind rather than the other way around. But if that's the case, if mind is all-powerful, then I do not see why it would be so determined to construct itself such crude and pointless hosts*. No, it is mind from matter which is most appealing to me. Yet there seems an undeniable interplay between the two, rather than demanding a total superiority of one or the other.)
* In other words, why aren't I Jason Momoa ?

We must consider also that pain and pleasure are also qualia. This leads to the uncomfortable prospect of our ghost's world as one of eternal bliss or eternal torment, or a mingling of both.

Or does it ? For a singular consciousness perhaps not, for there would be nothing to induce it. Then again, the mere memory of pain (as Locke noted) hardly compares with the real thing. But psychological distress, anxiety... are those internal ? Worry and doubt are not the same as the pain of dismemberment, but can be debilitating all the same. Fear is perhaps the literal mind-killer.

The Death of the Discworld experiences emotions, but differently to humans. Lacking hormones, he can think angry, but not feel angry. Even feelings and emotions are, arguably, different from one another, still more so from thoughts. Likewise in Greek mythology, the spirits were mere shades of their former selves, not at all as vibrant or vital (as it were) as real people. So our afterlife might be dim indeed, a realm of pale shadows - lacking the errors of our senses, yes, but hostage to the errors of our subjective judgements.

Think of smell. I find it much more difficult to imagine a smell than an image - I can do it, but to a very limited extent. I can imagine a loaf of bread in some considerable visual and even tactile detail - the texture, the colour, the feel of it, the flecks of flour and seeds - but the smell is harder. Put an actual fresh loaf in front of me and the sensation comes freely with all its richness, but without that direct perception, the qualia of smell is weak indeed. So too might be the realm of the ghosts, little more than an echo. The constraints provided by other consciousnesses would not seem as strong as the far stricter limitations imposed by the brain and body, which keep our thoughts ordered and whole. The afterlife might be vague and faint - far more prone to confusion and obscurity, not less as Plato thought.

Then again, dreams do not always seem so formless. Indeed, their sensation often seems vivid and intense until we awake, and only then does the memory diminish. Is this because, when dreaming, we exist in some realm of pure qualia, and thus our "perception" is wholly dominated by them ? Or is it that the sensations are generated and amplified by the same apparatus we use for real perception, without which we would have little or no clarity or awareness whatsoever ?

To be a ghost would not necessarily mean we would be anything like a traditional spectre. Stripped of all our physicality, we would be left with (assuming it to be possible at all) pure awareness, emotion, and memory. And even the quality of those might not in any way resemble what we're used to : lacking all our usual senses, hormones, and other bodily conditions that demonstrably influence us, it's hard to see how life as a ghost could much resemble life as a mortal.

Even more radically : what of time ? According to relativity, photons (i.e. energy) do not experience time. If our ghost is energy, then, its existence becomes utterly unfathomable. Perhaps it would escape the problems of memory (there would be no time in which to store them, nor any sense of continuity or change), but its whole nature would become so radically different to our own that speculation on its subjective experience would become truly meaningless.

I do not believe ghosts exist. And while I'm even more certain that my speculations here are far from complete or even correct, I for one won't be trying a Ouija board any time soon. The ghost, so far as I can tell, would have nothing much to say.

Meritocracy is not malevolent

Haven't done any posts on meritocracies for a while, but this Slow Boring piece is quite interesting.

For those unaware, I spent some considerable time investigating this in a series of simulations. I even got as far as writing a paper, but I just don't have the time to deal with the formal process of getting it into a publishable format, let alone handling the peer review experience. You can find a short summary here, or if anyone wants a copy of the full "paper", just ask.

