Adam Spitz

Learned Optimism

2006-07-31T11:30:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Learned Optimism, by Martin Seligman. I heard about it from Steve Pavlina's post about his favourite books; I read it because I thought it would be cool to have a more solid intellectual understanding of how optimism helps. (I've already had it drilled into me by all the personal-development books I've been reading, but none of them really talked about it scientifically.)

The central idea is that different people have a different "explanatory style." "Pessimists" tend to explain bad events with reasons that are "permanent" (this bad thing will last forever), "pervasive" (it'll affect everything I do), and "personal" (it's my own fault), and they explain good events with reasons that are temporary, specific, and not their own doing. Optimists do the reverse.

A person's explanatory style affects a lot of stuff:

How likely he is to go into a state of depression (learned helplessness produces the symptoms of depression, but it doesn't necessarily last a long time; whether it lasts long enough to be considered a full-blown "depression" depends largely on the individual's explanatory style and on the amount of "rumination" he does);

How likely he is to achieve things in the classroom, workplace, sports field, etc. (so it's not just about talent and desire; explanatory style is a major third factor that people usually don't consider when they're thinking about who to hire or how to improve performance);

How healthy he is (optimists tend to catch fewer infectious diseases, have better health habits, have stronger immune systems, and maybe even live longer - and there are plausible scientific explanations for how this could happen);

How likely he is to win elections (or at least American elections - Americans tend to vote for optimistic leaders).

A person can learn to change his own explanatory style; it's not just up to nature and nurture. (That's how the researchers learned that a pessimistic explanatory style actually causes bad stuff like depression, rather than the causation being only the other way around, or just being correlated with it for some other reason - teaching people to use a more optimistic explanatory style cured their depression, and decreased the likelihood of people getting depressed in the future.)

Pessimism has the one advantage, though, that people tend to be more realistic in some kinds of situations when they're feeling pessimistic (though believing that the worst will happen is sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy, so be careful - believing that wonderful things will happen might be perfectly realistic). So pessimism is still useful, and can be really important, especially when the cost of failure is high. Being optimistic is still much more useful most of the time, but what he's advocating isn't blind optimism; it's a sort of flexible and conscious mostly-optimism.

Personally, I think I'd rather think of my goal as striving for realism rather than optimism or pessimism (if a problem really does currently affect everything in my life, or really was my own fault, I want to recognize that rather than pretend it's not true), but with a sort of meta-optimism that recognizes that problems are almost never permanent or pervasive, and that thinks "I can do something about this" or "I can make sure this won't happen again" rather than "this was my fault."

Anyway, I really liked the book. He seemed like a good, conscientious scientist guy - he bent over backwards trying to think up objections to his own ideas. And the book was clear and easy to read.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

2006-05-01T18:13:00.000-07:00

I recently read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I enjoyed it. It had a very different feel from the other personal-finance books I've read, like The Wealthy Barber and The Automatic Millionaire. The other two books say, "Save 10% of your income, and when you retire you'll be a millionaire." Rich Dad, Poor Dad says, "You can do that if you want, but if you actually learn and think about money, you can do way better than that."

One thing I learned that I had never thought about before: Because schools don't teach people this kind of money stuff, most people learn it at home - which means that if you were raised in a poor or middle-class family, and you don't explicitly go out of your way to learn about money, you're probably going to have a poor or middle-class person's attitude toward money, even if you grow up to be intelligent and educated. Which is one reason why there are so many people out there who are earning really nice salaries (because a good education is usually enough to let you achieve that) but not getting rich (because they're following the patterns of working and spending that they learned from their parents, who didn't get rich).

I wouldn't use the book as a source of advice, but as a source of inspiration I really liked it.

Wealth and happiness

2006-04-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

This blog post from the British Psychological Society Research Digest Blog says:

Contrary to the predictions of humanists, Kahneman found that, overall, the richer people were, the higher their life-satisfaction. And although, overall, dreams of wealth at university predicted subsequent reduced life-satisfaction, this relationship disappeared with financial success. Furthermore, the enhanced life-satisfaction that came from financial success was unaffected by whether or not individuals had dreamt of wealth when they were younger.

The message, it seems, is that striving for wealth and failing will make you miserable. Financial success, meanwhile, is likely to make you happier whether you dreamt of it or not.

I haven't read the actual original article because I think I'd have to buy a subscription to the journal. But the question that I'm curious about is whether they've actually determined causation or just correlation. I would have bet that most of the causation was the other way around - happy people are more likely to get rich.

(The first comment on the post I linked to says something similar, and points to a study, which I also haven't read. :)

Beliefs affect reality

2006-04-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

"Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, either way you're right." -- Henry Ford

"Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try." -- Peggy Noonan

One connection that I've been noticing between my old ethics-and-politics obsession and my new personal-development obsession is the differences between people's beliefs about what people are capable of accomplishing for themselves.

One common theme that keeps popping up over and over in these personal-development books is that the number-one most-important absolutely-critical thing, if you want to achieve some goal that you've set for yourself, is to believe that you have the ability to achieve it. If you don't believe that, it's very very very unlikely that you're going to be able to maintain the energy and the motivation and the creativity that you need.

But I keep hearing left-wing people say things that sound to me like they have a mindset like, "Poor people are mostly helpless and dependent. It's not their fault, they didn't do anything wrong, they just don't have much control over their world. They were just born into this situation, or pushed into it by other people who exploited them, and now they can't get out of it without help."

To the extent that our beliefs affect our abilities and our motivation and our energy, a poor person who adopts the left-wing mindset is crippling himself.

Of course it's important to set realistic goals. I believe that it's perfectly realistic for almost anybody (at least in Canada or the U.S. - I don't know much about what things are like in other countries) to believe that he can accomplish amazing things and become fabulously successful.

Personal development books

2006-04-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

I think my phase of obsession with ethics and politics is over. I've started a new obsession with "personal development" stuff. I'm finding, though, that I'm more reluctant to talk about this stuff than I was to talk about politics (even back when I was completely new to politics). But I can at least mention what I've been reading and listening to lately. I've mentioned Steve Pavlina's website here a few times already; here's some other stuff I've read:

A few basic personal-finance books, like The Wealthy Barber and The Millionaire Next Door. (I'm completely new to this kind of stuff, so those books might not be interesting at all to anybody who knows anything about the subject. But I found both of them interesting.)

Several time management books. The ones I liked best were Getting Things Done by David Allen, which I read several months ago and mentioned here, and Time Power by Brian Tracy.

Some books on dealing with people; the one I liked best was How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. (I liked it because it was clear about what the general principles were, but also filled with cool inspiring stories about real people actually doing neat things.)

Some personal-development books that I'm not sure how to categorize because they talk about a lot of different subjects, like Unlimited Power and Awaken The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins, and Maximum Achievement by Brian Tracy. I liked all three of them. (Tony Robbins' writing style got a little bit annoying after a while, but there was still lots of good stuff in there. And I understood his writing style better after I heard his voice in an audio program.)

Some more "spiritual" stuff by Eckhart Tolle. I really like what I've seen of him so far, but that isn't much yet. I listened to some of the audio version of Practicing The Power Of Now, and skimmed through the book versions of The Power Of Now and Stillness Speaks.

The Inner Game Of Tennis, by Timothy Gallwey. I don't have the slightest interest in tennis, but I loved this book. What was most amazing to me was how much the stuff he said reminded me of the stuff I've heard Eckhart Tolle say.

One thing that surprised me was how valuable repetition turned out to be. A lot of these books say similar things, and even within a book I found that they were often repetitive. I was annoyed about that at first, until I had the experience of reading an idea for the fourth or fifth time and suddenly deciding to actually try the idea. I thought to myself: "Why didn't I try this the first time I read it? Maybe this guy phrased it in a slightly different way than the other four guys who said it?" I'm not sure, but I don't think that's what made the difference - I think it just took a few repetitions for me to feel comfortable enough with the idea to be willing to try it. I've had this experience several times since then. It might be interesting and useful to try to train myself to seriously consider every idea I come across without needing to hear it more than once.

2006-03-09T07:22:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed reading this talk by Jared Diamond (the guy who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel) about how to organize people if you want to create wealth. The stuff about the German beer industry and the Japanese food industry was interesting to me, if it's true. (He says that Germans tend to be very loyal to their local brand of beer, and that Japanese people tend to value the freshness of their food very highly, so each producer has a little monopoly over their local region. He also says that there are government rules protecting those industries from foreign competition. So there's very little competition in those industries, even though some other German and Japanese industries are very competitive.)

Conscious reflection

2006-03-04T08:21:00.000-08:00

I've been finding lately that there's something beyond "smart" that I value a lot more than I value raw intelligence. I think it's something like "reflective."

A lot of the biggest changes in my beliefs and my behaviour have come from noticing, and then thinking through, areas of my life that I hadn't thought much about before:

I programmed happily in Basic for a long time, until I learned C++, at which point I realized that my choice of programming language might actually make a difference, and so I started learning a bunch of other languages and thinking about ideas for languages of my own.

I never really thought about my personal values (and related subjects like ethics and politics) very seriously at all, only very superficially, until a couple of years ago. Once I became interested, I spent huge amounts of my time thinking about them, and writing down my thoughts, and reading stuff other people had written, and arguing with people. Since then, the way I feel and the way I behave (at least around some people) have changed a lot.

Until my boss Dave introduced me to General Semantics, I had never thought very deeply about a lot of the language patterns I used. Since I started thinking about it, I've sometimes been a lot more careful about the way I use words (but sometimes I forget), and I've been trying to train myself to get rid of a bunch of bad language habits.

The scary thing is that before I started reflecting on them, I had no idea that my thinking on any of these subjects was so shallow. If you had asked me, I would have said that I was pretty sure Basic was a decent programming language, and that I had a pretty good idea what my values were. And if you had asked me whether my language habits were leading me to think and communicate unclearly, I would have just sorta looked at you funny and decided that you were a kook with a silly pet peeve. But after I started seriously thinking about those subjects, my behaviour changed a lot.

So what I mean when I talk about "reflection" isn't just "thinking about stuff I've never thought about before." (I never knew anything about quantum physics until I read QED and Schrodinger's Kittens, but reading them didn't really change my behaviour.) It's more like, "thinking about choices I'm already making." Even before I started thinking about them, I was still making programming-language-related and personal-values-related and word-pattern-related choices - I was just making them blindly, and I didn't even realize that I was making them blindly.

It's hard to notice which areas of my life I still haven't consciously thought through. Lately I've been starting to learn more about managing my money, and a little bit about eating habits, and I can see my behaviour starting to change. I also tried time logging for a few days, which was a real eye-opener. One way of finding new subjects to reflect on might be to ask other people what subjects have had a big impact on their life.

It's also hard to know, even in the areas that I have thought about a lot, how mature my thoughts are. Even if I've been thinking about something for a long time, I'm not sure how to tell whether I'll someday look back at my current thoughts and decide that they were hopelessly naive. One way of figuring out how mature my thoughts are is to find people who have different opinions, try to find out the reasons why they hold those opinions, and make sure that for each reason, I have a counter-argument for it (if I disagree with it), or else that I've incorporated it into my own reasoning. (This blog has been useful for that, and my arguments on other people's blogs.) Another way is to try to write down my opinions and then make sure that I know what I mean by all of the words that I use - that I can use less-abstract words to explain whatever I say, down to a reasonably low level. (My personal wiki and this blog have both been useful for that.)

I've known a fair number of smart people, and I think I'm pretty smart myself. But I've seen smart people (including myself) waste a lot of time by running really fast in a bad direction. So I think I value this reflectiveness stuff more than I value raw brains. I'd expect that people who think deeply about what they do (even if they think slowly) will produce results that they like better, in the long run, than people who think quickly but shallowly. (Or maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better about getting stupider. I feel like my thought processes have been slowing down as I've gotten older. :)

Which areas of your life have you found yourself making significant changes in, after you started thinking about them?

Online loans and donations

2006-03-01T16:06:00.000-08:00

I'm really glad to see stuff like this happening. I like the idea that the Internet might be able to help make voluntary loans and donations viable in areas where they previously weren't.

Merit

2006-01-31T10:43:00.000-08:00

Here's a story about a university professor who had an overcrowded classroom, so he offered a grade of 70% to anybody who stopped coming to the class.

When asked whether what he did was wrong, he grew impatient, launching into a critique of "our so-called merit-based society," adding it rewards the privileged.

"I was saying to the students: 'This is an act of grace and it's a good thing in life to accept grace.' It's not a good thing to think that you have to earn everything, because that's an illusion."

Luck -- not effort -- plays the largest role in who succeeds in our society, he said.

"It's often because of good luck, the family they were born into, the genes they were born with. So when you establish a society totally of merit and credit, it just suits the privileged. And it always works against the underprivileged."

Erin Pavlina

2006-01-31T10:31:00.000-08:00

Steve Pavlina's wife, Erin Pavlina, has started her own website. So far she's got six articles in her Articles section, and I really like three of them:

Jump Into the Pool With Your Clothes On (about not worrying about what other people think)

Gimme a Break (about giving people the benefit of the doubt)

Kindness is Contagious (about getting into the habit of giving compliments whenever they come to mind)

Keeping your cup empty

2006-01-29T08:31:00.000-08:00

I like this paragraph from Robert Pirsig's Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals (the sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance):

There's an old analogy to a cup of tea. If you want to drink new tea you have to get rid of the old tea that's in your cup, otherwise your cup just overflows and you get a wet mess. Your head is like that cup. It has a limited capacity and if you want to learn something about the world you should keep your head empty in order to learn it. It's very easy to spend your whole life swishing old tea around in your cup thinking it's great stuff because you've never really tried anything new, because you could never get it in, because the old stuff prevented its entry, because you were so sure the old stuff was so good, because you never really tried anything new... on and on in an endless circular pattern.

A few years ago I started my own personal wiki on my hard drive, for exactly that purpose - to write down my thoughts, so that I can forget them if I want to, without fearing that I'll lose them permanently. I really don't like the idea of keeping everything that I know inside my head. I'll forget some parts, and I'll get overly attached to other parts.

This isn't just about "letting go" of my old notions - it's also about building on them. It's happened so many times that I've started browsing through my wiki, and I've seen a page and thought, "Hey, I've got something I can add to that now," so I do. If I didn't have all that stuff written down, I bet I'd spend a lot more time just running through my old thoughts over and over again inside my head. But instead, when I want to run through my old thoughts, I just find that page in the wiki, and my old thoughts are already there, and so it's much easier to build on top of them rather than just reiterate them.

A really important special case of this is writing down ideas and observations that contradict my existing ideas. (I think I learned this from reading The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright.) The best way I know to make sure that my ideas make sense is to write down every objection I hear to my ideas as soon as I hear it. It's not enough to just say, "I'll be scrupulously honest with myself and make sure that I've got an answer to every objection that I hear." If I try to do that, I'll forget a lot of the objections. The human brain is really good at forgetting stuff like that. If I write all the objections down (and make myself be scrupulously honest about addressing each of them), it's easier for me to make sure that I actually address them.

