Arguing on the Internet: Turd-Juggling, the Philosopher's Way!

So while I was researching some stuff for IBD, a post from the blog He Lives came up. Apparently, I was able to do some good for his 'net relevance, 'cuz there are more comments in that one thread than the guy's had in all of September combined (except for this other post from early September - yes, I counted)!

Anyway, I fired what I wanted to be a parting shot (the amiable kind, not the insulting kind), and ended up putting my foot right the fuck in my mouth. What follows is my response to that, since I'm kinda-sorta done with that conversation over there (I apologized for my faux pas, though). As such, it's mainly written "to" a couple of individuals, namely Wandering Internet Commentator and Neil B (with whom I shall be talking some modal realism this weekend). Ultimately, I just couldn't say no to utility calculus (Finally, a chance to use my degree!).

That said, let's take a step back for a second, because I think this moment right here is useful. Let's stick with this "I'm the villain" thing and see where it goes. Did I just make a hate speech? I can tell you that I meant to be inflammatory, but I didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings. I mean, there was no "hate" involved on my part, so even if whatever definition of "hate speech" you choose applies, I think the term is misleading because I'm just not hateful. I meant to rattle cages just a little, not to poke at what I now see as something more like an exposed nerve; I meant to be irreverent, not sadistic. I was trying to follow the internet maxim: be a douche-nozzle, not a douche-bag. I can't control anyone's reactions, of course, but I truly didn't mean for anyone to react as a parent of an autistic person probably would upon reading my comment. (I just so happened to be missing a key piece of information, namely: that our erstwhile host is one such parent.)

Even here, I'm having trouble trying to draw the line between "participating in the conversation" and "analyzing the conversation," the latter leading me to stick to my guns in what could be seen as the worst possible way of not changing how I was doing the former. I'm really trying to say here, "Look, I'm really sorry about that, because I didn't mean to hurt your feelings in this conversation about feelings. But let's put all that aside for the moment and look at what just happened, because it pertains to that very conversation."

WIC, yes that was Neil B on little old ladies, not you. My bad, and thanks for the correction! I guess that's what I get for posting surreptitiously from work. Neil, you wrote, "I don't see a big difference in terms of probability expectation value, between something clearly wrong might happen to someone, v. something maybe wrong will clearly happen to someone." I can show you what I'm trying to do with math! Hooray! Two caveats: this is not a new argument, it's a translation of my same old argument in the hope that this new perspective will help; second, this is not a mathematical proof, it's just an explanatory model which could be presented just as validly but in a completely different way, should a competing perspective be adopted. My argument, in other words, is that "this is the 'proper' way to look at it."

First off, let's just assign "maybe" a probability value of 0.5, and "wrong were done" gets the arbitrary variable "W," for whatever reason you like. Certainty is C (because we want to see explicitly where our certainty is), and events are E. I think what you're saying could be expressed as, "CW*0.5E=0.5W*CE," or "Certain wrong maybe eventualizing is just as bad as maybe wrong certainly eventualizing." Or, to re-phrase your original in the terms of this ad-hoc utility calculus, "The expected return of a certain-wrong maybe-occurring is equivalent to that of a maybe-wrong certainly-occurring." So far, so good?

Any junior high kid could see that that's a true equivalence for any particular values of W & E (C=1, and is only shown for clarity) because we're just multiplying everything together. However, that "maybe" of 0.5 can change, as the probability of "wrong were done" occurring is affected by attitudes, cultures, proximity, and a million other things. As different cultures (made of different individuals with different attitudes) come together in an orgy of elbow-rubbing, I think it uncontroversial to propose that the probability of "wrong were done" occurring will rise*: actual harm (physical, emotional, financial, etc.) will be done by way of sectarian violence, or bigoted violence, or whatever you want to call it when someone says, "Hey, they're different, so let's get 'em," and then goes and "gets 'em." The left side of our equation has increased in magnitude as that coefficient next to the E has gone up, tipping the scales. And so, says I, we are justified in criminalizing those certain wrongs in order to curb them (though they are not completely eliminated).

Meanwhile, what does the right side look like? Remember that we're talking about something that's "maybe wrong" (i.e. "offense" as opposed to "harm/violence"). And that capacity for offense is a certainty, it's always there. The uncertainty, our matter of chance, is as to whether or not this offense is "wrong" (the open question is not whether "you was offended," but whether "wrong were done"). As an easy example, we have Cory's assumption that I have a penis; whether I do or not is immaterial, I can be offended that he made the assumption at all. As it happens, wouldn't you know it, I decided not to let it bother me (partly 'cuz I'm a steely bitch, partly 'cuz it truly doesn't matter). I had a knee-jerk reaction, but I see that knee-jerk as my problem, and the decision of whether to "merely go with it" and be offended or "rein it in" and not be offended as my decision.

Everyone has the chance to make this decision every time they have a knee-jerk reaction of any kind: do you go with it, or do you rein it in? The knee-jerk reactions themselves are beyond control: you cannot control whether you (or anyone else) will ever have a knee-jerk reaction, and the only way to make sure that knee-jerk reactions don't ever happen is to ensure that people receive no stimulus whatsoever; the only way to do this, in turn, is to shut everyone up and kill them all, so we'll discard knee-jerk reactions as irrelevant to our discussion. They truly cannot be helped, and we're talking about what can be helped (I think). And anyway, nobody self-identifies as an unthinking, inexorable force of nature; feelings are not tornadoes to be avoided (or ignored at one's peril); every part of a person is subject to change. This includes habits, behaviors, thoughts, words, and feelings. And if a person ever asserts that feelings are like tornadoes, then the message is clear: "I cannot be controlled, so when I Hulk out and wreck shit, everyone else better get the Hell away." Such persons have abdicated the realm of douche-nozzlery (and everyone is a douche-nozzle from time to time) and entered the realm of douche-baggery. Be a douche-nozzle, not a douche-bag.

So, given the fact that knee-jerk reactions will always occur no matter what we do, and that people are able to realize that their knee-jerk reactions may or may not be the best way to continue reacting to something, what is accomplished either way? Well, being offended certainly may spur some to action, and that action may be either productive, unproductive, or counterproductive. In either case, our person-in-question will be better-equipped to predict the value of whatever action they're about to take if s/he is calm. And it may even be the case that feigning offense is the best way to accomplish one's goals! Certainly, if one could reap the benefits of perceived offense without actually experiencing the maybe-harm of genuine offense, that would be a productive (though dishonest) move to make. But regardless, the point is that in all cases, you do yourself a disservice by choosing to let others have the power to offend you, and you can reduce your own personal right side of the equation to near-zero simply by changing your mind and deciding not to take offense.

Therefore, everyone should change their mind and decide not to take offense, because no matter what your goals are, zero good is accomplished by getting worked up over an insult. What good does it do merely to be offended? What good could come from offense, but could not be accomplished by another means that bypasses the "offense" process entirely? Zero, and zero, respectively. You create no good by getting offended, and any good that could come after being offended could also be created without that offense ever actually happening (inevitable, unpredictable, irrelevant knee-jerk reactions excluded). In other words, whether a person is trying to push your buttons or not, you do yourself zero help by letting your buttons be pushed. Even if we all adopt the view that I'm being childish by participating in IBD, what does it say about any group that lets themselves be upset by a child? I'd say they need to grow a collective spine, or they will find themselves upset out of all proportion over a whole lot of nothing, and not getting any work done in service of any of their actual causes.