Anyway, it seems to me that there are some very legitimate objections to the idea of a meritocracy :

• The flip side of awards based on merit is the implication of punishment based on failure (or at least the lack of rewards). Fear of punishment does work as an incentive in some cases, but by no means all, and there's a threshold : take too much from people and all you do is crush them. You can't pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you don't have any boots.
• Related : the mere notion of a meritocracy says nothing at all about the degree of inequality. It implies some, but that's all. If abilities follow a Gaussian distribution, then it follows that the most extreme talents are disproportionately rare and therefore command a highly non-linear premium, thus leading to potentially extreme inequality.
• Virtually all talents are in part natural. Is it fair to reward or punish people for things over which they have no control ? Nobody wants to be stupid or lazy, but some people are. The concept of meritocracy doesn't say much about how we should attempt to change people's characteristics.
• Material success requires material resources. Inherited wealth makes a mockery of the meritocratic ideal, since the child of a billionaire will find it far easier to start their own company than the child of a pauper no matter how gifted they are.
• A meritocracy in a free market leads to absurdities like kicking a ball around being valued manyfold times more than nursing skills, or marketing success being rewarded infinitely more than researching cleaner energy.

So a pure meritocracy is uncontestably a Bad Thing (see also Plato's Republic). Yet certain meritocratic ideals are equally uncontestably a Good Thing : if you have two otherwise equal candidates, you give the job to the more qualified. You give people a bonus when they go the extra mile. Unequal work demands unequal pay - it's just that this is far from the be-all and end-all of society. To have a truly just, fair system, you must give equal opportunities from the word go. You have to give people the best possible chance to improve themselves, not take so much that they're trapped in squalor. And you can't give people unequal pay for unequal work to an unlimited and unrestricted degree; giving people too much is as harmful as giving them too little.

Now, I agree with the Slow Boring author that very often that people do, in the real world, broadly tend to rise according to their qualifications. By and large, most professors of literature probably aren't bluffing their way through each day, most of the uber-wealthy technocrats are hardly stupid people who got a lucky break. You need some ability, except through lotteries and inheritance. And I agree that smart people are fully capable of making bad decisions... but I think on this point the author goes too far :

The people who work in private equity are very smart. Their job is to look for companies that, for whatever reason, are not being managed in a way that maximizes shareholder value. Then they take them over with borrowed money and rejigger operations so as to increase profits. In the case of nursing homes, it turns out that basically, if you give patients more drugs, you can get away with lower staffing levels, and then you can drain the resources that are freed up by that in various ways...  the point here is that things can go awry not despite, but because smart people are in charge.

Doctors are quite a bit smarter than the average American, which seems reasonable. Nobody wants a dumb doctor. But you also don’t really want a shrewd doctor who is putting his smarts to use figuring out how to take advantage of his asymmetrical information vis-a-vis his patients to buy unnecessary services. You want healers who, yes, earn a comfortable living, but also comport themselves according to a code of honour and offer legitimate medical advice. But this concept of honour and virtue is consistently at odds with the merit principle.

I think this points more towards an overly-crude definition of "merit", and an incomplete understanding of the nature of intelligence, than a fundamental flaw in the meritocratic ideal. Which is exemplified by the author's opinion on Trump :

Liberals who’ve had their brains poisoned by meritocracy often make out Trump to be some kind of dunce who only got anywhere because his dad was rich. But if you examine the record, it’s clearly not true. His recognition that he could get away with repeatedly stiffing contractors without becoming unable to do business going forward was genuinely insightful. The way he emerged from bankruptcy in Atlantic City by launching a publicly-traded company and then sticking his shareholders with his own personal debts was nothing short of brilliant. The problem with Trump is that he’s a bad person. He ran the federal government with the ethics of a private equity team taking over a nursing home.

No, Trump is thick as shit, of that there's no doubt. Rampant short-term, hyper-competitive, zero-sum-game, winner-takes-all behaviour is unbelievably stupid. That it's financially successful for the individual doesn't mean it doesn't have appalling wider consequences. This is much like the difference between critical and analytical thinking : people can be very adept at justifying insanely stupid things. This doesn't make them a special kind of genius - it literally makes them a special kind of stupid. It's like being a fantastic cavalry leader but a terrible tactician : leading a heroic charge into a volley of machine gun fire; or being a brilliant tactician but a lousy strategist - winning amazing battles you needn't have fought at all.

What you want to do is incorporate different aspects beyond raw analytic ability into your definition of "merit". You want it to include strategic, long-term, holistic thinking. You want it to include social responsibility and a consideration for the broader ramifications of the plan, not just short-term, analytic rationalisations for tactical decision-making. In short, you want to be good at planning a coal mine, not just good at hacking through rocks. This is not a fundamental weakness of meritocratic thinking, but a misunderstanding of it. Regardless of their medical skills, a doctor who defrauds their patients ought by definition to be a terrible doctor.