I re-learned the keep-your-cup-empty principle in a different context when I read Getting Things Done, by David Allen. A lot of people (including me) have a lot of things on their "to do" list - short-term things ("return those library books"), long-term things ("get a black belt in a martial art"), lots of stuff. I used to carry that list around inside my head, which was stupid in a few different ways:

I sometimes forgot stuff.

I worried about forgetting stuff.

There was less room in my head for whatever I was working on at the moment, because part of my brain was occupied remembering all this stuff.

Getting Things Done suggested capturing everything I want to get done - now, later, someday, big, little, medium - into a system that I trust, outside my head, so that I don't need to keep it in my head anymore. So far I've been doing this for about six weeks, and I like it. (I started off using plain text files and a text editor, but now the system I use is a little Self program I threw together, plus a Yahoo Calendar for sending me timed reminders.)

One interesting question is: If I get into the habit of forgetting stuff because I know that I've got it written down somewhere, is that going to result in my brain getting lazy and my memory deteriorating? Maybe I'd be better off if I tried to train my brain to have a better memory, rather than training it to be forgetful.

Asking questions

2006-01-27T14:24:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to understand how my boss, Dave, is so fantastically good at listening to other people's reasoning and picking out the flaws in it. I think part of it is that he's gotten into really good habits about what to do when he doesn't understand something.

When I'm listening to someone explain something, and I don't quite get it, I don't always speak up. Sometimes I don't even consciously realize that I've missed something - I'm just listening, trying to soak in the other person's words. Sometimes I realize that I've missed something, but I hope that it'll become clear over the course of the conversation - maybe the other person's next sentence will make this clear to me. But often that clarity never really comes. Sometimes I feel like I should understand what's going on, and I'm afraid of looking stupid, so I just sorta hope to soak it all in and then retreat into privacy and puzzle over it until it makes sense to me. Sometimes this works, but usually it doesn't. And often, retreating into privacy isn't an option at all - I need to understand now, so that I can participate in the conversation.

So it's pretty clear to me that my existing habits are sabotaging my own goals. The only reason (and it's not a reason I'm proud of) to refrain from asking questions is because I'm afraid of looking stupid - but by not asking questions, I often end up looking stupider than I would if I had asked. And I end up being less able to contribute to the conversation than I would have been if I had asked.

My best idea so far on how to fix this problem is to develop the habit of asking questions immediately, as soon as the other person says even the tiniest thing that doesn't make perfect sense to me. This might be a hard habit to develop, though, because sometimes I don't even notice when there's a question that I need to ask. So for this to work, I also need to figure out ways of being consciously aware of how deep my understanding is. (I've got three mental states: Conscious Understanding, Conscious Confusion, and Non-Conscious Confusion. I want to find a way to make sure I enter Conscious Confusion instead of Non-Conscious Confusion.) I think that might be an easier problem, though, because I do know what it feels like to be in Conscious Understanding. Sometimes I'm listening to someone explain something, and it just makes sense to me, all the way through - every sentence he says, I understand completely. I know what that feeling is like. I just haven't trained myself yet to notice when I'm not feeling that way. So I think that maybe that's the habit that I need to develop first - I want to train myself so that alarm bells go off in my head whenever I don't feel that sort of clarity. And then I can get in the habit of immediately saying, "Wait," when those alarm bells go off.

Election results

2006-01-23T23:04:00.000-08:00

The numbers aren't quite final yet, but it looks like Conservatives 124, Liberals 103, Bloc Quebecois 51, NDP 29, and one independent guy from Quebec. Looks like I got more or less what I wanted. (At least, I think I did. I don't know much about the details of how this government stuff works. Am I right in thinking that the NDP has less power in this Parliament than they had last time, even though they've got more seats?)

Junk food

2006-01-22T19:05:00.000-08:00

Here's an article called Why America Has To Be Fat. It says:

It turns out, economists say, that changes in food technology (producing tasty, easy-to-cook food, such as french fries) and changes in labor (we use to be paid to exercise at work, now we pay to exercise after work) combined with women's importance in the workforce, not the kitchen, have combined to produce industries able to cheaply and efficiently meet the demands of our busy lives. The cookie industry. The fast-food industry. Potato chips. Soda. The chain-restaurant industry, with its heaping portions of low-priced, high-calorie foods.

I wonder if it's possible to produce healthy food as (or almost as) cheaply and efficiently as we can produce junk food. I always figured that we've been producing all this junk food because a lot of people prefer it. (I certainly used to.) Is the article saying that it's really because junk food is much cheaper to produce than healthier food, and most people would prefer healthier food but aren't willing to pay the extra cost? That'd be interesting, if it's true. I'm skeptical, though.

2006-01-22T09:26:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to almost have fun listening to the NDP:

The [Conservatives'] tax cuts will give dimes to people but dollars to banks and oil companies, Layton asserted.

"Working families are tired of being at the back of the line when they deserve to be at the front of the line," he said.

I actually do like the term, "credit-card medicine." I'm completely in favour of allowing it, and I hope it "spreads."

2006-01-20T21:32:00.000-08:00

Here's a neat article about an algorithm for detecting deceptiveness in speech. I don't have the slightest idea what the algorithm is (the article doesn't say much about it, and I wish it did) or how useful the algorithm currently is. I just like the idea of trying to come up with an algorithm that would match my own perceptions of a speaker's trustworthiness.

Shower heads

2006-01-11T14:55:00.000-08:00

I really like this. The article itself is a bit overly dramatic. But I love the idea of the shower with three heads (to get around the laws restricting water flow per shower head).

2005-12-28T15:53:00.000-08:00

So far this federal election hasn't been very interesting for me. I don't like the Liberals (both because I dislike liberal philosophy and because the Liberals seem to me like corrupt weasels), but the Conservatives haven't impressed me much either. (I don't mind conservative philosophy, but I'm not sure the Conservatives are very conservative.)

Based on what I've seen so far, the result I think I'd like most would be another minority government, where any two of the three bigger parties (Conservatives, Liberals, Quebecois) combined would have more than 50% of the seats, with the NDP being irrelevant. (I do not want the NDP to keep the power they've had recently. I think that a Liberal+NDP coalition would do a huge amount of damage.)

In the long run, I think it might be interesting to see some sort of electoral reform to make it easier for independent candidates and candidates from smaller parties to win seats. (I haven't thought this through much yet, though.) I'm kinda disappointed that I haven't had anyone I thought was really good to vote for in either of the elections that have happened here since I became interested in politics.

Emotional Mastery

2005-12-16T00:21:00.000-08:00

I like this post by Steve Pavlina about taking control of your emotions. (He wrote it over a year ago; I've been so impressed by what I've read on his blog so far that I'm going back through his archives.)

Polyphasic sleep

2005-12-15T18:05:00.000-08:00

I'm really, really tempted to experiment with polyphasic sleep. My schedule is flexible enough these days that I don't think it'll be much of a problem to have to take a half-hour nap every four hours. I have no idea whether it'll work for me or not, but there's probably not much harm in trying it. And it'd be awesome to have an extra 4-5 hours a day. :) Plus it sounds like a really interesting experience, so it might be fun to try even if I eventually decide to go back to regular monophasic sleep.

Update: OK, I started to try it out, but I aborted the experiment after a few days. The first day was OK - I was tired, but it was no big deal. The second day I was pretty exhausted. The third day I was actually starting to feel a little better (I had a couple of good naps where I think I got some REM sleep), but then in the evening I ate a couple of pieces of pizza and then got a fever. I don't know what caused the fever - maybe it was the pizza, or maybe it was sleep deprivation, or maybe I caught a virus, or maybe it was something else entirely. But I got scared and decided that I didn't want to try to deal with a fever when I still wasn't getting much sleep. So I decided to abort the experiment - I got nine hours of sleep that night, and the next day I felt mostly better.

I'm kinda disappointed that I didn't get to find out whether I would have eventually adapted or not. It could be that I was right on the verge of adapting - I really did feel pretty good for most of that third day. I'd be interested in hearing other people's experiences, if they decide to try the experiment. But I don't plan to try it again myself anytime soon, unless I hear from a bunch of people saying that they tried it and got good results.

Steve Pavlina

2005-12-15T12:05:00.000-08:00

I'm really starting to like this guy. I originally found his blog through his article on sleeping habits. Today he posted this story about a bunch of things he's done that people told him he wouldn't be able to do. He says it "reads almost like an Ayn Rand novel," and I agree.

Being conscious of abstraction

2005-12-12T14:32:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Alfred Korzybski's book, Science and Sanity, and also this website about General Semantics. Here's some of what I've learned so far.

Words cannot completely describe reality. So it's not like we can ever use completely "correct" words. All descriptions of reality are abstractions (they leave out information about the thing being described), and there are infinite possible levels of abstraction.

So, first, if I'm talking to someone and he doesn't understand what I mean by my words, it's always reasonable for him to ask, "What do you mean by that?" Sometimes I won't know how to answer, but I hope that usually I'll be able to give him a more precise description of what I mean (though my more-precise description can never be completely precise).

Second, it's useful to try to be consciously aware of what abstractions I'm using, even if I don't spell them out in my actual speech. For example, earlier I talked about leaving money "in the hands of the people who earned it," but what I meant by "earned" (if we're talking about money) was something like, "A has earned a particular amount of money from B if A received that money from B in exchange for doing something that B wanted." I didn't bother to say all that, because it would have really gummed up my sentence, but I knew that that's what I meant, and I could have said so if anybody asked me to clarify. And I could go further and tell you what I mean by "money" or "in exchange for" or whatever else.

But the part of the General Semantics stuff that I've found most interesting so far is discovering patterns in my own (and other people's) speech that can lead to problems in thinking or communicating. (I believe that the words I choose can influence my thoughts; leaving particular kinds of information out of my speech can actually lead to faulty thinking, not just faulty communication.) Some words can be so misleading that I'd rather just get in the habit of not using them at all. Here are a few "truths" which I think are pretty safe assumptions, and which our language patterns often ignore or contradict:

Non-humans are not humans. We often anthropomorphize. "Society," "corporations," and "government" are common ones when we're talking about politics. It's really tempting to talk about these larger entities using the same words that we use when we're talking about humans - to talk about a "society" "deciding" or "valuing" or "dying." I think that using those kinds of words often hides differences that I think are important. Alex recently wrote a post about how corporations are not humans, which I liked. Tony recently wrote a post where he talked about "society as a whole" as if it were something that could "benefit," and I didn't know what he meant by that (so I asked him).

We have some control over our emotions. "You made me angry." "That's annoying." "I just want to find someone who'll make me happy." Everything, including emotion, has many causes. When we speak as if the only reason why we're angry is because of someone else's actions, it can be harder to remember that we actually have some control over the way we feel. (Personally, I think it may even be possible to train myself to have nearly complete control over my emotions, and I've found it useful to talk about my emotions as if they're completely up to me. "I chose to be angry when you did that." "I chose to feel annoyed when that happened." As soon as I say a sentence like that, I think, "Well, if I don't want to feel angry, then I might as well just let the anger go and deal with the situation calmly." Phrasing the sentence that way is closer to reality than the "he made me feel X" phrasing, and serves as a useful reminder.)

Things change. A few days ago I said to Dave, "The cake is in that fridge over there." How the heck could I possibly know that? What I meant was, "I put the cake in that fridge about an hour ago." (In this particular case, the cake did turn out to still be there. But there've been plenty of times in the past when I've said things that turned out not to be true because conditions changed. So I'd like to get in the habit of saying, "I observed X at time T," rather than, "Y is true.")

Different people have different preferences. The other day I told Alex, "We should go to work right now." What did I mean by "should"? A less abstract version of my words would have been, "If we don't go to work right now, we'll miss Jim Waldo's talk." That would have left the door open for Alex to say, "Nah, I don't think we'll miss it even if we wait a few more minutes," or, "I don't mind missing the talk." By saying "should," I implied that I knew what his preference would be (or that if his preference was different than mine it would be "wrong"). I think that using the word "should" causes a whole lot of unnecessary anger and argument and embarrassment and other stuff, and I'm starting to think it's just way more trouble than it's worth; maybe I should stop using it altogether. (Oops. Dang.)

I've talked about this kind of thing a little bit before. And at the Institute of General Semantics website there's a bigger list of stuff like this.

Anyway, I've been finding it really interesting to pay attention to the words I use and the words other people use, and to try to notice where the words are leading to sloppy thinking.

Words cannot completely describe reality

2005-12-11T14:38:00.000-08:00

Here's an excerpt from an article called "When to 'Keep Still'" by Irving J. Lee (which I found in this collection of articles, which Alex pointed me to):

Pinch your finger. Say no words. Notice the experience. Do it again. Notice that something happened on the silent level. You had a direct experience which may be described verbally in many ways. But whatever might be said in words would not be what you felt by the pressure of the pinch. You should continue to remain silent so that you may become more aware of what goes on inside-your-skin. The nature of that inside feeling, of whatever happens, of whatever comes to awareness is not an affair of language, but is in its entirety an un-speakable matter. This may seem obvious, but unless it is sharply realized that what was felt belongs to the realm of silence, that it is quite different from what may be said in the realm of discourse, we shall miss a most important factor in the process of proper evaluation.

Pick up an object, a pencil or a book. Turn it over in your hands. Handle it. Drop it to the floor. Say nothing as you go through these operations. Look at the object. Now say the word "book." Notice that what you said was not the object itself. What you handled is not words. You might write with the pencil, but you could not write with the word pencil. You could drop the book to the floor, but you could not drop the word "book" unless the word was objectified by being written on paper. You must see that you are dealing with two distinct levels, one verbal, one silent.

Stand up and walk the length of your room. Notice the movements of your feet. Say nothing about what you are doing. Don't even talk to yourself "inside." Merely realize that you are engaging in a form of physical action. After walking, sit down. The action is now ended. Is it clear that the walking took place on a level that was non-verbal, that you merely did something? Now you might try to describe the process of walking, the way your legs move, the shifting positions of your body, the character of the action as you felt it. Regardless of the clarity or complexity of what you have just said, that description will not be on the silent level of the actual walking. No matter how you walked, that action will not be on the level of what you said. Whatever you may say about your behavior, the behavior itself will be different.

The lesson that I take from this is that when I'm using words to describe the real world, and someone asks, "What do you mean by that?" it never makes sense to answer, "I mean exactly what I said." (Though sometimes I'll answer, "I don't know.") There's always a lower level of abstraction. It's useful to be aware of what the less-abstract version of my words is, even if I still say the more-abstract version as a shortcut. (And sometimes it's even worthwhile to just say the less-abstract version, even if it's longer and wordier than the more-abstract version. I'll try to write another post about that soon.)