What's more, we can actually do some good by giving people opportunities to practice at not taking offense. Whether people realize it or not, the existence of IBD prepares people for it. They have the opportunity to think, "Gee, IBD is coming up, I better get ready to do whatever it is that I'm going to do for it," whichever side of the fence they're on. The turd is on the table, it won't go away, and we can ignore it, get mad at it, or play with it. I say we play with it, we throw it back and forth, and we laugh while we do it - in the name of Jesus, or Allah, or Kali, or Poseidon, or just plain old good-natured ribbing. It's all turd-juggling, anyway; we may as well have fun while we're doing it. Or, as my friend Rebecca once said to me, "Learn to laugh at your problems, and you will never run out of things to laugh about." IBD is a day of play, not a day of work; but play is good for you, too.

Does that make at least a little more sense?

* - OK, fine, the folks who beat up gays (or slander blacks, or refuse to insure trannies) might just find someone else to beat up for some other equally preposterous reason. But now you're talking individuals, and some bigots meeting some gays/blacks/trannies might also come to realize that they're people, too. The fact remains that different cultures/attitudes/people, by virtue of existing, create more opportunities for culture/attitude/person-based violence, because now a bigot has one more reason to hate someone different. Point is, though it admittedly gets more complicated and isn't "just a wash," we need actual data (not a merely possible counterexample) to not treat it like "just a wash" as I do here. Got data? OK, I'll re-do the whole utility calculus when it comes up.

Sort-Of Reviews in Not-Really Stereo: "Here Comes Science" and "Act II: The Father of Death"

I finally got my meat-space copy of Act II: The Father of Death by the Protomen (I also got their bag, finally replacing my Air Force surplus carry-all of ten years) and have had time to digest it. I've been sitting on Here Comes Science for a while, since they came out in the same week, so I gave myself some time to think about that one as well.

Here Comes Science makes me laugh because a friend of mine (the philosopher who was instrumental in getting my sorry ass out of Objectivism) made a mix CD of They Might Be Giants and Sesame Street to test a professor's claim that the two are indistinguishable. So here they are with deliberate children's educational music, which I imagined would be even less distinct from Sesame Street, and... well, the answer turned out to be both yes and no.

Meet the Elements and The Bloodmobile are early-on examples of songs that I could see right at home on Sesame Street. But then there are songs like Science is Real and I Am a Paleontologist which cast scientists in a rock-star sort of light, which I fuckin' dig. Mainly, though, I find the album to be a breath of fresh air, giving some straight dope on science to kids in ways that they can appreciate and understand. For example, Put It to the Test carries a line that I almost want to get tattooed on my forehead: a fact is just a fantasy unless it can be checked.

But even better than the CD itself is the companion DVD that comes with it, containing music videos for all eighteen tracks (Here Comes Science, the song, doesn't count) strung together with contextualizing shorts narrated by John & John. Kids will laugh and be tricked into learning, but the educated viewer/listener will catch some covert lessons on falsifiability, the tentative nature of science, the importance of technical distinctions, and the place of humanity in the cosmos and on Earth. Even the liner notes are crammed with neat little things like a timeline of the Universe's life and the history of science (including the first articulation of the scientific method in 1021 by Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham - a new one on me!).

So I recommend this album to everyone without reservation. If you're not a child, just imbibe your intoxicant of choice and check out the music videos, it will be perhaps the most erudite stupid-fun you could possibly have. My friend Melissa called it "a big fuck-you to religion," and the Hell of it is, she's right (more on this in later posts).

My feelings on Act II are rather thoroughly mixed. Let me first compare my experience of The Protomen (or "Act I," if you prefer) to this second album. I listened to it many times before ever seeing the liner notes, and it took a few play-throughs to grow on me. In particular, Unrest in the House of Light struck me as disorganized and sloppy until I adopted the idea that the whole song is a crescendo to the last line: You cannot win. I didn't like Vengeance until I had gotten over my falling-out with punk rock. I'm going through the same thing with Act II: even though I really like that they "turned the horns up to eleven" (as one of my friends put it), Keep Quiet and Light Up the Night are pretty eighties-tastic and rubbed me the wrong way at first, while the middle of the album drags a little to me. Compare this to the Morricone-esque opening tracks, and I think a little bit of alienation is to be expected on my part. Also, if you know off the top of your head who Ennio Morricone is, please let me know because I just might love you.

Then there's the matter of extra-lyrical narration. Both albums have narration in the liner notes which is in no way communicated in the songs themselves, and in both cases, these extra narrations are married rather happily to instrumental bits devoid of lyrical content. The upshot is that the reader/listener can read along without interrupting the experience at all (I used my internal narrator rather than reading as quickly as I could), and I think it's awesome that this stylistic device was preserved.

Switching gears, I don't like that the Protomen seem to have relied on this device more in their second album than in the first. Throughout The Protomen, the action was always clearly communicated through lyrics and music, so that one could get a "good enough" picture of what was happening and who was speaking just by listening. In Act II, this is impossible; the exile of Dr. Light could easily be confused with a train ride to imprisonment, as it is unclear from listening alone whether Light is convicted or acquitted (which matter alone says quite a bit about the state of that world!). After this ambiguous event (and a curiously suggestive instrumental number), the next speaking role is given to Joe, who simply starts singing Breaking Out without ever being introduced.

That's my only substantial complaint about the album: as a rock opera, their storytelling is a bit sloppy when compared to the directness and clarity of their first release. Or maybe they're just being more economical with their units of storytelling, I don't know. It also bears mentioning that the major character developments of the first album are not mirrored by similar developments here: the action is all about how Wily completely ruins Light's life. This is very much a prequel which sets the stage for the released-first-but-chronologically-second part of the story, and for that, I think the lack of profound character development can be forgiven.

Everything else is either improved or just as good: the thematic unity is preserved, but presented in the form of smooth transitions from song to song rather than the variations on a central chord progression that ran throughout Act I. While the "genre pallette" is not as broad, the level of musicianship is about as high, and some of the production values are cleaned up (they even start distorting the sound at the end, which makes me think they're meant to be played in chronological order). At the end of the day, you'll probably like The Father of Death if you liked The Protomen, and I recommend listening to Act II first if you ever listen to both albums in one sitting.

101 Interesting Things, part twenty-five: Irreducible complexity evolved in the laboratory.

TL;DR version: ATTN Creatards & IDiots: Science wins at everything forever. Even disproving your own unnecessary-to-disprove bullshit.

I can't stop smiling. There are victories, there are triumphs, and then there is the work done with Escherichia coli by Dr. Richard Lenski and his team of bacterium-wranglin' heroes. This was brought to my attention by Silver Garou, who in turn got it from Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (chapter five, "Before Our Very Eyes"), in case you've got the book and want to play along at home.

This is pretty much what happened: Team Lenski put twelve as-identical-as-possible strains of E. coli each in its own test tube, then put less-than-a-day's-worth of glucose in each tube and let them sit overnight (in a shaking incubator, to keep them warm and mixed). The following day, a small sample of each "ancestral tube" was used to seed a "descendant tube" and the ancestral tube was frozen. Lather, rinse, and repeat every single day since 1988. I mean, holy balls, these docs are tough!

Dr. Dawkins carefully explains all the relevant bits which lead to one inescapable conclusion: E. coli, in Team Lenski's lab, evolved completely de novo two separate mutations which allow for the digestion of citrate. Each of these mutations amounts to a distinct step in the metabolic pathway, and neither "does anything" of interest without the other. In fact, what Team Lenski has discovered (thanks in large part to the beyond-Herculean efforts of one Zachary Blount) is that these two mutations were produced independently and thousands of generations apart.

The alert reader will notice that this is irreducible complexity. The Good Doctor's words here surpass me both in clarity and brevity, so I shall give him the stage:

There is a comic sequel to this triumphant tale of scientific endeavour. Creationists hate it. Not only does it show evolution in action; not only does it show new information entering genomes without the intervention of a designer, which is something they have all been told to deny is possible ('told to' because most of them don't understand what 'information' means [ask one of them to distinguish data, information, and knowledge, if you doubt this - D]); not only does it demonstrate the power of natural selection to put together combinations of genes that, by the naive calculations so beloved of creationists, should be tantamount to impossible; it also undermines their central dogma of 'irreducible complexity.' So it is no wonder they are disconcerted by the Lenski research, and eager to find fault with it.