The facts are pretty clear that poor ethics can frequently be rewarded. To have a healthier society, we need more emphasis on fair play, “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay,” and creating an atmosphere in which people would be ashamed to tell their parents that their well-paid finance job involves identifying ways to make patient care worse.

Surely there's a large overlap in the Venn diagrams of ethics and intelligence. "I made a million dollars by this clever financial algorithm that deprives people of medical care" is an act of profound stupidity as well as an unequivocally immoral choice. I agree, though, that there are differences (being stupid doesn't invariably make you evil), and this too is a component inherently missing from a pure meritocracy. There just isn't any one single principle which can lead to the best society. You need a combination.

That’s not a simple switch we can flip. And while it obviously includes a regulatory component, it’s fundamentally not a regulatory issue. It’s a question of social values and getting away from celebrating tournament winners and being “the best,” and a shift to celebrating other kinds of virtues including humility, restraint, fairness, and a belief that some things just aren’t worth it.

But by far and away the biggest aspect of this will be that regulatory component; laws are a cause of societal values as much as a consequence of them. Merely proposing to change those social values by themselves is so vague as to be meaningless : unless you're prepared to suggest concrete legislative changes, then it amounts to saying little more than "we just need to be better people". Is there a special name for this particular fallacy ? Because this sort of "let's just make better choices" seems to be one of the worst and most common fallacies of all. No, you have to campaign for actual consequences, otherwise the fine ideals are only ever so hollow.

Meritocracy is bad

America is good at elevating "the best" people; the problem is that's a bad idea.

Proto-civilization

Humans are annoyingly social creatures. Not everyone enjoys living in big cities, but lots of people do. Yet the standard narrative is that living in large groups is a relatively recent development enabled only by the invention of farming, that prior to this we lived by necessity in very much smaller communities. After all, you can't support a large population by hunting mammoths and gathering berries.

This would seem to be broadly true as far as it goes, but it may not be the whole story. True, you probably can't sustain an unlimited population size by hunting and gathering : farming definitely helps. But the manageable population size might be considerably larger than that of a small village. There is probably also not a singular moment of agricultural revolution at which point suddenly everyone became farmers. In one of Francis Pryor's books (I forget which one), he makes reference to evidence of Neolithic settlements having deliberately sown desirable plants millennia before the Agricultural Revolution proper; not in anything like as sophisticated an approach as actual farming, but useful all the same.

So if farming doesn't suddenly spring into existence, perhaps neither does full-blooded civilisation. Couple of good recent BBC documentaries about this. First, The Lost Circle Revealed describes how part of Stonehenge was not only originally made of Welsh rocks, but actually assembled in Wales before being moved to England. Second, the slightly older Secrets of Orkney, which presents the case that the stone circle culture first developed in Orkney and then spread to the rest of Britain.

Now, at this point it's probably worth bearing this in mind :

Well fair enough. But if the physical achievements of Stonehenge and the cosy stone houses of prehistoric Orkney pale in comparison to their contemporary Egyptian counterparts, maybe the mental ones are not quite so sub-standard. After all, dragging a series one-tonne stones 140 miles (!) through the Welsh terrain is an achievement not to be sniffed at, but more than that, it requires mass co-operation over a huge geographic area. There surely wasn't a prehistoric British nation-state, but the collaborative effort must have taken place on a similar scale. If they didn't have the capabilities to construct the pyramids, then still had the mindset necessary to formulate, plan, and achieve national-scale projects. They were also (it would seem) considerably less hierarchical than the Egyptians, with the only real difference in the local chieftains being that they lived in - Pryor again - "a slightly larger roundhouse" than the common folk. And this seems to have lasted for many thousands of years.