Letting people make their own mistakes

2005-12-11T13:26:00.000-08:00

Seen in a short CTV article:

Scott Reid, Prime Minister Paul Martin's director of communications, says there's nothing in the Harper plan to make sure that cash allowances intended to pay for day care would actually be spent for that purpose.

Reid says parents could take the cash windfall and spend it on anything they want _ including beer and popcorn.

The remarks made on a CBC television program sparked an immediate response from the Tories.

They say Reid's comments prove the Liberals don't trust families to make their own choices on what's best for their children.

I agree with Scott Reid that the Conservative Party's proposal would allow parents to spend this money on those things. I don't agree with "the Tories" that Scott Reid's comments prove anything about "the Liberals," though I have heard similar attitudes before from people who identify themselves as liberals or socialists.

Personally, I'd prefer to just leave the money in the hands of the people who earned it in the first place. But given that this money is going to be redistributed to these parents (either in the form of cash or in the form of "free" social programs), I'm completely in favour of allowing the parents to spend the money on beer and popcorn. (I don't expect that many of them will, though.)

Update: Looks like CTV pulled the original article and now there's a new article about Reid's apology:

Reid later sent an email to reporters apologizing for his remarks. "It was a dumb way to make my point and I apologize because obviously, no responsible parent would make that choice. The point remains that Mr. Harper offers a tax cut, not a child care plan."

I don't think I'd call the Conservative Party's proposal a tax cut (because it's significant to me that they're proposing taking money from non-parents and giving it to parents), but I agree that it's not a child-care plan. If I were a parent, I don't think I would want a government child-care plan. I'd rather have my money back and figure out my own plan.

Forgiveness

2005-10-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about the topic of forgiveness ever since it came up in the smoking discussion.

If someone screws up, but then manages to completely compensate everybody else for the harm he caused, so that nobody suffers but himself, I don't think there's any question of forgiveness at all - he didn't hurt anybody but himself, and so he shouldn't feel guilty. (Hopefully he'll still learn not to make the same mistake again, for his own sake, but if he's shouldering the entire burden himself then there's nothing for anybody else to forgive.)

To the extent that he can't make up for all the harm he caused other people, though, there are a bunch of criteria that I use to decide whether or not to forgive him (in the sense of reassuring him that I'm not angry at him and he shouldn't feel ashamed anymore). The most important ones are:

1. Does he agree that he made a mistake?
2. Has he done as much as he reasonably can to make up for the harm he's caused?
3. Has he taken reasonable steps (if any are possible) to try to prevent himself from making the same mistake in the future?

If he's done those three, there's nothing more he can do. That's why those three are the most important ones to me. And for little mistakes, I hope he'll just let it go and not feel ashamed anymore. But for bigger mistakes, he'll probably feel ashamed for a while longer, and there are a few more factors that matter to me when I'm deciding whether or not to reassure him that it's not such a big deal. This is probably not a complete list, but here are some:

4. How much time has passed since he made the mistake? (This is related to #3, because when time passes and he doesn't make the mistake again, that shows that he did a good job of learning his lesson.)
5. Was his choice obviously a bad idea? (Sometimes it's hard to tell whether a particular choice will be a bad one or not. If I warn someone that something is a mistake, but he has good reasons for believing that it's not, and he goes ahead and does it, and then later realizes that it was a mistake, that's not so bad. But if it's obviously a mistake and he just ignores me, I think he ought to feel pretty bad about that.)
6. Did he make his choice consciously? (Sometimes people do stupid things just because they're not thinking. But if he has his conscious attention called to a mistake that he's about to make, and he consciously chooses to go ahead with it, I think that's worse.)

Those are (at least some of) the factors that matter to me when we're talking about whether I think someone should keep feeling ashamed for making a mistake that hurt other people. There are other mistake-related questions, like whether I'm willing to step in and use my own time or money to bail someone out for making a mistake that hurt himself. For that question, these same six factors matter to me (I'm less likely to bail someone out if he hasn't taken steps to avoid making the same mistake again, or if it was a really obvious mistake, or if he was warned ahead of time that it was a mistake, and so on), but also some other factors, like how much I care about him. Bailing someone out is like forgiveness, but it's also like charity.

One thing to notice is that a lot of these factors are often difficult for a big impersonal bureaucracy to determine. When a bureaucracy gets into the business of bailing people out for their mistakes, I think it usually does a lousy job of determining which people deserve to be bailed out, because it just doesn't know enough of the relevant details of each person's life. And I think that the fact that the bailing-out was impersonal and not-necessarily-voluntary takes a lot of the meaning out of it.

Smoking

2005-09-29T22:31:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to stay away from politics lately, but Alex pointed me to this article about the B.C. tobacco lawsuit and I just can't resist mentioning it.

I'm not completely sure that my understanding of the story is correct, but it looks to me like the B.C. government is mad that smokers cost more health-care dollars than non-smokers, so the government is suing the cigarette makers.

What I'm curious about is: Why didn't the government just raise the cigarette tax? (Isn't there already a tax imposed on cigarettes?) In terms of who ends up paying what, wouldn't the results be about the same? If the government wins this lawsuit, won't the cigarette companies just raise their prices and pass the costs on to their customers anyway?

It seems to me that the main difference between suing-the-suppliers and taxing-the-consumers is in the moral worldview. Who is the bad guy? Who is responsible for what?

Suing the suppliers sends the message that the tobacco companies are the bad guy; they're the ones responsible for the increase in health-care costs, and later on they'll be the ones deciding to raise their prices. Taxing the consumers directly would send the message that people who decide to smoke are responsible for their own increased health-care costs. (Even better would be to just make people actually responsible for paying for their own health care.)

I don't have any fondness at all for cigarette makers, but I don't have much sympathy for smokers, either, and it seems to me like individual people really do have the ability to choose whether to smoke or not. (I've never smoked a cigarette in my life. Some people smoke and then quit. We really do have the power to choose.) Blaming the cigarette makers makes no sense to me, except as a way of spinning the story so that the government is the good guy and business is the bad guy and individual smokers are helpless dupes. "The evil companies hurt people, government heroically attacks the evil companies, the evil companies thwart them by raising prices," rather than, "Smokers do stupid things and try to get other people to pay for it, other people reject the costs and make the smokers pay for themselves."

Reddit and del.icio.us

2005-09-24T00:17:00.000-07:00

I don't really understand it very well yet, but I'm starting to feel like del.icio.us has potential. I've been using it just because it's a convenient accessible-from-anywhere place to store my bookmarks, and because tags seem like a more useful way to organize my bookmarks than a hierarchical folder structure. I've never really gotten any value out of the "social bookmarking" aspect of it. But I'm kinda curious about whether it would be possible to run some sort of similarity-calculation algorithm on the entire set of del.icio.us users, to see which people have bookmarked a lot of the same pages or maybe used a lot of the same tags (and therefore might have similar interests or tastes).

I never really saw del.icio.us this way until I saw Reddit. Reddit is a neat idea, but it's not as useful as I think it could be, because the ratings aren't personalized. The items that rise to the top of the Reddit list are the items that are the "most interesting" according to the combined ratings from the entire Reddit reader base; what I want to see are the items that are most interesting according to the combined ratings of people like me. (Well, sort of. That's not the only point of view that I want. But it's one of them.) So I'm wondering about some sort of combined del.icio.us/Reddit thing that could hopefully do a reasonably good job of figuring out who "people like me" are.

Probably someone's done something like that already. :) Anybody know of anything?

Bumvertising

2005-09-21T14:29:00.000-07:00

I think this is awesome. :) Thanks to Tony for showing it to me.

Artists erect giant pink bunny on mountain

2005-09-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

Cool!

Protecting people from their own stupidity

2005-09-10T22:30:00.000-07:00

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." -- Herbert Spencer

Recently I read an article by Malcolm Gladwell about health care. One of his points is that when people need to cut back on their health-care expenses, they do tend to cut back on "frivolous" expenses (which I'm assuming means something like "expenses that only give the patient a small amount of extra value per dollar"), but they also tend to cut back on non-frivolous expenses (like routine dental checkups and other kinds of preventative stuff that can save them a lot of money down the road). And so presumably he believes that the government ought to intervene in people's health-care choices, because people are too stupid to make good decisions for themselves.

I don't understand people who want to protect other people from the consequences of making bad choices. I can understand feeling sympathy for people who can't know any better. But I don't understand feeling sympathy for people who do (or even can) know better. If I thought that there were a lot of uneducated people out there who don't realize that routine dental checkups can save them a lot of money and pain in the future, the most I might try to do is maybe start up a class, or write a book called Taking Care Of Your Teeth For Dummies, or something like that.

I think that "the government will take care of me" is a really bad mindset for people to get into. What I want people to feel is, "It's my own responsibility to take care of myself, and I'm bloody well gonna learn to do it right." Controlling people "for their own good" just seems like a really bad idea to me. I wish Gladwell had said something about why he wants to do this. I don't think he's a stupid guy. I've got a couple of his books, and I liked them. But this article seems to me like he just never bothered to think particularly deeply about any of the things he said.

Katrina

2005-09-01T16:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a post over at Liberty Corner about some of the causes of, and responses to, the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Inequality and Risk

2005-08-28T20:55:00.000-07:00

Here's an essay by Paul Graham about the connection between economic inequality and risk-taking.

Loving one's work

2005-08-28T13:38:00.000-07:00

I keep running into people who are surprised that I love my work.

One night, a few weeks ago, my mother asked me what I was doing. I said, "Working." She said, "I'm sorry to hear that."

A few Saturdays ago, my girlfriend's grandfather asked me what plans I had for that day. I said I'd probably do a bunch of work. He said, "Oh, come on, what do you do for fun?"

Most of the things I learned about computer programming during my university years were learned doing my own projects on my own time. I wrote a little computer game (in C++, because I wanted to learn C++, and then I rewrote it in Java so I could learn Java, and then I rewrote it again in Smalltalk to I could learn Smalltalk). I wrote a Smalltalk interpreter of my own. I did various little projects in Ruby. I joined an Open Source project to work on a Ruby VM written in Ruby. Later I did some work on Squeak. I also used to read all sorts of stuff about programming - books, discussion forums - and have arguments with people, online and in person. I did all this stuff because it was fun. I was having a good time! I wouldn't have done it if I wasn't. People looked at me like I was nuts and asked me, "But don't you want to have a life?"

The other day I was in a bookstore, and a stranger struck up a conversation with me. He made small talk for a while, and then asked me where I went to school and what I did for a living, so I told him. Then he said, "I've got a small business, and I'm looking for a few smart young people to join me." I probably should have waited for him to tell me more details, but instead I just told him that I'm not looking, I've already got a job and I love what I do. And he got a big smile on his face and said, "Wow. You're the first person I've talked to who actually loves his job. Most people grumble about it," and he thanked me and walked away. I thought that was really cool.

I've talked to a few more people like that, people who seem to understand that it's possible and cool to love your work. But most people don't seem to get it. (Today I talked to one of each - my girlfriend's grandmother said, "Hey, that's great, it's nice to run into someone who enjoys his work," but a tenant at my building just looked at me like I was crazy and said, "What, do you play games for a living?")

I don't work all the time. I've got other interests, and I spend time with my friends and my girlfriend and my family and stuff. But I think my life would be dreadfully boring if I had to work a bunch of hours a day at a job that I hated.

Yomango

2005-08-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

I think this is hilarious. Especially the manifesto. Or would be, if it were a joke. (Is it?)

From the Wired article:

"Yomango is a brand name whose principal objective ... is not the selling of things," according to the movement's manifesto, "but the ... promoting of shoplifting as a form of disobedience and direct action against multinational corporations. Buying is an action based on obedience; (we are) taking to the extreme the free circulation of goods."

Self-Defeating Behaviour

2005-08-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a post by AnalPhilosopher about helping the needy.

We're All Human

2005-08-17T18:27:00.000-07:00

So what?

The other day, during that health-care discussion over at Bound By Gravity, someone said to me that he thought that "the kindness of strangers is particularly valuable." I asked him why. What reason could the stranger give for why he's offering this help? He said, "We're all human, and we're all in this together."

I don't understand that. Should I feel proud of myself when someone gives me help because I'm human? I didn't do anything to become human; I was just born that way. Sometimes people tell me, "I like the colour of your hair." I never know what to say to that, either. They look at me a little funny when I say, "OK," or, "Yes, I like it, too." I think they were expecting me to say "Thank you," as if I was proud of having hair that colour. But that seems silly to me - why should I take pride in things that I didn't cause, or that didn't take any special talent or hard work or anything like that? (And why do they expect me to?)

I don't feel any particular kinship with other people who have red hair; I've known some good ones and some not-so-good ones. I feel the same way about other humans in general - I've known some good ones and some not-so-good ones. Mostly they seem just fine, but not particularly interesting. I don't meet very many people I really like; that's why the ones I've found are so precious to me.

So... I dunno. I'm told that I'm supposed to feel a sense of love towards other human beings, just because we're the same species. But I don't really feel it. It's not that I dislike strangers - it's just that I want them to give me a reason to value them, and "I'm human" isn't really a reason that means much to me. I'm optimistic about most humans' ability to give me some sort of reason to value them, if they want to, but just being human isn't a reason in itself. And I don't understand why anybody would want me to feel that kind of feeling towards them. (Or, rather, I can only understand it if I think of them as either having no respect for themselves, or having no respect for me.) At best, that feeling seems completely meaningless, and at worst, it seems really insulting. (Damning with faint praise.) Calling this "love" cheapens real love.

In my more cynical moods, it feels to me like people are trying to get me to accept complete worthlessness as something to value. These people have gradually lowered their standards for what's worthy of love, what's worthy of reward, until finally they reached rock bottom - a criterion that everybody can "achieve," because it takes no effort or thought or willpower at all.

Health care fundamentals

2005-08-08T01:15:00.000-07:00

I've been having some fun arguing about health care over at Bound By Gravity.

What Business Can Learn From Open Source

2005-08-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

I like this essay by Paul Graham. (I like pretty much everything he writes.)

By The People, For The People

2005-07-30T11:25:00.000-07:00

Here's a post about government, over at Tilting At Windmills.

Enforcing virtue vs. enforcing voluntary contracts

2005-07-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

I like this post over at Crawl Across the Ocean. The book by Joseph Heath (The Efficient Society) sounds interesting.

Choice

2005-06-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

Written by an NDP supporter in the comments section of this post at Bound By Gravity, talking about allowing private health providers to compete with the public ones:

I agree, but only to a point. The rules should be clear -- opt out of medicare once and forever. You can buy insurance (if you qualify) but you can never come back to the public system if, down the road the insurance companies make your life a living hell. Don't come crying to the government if you have to put your house up for sale to pay your bills. Make your choice and live with it.