Dawkins goes on to explain that Andrew Schlafly of Conservapedia has been making a stink about this (of course!), and PZ Myers lays out the whole sordid tale right here.

OK, time to talk myself down a bit. This is, at the end of the day, just another (rather large) nail in the goddamned coffin. I mean, people to this day deny that Elvis is dead or that the Holocaust ever happened, but they've been appropriately sidelined as the brainless twits they are, and this is another step in that process. Creationism/ID has been dead for years, the caricature of a cadaver trotted out by Ham, Gish, and Comfort at regular intervals for a viewing and a reading, no more a scientific account than a funeral sermon is a life. Perhaps now we can give it a proper burial. Or an improper one, for that matter. I don't care either way, so long as the ghoulish monstrosity is left as far behind us as we can manage.

101 Interesting Things, part twenty-four: Matt Steven

Matt Steven isn't your average basketball player. He mainly stands around shooting free throws during practice, and he's the designated shooter for his high school team. He makes about half of his free throws, which is Hella better than I've ever done.

Oh, he's also blind.

Yep, a blind kid has won games for his ball team by shooting free throws, and everybody loves him. Matt's brother taps his cane on the back of the rim for him, and that's how Matt orients himself. I'm not a big sports nut (a shitty coach kinda ruined things for me in high school), but this guy is my hero.

There's really not a lot more to this one, except that a blind kid is winning basketball games by shooting free throws. Think about that one for a minute. So cool!

Faith needs protection. No joke.

Kid gloves: off. Rant: on.

So there's a bunch on the 'tubes about atheist advertisements being complained into censorship, about atheists being vilified for trouncing others' beliefs, about the insensitivity of all us modern folk for criticizing each others' faiths, about the problem of everyone rubbing elbows while we disagree so vehemently on matters metaphysical, and a bunch of other nonsense that amounts to children whining that they don't want to hear this or that. "Boo-hoo, I don't wanna hear that stuff, wahh-wahh, why can't you just be quiet back-stage while I'm loud and in the spotlight?"

Let's get this straight, right off the bat: if you complain that something offends you, then you are whining. Offense is not harm. If you complain that something harms you, then your complaint is legitimate. And if something offends you and is harmful to you, then confine your complaint to the actual harm (as opposed to the pretend harm) or you will be seen as a whiner and the legitimate component of your complaint will probably be drowned out.

As Thomas "I owned slaves but still had relatively progressive values for my time" Jefferson said, "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Tru Fax, right there - the very truest. There is a piece of the puzzle that is missing from the public discourse, one that makes sense of the whole debacle, and that piece is simply this: only stupid ideas need protection.

That sounds flippant, but I'm being perfectly serious here. And also flippant. Good ideas are backed by evidence and/or argumentation, and they get a foothold in the meme pool based on those merits. While they may not be as infectious, prolific, or enduring as others of their kin, these merits are all that good ideas need. Furthermore, it is these merits which cannot be taken from good ideas and cannot be conferred upon stupid ideas, and this is why faith needs protection. Faith does not have redeeming qualities as a rational idea or as an empirically supported idea, it only has the memetic merits of being infectious and communicable. These flaws make faith vulnerable to rational and empirically supported ideas, and acknowledging these facts in public discourse is anathema to the maintenance of faith in practice because cognitive dissonance is a bitch.

"Faith" is a great many things to a great many people. Let's take a quick tour along the continuum: faith is the hope of things unseen; faith is believing what you know ain't so (thank you, Samuel Clemens); faith is believing without or despite reason and/or evidence; faith is trust; faith is patience; faith is kindness. Atheists, skeptics, and humanists may all "argue in good faith," and this is not a problem for us faithless heathens, for "to argue in good faith" is to trust in one's argumentative partner. Same letters, different idea. I, as a humanist, place faith in the goodness of humanity, insofar as I expect us to do all the good that it is in us to do (though we often fall far short, I still have that faith as an expected standard - this is called "optimism" by some). I have faith in my brother, insofar as I believe that he will find happiness in his life; though I also recognize that he may in fact fall short of this. Faith, like all words, has multiple meanings.

I'm talking about one kind of faith here: belief without or despite reason and/or evidence. "Faith" is shorter, but you can replace every use of "faith" with "belief without or despite reason and/or evidence" if you ever find yourself confused as to what exactly I'm yelling about here (except, of course, for the last paragraph). That's the kind of faith that is stupid, and that's the kind of faith that needs protection. Faith is frail and weak; evidence and reason are enduring and powerful. Faith must be shielded from evidence and reason, for those things erode faith. Believers are humans, though, and humans have psychological needs, some of which include:

• To maintain an image of oneself as consistent.
• To maintain an image of oneself as rational.
• To maintain an image of oneself as intelligent.

These are all directly opposed to faith - it is not consistent, it is not rational, and it is not intelligent to believe something without reason or evidence. We require reason and evidence in all other areas of our lives: whether we're poking around on Snopes or looking up the latest health scare, we typically follow evidence and reason to form our beliefs. Nobody drives by faith, writes a grocery list by faith, balances their checkbook by faith, or does bids on e-bay by faith. In all of those activities, the overwhelming majority of people behave in a mostly-rational fashion for the overwhelming majority of the time (at least as far as the whole "forming beliefs about the way things are" activity is concerned). So faith is not consistent with our day-to-day lives.

Neither is faith rational, as a matter of definition. While I am defining my way to victory on this point (and deliberately confining my tirade to faith that does in fact lack or defy evidence and/or reason), I am not merely defining my way to victory here. This is a pertinent point for the simple reason that many people do in fact believe things without or despite reason and/or evidence, yet most people do have a psychological need to consider themselves as rational beings. We're complicated, you see. This kind of faith - which many people actually have - is directly opposed to this deep-seated bit of human nature. This matters, in other words, and no amount of cultural apologetics can fix it. Y'know, just in case there's anyone out there who cares to point out that there's no rule saying we have to be rational, or that humans aren't rational all the time; sure, the former point is true and the latter point is true, but faith is still a problem for this reason.

Last, faith is not intelligent. It's just not smart to believe something with all your heart but without or despite reason and/or evidence, The End. There are many different forms of intelligence, and trying to come up with a universally acceptable one is a fool's errand. Just the same, I challenge anyone to propose a workable definition of "intelligent" that allows for the behavior of "adopting a belief without reason or evidence and deliberately ignoring obvious questions that would undermine said belief." Pro Tip: This can't be done without special pleading or begging the question (or flat-out arbitration, I suppose). Conversely, I'll bet we could all come up with three definitions each of "stupid" that would cover such a behavior. Here's one: "failing, deliberately or otherwise, to adhere to rationality and general thoughtfulness; absent-minded or flighty in one's conscious thought processes." We're all guilty of stupidity from time to time (especially under this definition), and I'll be the first to admit that I have some pretty epic bouts of The Stupid. Here, watch: "I'm the first to admit having an epic bout of The Stupid! Neener-neener!" But that's part and parcel of the homo sapiens gig: we all make mistakes, and we don't stop until we die. Faith is still stupid, though.