There is nothing special about Britain. While we can't ever know what exactly the mindset was, whether this mass cooperation was some sort of emergent phenomena from local interests or a more deliberate, pseudo-nationalistic effort, it would still imply that our idea of small roving bands of hunter gathers is hardly the full picture. We are animals, and some animals are social to a degree far exceeding that of humans. So how are back does this large-scale thinking really go ? Maybe tens of millennia. Maybe all the way. Certainly, it would seem, far back beyond the earliest cities.

On to the Aeon piece, which is written in a somewhat tangential style that makes it hard to extract its main point, but I shall try.

This is more than just a theory of prehistory. It’s the modern, scientific origin myth. Yes, we live in mega-societies with property and slavery and inequality but, at heart, we are mobile, egalitarian hunter-gatherers, wired for small groups and sharing. According to the evolutionary social scientist Peter Turchin, this view is ‘so standard that it is rarely formulated in explicit terms’. It’s also probably wrong.

Both a kingdom and a state, the Calusa concentrated power in a hereditary sovereign who had life-and-death control over his subjects, a fact he demonstrated with regular human sacrifice. He ruled from the island of Mound Key – specifically, from a massive house perched atop a 32-foot-high mound and spacious enough to fit 2,000 people. He oversaw full-time military and priestly classes and funnelled surplus production into lavish celebrations... They ruled an area larger than Switzerland... How did the Calusa build such a large, stratified society? A reasonable guess would be through agriculture. Turns out, that’s not what happened. The Calusa built a state not through agriculture but through wild game – in particular, fish.

The more we dig through history, the more we encounter foragers who were sedentary and hierarchical. They covered Japan before agriculture. They dotted the South China coast before agriculture. They inhabited the Levant, tracts of the Nile, the beaches of southern Scandinavia, the central plains of Russia, the coasts of the Atacama Desert, and the grasslands of the high-altitude Andes – all before agricultural peoples dominated those regions. Even today, sedentary foragers live in riverine and coastal regions of New Guinea.

And then there are the Sunghir burials. Roughly 30,000 years old and situated 200 km east of modern-day Moscow, these are the zenith of Upper Palaeolithic funerary extravagance. Especially striking are two adolescent boys: buried head-to-head, coated with ochre, accompanied by 16 mammoth-ivory spears and showered with more than 10,000 mammoth-ivory beads.

Still, for Pettitt, the burials overturn any assumption of simple, hyper-egalitarian bands. They indicate societies of specialists. They indicate status-minded, conspicuous consumption. Even if people were chucking deer canines and mammoth-tusk lances into the graves of people who died strange deaths, they still had the time and motivation to craft such fancy knick-knacks. ‘It’s inconceivable that Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers were egalitarian,’ Pettitt said. ‘It just doesn’t work.’

I would suppose that if humans are hard-wired for anything at all, they are flexible enough that culture can override innate behaviour to almost any degree. The past would be to be a mixture of hierarchies and strictly egalitarian networks, from small-scale bands to enormous pan-national groups. Though specialisation doesn't necessarily equate to hierarchy, much less centralised control, still sometimes clear centralised hierarchies did emerge, with or without farming, and could be extraordinarily successful. Yet at the very least, stable egalitarian societies, if not bona fide egalitarian civilizations, were also equally a part of the story, also lasting for enormous periods. While we do have animal natures, perhaps how we arrange ourselves just isn't part of that. Maybe there is no "natural tendency" for human societies to be like anything in particular at all.

If, however, we evolved in both mobile bands and large hierarchical communities, then, by nature, we are much more psychologically flexible. We’re egalitarian, yes, but also predatory and hierarchical. We’re prepared to interact with familiar people, yes, but also ready to cooperate with strangers. The idea that human nature was forged in a chaos of sundry social environments might be more distressing than a narrative about small, egalitarian bands. But it explains the breadth of human behaviour and the ease with which we live in modern societies. The world today is unlike anything humans have experienced, yet in terms of their hierarchy, sedentism and political complexity, the societies we’ve built might still be deeply familiar.

Not all early human societies were small-scale egalitarian bands

Beyond the !Kung : A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale

People are weird and I don't like them

I wandered into an online debate the other day and it served as a potent reminder of how little I understand people.