Priorities

2005-06-16T11:10:00.000-07:00

Ugh. This is the kind of thing that makes me dislike the Conservatives almost as much as I dislike the Liberals.

Skunkworks

2005-05-14T20:24:00.000-07:00

I really like this story.

Sex-change operations a human right?

2005-04-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

I'm not particularly worried about demand for sex-change operations shooting through the roof if we do this, but it still kinda bothers me that this is the kind of thing we're considering spending our health-care dollars on. I would have liked to see the article mention some of the alternatives that we could be spending that $25,000 on. I really dislike this kind of one-sided empathy.

The article, for those who don't want to register with the Toronto Star website, is about how Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has promised that his government will reinstate OHIP funding for sex-change operations if the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal rules that that it should. The rest of the article tells the story of Martine Stonehouse:

Stonehouse was born "Martin" but never felt comfortable as a man. "For 25 years to please my parents and society I fought to be a man. It wasn't me."

In 1994, Stonehouse began the transition to becoming "Martine." She was ready for surgery in 1998 when the government suddenly stopped paying for it. Her life has been on hold ever since because she — and her fiancé John Gelmon — cannot afford the $25,000 procedure.

With the tribunal over and McGuinty's encouraging words, Stonehouse hopes she soon will get surgery and then walk down the aisle at her wedding.

If the tribunal rules against them, she vows to appeal. "It will be very devastating for us because it will mean we can't get on with our lives and I have a lot more to my life than just this."

What bothers me about the article is that one side is "humanized," to try to encourage people to feel empathy for the person, but the cost is left as a raw dollar figure. Of course, it's impossible to list all the possible alternative uses for that $25,000, but mentioning even a few of them would help remind people that there are real tradeoffs to be made here. It would change the article from sounding like an "empathy vs. cold-hearted money-grubbing" issue to sounding like an "empathy for this person vs. empathy for that person" issue.

(Of course, I'm not sure that empathy is the best way to be thinking about these things in general. But making the article less one-sided would at least be a step in a good direction.)

2005-04-22T17:50:00.000-07:00

A quick thought about this sponsorship scandal thing and the speeches last night: This fuss about whether or not to wait for Gomery's report seems to me like a flaw in our system of government (or meta-government, or something). We've got two good things that we want, and the system doesn't have a procedure in place to let us have both of them. I think it would be good to wait for the inquiry to finish before condemning the Liberals, but I also think it would be good to take them out of power in the meantime. (If this were any other sort of organization (a private company, or a school or something), with the people in charge being investigated for corruption, you'd certainly wait to hear the results of the investigation before, like, throwing them in jail, but I don't think you'd leave them in charge of running the organization in the meantime. You'd choose a temporary person or group to lead, and then you'd go through the full, proper leader-choosing process once all the facts were in.)

Under our current system, we can't have both of those good things, because (as far as I know) the only procedure we've got for taking them out of power is to hold an election, and if we did that it would be pretty ridiculous to have another election right after the inquiry finishes. So we're stuck with the choice between either judging the Liberals before all the facts are in, or letting them keep their hands on our money for another bunch of months.

Of course, maybe it's not possible to create a solution that gives us both good things, in which case this isn't really a flaw in our system of meta-government; it's just an annoying fact about meta-government of a large country in general.

2005-04-14T07:56:00.000-07:00

I like this article about marriage by Jenny Morse (whom I've mentioned before; this article is a more complete argument for the ideas she talked about in the interview I mentioned before).

Whose Life Is Worth Living?

2005-03-31T15:54:00.000-08:00

Orson Scott Card's latest essay.

J. J. C. Smart on ethical subjectivism

2005-03-30T21:03:00.000-08:00

This passage by J. J. C. Smart is a good description of the way I feel about ethical subjectivism.

Systems of ethics

2005-03-30T20:43:00.000-08:00

Tony sent me a link to this essay, which I like. Main ideas:

There are (at least) two different ethical systems that have proven themselves useful in the real world: Guardian and Commercial. Guardian ethics are appropriate for things like governments and police forces; Commercial ethics are appropriate for things like business and trade.

The ethical systems aren't just different; they're actually incompatible, in the sense that each system should be applied only to the tasks it's suited for, and the systems shouldn't be mixed. For example, paying for things is fine and moral and good in the Commercial world, but abhorrent in the Guardian world. (How much money should the government charge for the right to kill someone?)

Guardian ethics tend to be useful in zero- or negative-sum situations (if someone steals my computer, he has one more computer and I have one less computer; nothing is created). Commercial ethics tend to be better in positive-sum situations (if I have a surplus of wheat, and someone else has a surplus of eggs, we'll both be better off if we trade).

The invention of computers has created "unlimited-sum" situations - if someone writes a computer program or composes a piece of music, that computer program or piece of music can be distributed for near-zero cost to an unlimited number of people. Neither Guardian nor Commercial ethics are appropriate to unlimited-sum situations; that's why we're seeing the emergence of new movements like Open Source software, and why we're seeing so much fighting over software like Napster and BitTorrent. What's happening is that there's a new form of ethics that applies to unlimited-sum situations (the article calls it Information ethics, but I don't like that name), and it's tricky to sort out where the boundaries are between the rightful domains of each ethical system. (Guardian and Commercial have had centuries to figure out where the boundaries and interfaces should be between each other, and we still get it wrong a lot of the time. Information ethics has only been a major player for a decade or two. So of course we haven't figured out how to integrate it with the other systems yet.)

Because bad things happen when an organization tries to live according to multiple conflicting ethical systems, we shouldn't expect any organization to be able to solve all problems. Many organizations will create problems that they not equipped to solve, and almost all organizations will confront problems that they cannot address. The solution is to have organizations of each type working together, keeping each other in check, and letting the solution to the problems emerge from their interaction.

Need

2005-03-15T22:25:00.000-08:00

Phil's blog pointed me towards this Sarah McLachlan World On Fire video. My main comment about it is that I think there's an interesting worldview gulf between me and the people who produced the video. The video had lots of examples of people who need money pretty desperately, but didn't say anything at all about how they ended up in that desperate situation. And to me, that's a really important part of the decision-making process when it comes to helping people in need - not just the fact that they need the help, but the reasons why they ended up needing it.

(I'm not saying that I think these poor people deserve to be in the situation they're in. I'm just saying that to me, the absence of any explanation of how these people came to the point of needing this money so desperately is a huge glaring omission - if I were the one producing the video, I think I'd spend a fair chunk of time on that, rather than just on the "they need the money" part, because I think it would make the video much more convincing. (But then, maybe the video was just meant to be an inspirational thingy aimed at people who already believe, rather than a persuasive thingy aimed at people who don't believe yet.))

2005-03-15T18:16:00.000-08:00

My friend Phil has started a blog. (Yay!) We've been talking lately about whether ethics is objective or not, and he just made his own post about the subject. Here's part of it:

When I say that ethics is objective, I mean that given all the details of a situation, there is a "best" way for each person in that situation to act. I believe this implies two things: one, that values are objectively-based, and two, that given a particular set of values, there is a best way of attaining them.

In our e-mail discussion we had kinda refined our terms a little bit more than this. I don't like the statement, "given a particular set of values, there is a best way of attaining them," because some of the things that I value conflict with each other. (For example, I value both security and liberty, but it's often true that in order to get more security, we need to give up some liberties.) So anytime I'm deciding whether or not to do a particular Action A, I need to weigh the tradeoffs between my various values and decide which potential-future-universe I like better: the universe that would result if I do A, and the universe that would result if I don't do A. So, Phil, if you're willing to revise your statement to, "given a particular universe-evaluation function, there is a best way of maximizing that function," then I agree with it. :)

I also want to quibble with the wording of the statement, "values are objectively-based," because I'm finding that the word "objective" seems to mean two different things. Sometimes it seems to mean, "based in reality," and sometimes it seems to mean, "applies to everybody." So, Phil, are you saying, "everybody's values are based in reality," or, "everybody should value the same things," or both? I don't mind the first one but I disagree with the second one. (For example, I value my own well-being more than I value a stranger's well-being, and I think that the stranger should value his own well-being more than he values mine. So I don't think that everybody should share the same universe-evaluation function.)

Sorry for being so finicky over the words. :) Most of the time we can speak loosely and nothing bad happens. But right now I think there's some confusion coming from bad wording.

2005-03-09T21:49:00.000-08:00

Every time I read anything Paul Graham writes, I feel the urge to go off and start a company.

Why I'm not sure how much to value tradition

2005-02-20T10:21:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking some more about conservatism, trying to figure out if I'm gonna turn into a conservative or not. The conservative "meta-ideology" seems to be something like, "Human nature is pretty fixed, so we should be cautious about change, because our traditions tend to be policies that have proven themselves to fit well with human nature, and because it's foolish to think that we can predict all the consequences of a change."

I agree with most of that, but I think there's some missing nuance there. I agree that a big chunk of human nature is pretty fixed. I agree that we should be cautious about change, because the universe is complex and hard to predict. But I don't place as much weight on tradition as a conservative does, because I think that a whole bunch of other aspects of the world have been changing radically, to the point where the traditional solutions don't make nearly as much sense anymore.

In particular, the two main areas of change that I've been thinking about so far are complexity and technology. We've got way, way more people now than we used to have, with more (and faster) communication between them, too. So today's societies are vastly more complex than historical societies. Organizational patterns that work for a small society of slowly-communicating people can be disastrous for a large society of quickly-communicating people. (More is different.) And organizational patterns that were completely impractical before computers existed might actually become viable now that we've got the Internet.

So... I agree with conservatives that we want our policies to be in harmony with human nature, but I also want them to be in harmony with other aspects of reality. And some of those aspects (like our level of technology and the complexity of our society) are changing quickly enough that some of our traditions don't really fit reality anymore. (So we need to change, but we should still do it cautiously, and we should still try to make sure that whatever new ideas we try still fit with human nature.)

The social contract

2005-02-14T13:11:00.000-08:00

Phil wrote:

I don't think the state points a gun at you with regards to health care (or taxes, etc). It is included in your contract with the rest of society. You get to pick where you live (i.e. which contract you sign), but I don't know of any point in time where you could not sign any contract (implicitly or explicitly) and expect to live long So there are benefits to this contract too, even though you may not agree with each individual result. And the government enforcing a contract you agreed to (i.e. voluntarily) does not seem unreasonable to me.

I agree, in an absolute sense. But I think that there are degrees of reasonableness, and I think that the degree of reasonableness of a social contract depends on how easy it is to switch to a different society. Moving to a new city is easier than moving to a new province. Moving to a new province is easier than moving to a new country. So if you're saying that the idea of a social contract is reasonable to the extent that I get to pick where I live (which I would agree with), then do you also think that we should be pushing a lot of government functions down from the federal level to the provincial or municipal level? I'd like that. (For organizational reasons, we could certainly have federal bodies to help organize all the municipalities who want to participate in a particular program, but it would be up to each municipality to choose which programs they want to belong to - it wouldn't be mandatory.)

Even down at the municipal level, though, a contract between me and the city is much harder to leave than a contract between, say, me and my employer, or me and my landlord. The most important reason why people dislike switching cities, I think, is because of bonds between people. I moved from California back to Toronto because I wanted to be closer to my friends and family; those kinds of interpersonal ties aren't nearly as strong between me and the people at my job. (This isn't a hard, clear dividing line or anything; it's just a difference of degree. But it's a pretty big difference of degree. There are people at my job whom I care about a lot, but not as many as the people I care about near Toronto. And people can decide, as a group, to leave a city and move to a new city, but that's hard because people's connections aren't really organized by groups so much as by webs - I wouldn't want to leave Toronto unless my girlfriend and some of my family and some of my friends came with me, but those people wouldn't want to leave without some of their family and friends, and those people wouldn't want to leave without some of their family and friends, and so on. So it would be a pretty big bunch of people who'd need to move, and it's unlikely that all of them would agree that the new place had better political policies than the old place... Anyway, I think there's a lot of this kind of friction. Moving isn't easy.)

So, yes, I get to pick where I live, so you could say that by choosing to live in a particular place, I'm implicitly agreeing to that place's social contract, and since it's reasonable to enforce regular contracts, it's reasonable to enforce social contracts... but I don't buy it. I don't think the analogy is close enough. Leaving a city (choosing a social contract) is very different from choosing most other kinds of contracts.

And so I see the government's actions as coercion, rather than contract enforcement. The way I see it, the government is taking advantage of this intrinsic reluctance of people to leave their homes. Most of that reluctance wasn't caused by the government at all - people will become attached to their friends and family no matter what kind of government they grow up under. So the fact that people choose to stay in their city or province or country isn't really (to any major extent) feedback on the goodness of the government's policies; it's an almost completely separate thing, and the government is just piggybacking on it.

Anger and involuntary connections

2005-02-11T11:37:00.000-08:00

We're all stuck in this same universe together, and everything is connected to everything else. We're surrounded, almost constantly, by other people. That's a wonderful thing, in lots of ways. And it's ridiculous to think that we can disconnect people from each other. But does anybody else get the same sort of good peaceful feeling that I get in situations where I know that someone else's stupid decisions aren't going to affect me much? And in situations where I know that my own stupid decisions aren't going to affect anybody else much?

If I have a friend who's in a romantic relationship that I think is unhealthy, I feel sad, but I don't feel angry. It's her choice, and I can't live her life for her. I care about my friend, and I'll give her the best advice I can whenever she asks for it, but if she doesn't ask, that's OK too. She has the right to choose her own romantic partner, and to choose what sacrifices she's willing to make for the sake of her relationship. And, ultimately, if her choice turns out to be a bad one, it hurts her, but it doesn't really hurt me in any major way. (I'll console her, but that's my own voluntary choice, and it's no major hardship for me anyway.)

If I have a friend who keeps spending money in ways that I think are foolish (say, on excessive amounts of music and movies and video games and stuff), I feel sad, but I don't feel angry. It's his choice; he's responsible for paying his own rent and buying his own food and stuff. If he ends up not being able to do those things, I might choose to help him out, if I can afford it, but that's my own voluntary choice, and I wouldn't do it if I needed that money for someone or something else that I cared about more. So if I end up helping him, it's my own voluntary choice. Ultimately, he can screw himself over, but he can't screw me over in any major way. And so even though I care about him, I don't feel angry about his spending choices; just a bit sad.

I see so much anger in politics, and I think a lot of it (though certainly not all of it) is because we've tied people's lives together too closely. It's impossible to eliminate all involuntary connections between people, but a lot of the ways we've structured our society have ended up creating even more involuntary connections. When someone's vote has the power to take away something you feel entitled to, it's easy to be angry when he has beliefs you don't like. When someone's actions are paid for with your money, it's easy to be angry when he does things you don't like.

Anyway, I don't mean to say that it isn't still worthwhile sometimes to tie people's lives together more closely. Just that we ought to be aware that it's going to cause this kind of anger.