And so we see that, because faith is a dumb idea, it needs protection from the good ideas that would otherwise supplant it. Faith needs tricks to keep itself in place. Faith can't survive on its own in a truly free marketplace of ideas. Faith is a crutch for when we lack explanation or authority but want it anyway, and when a real explanation or an actual authority is found, faith evaporates like dew in the morning sun. When the crutch is no longer needed, the patient needs to learn to walk unaided; for some, this will be a very painful and awkward process; for others, it can be easy. But there are those who wish to walk around with their crutch as a permanent fixture, they get so attached to the crutch that it seems an essential part of their sense of self, and they'll fight anyone who tries to take the crutch away or even say that they don't need it. To take the metaphor to its appropriately awkward conclusion, some of these folks even get upset at the very idea that some people live entirely crutch-less lives, it's so ingrained into their way of life.

So how does faith get the protection it so desperately needs? It's called "social proof," and it's one of the bigger foibles of this whole brain-having business. I would argue that it's the main reason that most faithful aren't formally diagnosed with a delusional disorder: it's just not practical to classify most of a population as "delusional," even if one person alone would be so-classified, and so religion gets a special exemption. You see, when we come under the impression that a lot of other people think something, we tend to see that something as "correct," or at least "legitimate." It's that same old line, "Ten million screaming Elvis fans can't be wrong," but wearing a psychologist's hat and nodding sagely from a leather armchair while you talk about your childhood. It's also one of the reasons that Kitty Genovese died - contrary to popular belief, it is not urban depersonalization that made it possible for her assailant to repeatedly attack her in view of an entire apartment complex. Nor did all those onlookers simply assume that "someone else" would take care of things¹. The truth is more subtle and less satisfying.

Kitty Genovese died also because a large number of individuals saw a group doing nothing, and therefore assumed that "nothing" was the right thing to do². Absent a telepathic time machine, that's the best reconstruction we can get of the situation. This has been tested over and over, and it's why advertisers continuously show people using the advertised product: they're trying to hack your decision-making process by showing you, true or not, that other people do the thing that they want you to do.

Social proof is one of the biggest protections that faith has had in place for the last several thousand years running. The publicly acknowledged existence of happy, moral atheists is a direct and imminent threat to that. This is why the faithful can't stand to see a bus sign that even acknowledges that there are those who don't believe in God. This is why the faithful go into conniptions when they see atheistic displays during the holidays. This is why the faithful tell atheists to sit down, shut up, and keep their unbelief to themselves: our existence is a threat to their way of life, insofar as their way of life includes building up that wall of social proof around the useless bauble of faith. And soon, we shall see this power harnessed for good or for awesome as it gives Bill Donohue a pants-shitting heart attack, hopefully on live television.

This is also why the faithful oppose stem cell research, or evolution, or reproductive rights, or gay marriage, or anything that threatens their worldview: scientific and cultural progress of any kind erodes the protections they've built for their faith, because results are undeniable (and cognitive dissonance is a bitch). This is also why the faithful tend to accept the comforts of civilization they grew up with (thanks, science!), while decrying the imaginary iniquities of further-civilizing efforts: change for the better implies that there was a "worse" to come from, and that undermines faith. But the advances they grew up with are familiar, so those are seen as non-threatening. Did you catch that? Even though the "new and threatening" innovations are a natural outgrowth of the same principles that fueled the development of the "old and safe" innovations, they don't see scientific progress that way because they don't think about it enough (usually). It only goes as far as "new and threatening" versus "old and safe" for quite a lot of them. But public misunderstanding of science is another topic for another day.

In closing: Faith (as a belief held without or despite reason and/or evidence) really needs protection, not as a deontological maxim, but because it can't stand on its own. Social proof has historically been brought to bear in service to this task, but social justice and free speech and generally being civilized persons gets directly in the way of the social proof which the faithful so desperately crave. And so of course we shall be met with shrieking opposition every step of the way, because the better the situation gets for us, the worse it gets for the faithful, as their social proof collapses and exposes their frail faith to the better ideas that undermine it. They see this as "bad." It would be better termed as "growth." And, barring another Dark Age, it is inevitable.

Fuckin' hooray!

Notes:

1. This phenomenon has been identified and has nothing to do with urban environments (as opposed to rural environments), but rather large groups (as opposed to small groups), and it's called "diffusion of responsibility." From the Wikipedia article: "Diffusion of responsibility is a social phenomenon which tends to occur in groups of people above a certain critical size when responsibility is not explicitly assigned. This phenomenon rarely ever occurs in small groups. In tests, groups of three or fewer, everyone in the group took action as opposed to groups of over ten where in almost every test, no one took action." And for clarity, though the Wikipedia article states that diffusion of responsibility can manifest in a bystander effect, the bystander effect page lists diffusion of responsibility as just one of its multifarious causes. Hooray for overlap!

2. Yeah, OK, it's still more complicated than that. I know. But in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Cialdini argues pretty much this idea in chapter four ("Social Proof: Truths Are Us"). He goes on, he lays out a great case, but the point is that this bystander effect is huge and not a lot of people really understood it until the studies were done. It's not just diffusion of responsibility.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into Objectivism: Further down the crazy-hole

Before we get started, I want to say that I am equal parts amused, ashamed, and embarrassed (with half a scoop of nostalgia) by all of this; and also that in all quotes, my changes are in [brackets], and my comments are signed in [bracketed italics - D], with all other emphasis and parentheticals preserved.

So there I was, young, high-strung, and full of the dumb, having just shaken off the shackles of Christianity. And who had brought me out but the cantankerous Ayn Rand, priestess of capitalism, founder of Objectivism, the Commie-Hater Supreme herself. As a side note, one of my philosopher friends told me of a study that showed psychoactive drugs tend to reduce one's religious inclinations (through some mechanism or other, I can't remember and was never able to find the study myself), and so wasn't it fascinating that the latest religions - Mormonism, Scientology, and Objectivism - were all very anti-drug? So go smoke a bowl for atheism, if you're so inclined. And if you're not, well... that's OK too, I guess. You can smoke a bowl just 'cuz.

Anyway, the thing is, Objectivism actually has a lot going for it! I could probably write a book extolling the genuine virtues of Objectivism, but I won't - I'll simply point out a couple of examples and then move on to what got me talked out of it:

According to [the idea that there is an inherent clash between the moral and the practical], every man faces a basic alternative: to dedicate himself to the good, the right the noble, to be an "idealist," in which case he must be unworldly, unrealistic, doomed to defeat - or to pursue success, prudence, that which works, to be a "realist," in which case he must dispense with ideals, absolutes, moral principles. (In philosophy, Platonism recommends the first of these choices, pragmatism recommends the second.) The alternative is: be good without earthly purpose, or seek ends while ignoring the necessary means. In other words: commit yourself to virtues or to values - to causes or effects - to ethics or to life.

Objectivism rejects this dichotomy completely.

- Leonard Peikoff, "Virtue as Practical," from Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

I mean, c'mon, that's just hot! Sure, those are straw-men, but he gives them such a thrashing, he does! I mean, it's a fun oversimplification of a rather complex and ongoing thing (viz. Western philosophy, but I'm sure I could be accused of doing worse to religion), I just like the way he says it. I also love the primacy of existence:

From the outset, consciousness presents itself as something specific - as a faculty of perceiving an object, not of creating or changing it. For instance, a child may hate the food set in front of him and refuse even to look at it. But his inner state does not erase his dinner. Leaving aside physical action, the food is impervious; it is unaffected by a process of consciousness as such. It is unaffected by anyone's perception or nonperception, memory or fantasy, desire or fury - just as a book refuses to roll despite anyone's tantrums, or a pillow to rattle, or a block to float.

The basic fact implicit in such observations is that consciousness, like every other kind of entity, acts in a certain way and only in that way. In adult, philosophic terms, we refer to this fact as the "primacy of existence," a principle that is fundamental to the metaphysics of Objectivism. Existence, this principle declares, comes first.

- "Existence as Possessing Primacy Over Consciousness," Ibid.