Well, I didn't really wander. I was invited in by someone I respect who wanted my opinion, most likely because I've previously expressed skepticism for the idea of getting more scientists into politics. He is of the opinion that we should keep science and politics separate (I completely agree), so asked me for my thoughts as to why scientists shouldn't become politicians. As a summary of "what I think is wrong with politics", it got a bit more ranty and tangential than I intended, but I'm still pretty pleased with my response, so here it is for posterity.

***

I don’t think there is any harm in individual scientists going into politics. I would even encourage it. Where I draw the line is getting any sort of mass movement of scientists becoming politicians, or forming political parties, for a few reasons : 1) the distrust the media (often rightly) bestows on politicians will flow back towards scientists, meaning no-one will have any trust in the facts; 2) [Probably more importantly] scientists are not representative of the whole population any more than lawyers are, nor is science the only form of expertise; 3) any proficiency for scientists to be more impartial is in large part a result of the system they operate in, and not solely due to training. Put a scientist in the system of destructive criticism formed by the system of opposition [I mean in politics, where the opposition is duty-bound to oppose utterly everything] and relentless media attacks, and there’s no reason to suppose they’ll do any better or worse than anyone else. This last point might help explain why politics is so dominated by lawyers, who for all their faults are at least trained and expected to deal with this.

But… science does unquestionably work much better than politics. My take on this is that science has a system of well-moderated debate and peer review. In some venues, like conferences and blogs and whatnot, we can say whatever we like. But in formal publications, we’re forced to only set down what we can agree on, with an editor ensuring that the debate is handled according to clear rules (at least when it works well, which it often doesn’t). There is an inherent incentive to discover something new which is counterbalanced by the need to rigorously justify it. Thus, in the main, you get a sort of optimistic, progressive skepticism. No-one is ever really silenced, all ideas are up for discussion, but only the most solid findings are written, as it were, into law.

An additional key factor is that scientists are kept relatively isolated from the media. They don’t have to fact [sic; face] the shitstorm of questions from a wilfully ignorant rabble on a daily basis - by and large they get criticism from other experts instead. Unlike in politics, there’s far less of a public shaming of anyone who - woe betide! - dares to change their mind on an issue. And more importantly, science isn’t nearly so dominated by individuals as in politics. It’s much harder to point a finger at an emergent consensus.

What politics needs is not more scientists so much as it needs more diversity - people from all kinds of walks of life, of different professions, different levels of income and other backgrounds, as well as a better system for managing discussion and an end to the winner-takes-all strategy. Science has done pretty well at marrying competition with collaboration, but the political attempt has been more of a literal shotgun wedding.

***

The response I got from another participant, who as far as I can tell had been entirely civil until that point, was... less than enthusiastic. The words "inane" and "bullshit" were used. Lots of pointless, let's-take-everything-literally-and-to-a-pointless-extreme questions were asked which were WRITTEN IN ALL CAPITALS BECAUSE ANGER. I was called an entitled, arrogant, fascist.

Right...

So, a scientist says, "I don't want scientists dominating politics, I would prefer to have a more representative group of people running the country"... and that is fascism how, exactly ? Okay, I didn't say it explicitly (because I forgot), but my main point is that politics should be run a la the process of scientific discovery (this is mentioned in detail in the links, but my bad for not pointing this out more directly). But nothing here amounts even to populism, let alone fascism. Nothing here says "ignore the experts". Nothing here undermines scientific credibility (quite the reverse) or demands we respect the nobility of the peasants or something. And quite what in my response should provoke anger, especially from someone I've never before interacted with before, and who otherwise gives no indication of easily provoked... well, in this case "scientists baffled" is exactly correct.

Oh well. I'll preserve this as a record as the single weirdest response I've ever encountered, and move on.

Compassion fatigue and energy supply

Most people reading this are probably visiting from the Pluspora social media network, where I'm modestly active. It's an acceptable substitute for Google Plus, mainly thanks to the community more than the site itself (which is, frankly, crap). You can get some genuinely intelligent, protracted discussion going there about all kinds of topics, largely without having to deal with trolls or lunatics. Challenge someone's argument and most of the time it at least doesn't immediately descend into a shouting match. That alone is more than adequate compensation for the interface that looks like it wandered out of the mid 1990's having forgotten to put any clothes on.