Abortion

2005-02-11T10:08:00.000-08:00

Here are Jason Hayes' thoughts about an article about a woman who chose to have a second-trimester abortion because her child was diagnosed with a genetic abnormality.

I'm finding that I'm almost afraid to have an opinion on this issue. It's one of those situations you pray you never get into.

To take it up a meta-level, though: In situations where there are two opposing goods, but one of them is immediate and emotionally-striking, and the other is more abstract and long-term, I think it's really important to make an extra effort to do all the standard conscientious philosopher things. Be logical and thorough, and make your moral axioms explicit, and be very aware of which words you choose to express your ideas.

I honestly don't know what I would end up doing if I were in this situation in the real world. I might well end up deciding that the immediate, emotional good is more important. But I hope that I'd think things through logically before making that choice. And I have a hard time condemning people who'd make the opposite choice. I'm sad to see so many people who are so quick to condemn this woman.

Libertarian family values

2005-02-08T19:49:00.000-08:00

I like this interview of Jenny Morse in World magazine about why, on family-related issues, economic libertarians ought to believe in some of the same sorts of policies that conservatives believe in. If you're the kind of person who believes in small government, strong families are really important. They're the most basic non-government way we've got of organizing society. They occur naturally (in a certain kind of society, anyway) without requiring any initiation of force. They provide some of the kind of social support that otherwise government would try to provide. For a libertarian, that's really important stuff. The article suggests that the weaker families get, the bigger government tends to get:

WORLD: Social conservatives have emphasized the cultural effects of single parenting. Why should we also examine its effects on governmental growth?

JM: The simplest answer is that the government becomes the substitute for the absent parent, either by providing financial assistance through welfare, or by imposing work rules that try to level the playing field among all types of families. But government is a pathetic substitute for parents. Even with extra money, the children of unmarried parents are more likely to drop out of school, do poorly in school, have mental-health issues, and even physical-health issues.

All these problems end up becoming taxpayer problems, whether libertarians like it or not. The sons of unmarried parents are more likely to have trouble with the law, commit crimes, and end up in jail. That costs taxpayer money, even with a libertarian minimal state.

(Minor side note: At first, when I read this article, I thought, "Is there really any difference between a regular conservative and a libertarian who's conservative on family issues? But there really does seem to be a difference in the fundamental values, even though the policies might be similar. Which fits nicely with some other stuff I've been thinking lately, and goes part of the way towards explaining why I'm reluctant to call myself a conservative even though I agree with conservatives about a lot of policies.)

2005-02-01T22:40:00.000-08:00

Here, via The Meatriarchy, is a story about an American school district.

The administrators decided to eliminate the spelling bee because they feel it runs afoul of the federal and state mandates of No Child Left Behind.

"No Child Left Behind says all kids must reach high standards," Newman said. "It's our responsibility to find as many ways as possible to accomplish this."

The administrators agreed, Newman continued, that a spelling bee doesn't meet the criteria of all children reaching high standards because there can only be one winner, leaving all other students behind.

Who needs The Onion?

2005-01-29T15:07:00.000-08:00

Seen in The Globe and Mail:

An Ontario Superior Court judge has absolved Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty of breaking an elaborately signed contract promising not to raise or create new taxes, saying anyone who believes a campaign promise is naive about the democratic system.

Political ambivalence

2005-01-28T15:23:00.000-08:00

I really like this post over at Diachronic Agency (the blog of a liberal philosopher, I think). I agree with him. People who think that these moral issues are one-sided (even if they're on "my side") bother me much more than people who accept that there are good arguments on both sides (even if their values and reasoning lead them to disagree with me over how much weight to give those arguments). I'm finding that I'm perfectly willing to argue against things that I believe, just for the sake of showing the people who are on "my side" that our opponents aren't evil.

The Conservative Philosopher

2005-01-26T23:17:00.000-08:00

A group of conservative philosophers have started up a new blog, The Conservative Philosopher. I'm hoping that this blog will play the same kind of role for conservatives that Left2Right plays for left-wing people - that is, I'm hoping that it'll be a place where non-conservatives can read well-reasoned posts about conservative ideas and realize that conservatives aren't evil, after all. (I still think I'm one of the non-conservatives, but I have a feeling that I'm moving in a conservative kind of direction. At the very least, I value a lot of the things that conservatives value, even if I don't value them quite as much as a conservative does.)

There's a good post here entitled, "The essence of conservatism."

Update: Fixed the link to the "essence of conservatism" post. I would have sworn it was right before - I check all my links before posting. Oh, well.

Self-centered love

2005-01-25T22:40:00.000-08:00

Curt from North Western Winds wrote a response to my post on love and marriage:

With this formulation, you are staying in the relationship because "it works for me"; the implication is that if it works for the other person, well, that's nice but not necessary.

That wasn't what I meant to imply. (Heck, it's almost the exact opposite of what I meant to imply.) I think it has to work for both of us. If it's not working for both of us, I don't want us to stay together. I value her happiness; how can I be happy to be with her if she's not happy to be with me? Like you said: "If a marriage really is based on Love - not luv, but capital L, mature Love - then you will care about that other person as much as yourself, if not more." That's exactly why I want my partner to know that I want her to leave me if she stops being happy with me. I really, honestly don't want us to stay together if she's not happy with me.

In contrast, taking a public vow of lifelong duration is admirable because it says that "I know there may be times when my passion for you will rise and fall, but I will not put my own personal feelings over my commitment to you." This view of love is properly other centered. This is the kind of love that stays when something horrible happens - cancer, brain damage, etc. Under the first definition, as soon as you're not getting what you want, or it becomes hard, you'll probably bug out.

I don't think that's what I would do. Or what she would do. I trust both of us to be able to take the long view. I understand that there will be hard times, and I believe that I'll stick with her and get through them, not because I promised to, and not because I'm sacrificing myself for her sake, but because it will make me happy to do that, because her happiness really is important for my own happiness, because I believe that it really is the best thing for me in the long run, because what we have together is worth fighting for.

We all have moments when we are not out best. Who wants to live in such a way that our behavior is always hostage to our marriage? That is how any old friendship or acquaintance works. There are obviously limits, but marriage is different from those kinds of relationships because when the commitment is in place you can let your hair down a bit, without fear that you will be judged and rejected in short order. Marriage should be about giving, not getting. It is a sanctuary from the upheaval of ordinary friendships.

I trust myself and my girlfriend to be smart enough to think about the long run. I'm not afraid that if I let my hair down, my girlfriend will reject me in short order. I don't need her to commit to me in order to be confident that she won't do that; I'm confident right now, without any sort of commitment, because I know that she's wise and forgiving and able to see the big picture. She does judge me, and I trust her to judge me wisely, and I'm proud of being a person who's so good - in her judgment - that she'd rather be with me than with anybody else. I know that I don't need to be perfect. I know that she'll forgive me and still love me even when I'm annoying or when I screw up or when I hurt her. (And I also know that there are limits, like you said. But I trust myself to be a good enough person not to get anywhere near those limits.)

As for letting our hair down "when the commitment is in place" - I think that it's really, really important to let our hair down before the commitment is in place. When I do get married (which I will, because I plan to have kids someday), I want to be able to tell my wife that I married her knowing exactly what I was getting into. That I've seen her highs and her lows, and that I want all of her.

Anyway, my main philosophical point here is that I'm rejecting this distinction that I think you're trying to make between "self-centered" and "other-centered." I want my partner to know that it's OK for her to leave me if she thinks she'd be happier elsewhere, not just because I'm other-centered, and not just because I'm self-centered, but both. Or neither. Or whatever you want to call it. Our interests coincide, because we value each other's happiness and because we value the knowledge that each other's actions are voluntary.

Affirmative action in universities

2005-01-24T10:35:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting post on Left2Right about affirmative action in university admissions. The argument is that one of the purposes of a university is to bring together a whole bunch of diverse viewpoints. A lot of the best learning that happens at universities is the "stay up all night arguing about the issue with your roommate" kind of learning, not the "memorize it for the exam" kind of learning. And for that good kind of learning, it's valuable to have students with lots of different viewpoints - and having a variety of races probably helps with that. So it might be perfectly rational for universities to discriminate in favour of minorities.

This is another one of those cases where I think it's really important to make a distinction between "racial discrimination" (which is the phrase I keep hearing people use) and "irrational discrimination" (which is probably the thing that we agree is bad). Arguing that "racial discrimination is wrong" makes it harder to see that there are some kinds of racial discrimination that might make sense.

Quibbling over semantics

2005-01-21T23:55:00.000-08:00

Over at Left2Right there's been some talk about "equality of opportunity":

Any defensible conception of equality of opportunity has to include some conception of equality of starting points. And again, "equality" will mean ensuring a floor that's good enough, not somehow ensuring that everyone receives an identical or identically valuable package.

One thing that's interesting to me is that the author (Don Herzog) is explicitly saying that the principle he believes in is that there should be a "floor," rather than actual literal "equality." That sounds a lot like the "minimum opportunity" thing that I was thinking about a while ago (here and here), and I'm glad to see other people talking about the idea.

It bothers me a little bit, though, that he's still using the word "equality" to describe the idea. Even after saying that what we really wants is a floor, rather than literal equality, he keeps on using the phrase "equality of starting points" to describe the floor idea. This point actually caused a misunderstanding in the exchanges between Herzog and D. A. Ridgely (which are worth reading) in the Comments section, but Herzog dismissed it as "quibbling over semantics."

I think it's important, though. I think that the words we use influence the thoughts we think, and that if we keep using the word "equality" to describe an idea that doesn't really have anything to do with equality at all, we're going to be pulled in the direction of something we don't believe in. (And in practice, I do sometimes see left-wing people arguing for literal equality of starting points - though maybe that's because those particular left-wing people really do believe in literal equality rather than a floor.) In any case, even if you don't believe that using inaccurate wording is as harmful as I believe it is, there's still no reason to keep on using the inaccurate wording on purpose.

Am I wrong about the wording being inaccurate? In what sense is there any "equality" of starting points, in the idea of a starting point floor?

Using the word "equality" makes right-wing people angry, because the idea of enforcing literal equality of starting points is something that they believe is deeply wrong, and as long as left-wing people keep using that phrase, the right-wing people are going to be afraid that the left-wing people really mean it.

And I think that left-wing people ought to care about using the right words, too, because I think that using the wrong words to describe their ideals is going to make them more likely to advocate and implement policies that don't actually match their ideals.

Slippery-slope arguments

2005-01-21T14:49:00.000-08:00

There was an article in the Toronto Star yesterday about the "slippery slope" argument that legalizing gay marriage will lead to legalizing polygamy.

The article tells me that Justice Minister Irwin Cotler says there's no link between the two. "We don't see any connection, I repeat, any connection between the issue of polygamy and the issue of same sex marriage. Any attempt to make that kind of connection is simply a way of confusing distinguishable issues in every regard." But the article doesn't tell me why he thinks that.

It really seems to me like the main arguments that are being used to justify gay marriage apply just as well to relationships with more than two people. If three people all love each other and want to commit to spending the rest of their lives together, why shouldn't they be able to get married? I don't know the liberal answer to that. I suspect that if you asked liberals whether they would support people's right to have polygamous marriages, a bunch of them would say, "Yeah, now that I think about it... well, marriage is about people who love each other deciding to commit to each other... and it doesn't do me any harm if they get married, so it's really none of my business... so, actually, I don't see why a group of three people who love each other and want to commit to each other shouldn't be allowed to get married."

I'm still in the process of thinking through my position on this stuff, but so far I'm in favour of recognizing gay marriages, and I can imagine convincing myself that my own principles require me to be in favour of recognizing polygamous marriages too. Even if the slippery-slope argument makes sense, I might decide that the right place to be is at the bottom of the slope. But it seems to me like it's really dishonest to say, "Quit confusing the issue, nobody is suggesting we allow polygamy, we're just talking about gay marriage," when a whole bunch of the loudest arguments in favour of gay marriage apply equally to polygamy.

Evaluative scatter

2005-01-21T11:00:00.000-08:00

AnalPhilosopher has an interesting post about the objective morality stuff that I was talking about earlier. His point is that if morality is objective, if moral judgments are things that we can just study to figure out whether they're true or false, then he would expect that philosophers (whose job is to study these kinds of things) would be more unified in their moral beliefs than the general population. But that doesn't seem to be true - if anything, there's more divergence in moral judgments among philosophers than among the general population.

Political correctness

2005-01-18T21:53:00.000-08:00

AnalPhilosopher has a link to this article about a recent talk at an academic conference. The story is that the speaker suggested that one possible reason why fewer women succeed in science and math careers might be because of innate differences between the two sexes. And then some people were outraged and walked out on him.

I don't have any idea whether it's true or not. But it seems silly to me to be offended by the notion that it could be true. Men and women are biologically different. Why is it insulting to suggest that those differences might have real effects on people's abilities? (I vaguely remember learning something a long time ago about some studies that found differences between men's and women's scores on various aptitude. Maybe women were better at linguistic stuff, but men were better at spatial manipulation stuff? I don't remember. It was a long time ago, and my memory is all fuzzy.)

I believe very strongly in judging people on their merits, as best I can. I also believe that differences between individuals tend to be much larger than differences between these kinds of groups, and that most of the time there aren't any statistically significant differences between groups anyway. So I'm pretty sure that it's virtually always stupid to discriminate based on gender or race or sexual orientation or whatever. But it seems ridiculous to me (and even a bit insulting, in the case of things like religion or culture) to take it as an axiom that those things never make any difference. And I think it's even more ridiculous to be offended by the notion. Even if it's false, it's worth studying to make sure that it's false.

Paul Graham had it right. If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that it's sexist. And if it's not false, it shouldn't be suppressed. Any time you're more comfortable saying, "That statement is sexist," than saying, "That statement is false," that's a pretty clear sign that you're not particularly certain that the statement is false.

Republicans raising little Republicans

2005-01-16T11:06:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or does this Toronto Star article make it sound like having babies is a sinister Republican political strategy?

Accept all distinctions

2005-01-15T01:44:00.000-08:00

I believe that it's never harmful to make a mental distinction between two different concepts, even if I have the same opinion about both of them.

For example, here I described one of the principles behind socialism as, "I have the right to force other people to do what I want." Then my friend Phil pointed out that he makes a distinction in his head between "I have the right" and "society has the right." And I'm happy to make that distinction in my head now, too, even though I don't think it makes as much moral difference as he thinks it does.

Libertarians like to make an explicit distinction between "X is moral/immoral," and "People should be forced/forbidden to do X." That's a distinction that I think liberals and conservatives fail to make sometimes. (For a liberal, X might be helping poor people. For a conservative, X might be abortion.)