Then there's Philosophy: Who Needs It? (answer: everyone), a great lecture which is well-summarized in the Wikipedia article on the book bearing its same title, and you can listen to the whole thing here. (Couldn't find full text online, sorry.) I also love smoking exactly because of Ayn Rand, and I love her for it, despite the addiction:

"I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind - and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1992 Signet edition, paperback), p. 64

Another great one is the law of non-contradiction, which can be found in lots of places and is simply stated: "Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." Well, OK, or your argument is invalid (but yes, the argument is unsound, at any rate, unless it's a proof by contradiction but I guess that's the point). Finally, there's Objectivism: TL;DR version.

So that's pretty much how I got taken in. Like my Bible-thumping days, I was counting hits and ignoring misses; there were just more and better hits to count with Objectivism. I had read Anthem in junior high for an essay contest (never wrote for it, but I do have participation awards for Optimist's Club essay contests!), and I liked it, so I started reading The Fountainhead, and that led to Atlas Shrugged, and by the time I was twenty I had We the Living and Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand under my belt as well. Even in those early days, the seeds of doubt were already being planted: my father, who has some familiarity with Rand's work and philosophy, said something to the effect that Objectivism would be great if only we could truly be objective; a high-school English teacher of mine had said that The Fountainhead was his favorite book, but when we talked more about it, he said that Gail Wynand was the only "real person" in the story (everyone else is absurd caricatures, and it took me a while to appreciate that). A friend once told me, when we first met, that he didn't like Robert Pirsig's Lila as much as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance because it was "a little too Atlas Shrugged" for him, which fascinated me because he had read all of these books like I had but had completely different opinions on pretty much everything about them. These criticisms stuck with me throughout my entire Objectivist phase, and I apologized them away. It was OK, I thought, they just didn't get it.

For context, I was still reading Atlas Shrugged during my first year of college (I was on scholarship, which I lost), then I finished that and read all of Peikoff's Objectivism during the next year, which I had taken off of school to decide "what I wanted to do with my life." I was in love with Ms. Rand for this entire time, and all my friends were in different towns for college. I also went to work for The Man and took a swift dive down into Business Ethics Hell, but that's yet another story (though it was very, very instructive). In fall '04, I had decided to enroll for spring in a local community college with my major changed from physics to philosophy. My courses over the next few semesters included an introductory psych course, a course in ethics, a course in logic and a course in world religions from the same instructor, and a tandem course in theatre and psychology (which was awesome). In short, these three courses laid the groundwork for my falling out with Rand, because they taught me that life is complicated: people are complicated, governance is complicated, social dynamics are complicated, the economy is complicated, it's all a huge fucking mess and Objectivism flatly fails, fails, fails to make sense of it.

The medium-length version is that, while I can't really say that this or that thing "clinched it" for me, there were three "main themes" that continuously pecked away at the underpinnings of my Objectivist leanings:

• Objectivism fails at recognizing intersubjectivity (I didn't know the term back then, though this caused friction in arguments when trying to agree to definitions).
• Objectivism ignores the fact of luck entirely. Or just calls it "virtue 'cuz results."
• Objectivism is incompatible with human nature (both our psychology and our limitations).

I didn't know those things back then, so there I would be in class, spouting my Objectivist nonsense, and honing my arguments against my "opponents" (the instructor and anyone who disagreed with me). The particular debates are tedious and embarrassing, so I'm going to skip them, except to say that one hinged upon a rather crucial misunderstanding of the word "arbitrary¹." The professor actually said, "I don't think that word means what you think it means," and was right. I mean, jeez.

Anyway, seeing the vigorous disagreement in ethics initially disgusted me, but ultimately eroded my Objectivist ethos, as I began to see that it is possible for equivalently intelligent and informed persons to rationally disagree on things like, oh, the meaning of "good." Learning about how languages evolve, and how they shape (and are shaped by) our minds, eroded my confidence in humanity's ability to be absolutely objective with language. And my aforementioned philosopher friend explained some history to me, chiefly concerning Objectivism as a movement (check this story) and Rand's affair with Nathaniel Branden in particular, which eroded my confidence in both the character of Objectivists and the ability of Objectivism to improve upon a person. And so the journey was another long, smooth transition, much like my deconversion from Christianity. Medium length version: done.

Enough broad strokes, it's time to get down to brass tacks. Hoo-boy, real-time update: as I'm writing this, I just cracked open Peikoff's Objectivism for the first time in years, and apparently I took notes during my deconversion (there was "a second reading," you see...). The margins are full of "WTF retarded," "Wow... just wow," "MORON," and "BS!" Lots of underlining. Yeesh. I'm not gonna lie, I could spend years trying to pick the best points to refute, so I'm just going to pick three at random.

1. From "Knowledge as Hierarchical":

As an example [of context-dropping], I will quote from a recent skeptic, who asks: "How can I be sure that, every time I believe something, such as that there are rocks, I am not deceived into so believing by... a mad scientist who, by means of electrodes implanted in my brain, manipulates my beliefs?" According to this approach, we cannot be sure that there are rocks; such a belief is regarded as a complex matter open to doubt and discussion. But what we can properly take as our starting point in considering the matter and explaining our doubt is: there are scientists, there are electrodes, men have brains, scientists can go mad, electrodes can affect brain function. All of this, it seems, is self-evident information, which anyone can invoke whenever he feels like it. How is it possible to know such sophisticated facts, yet not know that there are rocks?

How about if you grew up on a space station, douchebag?! And it misses the point, even if nobody ever grows up on a space station. The point is this: what if we're being deceived in a way that we cannot discover? Well, then we're being deceived in a way that we can't discover. That's all. Peikoff seems to have a problem with this idea, though, and instead argues that since we can't possibly know if it is the case, then we know for sure that it's not. WTF.

2. From "Loyalty to Rational Principles":

[T]he good has to be an issue of "all or nothing," "black or white," and [...] evil has to be partial, occasional, "gray." Observe that a "liar" in common parlance is not a man who always, conscientiously, tells falsehoods [and so on...].

To be evil "only sometimes" is to be evil. To be good is to be good all of the time, i.e., as a matter of consistent, unbreached principle.

The above is the full reason why Objectivism condemns as vicious today's cult of compromise. [...] Evil is delighted to compromise - for it, such a deal is total victory, the only kind of victory it can ever achieve: the victory of plundering, subverting, and ultimately destroying the good.

Yeah, so I guess we're all evil forever, then. Sorry, pal, but "good" is a word, words are categorically made-up, and you're an idiot. Well, OK, I'll give him a B for effort (points off for absolutism), mainly out of sympathy because ethics is such a splintered subject. Anyway, one more from the big book, this time from Chapter 11: Capitalism (they're defiantly not superstitious!). It starts pretty well, and then takes a turn for The Stupid:

The economic value of goods and services is their price (this term subsumes all forms of price, including wages, rents, and interest rates); and prices on a free market are determined by the law of supply and demand [... which are] two perspectives on a single fact: a man's supply is his demand; it is his only means of demanding another man's supply [I swear to Dennis Miller, there's a joke in there! - D]. The market price of a product is determined by the conjunction of two evaluations, i.e., by the voluntary agreement of sellers and buyers. If sellers decide to charge a thousand dollars for a barrel of flour because they feel "greed," there will be no buyers; if buyers decide to pay only a nickel a barrel because they feel "need," there will be no sellers and no flour. The market price is based not on arbitrary wishes, but on a definite mechanism: it is at once the highest price sellers can command and the lowest price buyers can find.

Economic value thus determined is objective. [And not dialectical?! - D]

[...] It is essential here to grasp Ayn Rand's distinction between two forms of the objective: the philosophically objective and the socially objective. [...] The philosophically objective value of a product is the evaluation reached by the men with the best grasp of reality (in a specific category and context), regardless of whether or not they are involved in buying and selling the product [armchair philosophers = economic conscience of the nation - D]. The socially objective value is the evaluation reached by the actual buyers and sellers. These two evaluations are not necessarily the same [for obvious reasons, blah, blah, blah].