Nevertheless, at times scrolling through the feed is highly unpleasant. Not because the content people post is wrong, and only in part because a lot of it is very bad, but mainly because so much of it is damn depressing.

When I say "bad", I do mean bad. There are opinion pieces masquerading as fact. There are random, unsourced factoid memes aplenty. There's activism championing a plethora of moderately interesting causes. And there's a tonne of stuff which does literally nothing at all except evoke an emotional response. 

What exactly am I supposed to do with this ?

I have absolutely no idea. There's a lot of stuff which seems to be intended just to make people angry, or blame some group for the follies of some other group. I don't doubt the sincere intentions of those posting it, nor do I even doubt the validity of most of the claims made, but much of it has simply no real function. It makes me momentarily angry, then I forget about it, and after a while I just feel depressed because of the horrible things going on in the world. Most of it is utterly irrelevant to my day-to-day life which is, to be blunt, really quite a pleasant experience, but much of social media seems to be hell-bent on convincing me that it isn't and/or isn't supposed to be.

Look, according to my feed for the last twelve hours, I should be worried about :

• Algorithms ruining privacy
• Overgrazing by cattle
• Drug-resistant microbes
• Amazon's efforts to suppress a book about capitalism
• Climate change
• Kids falling behind in school and how we should blame the parents
• Men not being in touch with their feminine side
• The difference between Republicans and Democrats both being ineffectual in office
• Men shaming slutty women too much
• Some weird shit about 8-inch sharks in goldfish bowls
• Republicans not caring about anyone except billionaires

And that's leaving aside all the totally random pieces of emotional drivel. Mind you, it's also leaving aside a lot of positive stuff and genuinely interesting articles, but you get the idea.

Again, it's not that I doubt the validity of the causes. It's just that it's stuck forever on the "raising awareness" stage, with no concrete plan forward, no concern for whether it's preaching to the choir or actually having a meaningful effect on people who might actually benefit from it, and most of it really boils down to a simple expression akin to saying, "I HAVE AN EMOTION RIGHT NOW". A great deal of it is so petty that it almost makes Harry and Megan sound interesting. Sometimes, it's all feckin' exhausting.

This leads me on to... energy supply ! Of course, what else ? 

Bear with me just a little longer. I promise this will all tie together soon.

We've learned two relevant but completely disparate things from the pandemic. First, that most people are in fact content to follow the rules. What they won't necessarily do is volunteer to do anything beyond them. And that's perfectly understandable : if the rules say it's safe to meet up with another household, a relatively small proportion won't take advantage of this. And second, we've seen that energy supply is by far and away the dominant factor (leaving aside agriculture and industry and other factors in climate change) that needs to tackled if we're to move to a greener future. Getting people to reduce their energy usage just isn't going to cut it - not even close.

What's the connection between all this ? Well, the article linked below finds that if you change people to green energy, most people won't voluntarily switch back, despite it being more expensive than fossil fuels. Like organ donation, it's far better to have an opt-out model than opt-in. The burden of switching, even if not particularly difficult, is enough to put people off. And people are willing to pay a bit more for cleaner energy. Of course, we shouldn't judge those who do switch back to fossil fuels - I would bet heavily that most of them simply can't afford the extra expense.

So why don't most people voluntarily switch to green energy in the first place ? The same reason they don't get organ donor cards : it takes time and effort that they don't have. It's not that they don't care. It's that they're overwhelmed with other things to do. This is why the burden should lie firmly and specifically with those who make the rules, not (only) on the general public. People are pretty good at following the rules, but they expect those rules to be sensible. That they don't voluntarily switch to cleaner energy doesn't mean they don't want to, or even that they're put off by the higher prices - it's just that they're overwhelmed with other things. They don't have the spare energy left to give it its due attention. They're busy satisfying their own needs, not because they're selfish, but out of raw necessity.

It isn't only social media, of course. It's everything. Not only are you supposed to work hard and long hours, but then you're expected to listen to the endlessly depressing news and then you're expected to care about a billion different causes of which pretty much none are either relevant, important, or anything you can do anything much about anyway. Modern society -at least in its virtual incarnations - is a bit like being trapped in an orphanage for depressed lepers who run an animal sanctuary but is now on fire. Pratchett said, "do the good that's in front of you", but bloody hell it's hard to know where to start.