I think that if you're arguing in good faith, you'll be happy to make whatever explicit distinctions your opponent wants you to. I'd like to hear liberals proclaim, loudly, "I believe that it is morally good to help poor people, and I also believe that people should be forced to help poor people." From the point of view of a libertarian, those are two separate opinions, and there's no reason why a liberal shouldn't be willing to state that he holds both of them. Similarly, I'd like to hear conservatives say, "I believe that abortion is morally wrong, and I also believe that abortion should be forbidden." If the conservative believes both of those, he should be proud to say them both, and once he's done that it's much easier for someone else to say, "I don't mind the former but I disagree with the latter."

Another distinction that's come up in my conversations recently is the distinction between irrational kinds of racial or sexual discrimination, and rational kinds. As a trivial example of the latter: when choosing a mate, I certainly do discriminate based on gender (and also on sexual orientation), and I think that's perfectly rational. Presumably people who want to outlaw "sexual discrimination" don't want to outlaw that particular kind of sexual discrimination. They want (I'm guessing) to only outlaw the irrational kinds. (And there are plenty of less-trivial examples, too - there's lots of evidence that men tend to be better at some kinds of tasks, and women tend to be better at other kinds of tasks.) So it bothers me when they repeatedly leave out the word "irrational", because it biases the discussion - once you put the word "irrational" back in, some extra moral questions become more obvious. (For example, how confident are we that we've correctly figured out all of the different kinds of sexual discrimination that are rational and all the kinds that are irrational?) So I find that explicitly making these distinctions in my head, and in my speech, can help me think more clearly.

And sometimes you actually end up learning something by making one of these distinctions, as I did when I learned to make a distinction between temporary safety nets and permanent ones.

I see a lot of anger coming from people who talk about politics, and I also see a lot of people who seem like they don't understand the distinctions that the other side is making. I think the anger is connected to the lack of understanding. Whenever I read something written by a left-wing person who gets all righteous because those evil selfish right-wing bastards don't believe in helping other people, I feel frustrated that this person is condemning me without understanding me, and I feel exhausted because I'm so tired of going back to basics and re-emphasizing these distinctions all the time. And he's angry too, because he's convinced that he's dealing with these monstrously evil people. It really feels to me like there'd be a lot less anger if people were more careful to keep distinct concepts separate.

Left/Right polarization

2005-01-13T21:58:00.000-08:00

Ever since it got started, I've been reading the Left2Right blog, which is a group of people who (mostly) consider themselves left-wing trying to "get through" to the right wing. And the thing that struck me (at least at first), and I heard some other people who agreed, was that the stuff they were saying sounded a whole lot like they were actually conservative in everything but name. No wonder they felt like they could get through to conservatives - they had labelled themselves left-wing, but their views were actually right-wing!

But after reading more of their stuff, I don't think that's correct. It's clear that they really do have left-wing values; the left's causes are the ones that really get them riled up, the ones that they want to push for. But a lot of the policies that they recommend still sound an awful lot like what some of the most reasonable (in my opinion) right-wing people recommend.

And I think that's true of me, too, but in reverse. Originally I read Ayn Rand's books and considered myself right-wing. Then I thought a little bit more and decided that I agreed with both sides on some stuff, so I wasn't really right-wing or left-wing. I really do believe that the left has some legitimate complaints, and I believe that there are various opposing goods that make it important to choose a spot somewhere in the middle of a bunch of these continuums, rather than at the endpoints. But now I'm starting to realize that it's still the right-wing causes that get me emotionally excited - when left-wing people say, "But here's this other good that I want to protect," I often agree, but it rarely gets me fired up. I care about making sure that people can own the fruits of their labour, and decide for themselves where to spend their money. And even though I agree that it's important to have a minimum opportunity level (which probably means some extra taxes, which reduces that own-the-fruits-of-your-labour thing that I value), I'm just... not very excited about that. Other people can crusade for that kind of thing. I'm certainly willing to go along with it, and even do some thinking about what the minimum level should be. But it doesn't get me excited, and so I don't feel much kinship with people who do get excited by it. So even though it's a left-wing cause and I agree that it's a good one, it doesn't make me think of myself as left-wing.

So my current half-baked theory is that there's this middle ground in "policy-space," where a whole bunch of the most reasonable left-wing people and most reasonable right-wing people live, but for some reason (and I'm not sure yet what it is), not very many people live in the corresponding middle ground in "emotion-space." So we get this weird polarization, because people naturally want to hang out with people who share their values (even though their policies may be different), rather than people who have very different values (even though their policies may be similar). I read several right-wing blogs, and I usually enjoy reading them even when I think they're totally ignoring some reasonable left-wing objections. And I read several left-wing blogs, and I'm often bored by them even when I agree with what they're saying - I just can't seem to muster up much enthusiasm for most left-wing causes.

So one interesting question is: why don't I get excited about the left-wing causes? What is it about each side that gets people excited?

2005-01-11T21:00:00.000-08:00

Tony wrote: "Consequentialism sounds silly & infeasible!"

I agree, but I also think that a lot of people implicitly accept it without really thinking about it, and I think it causes them a lot of guilt. It's not that most people actually make any real kind of effort to do as much for everybody as they possibly can; it's that they don't, and then they feel guilty about that. And other people try to make them feel guilty - and it works, because people haven't actually thought through this philosophical stuff (or else because the consequentialists are right, but I don't buy it).

I suppose that would be a consistent consequentialist answer to my question. "Yes, I have hobbies, and I'm not doing as much good as I could, but I feel guilty about that. And pretty much everybody else is like that, too, so they should all feel guilty too."

Just because a philosophy is infeasible doesn't mean people won't believe in it - it just means that they'll feel really guilty for not being able to live up to it.

The call of duty

2005-01-10T11:39:00.000-08:00

One of the arguments in favour of legislating morality (is there anything wrong with making an immoral action illegal, or making a good action mandatory?) is the idea that we're all morally obligated to do as much good as we can. If donating to the various tsunami-relief efforts is the best thing I could be doing with my money, then I'm morally obligated to do it. There's no such thing as "above and beyond the call of duty"; every good deed is a duty. (Apparently this idea is called "consequentialism" in the world of philosophology - AnalPhilosopher just wrote a post about it.)

I'm not a consequentialist. I think that there is such a thing as "above and beyond the call of duty." I think that I'm morally obligated to do some things for other people (pay back my debts, and refrain from violating other people's rights, and maybe some other stuff that we can argue about later). Beyond that, though, I think that I should do what makes me happy - and I'll be proud of myself if I decide that it would make me happy to help other people (and there are lots of forms of helping people that do make me happy, so I do a bunch of them), but I don't believe that I need to feel guilty if I decide that I'd be happier spending my time and money on other things.

My question for consequentialists is: do you have any hobbies? I like to juggle. It makes me happy. My juggling doesn't do any good for anybody except me - I mean, sometimes people are entertained by watching me, but that's not a very big good, and sometimes I juggle even when nobody else is around, just because I enjoy it. It's a completely selfish activity. I could be using that time to volunteer for a homeless shelter or something. But I don't feel guilty for that - I think that once I've fulfilled my obligations, it's perfectly fine for me to spend my time doing things just because they make me happy. But if you're a consequentialist, it seems to me that you'd have to feel guilty for spending any more time on your own recreation than absolutely necessary to keep yourself sane (or, heck, for doing anything other than living at the minimum level required for bare subsistence and working every minute you can for the sake of other people). So I'm wondering if consequentialists actually practice what they preach.

What Bush's Big Science Project Ought to Be

2004-12-29T13:40:00.000-08:00

Orson Scott Card writes about the need to find renewable energy sources and quit burning oil. No new ideas there, but Orson Scott Card is really good at understanding people and telling stories that people will believe. So I'm linking to what he wrote. I think it's important to spread these ideas.

Objective morality

2004-12-28T13:26:00.000-08:00

My friend Phil and I have been talking about the idea of legislating morality. His position, as I understand it, is that morality is objective - right and wrong don't depend on what each individual person values. There's one correct ethical system, and our job (as moral philosophers) is to figure out what it is. And since we've been thinking about this ethical stuff for a long time, our society's ideas about morality are probably pretty close to correct by now. So we should study ethics like a science, and teach it to our students, and try to make our laws match up as closely as possible with ethics. (Phil, am I getting this right?)

And the thing is, this question ("Is there an objective morality?") really matters. At first it sounded to me like some abstract thingy that wasn't really of much practical interest. But I'm finding that a lot of other stuff depends on it. For example, I keep hearing the word "unjust" being used nakedly, out on its own - "How can you stand idly by and let people do things that are unjust?" or, "Why shouldn't we make laws that force people to act in just ways? Why would you want the freedom to do something unjust?" But those questions only make sense if the word "unjust" makes sense on its own, without any qualifications. And I'm not convinced that it does. And once you start putting the qualifications in, the questions become a lot trickier to answer.

I'm not sure exactly what I believe yet, but I've got a couple of questions.

I think the most interesting question is: does this objective ethics cover every possible action? And if not, which actions does it cover? Personally, I think I believe that even if there are some objective ethical rules, they don't cover every action in the universe. There are lots of actions that aren't objectively moral or immoral, so you just choose according to what you value. I don't think there's any objective ethical rule that says I should have chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla. So what kinds of actions fall under the purview of this objective morality, and what kinds of actions don't?

I don't have an answer for that question yet. But one factor that I think is important is that for any particular ethical issue, there tend to be multiple goods to consider, and often some of them conflict with each other. (For example, I value both security and liberty, but it's often true that in order to get more security, we need to give up some liberties.) So if there's this continuum between two opposing goods, but we still think that that issue is covered by the objective morality, then we'd need to believe something like, "On the security/liberty continuum, if we number the endpoints 0 and 1, the objectively most-moral position is 0.634." Which is maybe reasonable, but it still seems a bit ridiculous to me. I can imagine that some people might value security more than I do or less than I do, and I'm not sure it means that either of us is objectively wrong.

My second question is: even if there is an objective ethics, can we ever really be sure that we know what it is? (And even if we think we could someday reach a point where we're sure, do we think we've reached that point yet?) I think it's really important to remember that we might be wrong.

This is related to the idea that we should keep the observer explicit. I think that it's misleading to ask, "How can you stand idly by and let someone do things that are unjust?" Whose conception of justice are we talking about? Even if there's an objective meaning for the word "just," I think it's pretty clear that people disagree radically on what that meaning is. So put the observer back into the sentence. "How can you stand idly by and let someone do things that you currently believe are unjust?" Or, "How can you stand idly by and let someone do things that the majority of people currently believe are unjust?" Those are reasonable questions, too. Putting the observer back into the question doesn't destroy the "How can you stand idly by?" position. But it does make some of the counter-arguments a lot clearer.

Conservatives and tradition

2004-12-14T01:21:00.000-08:00

I feel like I'm starting to understand conservatives better. I'm not a conservative yet - I think I'm something closer to a libertarian - but I can imagine myself ending up as a conservative in the future. If I do, I think it would be interesting to have a record of my thoughts during the transition.

The first thing I learned about conservatives that really made sense to me was their attitude towards tradition. Sometimes you hear angry liberals rant about how since conservatives value tradition so much, they must be in favour of other former traditions like slavery and denying women the vote. That's not what conservatives believe, though.

Conservatives don't blindly value tradition above all else. What they do believe, as Keith Burgess-Jackson explains it, is that it makes sense to (by default) have a presumption in favour of tradition. Tradition isn't the only factor to consider, but it is one of them. For a conservative, a tradition is innocent until proven guilty. When there are good reasons for getting rid of a tradition, we should get rid of it. But even then, we should move slowly, to allow time for the effects of changes to be felt. Conservatives aren't against change, but they do want to be cautious, because it's risky to mess around with something that's already working pretty well. (Conservatives feel that liberals tend to focus too much on the negative parts of the current system, and not enough on the positive parts.) Humans aren't very good at predicting the future, especially for really complex systems like our society. Changes tend to have unintended consequences.

Personally, I don't (yet) value tradition quite as much as a conservative does, but I can see the wisdom in moving cautiously. So it kinda bothers me to see people talk about how conservatives must be bigoted and hateful for wanting to preserve "traditional marriage." I think the conservatives are wrong about that one, but I don't think that they're evil just because they want to be cautious about making a major change to one of our most fundamental traditions.

The Myth of the Working Poor

2004-12-13T01:04:00.000-08:00

I found this article interesting (but long). I don't have any idea how trustworthy the article is; I'm posting the link here mostly because I have a feeling that a lot of Canadians hear a lot of stuff about how America is scary if you're poor, how it's impossible to work your way up if you're born poor, and they never hear the counter-arguments.

Left2Right

2004-12-12T21:15:00.000-08:00

I have high hopes for the Left2Right blog. I read several left-wing blogs, but this is the first one I've found that I really like.

Uncontrolled roads

2004-12-07T16:12:00.000-08:00

I love these ideas (though I've still got lots of reservations and questions). Make roads simpler, rather than adding a bunch of extra complexity. Don't rely so much on artificial controls; people can (and will) negotiate right-of-way using other mechanisms (like eye contact, for one). And, most of all, recognize that the design of the road affects the psychology of the people driving on it. Controls don't always have the intended consequences. Giving people signs and lane markers and curbs and speed limits doesn't necessarily make the road safer, because it changes the way people think when they're driving. (There are parallels here with economics. And programming languages. :)

Love and Marriage

2004-12-01T01:45:00.000-08:00

AnalPhilosopher has been writing about gay marriage, and I think that there's a point here that sorta fits with the stuff that I learned from reading Ayn Rand's books and talking to Dave and Kristen down in California. It's interesting to me that I didn't see the connection before.

What I learned from them is that there's real goodness in not committing to each other, in being able to know that you're staying together because you both still choose to, because neither of you has found anybody better, not just because you promised to stay together. Our culture tries to make us think that it's a good thing to promise to never change your mind about someone, but I don't think that it is. I think love is more meaningful when you can say to the other person, "I could leave, but I choose not to, because I still want to be with you more than I want to be with anybody else." Once you've promised not to leave, you can't say that anymore.

But I also believe that there's goodness in promising to stay together for the sake of your children, because children deserve to grow up in a stable household with two parents. So my compromise (for myself - I'm not talking yet about anybody else, or about any political stuff; I'm just talking about my own personal hypothetical future marriage) is that I think I should only get married when the time comes that I want to start having kids.

In practice, I don't expect it to be a big deal - I do believe that I'll know way ahead of time that I'm gonna be happy to be with this person for the rest of my life. But I still think that the relationship is more meaningful without the commitment, so I want to stay uncommitted as long as it makes sense. I think that people who get married just because they love each other are actually missing out on something really important.