Marginal utility, Ockham's razor, GTFO. Done. No need to posit stupidly unnecessary "objective monetary values of objects and services" (except the uninterestingly tautological "objective fact of a unit price paid"). I suppose Peikoff might like to backpedal and say, "Wait! Marginal utility is part of this whole 'context' thing!" OK, fine. Now explain how to choose whether to make the same profit $x by selling at high price to few customers or at low price to many customers, or somewhere in between, and how the unit prices thus obtained are in any way objective instead of arbitrary. Also, "socially objective" is "intersubjective" in a funny hat (in other words, not objective at all). And that "philosophically objective" idea is just a mess - you try defining "best grasp of reality" and stack-ranking people along a linear continuum. (You know a lawyer's gonna need that some day!)

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are still great fiction, to my mind, and the bit about Wyatt's Torch still makes me tingle. But this is getting tedious. A couple of quickies before I wrap this up:

The rules of Chess are arbitrary. And they're intersubjectively true, if you get them from Wikipedia. They are neither objectively anything (besides arbitrary), nor entirely subjective (though they are of course violable). According to Peikoff, "The arbitrary, if a man indulges in it, assaults his cognitive faculty; it wipes out or makes impossible in his mind the concept of rational cognition and thus entrenches his inner chaos for life." Chess: corrupting the intellect of humanity at least since 600 AD. Did I mention that language is pretty arbitrary, too?

Luck happens, you steely bitch. Sometimes people get dicked and need a hand up. Charity can be seen as an investment in the human capacity to turn one's life around, and institutionalized charity (such as welfare) is nothing if not insurance against one big screw-up ruining one's life. Sure, some people abuse the system, and they suck. But that comes with the territory. Besides, it would just be irrational to object to welfare-as-insurance, because that one big screw-up could happen to anyone, and "anyone" includes "you" (it's only short-sighted teenage invincibility that disagrees).

Objectivism is at best a conspiracy of doves, and at worst guilty of contradiction. This is what opposes it to human nature. It's like this: perfect people need no governance, but imperfect people can neither govern perfectly, nor perfectly be governed. Look, OK, if everyone lived out Objectivist values, then people would always be honest, kind, intelligent, and hard-working. But that's what every utopia looks like! And really, one guy can pretty much ruin the whole thing, as long as he's clever enough, and at some point there will be that one guy for whom the temptation is just too great.

But you know what's worse? Intelligent, rational people are not all Objectivists, but they should be, if it is indeed "true" or whatever:

• Assumption: Intelligent, rational people have read and understood Rand's work.
• Assumption: Objectivism is true.
• If Objectivism is true, then A) those who read it should be able to perceive its truth, B) living as an Objectivist is the rational thing for them to do, and C) one should act rationally.
• Therefore, if Objectivism is true, then intelligent, rational people should agree with it upon understanding it, and then do the rational thing and live as Objectivists. (Ethics from pure reason? How deliciously Kantian!)

But this isn't what we see, is it? So let's check our premises: either Objectivism is not true, or not all the intelligent, rational people who've read it are able to understand it (so for her to say that Objectivism is true, she at least implicitly says that being unconvinced is stupid). But, to continue the very first quote I mentioned above:

The moral man's concept of the good, we hold, is his fundamental standard of practicality. Such a man experiences no conflict between what he thinks he ought to pursue (self-preservation) and what he wants to pursue. He defines all of his goals, fundamental and derivative alike, by reference to reality. As a result, he pursues only objects that are attainable by man, consistent with one another, and possible to him; he uses his mind to discover the means (including the principles) necessary to reach these objects; and he applies his knowledge in action, refusing to evade what he knows, to drift purposelessly, or to sacrifice his interests. This, in Ayn Rand's view, is the description of human nobility. What other policies could practicality require?

I couldn't agree more. That's why I'm a Humanist.

Note:

1. OK, I can't resist. I quote Peikoff's Objectivism, "The Arbitrary as Neither True Nor False":

An arbitrary claim is one for which there is no evidence, either perceptual or conceptual. It is a brazen assertion, based neither on direct observation nor on any attempted logical inference therefrom. For example, a man tells you that the soul survives the death of the body; or that your fate will be determined by your birth on the cusp of Capricorn and Aquarius; or [blah, blah, blah]. If you ask him "Why?" he offers no argument. "I can't prove any of these statements," he admits - "but you can't disprove them, either."

In the first place, that last description more appropriately refers to unfalsifiable statements. And, uhh, I wrote "Take THAT, Hume!" in the margin (apparently I took notes the first time through, too), because I thought this somehow solved the problem of induction at some point (the actual refutation, later on in the book, is... significantly less inappropriate than this). Anyway, in my logic class (the one with the Protestant-turned-Catholic instructor and the Catholic-turned-Protestant student), we were discussing the liar's paradox. I responded that since the statement could neither be resolved as true nor as false, and since there was no outside evidence that could possibly decide the question, that it must therefore be arbitrary and thus unworthy of our consideration. Umm... that didn't work. Like, at all. But I did listen to what the professor had to say, and I learned from the experience, and he conceded a point when I retreated to, "Well, OK, how about we say that the liar's paradox is just nonsense, like speaking of a square triangle?" This was pretty much the "formal start" of my deconversion.

Prejudice in Action: The Greeks were right, after all!

I've been reading a lot about diversity, inclusion, tolerance, and other such-what in the atheiskeptihumanist blogosphere recently, and it's given me pause for thought. Specifically, it's raised a rather sore point for me, the matter of my own prejudice. I'd like to share some thoughts on that today.

I hate ugly people. It's terrible, I know. It's awful, and arbitrary, and irrational, and harmful, and a disservice to valuable members of my society, and a betrayal of the values I hold most deeply. And I can't help it.

What's worse, I'm not even that great-looking. I mean, I think I look OK, and some people seem to find me fairly attractive and that makes me feel wonderful, but the point is that I'm not even "dump in your Cheerios and you wouldn't care" hot, and here I am pronouncing judgments on other people for their looks alone. I think I have a pretty low threshold for what I see as an attractive person, and I try to find beauty in all that I see in the spirit of "aesthetic optimism" or whatever. But for some things, and some people, I just can't see any beauty and that revolts me.

I confessed this to one of my friends, who responded, "Oh, I'm the same way. I go with the ancient Greeks on this one: ugly people were cursed by the gods." My friend was speaking facetiously (neither of us believes in any gods at all), but that's kind of the level this gets to: with nothing rational or intelligent to fall back on, no moral justification, we jumped right to divine arbitration for our Haterade.

I'm talking about this today because this is the sort of thing we're fighting against, the sort of unreasoning prejudice that we, as atheists, or secular humanists, or whoever, have to deal with. And it's the same sort of unreasoning prejudice that has plagued all sorts of people throughout history: "Lookit them folks! They's differ'nt from us! Let's hate on 'em!" It has been meted out in different degrees, at different times, from different sources, upon different targets, but at root it all comes down to, "They're different, let's get 'em." This one thing will tell us all we need to know about you. It's just false.

Here's the difference: I know this about myself, I recognize it as prejudice, and I fight against it actively because being prejudiced like this makes me feel like a bad person. Whenever I am interacting with someone who I think is ugly, I try my very hardest to shove the "Ah-ha-ha lookit the freak" thoughts to the back of my mind, and haul the "this person is a person and deserves to be treated as such" to the front. I try to take every opportunity that comes my way to beat my lizard brain with the cudgel of tolerance, so to speak, and so far it's working. The disgust and revulsion get a little less intense every time, and the unfamiliar thing that so weirded me out gets a little more familiar, a little less weird, a little safer every time. I see my prejudice as bad, whereas most bigots seem to see their prejudice as somehow correct. "We don't know 'em, and we don't wanna know 'em," and that's just fine and dandy to them, it seems.