In Utopia for Realists, the author makes the point that many impoverished people do not claim benefits they're perfectly entitled to : the burden of filing the claim is just too much, especially given the circumstances. And in The Happy Brain, the author notes that even being happy continuously is a tiring process. So I would suggest that a variant of compassion fatigue can affect everyone. If you're being asked to continuously care about everything, to have a passionately-held opinion on just about every possible topic from toxic masculinity to unjust labour laws in the cheese-making industry, you'll end up doing... nothing. It's like being pulled in a dozen different directions all at once. If you were asked instead to just do one simple thing, I suggest the results might be markedly different.

This is not the only possible interpretation, of course. It's also possible that this is just sheer human nature, that we tend towards inaction unless a specific threshold is reached - either that of a reward or a punishment. But I would suggest that compassion fatigue does at least play a role in shifting that threshold if nothing else.

And all this goes both ways. It's possible that most of those who don't switch back do so for the same reason, and if they were less overwhelmed with other things, they might actually prefer to have cheaper but more polluting energy. But here too the burden must fall on the politicians and energy companies. A vast reduction in personal energy use, or other lifestyle changes, is simply impossible. Leaving it up to individuals or corporations is as loopy as saying that people should follow their "common sense" during a pandemic. It just won't work. 

Thankfully there's a positive take-home message form all this : changing the rules does work. People are reluctant to change voluntarily but they will change if gently prodded. And there are very easy ways to prod them so gently that they don't even notice, like making green the default. So stop badgering people. Stop shaming them for not cutting back on energy use. Pressure instead governments and energy suppliers to default to green options, giving opt-out options for those who really need them. And surely this is where all activism must ultimately focus : not on changing the attitudes of a weary populace, but in the actions and policies of those with the capability to effect real change - part of which should be designed with the goal of making said populace considerably less weary.

Climate change: 'Default effect' sees massive green energy switch

When Swiss energy companies made green electricity the default choice, huge numbers of consumers were happy to stick with it - even though it cost them more.

Born Fair

Here's an interesting article about whether animals share a "human" sense of fairness. I say "human" because it's not clear if the people considered in the studies were from any particular culture or if this is really a universal. But it does make the point that you have to have a very careful experimental setup to determine in a monkey is really objecting to unfair treatment or not.

Imagine that there was no second monkey in the experiment, just one monkey and an experimenter with a bowl full of cucumbers and another full of grapes. If the monkey were given the cucumber as a reward in that case, she might also object to it — not because it was unfair, but just because the cucumber doesn’t seem very appealing once the monkey knows there are grapes to be had. The monkey who rejects cucumbers may be less like a political protester and more like a two-year-old swatting away a proffered apple slice when a well-stocked candy jar is in full view.

But hang on, surely giving a lesser reward when you could easily give a better one is every bit as unfair as giving different rewards to different monkeys. That monkey and the toddler are both equally justified in throwing a temper tantrum, because their handlers are both being jerks. From later in the article, what I think the author is driving at is that the monkeys who receive grapes also don't object, even though their treatment is just as unfair as the ones given cucumbers.

Plato all but equated justice with happiness. He thought that so long as everyone was treated fairly, happiness would surely follow. But I am not so sure. Fairness is important, but then again so are grapes. I do not think the majority of people would be unhappy to receive a grape if it meant someone else had to be given a cucumber (or even a kick in the teeth) instead*. The base desire is to receive the best reward possible, regardless of fairness. We are very much more concerned with "fairness" when we're being given cucumbers - it takes some real commitment to principle to object to one's own unfair receipt of a  grape.

* With the major caveat of visibility. If you can see someone else being treated worse for no reason, I think this is very different from the vague awareness that some anonymous schmuck got shafted with a cucumber** instead of rewarded with a tasty grape instead.
** Literally.