The fascinating thing here, to me, is the correspondence between the stuff that I just said and the usual conservative and liberal arguments. The stuff about how I don't want to get married until I'm about to have kids fits nicely with the conservative thing about how the "institution of marriage" needs to involve having kids. I've never really heard a conservative talk about the reason why they believe that that's the definition of marriage, which is why I think it sounds to liberals (and to me, too, until a few minutes ago) like an arbitrary definition that the evil conservatives must have made up because they're prejudiced against gay people. But I think that there are good reasons, down at the personal level, for me to tie the idea of marriage to the idea of having kids. So I'm starting to understand where the conservatives are getting their idea of marriage from. (None of these reasons, though, have much to do with whether the kids are the parents' biological children or were adopted. So I don't see any reason why a gay couple shouldn't be allowed to adopt a kid, and why they shouldn't be allowed to get married if they do.)

And then there's the liberal position, which talks about how marriage is about love and commitment and gay people can do that just like anybody else. I agree with the part about gay people being perfectly capable of loving each other and committing to each other, just like anybody else. But I don't agree that marriage is just about love and commitment, so I think the liberals are missing the point. I think that their talk about love kinda undermines their position, because I think that real love is more meaningful when it's not promised. And I think that their emphasis on commitment (rather than on the purpose of the commitment, which I think is stability for the kids) shows that they've got some pretty messed-up values; wanting commitment for its own sake means you're just scared and looking for a promise that the other person won't leave you even if they change their mind about you.

So I think that my position is kind of a weird one. I want to make a distinction between committed-life-partners and committed-life-partners-with-kids. I don't know which one corresponds more closely to common usage of the word "marriage," but I do think that the first one isn't even something that we ought to be encouraging, and I'm not sure why it would make sense for any legal benefits to go along with it. (I'm not even sure it makes any sense for legal benefits to go along with having kids. But whatever. We can argue about that later.)

I don't see any reason to pay much attention to the distinction between gay-marriage and straight-marriage; if a gay couple adopts a child, I don't see why they shouldn't get all the same legal benefits that a straight couple gets when they have a child. (If people get tax deductions for having dependents, that logically applies equally to biological children and adopted children.)

So I think I'm pro-marriage-with-children (including gay-marriage-with-children), and anti-marriage-without-children (including straight-marriage-without-children). Is that weird? The idea is kinda starting to grow on me.

Speaking precisely

2004-11-24T18:45:00.000-08:00

For the past year or so, I've been consciously trying to get in the habit of speaking precisely, and speaking in ways that encourage good thinking habits.

For example, I'm trying to be a lot more careful about the word "want" these days. In particular, I'm trying to avoid saying things like, "I want to go out and have fun with you guys tonight, but I can't because I have to work." It's not true that I can't. I don't have to work. I want to go out and have fun with my friends, but I also want to keep my job, and I want that more. So I shouldn't say, "I have to work tonight," but rather, "I want to work tonight." I find that phrasing it that way makes it much easier to be happy, because I recognize that staying home and working is something that I want to do.

Or to look at it from a slightly different perspective: this is about trying to identify myself with my long-term rational desires, rather than my short-term irrational desires. People have a tendency to think short-term rather than long-term, and I think that part of the reason is because we sabotage ourselves by using bad words. When people say, "I want to go out and have fun tonight, but I have to work instead," the "I" in that sentence is this irrational person whose true desires are the short-term ones, who only does the long-term unfun stuff because he "has" to. And phrasing the sentence that way reinforces that feeling. But that's silly. Why should that person be the person they identify as themselves? I want my self, my "I", to be the person who can be rational and think about my long-term good and be happy even when I'm doing something that's not fun. So I try to speak that way, to help me get in the habit of thinking that way.

Another speaking habit that I'm trying to develop is keeping the observer explicit. I'd like to avoid saying things like, "X is true," when what I really mean is, "Right now, I believe that X is true." This means that my writing gets cluttered with a bunch of "I think" and "it seems to me" and "as far as I can tell," but I like the overall effect. It keeps me very conscious of the fact that I might be wrong.

Of course, it's annoying to see all those extra words cluttering up everything, so in the very long run (and I don't expect this to happen within my lifetime or maybe ever), I'd like to see our language change in a way that makes these things easier to say. I think that our thought patterns are influenced by our language, and so I think that having a language that makes it easier to say "X is true," than to say, "Right now, I believe that X is true," trains us to be more confident of our opinions than we really should be.

It's Charisma, Stupid

2004-11-08T14:33:00.000-08:00

An entertaining Paul Graham essay about the theory that the only factor that matters in a U.S. presidential election (ever since TV became widespread, anyway) is the charisma of the two candidates.

People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.

The Naked Face

2004-10-31T22:12:00.000-08:00

A cool article (from a couple of years ago) by Malcolm Gladwell, about reading faces. I wanna learn to do this.

Individualism

2004-10-22T13:47:00.000-07:00

Tony asked this question to try to show that even people who side with "the good of the individual" aren't completely individualistic:

If you could become king of the world in exchange for causing great misery to a few million strangers, would you do it?

Is that really the way people see individualist philosophy?

I have no interest in being king of the world. It sounds like a lousy job. I don't want to tell other people what to do. Not because of any sense of altruism or fairness or team-playerness; just because a person's company or help or cooperation is worthless to me unless it's voluntary. I like it when people do what I want them to do, but only if they genuinely want to do it for reasons of their own. I like it when people agree with me, but only when they've reached that agreement by using their own best judgment. I like it when people give me gifts or do nice things for me, but only if they choose to do them voluntarily, not out of duty or fear or guilt, but just because they value me. All of the richness of having other human beings in my life is lost if their actions aren't voluntary; the thing that I value most about other people is that they're not me. They can surprise me, they can teach me, they can disagree with me. And that's frustrating sometimes, but it's also really wonderful.

There are people who seek power over other people, or seek to be wealthier than other people, or seek fame or prestige in the eyes of other people. Those are the kind of people who might enjoy being king. Their lives are completely centered around other people, but for some reason we call them "selfish." I don't think that's the right word; seeking those things is a form of abandoning your self, your own judgment, your own standards, and letting your life and your decisions and your happiness depend on other people.

I absolutely do value myself over others. Because I value my own happiness more than I value anybody else's, I'm not willing to let it depend on other people; I derive happiness from being proud of who I am, and from thinking about interesting things, and from being good at what I do... and because I value my own opinions more than I value others' opinions, what matters to me is whether my work and my values and my ideas are good in my judgment, not necessarily in anybody else's.

I also derive happiness from my friendships with people, of course. It's wonderful to meet someone who's interesting, and fun to be with, and likes you. But I think that you can't really experience that joy properly if there isn't a place inside you that just doesn't care what other people think, a part of you that can be happy no matter what other people do. Because otherwise you're always going to be afraid that the other person is going to take away your joy.

There's this really good feeling that comes from knowing that when you're spending time with someone, she's there because she wants to be there. If she wanted to be somewhere else, she would be. You don't have to worry that she's lying to you to spare your feelings, because she has no interest in doing that. When she compliments you, it's genuine. And I hope that my friends all know that my friendship with them is completely selfish on my part - every minute I spend with them is because I like them and I want to be with them, for my own sake. Every favour I do for them is because it makes me happy to do it, not because I'm sacrificing my happiness for theirs.

I guess I've gotten kinda off-track here. I'm just trying to paint a picture of how the world seems to me, and how other people fit into my life, and why the "you wouldn't want to be king, so you're not a complete individualist" point seemed so weird to me. The question of whether I care more about myself or about society is a good question (and we should talk about it more :), but exploiting people and becoming king of the world seems just as disgusting to me as it does to you. We've got lots of wannabe-kings in our society today, but I don't think that the right solution is to tell everybody that they should compromise between their own happiness and other people's happiness. That just creates a whole bunch of different problems.

2004-10-17T23:00:00.000-07:00

Are moderation and humility virtues?

Sometimes it's good to be humble. Sometimes it's good to be moderate. But sometimes it's good to be proud, and sometimes it's good to be extreme. ("Humility when humility is called for" and "moderation when moderation is called for" are virtues.)

That seems so obvious to me that I wouldn't bother mentioning it, except for a couple of disturbing attitudes that I've heard from people.

The first is that I've heard several people appeal to "humility" as a reason for going along with the crowd. I've been called arrogant for not accepting that the majority has the moral right to dictate my actions. I don't think this is a bad kind of arrogance; I think that submitting without being persuaded would be a form of abandoning my responsibility for my own actions and beliefs. I'm always happy to listen to people who want to try to rationally persuade me that I'm wrong, but I won't change my mind just because a bunch of people (or an authority person) tells me I'm wrong. (If I did, I'd be programming in Java. :) I do try to be humble, though, in the sense that I accept that I might be wrong, and so I try not to force my opinions on other people.

The second disturbing attitude is that I keep hearing people use the word "extreme" as if it's inherently bad. (Some people seem to think "ideological extremist" is an insult; I think it's neutral, or maybe even a small compliment.) A related one is when people talk about "compromise" as if it's always the right thing to do when people disagree. How much justice should you strive for? How good should you try to be? How much murder should you tolerate? If a burglar wants to steal half of your possessions, and you want him to steal zero, should you compromise at a quarter?

You don't know everything. You might be wrong. And it's often true that when two good people disagree, it's because they both have a piece of the truth. So listen to the other person's point of view, and learn from him, and judge for yourself whether he's right or not. Change your mind if you decide that he's right. Learn from the good parts of what he says, and ignore the bad parts. But don't compromise just because you don't want to be "extreme." Sometimes the extreme position is the right one, and sometimes majorities believe really stupid things. If you feel like you understand your opponents' reasoning, and you still disagree with them, then trust your own judgment. Be proud of your judgment - just not so proud that you stop learning. Live by your judgment, but don't try to force others to live by it.

Maybe this stuff is all obvious. I dunno. I feel silly posting it. But I keep hearing people say things that sound like they disagree. So I'm curious to hear people's objections.

How a libertarian might become a conservative

2004-10-13T13:03:00.000-07:00

I found this worth reading. In particular:

then i bought a house. it is said that one should prepare for two violent jerks to the right of the political spectrum: the first when one purchases his first home and the second when he has his first child. now a homeowner, i began to be concerned with issues that affected my neighborhood. suddenly the proclivity of conservatives for legislating morality began to bear some resemblance to my own reasoning.

I don't quite buy it yet, but it's interesting.

Criminals' rights vs. normal rights

2004-10-12T18:53:00.000-07:00

I asked, "Does an individual have rights that shouldn't be taken away by society (unless he forfeits them by infringing upon the rights of others)?" Josh answered, "I would say that a person's life and her security of person are the only certain things that cannot be justly taken away by the state - after all, once taken, they are permanently gone. Of course, some (not me) hold the death penalty to be justified, but even then only under extraordinary circumstances."

There are two different questions here. What rights shouldn't be taken away from a person, as long as he doesn't infringe upon the rights of others? And what rights shouldn't be taken away from a person even if he does infringe upon the rights of others? I was trying to ask the first question, but I think you answered the second one - or else maybe you've got the same answer to both questions. (I like your answer as an answer to the second question, though.)

For example, I believe that a person's labour ought to be his own. I think that we should make sure that he pays back whatever debt he owes to society, and we should make sure that he doesn't do things that infringe upon the rights of others, but beyond that, I don't think I (or we) have any business trying to control what he does. (I think it's fine to try to convince him to voluntarily change what he does, and to refuse to associate with him if he doesn't change what he does, but ultimately it's his decision.) Even if we think we know better than he does what's best for him. Even if we think that it would only cost him a little bit, and we think it's for a greater good. If he doesn't want to help us, he doesn't have to.

We can talk more about the own-your-own-labour thingy if you want; for now, I'm just using it as an example, because I'm trying to ask you whether you believe in any similar kinds of moral principles that should restrict what kinds of laws the government is allowed to make (even if the majority thinks those laws would end up being for the "public good"). Right now, it seems to me that you believe that the majority has the moral right to pass laws about pretty much anything, as long as the punishment isn't death and the laws are created through the proper governmental process and aren't "unequal". Is that correct?

Some equalities are more equal than others

2004-10-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

I asked what moral principles people think the constitution should be based on, and Josh's answer was, "equality before and under the law, uniform application of law, and, perhaps the most important of all, government only by law, not by arbitrary considerations or will."

Are those the only ones? If a law satisfies all three of those criteria, is that enough to make it a moral law?

I also have a feeling that once you start trying to flesh those three principles out in more detail, I'm not going to like the way you try to define "equality." For example, it seems to me that the income tax laws are blatantly unequal. If you believe in equality under the law, shouldn't everybody pay an equal number of tax dollars? (That's not my actual position; it's just the most obvious way to me of implementing the "equality" principle.) There are lots of ways of interpreting the phrase "equality under the law," so I don't think it makes sense to stop there and call that an axiom; there's gotta be something deeper behind it.

Do the ends justify the means?

2004-10-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

When I suggested to Josh that he doesn't have the right to use force to prevent people from entering the health insurance market, he replied:

Indeed, I do not have such a right personally. It is, however, the right and duty of the federal and provincial governments to legislate in the best interests of their constituents within the confines of the Canadian constitutional order.

I've heard that sort of thing from other people, too, and I really don't get it. I don't mind making a distinction between individual actions and collective actions, but I still don't understand why you believe that "society" has the right to do these things. So my question is: Are you taking it as an axiom that society is allowed to do whatever it wants, or are you working from some more fundamental principles? Does an individual have rights that shouldn't be taken away by society (unless he forfeits them by infringing upon the rights of others)? If so, what should those rights be, and why?

(You can answer that society is only allowed to do things that are constitutional, but that just pushes the question up one meta-level. What sorts of principles should the constitution be based on?)

My current impression of left-wing morality is that it believes in lots of good things, but it also believes that the ends justify the means. (I have that impression because I keep hearing, "It's for the public good," as a justification for using force against people - but that's a statement that tries to justify the ends, when I was asking them to justify the means.) I agree with a lot of left-wing ends, but I'm very very very reluctant to use force as a means to get there. (And we can talk about why I'm so reluctant, if you want. I like talking about that stuff.)

Maybe I'm wrong, and there really are lines that you believe society shouldn't cross, even for the sake of what the majority perceives as the "common good." But I don't know what those lines are. (If you don't draw the line short of using physical force against people, where in the world could you possibly draw it?)

I'm honestly trying to understand here. I don't mean to misrepresent the left-wing position; I just really don't understand it. What sorts of moral principles do you believe in?

Treating poor people like people

2004-10-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons why I kinda like the idea of doing wealth redistribution directly (rather than doing it by creating government services) is because I believe in treating adults (including poor adults) like adults.

That is, if we believe that the poor people really do deserve this wealth that we're redistributing to them, then I think they deserve it with no strings attached. (And if they don't deserve it, we shouldn't be forcing people to give it to them.) If it's their money, then they have the right to spend it however they choose.