This cuts both ways, however. On the one hand, this helps me separate myself from that crowd. On the other hand, now I'm more separated from that crowd, and that makes it harder for me to get into the heads of my fellow bigots and sort out what makes them tick. At the end of the day, that seems (to me) to create a moral difference between myself, a self-correcting bigot, and the greater group of self-reinforcing bigots. I try not to be insular, and when I find myself upset at another's appearance, I recognize it as my problem and do my damnedest to act like I don't think anything's wrong with that person. Or, at least, nothing I would be able to tell just by looking.

And so I see the prejudice of others as another sort of ugliness, an "ugliness on the inside." But is this the same kind of prejudice on my end, wearing a different hat? Perhaps. After all, can people really affect their attitudes? I mean, with practice, of course we can. But if determinism is true, then every uncorrected bigot in history "couldn't have helped it" in the sense that the necessary causes for their correction never came about. And so, trivial tautology that it may be, I can't "truly" help my prejudice for the simple reason that I can only do whatever work it is in my power to do, but no more. Not one jot or tittle. That's a real shame, to my mind. This is of no help in one respect, and of tremendous help in another.

It does no good to simply write off evils of any kind as causally necessary in the past, and therefore insurmountable obstacles. Sorry, that easy way out is simply cowardice in the face of evil. And because the consequences of prejudice impact the happiness of others, this is very much a moral issue, and so we should do whatever we can to make the situation better. So what can we do?

We can treat bigots like people, too. This is the "tremendous help" part, so pay attention! We can try to bring about the causes necessary for their correction. If we must wield peer pressure as a cudgel and metaphorically beat the tolerance into people, well, so be it. But this is a crude solution, and I think we should prefer more elegant ones wherever possible. This means engaging the opposition, keeping the dialogue going, loving our enemies, turning the other cheek, and just generally being the better, more patient people in the confrontation. Ugh, that sounds like work, I know... but it's the hardest and most productive work we can get in this culture war, and it needs doing.

Remember that most people think that they're good people, that they do the right thing most of the time, and that they're generally sane. This is totally false for pretty much everyone, unless you're Norman Borlaug. People need to think these things in order to maintain a healthy sense of self-esteem. Threatening the support of that self-esteem will be seen as a threat to the self-esteem itself (and thus a personal attack), and so we must be careful to be gentle. We must treat bigots, when we can afford to do so, with more care and empathy than they treat us. It's not fair. It sucks, and it's hard work. But it's the best way to make progress.

Each of those clauses in the last paragraph is important (except for the bit about Borlaug - well, OK, it's important but in a different way). For instance, "when we can afford to do so," allows for the fact that, if a fight is brought to us, we may need to respond by fighting. In that case, we are left with no choice, and must defend ourselves against an attack. But this will rarely score points against the other side, except in the general "social visibility" sense that we will make others see that we can't be bullied into submission. This is important, but it won't accomplish our goals all by itself.

We need to be aware of the psychological forces at play, and we need to be somewhat manipulative about how we go about this if we want to have the best effects possible. It's easy to get sucked into the trap of thinking that those who would oppress us deserve no quarter from us, but remember that desserts have nothing to do with it. Do you want to drive bigots away and reinforce their bigotry, or kill them with kindness, no matter how much it defies our own desire for retribution, to have a greater chance of bringing them around to a more civilized way? It's not always such a binary choice - for instance, here on my soapbox, I can pretty much be as loud and intolerant as I want, as my audience is pretty self-selecting - but in many situations, the two chief options will be some variation on, "Satisfy your own impulses and alienate the other person," vs. "Suck it up and make some progress on the other person, even though it hurts to let them 'get away with' being such a twit right now."

I am reminded of Plato's Republic, book one, where Socrates makes a case for the idea that we must do no harm. In discussing justice, Polemarchus volunteers as a definition of justice, "helping one's friends and harming one's enemies." Socrates responds that we humans are fallible and may be unable to judge with certainty who our friends and enemies are at any given moment. Because we may be mistaken, we should strive to err on the side of caution, treating all as friends and trying to harm no one. After all, in the long run, this may earn us some friends and thereby eliminate enemies (in what I think is the best way possible). This stacks up rather nicely with Sun Tzu's injunction to remove the enemy's desire to fight as the best way to achieve victory. Perhaps more appropriately to the situation, this also rings true with the words of Abraham Lincoln: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection."

And on that note, I'm done with this. For now.

Second Husband of the Polyandrous Bride of the Quickies Before Work: Quickies After Work

First, simple.wikipedia.org has officially rocked my socks. My first three checks (LHC, Travelling Salesman Problem, Monty Hall Problem) were highly satisfying, but there's nothing yet on the Two Envelopes Problem (my first-ever wikipedia edit!) or the P=NP problem.

Second, these kids didn't pay attention in physics:

source

And finally, these chicks are bad-asses:

source

That's all for tonight. In the morning, I'll whine about my own bigotry!

Bride of the Quickies Before Work

Remember, kids: lists are cool!

• The Chariots of Iron guys talk a lot about Direct Relief International, pimping for it as the most efficient charity they've ever heard of. From the Wikipedia page: "Direct Relief International is one of two charities ranked by Forbes that has received a perfect fundraising efficiency score for five consecutive years and is ranked by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as California’s largest international nonprofit organization based on private support." That says it all, to me. I would add them to Ebonmuse's excellent short-list of charities most worthy of donation. Remember these guys as the holidays approach - I know that I will.
• Due to popular demand (I have popular demand?!), I will be posting my deconversion from Objectivism. Saturday.
• Norman Borlaug died like two weeks ago, and I totally missed it (I feel like such a shit!). If you don't know who he is, get thee to an educationery!
• Tomorrow (9/30/2009) is International Blaspemy Day! I'm excited! Are you excited? Get excited! And do some blasphemy!
• Bill Maher is on heroic probation. I know that the status of just who is and is not my hero is probably not news, hence the Quickie; but Maher made an excellent movie without so much as telling me that he might be into some kookery (at least Ben Stein has started wearing his crazy on his sleeve). I have yet to fact-check, but you can see for yourself in the meantime: Orac (of Respectful Insolence) has a handy list of links at the bottom of an informative post.

OK, off I goes.

101 Interesting Things, part twenty-three: Myostatin

Myostatin is one of the main reasons we're not all mesomorphic hulks: it says to the body, "Hey, you have enough muscle, now start saving up fat in case we're starving later!" Well, it actually doesn't say anything, but you get the idea. It's regulated pretty strictly by genes, and one locus in particular determines whether or not your body makes it at all. These particular alleles are co-dominant, but it so happens that those who are homozygous "for" myostatin are the most common, and so we shall call that "normal." When organisms are heterozygous, they tend to be more on the big & burly side than their kin. But every so often, we find an organism homozygous "for" not having myostatin.

When this happens to whippets, they're called "bully whippets," and they look like they're Photoshopped:

I promise you that this image has not been tampered with. Neither has this Belgian Blue:

Sport animals and livestock are sometimes bred for myostatin deficiency in order to be more adept at whatever it is that they do, whether running races or producing meat for human consumption. It carries complications with it, but so do all genes (some are just more complicating than others). So what happens when this sort of thing occurs in a human body?