On the whole, evidence for fairness in other primates is much more limited than it is in adult humans. Monkeys and apes don’t reject an unequal distribution if the food is freely given rather than paid out in exchange for a task. In the lab, they generally act in their own interest when choosing how to dole out resources, while people are more likely to share equally with a partner. And they don’t turn down unequal offers in a task known as the “ultimatum game,” in which one partner decides how to divide up some resources and the other partner either accepts the offer or decides that neither partner will get anything. People often sacrifice resources in order to express contempt for an unequal offer, whereas chimps typically take what they can get, fair or not.

The general state of an animal is hunger, so it makes sense to accept any food on offer. I don't think I would snub an offer of a cucumber if I was really starving or unsure where the next meal was coming from even if someone else was being given grapes (I might still feel rather cross about it though). And I don't even like cucumber very much.

But studies show that it takes a surprisingly long time for children to incorporate fairness into their own actions. Three and four-year-olds do readily object to an unequal distribution of resources if they’ve received the short end of the stick. But, like non-human primates, they rarely protest when they’re on the winning end of an unequal distribution. This makes it hard to know whether it’s unfairness that they dislike, or simply getting less than others.

That last sentence is a bit confusing, but I suppose if you want to say it's really unfairness that someone dislikes, it has to be symmetrical. You can't say you value fairness if you don't also object when it works in your favour. So you can't measure it one direction. You have to measure both aspects of unfair treatment to know if there's really a moral principle at work here.

Interjection by Terry Pratchett :

“O’ course, I still hung up my stocking on Hogswatch Eve, and in the morning, you know, you know what ? Our dad had put in this little horse he’d carved his very own self...”
AH, said Death. AND THAT WAS WORTH MORE THAN ALL THE EXPENSIVE TOY HORSES IN THE WORLD, EH?
Albert gave him a beady look. “No!” he said. “It weren’t. All I could think of was it wasn’t the big horse in the window.”
Death looked shocked. BUT HOW MUCH BETTER TO HAVE A TOY CARVED WITH —
“No. Only grown-ups think like that,” said Albert. “You’re a selfish little bugger when you’re seven."

Which is apparently true (though whether it's cultural or not is another matter). First on kids being selfish little buggers :

In fact, in deciding how to distribute resources, preschoolers strongly favour divisions in which they come out ahead of others; not only are they likely to claim more than their own share, they even show a spiteful tendency to sacrifice resources if it means that they can have more than someone else. A recent study by Mark Sheskin and colleagues showed that when given a choice between allotting two prize tokens each to themselves and another child and claiming one for themselves while giving none to the other, 5 and 6-year-olds preferred the latter. 

And secondly on adults thinking differently, though not always in a better way :

As they approach adulthood, children show a steadily increasing tendency to distribute resources equally or even altruistically. But paradoxically, they may become less egalitarian in certain ways over the course of their development. Ernst Fehr and his colleagues found that children were more likely to deprive their peers of resources, even at a cost to themselves, if they were told that the other children came from a different school than if they were told that they belonged to the same school. This bias against members from a different group increased with age into the teen years, even though on the whole, teens were much less likely than younger kids to behave selfishly.

Is there a direct connection here ? Perhaps it mirrors some historical trends in ancient societies. It seems popular to shout down "individualism" as though it were necessarily an evil thing and invariably opposed to collectivism, which must therefore be a good thing. But as mentioned previously, thinking of oneself as an individual first and foremost may encourage thinking of others in the same way. When you identify yourself by your group membership, you may be predisposed to dealing with other groups more harshly, whereas if your group is less important to you, you may be less inclined to view other groups unfairly. Very crudely, individualism = selfish but fair, tribalism = cooperative but unfair. Maybe.

Presumably, it ought to be possible to treat each other as individuals but not put our own needs ahead of everyone else. What we want is for everyone to value each other as much as they do themselves, to adopt Epictetus' strategy of identifying their own self-interest with that of each other. This seems to be tremendously difficult in practise though.

Was the Golden Rule Born in the Mind of a Monkey?

As economic inequality increased in many wealthy nations in recent years, a debate has developed around the question of whether inequality is bad for national economies—and bad for their citizens. A captivating video clip of monkey behavior (see below), taken from a 2011 TED talk by primatologist Frans de Waal, has become a surprising piece of ammunition in this discussion.