It kinda bothers me to hear people talk about how poor people are just as good as rich people and we should treat them with respect, but then create all these government nanny programs that treat them like children. (But it fits pretty well with George Lakoff's view of liberalism.)

It's possible to believe in helping poor people without believing that we need to run their lives for them.

2004-10-06T23:02:00.000-07:00

Answers to a couple of objections about my health care proposal:

Health care demand isn't very elastic. I think this is too simple a statement. I agree that there's an upper limit to how much health care I'm willing to demand (even if it's "free"), but we haven't reached it yet. That is, health care isn't cheap enough yet for me to be willing to buy as much as I can use - before I reach that point, I'll say, "You know what? I'd rather spend my money on having a more enjoyable life, rather than a longer one." For example, I think we're spending way too much money keeping dying people alive for a few extra (usually miserable) months.

Also, it seems to me that health care is pretty elastic downwards. There are lots of things that individual people can do (eat right, exercise) to reduce their need for health care. Even without economic incentives, there are lots of good reasons to do those things, but it seems to me that being responsible for paying for your own health care would be another good reason. (And it seems ridiculously unfair to me that a person who eats healthy foods and gets lots of exercise should be forced to pay for the health care of a lazy fat guy who smokes.)
You sound like you want to abolish health care insurance. I didn't intend to sound like I said that. I think insurance is a great idea. I'm not willing to force anybody to buy insurance, but I imagine that most people would buy it anyway. I've got no problem with private insurance companies, and I've got no problem with creating a public competitor if it turns out that we think the private ones have formed a cartel.

What I do expect, though, is that there'll be a market for insurance that covers the catastrophic stuff only, and that lots of people will choose to buy catastrophic insurance but not bother with "insurance that covers everything." (That kind of insurance still seems like a bizarre contradiction in terms to me. :)

Health care proposal

2004-09-30T01:38:00.000-07:00

OK, a concrete proposal on how to deal with health care (or, in general, any industry where we're worried that the private sector has turned into a monopoly or cartel):

We abolish all the laws against user fees.

We abolish all the laws against private competition.

However much wealth-redistribution we decide to do (and I believe that the answer shouldn't be zero), we do it directly and openly and honestly: we take the money directly from the rich people, and give it directly to the poor people.

When we suspect that a particular industry has become a monopoly or cartel, we do an experiment:
1. Use tax money to set up a public corporation (Crown corporation?) to compete in that industry.
2. This public corporation would be accountable to the public (in the same sense as any current government program can be said to be accountable to the public, which isn't very much).
3. It doesn't receive a blank cheque. It doesn't receive ongoing, yearly government funding. It receives a one-time start-up lump of money, and that's it.
4. We set a date, by which it is expected to have paid back the initial lump of money.

The idea is that even though the public health-care provider would be "accountable to the public" and "not for profit", I still want it to be forced to prove that it's cost-effective. Which means proving that it offers services that people are willing to choose over its competitors' services, at prices that people are willing to pay.

The fact that the public corporation would charge money for its services doesn't mean that it's hurting poor people; we're going to give the poor people money.

This system has the following left-wing virtues:

It helps poor people.

It should do a reasonably good job of ensuring that the private ones can't get away with forming monopolies and cartels.

And it has the following right-wing virtues:

It doesn't create infinite demand by making stuff "free."

It doesn't do anything to hurt private businesses - they'll be competing with the public one on a level playing field.

The amount of force-funding is limited and clearly defined. The creation of the public corporation is an experiment with clearly-specified success and failure conditions. It's not a blank cheque.

And on both sides:

It emphasizes results over promises. It isn't enough for the left-wing people to claim that the private ones are evil and the public one will be more efficient; they have to create the public one and prove it. It isn't enough for the right-wing people to claim that privatization will solve everything; the private businesses have to actually be able to stand up to the challenge of the public one.

I've got more to say about this, but this post is too long already. :)

Comments? Objections?

Temporary safety nets

2004-09-29T01:35:00.000-07:00

A while ago, my friend Phil and I talked about the idea of charity. We tried to pin down our disagreement, and eventually came to the following polarizing question: "If you met a crippled stranger who asked you for money, and he couldn't do any work that would be useful to you (not through any fault of his own - his crippling was an accident), and you talked to him for a while and he didn't seem like a particularly interesting person, would you give money to him?" Phil says that he would, and at the time I said that I wouldn't.

Over time, I've revised my opinion, and now I want to add in an extra clause to the question: "...and the accident that crippled him happened more than X weeks ago..."

That is, I'd be willing to offer unearned help to someone who was suffering unjustly, as long as the accident happened recently. In the long run, I think it's his own responsibility to adapt to his new condition and find a way to earn his own living. But in the short run, it's too soon to expect him to have adapted yet, and so I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and help soften the consequences of the accident.

So my question (to Phil, or anybody else who's interested) is: is this still something that we disagree on? If the guy was crippled, like, six years ago, and he's still a bum, would you still give him your money?

"Acceptable" profit margin?

2004-09-28T01:34:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting discussion about Canadian health care going on over at Peace, order and good government, eh?:

To summarize, there are three questions here for the private sector. What constitutes an acceptable profit margin? Can the cost savings or additional revenues such that private sector operators will meet their profit targets without actually raising the taxpayers' bill be demonstrated? And is the private sector prepared to operate in a manner that's transparent enough that we can keep tabs on them? It's our money.

The first question really bothers me; I don't think it's my place to decide how much money anybody else is "allowed" to make.

The second question highlights the problems that come when you try to run the world on promises, rather than results. The government doesn't commit to giving us a certain amount of health care for a certain cost; it just takes our money and then promises to do the best it can. And for some reason, we've accepted that this is normal - that there's no choice but to give up our money in return for unreliable promises to provide unspecified services. So it bothers me that we're asking this question at all. There's no "burden of proof" here; nobody should have to "demonstrate" in advance that the business will make money, or that the business's prices will be less than the current public system's prices. Let the business say to me, "I will perform service X if you pay me $Y," and I'll see for myself whether that price is lower than my current provider's price.

And I think the third question is actually kinda neat, because I think that creating that kind of transparency is actually a legitimate government function. And it's one that I'd like to see people pay more attention to. I've heard it said that "consumers don't have perfect information" is a problem with pure capitalism, and I agree. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the government should take control; it might just mean that the government should make sure that consumers have access to certain kinds of information.

The thing that worries me most about this whole debate is that nobody seems to be challenging the moral premises. (A couple of them seem to be: We have the right to tell doctors how much to charge in exchange for their efforts. We have the right to take money from someone and spend it on his behalf.) Both sides are just arguing about results, which is fine, but it's not the only issue here. Unless you believe that the ends justify the means, the moral premises are worth looking at directly.

I understand that the left-wing people believe they have reasons for accepting these moral premises. I'd just like them to be explicitly stated. Right-wing people tend to be content to argue about results, because they believe that left-wing policies have failed, even if you judge them by left-wing ethical principles. (And I agree with them, to some extent.) But I think that some left-wing ethical principles are just plain wrong, and I'd like to see them discussed directly and openly. These days they seem to be just accepted without question (in Canada, at least).

I think the left-wing people have a lot of valid objections about capitalism. But I think the ways they've chosen to try to address those objections are often really immoral. And I actually think that there are more-ethical ways of addressing their objections, ways that will even be more effective - but most left-wing people never think of those ways, because they don't see anything wrong with trying to control people "for their own good."

2004-09-25T01:09:00.000-07:00

Tim Norton commented:

I agree that there are problems with the system, but the specific problem you listed today has the distinct odour of being more Union based than government.

I don't know what it means to say that the unions are the problem, rather than the government.

I agree that there might be unions unethically influencing the politicians. But how are you going to solve that problem? By trying to create more restrictions on the unions? I'm not sure that's ethical, and I doubt it'll be effective. Ultimately, the only solution that I can think of is to take the power away from the politicians, so that it can't be seized by unions (or by rich people, for that matter).

The politicians have absolutely no moral right to have the power to ban the American health care vans; if I want to buy a medical test from the American health care vans, that's nobody's business but mine and the van people's.

There are certain kinds of power that the government should have, but this isn't one of them. (And I think it's interesting to try to make up a constitution that describes what kinds of powers are legitimate.)

I might believe that some of the union leaders are unethical, but that doesn't mean that they're the problem. It's not my place to impose my ethical views on them, as long as they have no way of imposing theirs on me. The problem is that they do.

2004-09-24T02:25:00.000-07:00

From the Toronto Star:

Ontario's health minister rushed new legislation into law yesterday and promised to go personally to the U.S. border to stop an American for-profit company that provides health tests on wheels.

"They're not welcome here," George Smitherman said of Life Line Screening, a private medical testing firm from Cleveland. "I'll meet them at the border or confront them where they are."

Life Line has already attracted paid registrations from hundreds of seniors in Hamilton, Niagara and the Windsor border area for one-day diagnostic clinics that move by van from church basement to community hall across a region, using portable ultrasounds.

I find this completely bizarre. And really scary. Here we have a public health-care system with huge waiting lines, we have Americans voluntarily coming into the country to offer extra health-care services to people, we have Canadian citizens voluntarily paying for those services, and the government wants to ban it?

When the Canadians choose to pay out of their own pocket for the extra services, does that mean that they're paying less money in taxes? It seems to me that they're helping the public system - every citizen who gets his health care privately is one who won't be standing in a public waiting line.

Now that we're rushing this new legislation through to stop the Americans, are we expecting the Americans to join the Canadian public health-care system? Seems to me they'll just go home.

This is the practical, real-life consequence of an abstract ethical mistake. We decided that our moral goal was "equality" rather than "at least a certain minimum," and now we've got a system where we don't care if everybody has worse health care, as long as it's more equal.

Health care summit

2004-09-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

It really bothers me to see the politicians bickering over which level of government should take the blame for taxing us and providing bad health care.

The system is really screwed up, we know it's screwed up, but we still pretend that we can fix it by juggling the numbers. We can't.

The system intentionally creates incentives for unethical behaviour. That's the problem. Let people choose between health-care providers. Let people see the costs of each service that they want and decide for themselves whether the cost is worth it or not (for themselves - don't let people decide whether their neighbour deserves to be allowed to pay for heart surgery or not).

I'm not even arguing against the principle of forcing rich people to pay for poor people. That's a whole separate issue. If we're gonna force rich people to pay for poor people, let's at least do it effectively. Take the money directly from the rich people and give it directly to the poor people. Then at least the poor people will have reasons to spend the money wisely, even if they didn't earn the money themselves.

We created a commons that didn't need to exist. Then we created a tragedy that didn't need to exist. Then we decided that the solution was to add bureaucrats. And now we're arguing over which hand should hold the gun that forces us to pay for the commons and the tragedy and the bureaucrats.

I hate writing about this. The philosophy stuff is fun to talk about. This isn't. But I'm really scared.

2004-09-09T01:46:00.000-07:00

Tony says:

I like your combination so far. It'll be interesting to see what political ideas it spawns when applied to the current issues.

I find that my political opinions tend to be boring. Once I accepted that it's not my place to try to force other people to do things that I think are good, or to punish them for doing things that I think are bad, a lot of political questions became trivial and most of the complexity ended up in the small-scale personal-ethics questions, instead.

That is, if you ask me a question like, "Do you think we should have a law that says such-and-such?" my answer will usually be "No." But if you ask me, "Would you, personally, do such-and-such?" I have to think harder.

I, personally, try not to discriminate irrationally against people (based on race or sexual orientation or whatever), but I won't try to prevent you from discriminating in ways that I think are irrational. I think that it's my responsibility not to cause unwanted pregnancies, but I won't stop you from getting an abortion if you want one. I think that I should look especially hard for reasons to be kind to people who are poorer than I am, and help them for those reasons whenever I can, but I won't try to force you to do the same.

Were you thinking of any issues in particular?

2004-09-05T19:12:00.000-07:00

I've been reading George Lakoff's book, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. I'm not very impressed so far, but he's had a few useful insights.

The main premise of his book (oversimplifying a bit) is that conservatives and liberals tend to use "family" metaphors to model their ideas about politics, but they have very different models of what the ideal family looks like. Conservatives have a Strict Father metaphor for morality (obedience to authority, self-reliance, responsibility, rewards for goodness and punishment for badness), whereas liberals have a Nurturant Parent metaphor for morality (empathy, support, interdependence, children are cared for and expected to care for others in turn, letting people explore themselves and their own potential).

(This isn't intended to mean that liberals don't believe in self-reliance, or that conservatives don't believe in nurturing. But for liberals, self-reliance is secondary to nurturing - you need to be a whole, healthy person in order to help others. And for conservatives, part of nurturing means sometimes letting people fend for themselves, or punishing them for being bad.)

The point of the book isn't just to try to explain the two different moral systems; it's also to try to explain why they have so much trouble understanding each other (why things that seem like common sense to conservatives seem blatantly immoral to liberals, and vice versa), and why they use such different words to talk about morality.

Anyway, I can't really tell whether he's done a good job of explaining both sides. (Some of the Amazon reviews say that he's completely misunderstood the conservatives. But whatever.) The part that's interesting to me is that I like most of the stuff on both sides. There are just a couple of things on each side that I think are wrong, and if you take them out, I think you can combine the rest and get a coherent moral system.

The Strict Father system goes wrong with the blind-obedience-to-authority stuff (much better to question authority and decide for yourself whether it's right), and with the reward-and-punish stuff (I'd replace it with reward-and-ignore, mostly; I don't think it's my place to punish people for being bad, but I do think that I shouldn't reward them for it, and that I have the right to stay away from them and not deal with them anymore).

The Nurturant Parent system goes wrong with the duty-to-help-others stuff (I think I have a duty to repay what I've been given, but no more than that - anything else that I do to help others is voluntary, not "duty").

And what you end up with, I think, is a world where it's good to help other people, but when someone helps you, you know that they're doing it voluntarily. Where people forgive you and sympathize with you and help you grow, but you don't develop this feeling of being "entitled" to those things.

Essay writing

2004-09-03T18:57:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun Paul Graham essay about essay-writing. He talks about why high-school English classes seemed so pointless, and about how half the work of essay-writing is finding surprising stuff to say (because essays should aim for maximum surprise).

The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken.

I'm not sure whether he's quite right or not, but there's some truth to it. :) I keep finding myself questioning stuff that I took for granted as a kid. Maybe life is getting more surprising. :)

Spam filter?

2004-09-01T00:12:00.000-07:00

Does anybody know a web-based e-mail service (like Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail) that has a Paul Graham-style Bayesian spam filter? I'm using Yahoo right now, and their spam filter is just terrible.

I used to use the Squeak e-mail client, which had a really wonderful spam filter that used Paul Graham's algorithm. (Spam is pretty much a solved problem, as far as I can tell. At least for now. Maybe the spammers will get smarter in the future.) But I really like the convenience of having all my e-mail accessible through a web browser from anywhere.