Liam Hoekstra is what happens. He was first able to do the Iron Cross at five months old. He's been described as a "real-life Superman," but "real-life Captain America" is more like it (even though he's from Germany), considering the nature of their "powers" both cluster around embodying the peak of human capability. Everybody wants a piece of this kid, and it's actually making his family life pretty difficult. I'll say this once for clarity, and only once because it ought to be a non-issue: private citizens are entitled to private lives and being of scientific curiosity entitles no individual or organization to "a piece" of that person. At the same time, being of scientific curiosity is no fundamentally more or less newsworthy than being a good speller, or a good runner, or a good football player, or a good businessperson, so this definitely qualifies as news (but nobody gets to "do anything" with that news unless it's OK with young Liam and his family). Capisce? Great!

So I think that we can all agree that myostatin is interesting stuff, and it will be interesting to see if Mr. Hoekstra does anything else newsworthy in his life (besides being born with some particularly interesting genes).

Bullshit Pulpit: God gives a statement

Last Tuesday, God came down to Earth and delivered a statement to set the record straight on a few issues. Before speaking, the deity proved its divinity by levitating a woman several dozen feet into the air (and bringing her down safely), conjuring lights in various shapes from thin air at the request of various onlookers, and transmuting a cloth shirt into solid gold (mass spectrometry has confirmed that the shirt is indeed gold, and it has since been un-transmuted and returned to its owner). The entire text of the address follows:

"Good afternoon, everyone. Is this thing on? [God laughs] Yes, OK. Wow, this is going to be awkward. I just got back from vacation, and I see you folks have made a right mess of things. Well, you've done some things remarkably well - congratulations on the Human Genome Project, and good luck to you with the Large Hadron Collider - but there are some other things that haven't gone so well, and I believe it is my duty to tell you where you have gone astray.

"In the first place, I want to apologize for all the awful things that have been done in my name. Really, I am so very sorry, and I don't expect you to forgive me for all of them. But now I want to help set things right, so everyone needs to listen up.

"All holy books are wrong. I mean, most of them have some good stuff in them, but that's largely an accident, and you shouldn't really trust something just because it's in a holy book. You need other reasons besides that to believe something, and you don't even need the holy book to get started. Really, you can probably throw them all out tonight, and everything would be fine. All this religious confusion, I'm sorry to say, is a joke that I took too far. I tried starting up the One True Religion after teaching you speech, but whenever the folks I was working with started putting words in my mouth, I would just abandon them and move on to a different people who I thought might listen better. Eventually, I started telling people any crazy old nonsense that came to mind, since I figured you'd do whatever you felt like anyway - but then some of that nonsense got taken way too seriously, and I guess I have to take responsibility for that. I realize now that you people never listen - or, rather, nobody listens perfectly forever - and I should have been more patient with you all. My bad.

"Also, I don't really know how to say this, but I'm not perfect. Now, I know a bunch of you faithful folk are going to say, 'Oh, well if he's not perfect, then he can't be God,' but you need to listen to me right now: I'm not perfect and I never have been. I said that I was, back in the day, but I was a different sort of person back then. I've had some time to mature, I've gotten over my bad self, and I realize now that it was wrong of me to tell you that I was perfect, especially considering how seriously that's been taken and all the evil that's been done in my name ever since.

"I don't know everything, and I can't do just anything I want. Sure, I'm pretty powerful, but I don't even know how that power works. Kind of like the way that you can digest food with your stomach without knowing how all of that works, I'm just able to do some of this stuff, and I don't know what else to call it but magic. You guys actually know more now about the world than I ever did, in terms of how it works, so keep it up! For my part, I've been using my powers to go from world to world, uplifting life forms to make a galactic civilization one day. Keep it up with your science, leave no stone unturned, and maybe we can all work together in a great galactic federation some day.

"Also, I left Earth in what you now call the fourth century CE. I got fed up with feeling like nobody listened, and so I just left. I went to the Antennae Galaxies, I watched the Death Star Galaxy for a little while, I uplifted some life forms on other worlds to sentience and started better religions that made better societies, I did a whole bunch of things. I think this time away really helped me grow as a person, but I also realize now that it was wrong of me to up and leave you all without so much as saying goodbye. Totally my mistake.

"I cannot apologize enough for the things that I have screwed up in the past. I'm truly sorry, and I humbly ask your forgiveness for the childish ways I've behaved toward your ancestors. I thought you would have left all that nonsense behind you and moved on to a better way, but apparently I was wrong on that, too. At any rate, this is all past, and there are plenty of things that you folks are doing wrong right now, and we need to fix these right away before you all kill each other.

"Most importantly: you are all people. I can't stress that one enough: you're all people, you all have flaws, you all mess things up, but there's nothing more 'wrong' with any one of you than any other. You need to learn how to live with each other and accept each other, no matter how different you are, because you will always be different. If you take nothing else away from this speech here, then please at least understand that it is always, always, always wrong to think of another person as less than you, for any reason.

"There's a whole lot that follows from this, so I'm just going to list a few of those things. Gays should be allowed to marry - shame on you, California, for taking that away from them; and shame on you, Utah, for funding the effort. There have been other noteworthy examples of this evil discrimination - I'm looking at you, Alabama - but California was the biggest one. Marriage is not about children, it's not about man and woman, it's not about anything at all except the love between two or more people. Yes, 'or more.' You're all grown-ups, and if two married people want to bring a third person into their love, or a fourth or a fifth or a twentieth, there is nothing wrong with that. Just be aware that each person only has so much love to give, and it is very hard to divide that up among people in a fair manner. In a way, polyamory is love on 'hard mode,' insofar as it's much more difficult to do right, but it can be much more rewarding if you succeed at it - and way more frustrating when you fail.

"OK, that was the big one. What else... oh, right. Don't kill each other. Ever. It's always wrong. Even if you're defending yourself from someone, you should try to incapacitate your attacker, if possible. There's actually no Heaven or Hell, I don't know how you all came under that impression, but this life is all you have, and taking that away from someone is the worst thing you can do, because it stops them from living a better life and making good on all their mistakes.

"Don't oppress each other, either. Whenever you start saying that it's OK for one group of people to do something, but another group of people can't do that thing, that's when you know you've screwed up somewhere along the way. Don't keep women down, don't keep gays down, don't keep blacks down, don't keep anybody down. You're all people, and so you should all treat each other with dignity and respect.

"Next up, don't trick each other. Everybody tells little white lies now and again, and we shouldn't have to, but sometimes that just works out best. It's still bad, and you should feel bad about needing to do it, so that you don't do it unnecessarily. And even bigger lies, like ponzi schemes, or that thing with Enron a while ago, those are really, really bad. I don't think I need to elaborate further on this one.

"Don't hate each other. This one's the hardest, but the simple fact is that you're all different from each other, and that's OK. If your neighbor does something that you don't like, but nobody's getting hurt - and I mean 'might need medical attention' hurt - then it's probably not a problem. Remember that 'offense' is not the same thing as 'harm.' To actually harm someone, you need to endanger their physical wellbeing, or steal or wreck their stuff.

"And last on the list, don't be meddlesome. Nobody likes being meddled with, and nobody's entitled to meddle with anyone else's life. If you want to do drugs, or have crazy sex, or say naughty words, or play violence-themed games, that's all fine and good as long as you're not actually harming other people. And again, 'offense' is not 'harm.'

"I have to go soon, because I told some people I uplifted on another world that I would be returning, and it's going to take me a while to get there. And I'll come back for you folks, too, in a couple hundred years. Just make sure you stop believing that hogwash from the Bronze Age, and all the new hogwash based on that older hogwash, too. That should make it a lot easier for you people to work together, and then maybe once you've learned to live with each other, you can learn to live with the people from other planets, too.

"This brings me to my closing point, a note about the future and your place in it. You people are really messed up, and part of that is due to me, because I'm messed up. But you were my first people, so you'll always have a special place in my heart. This does not mean that you have a special place in reality, though, and make sure you remember this when you start dealing with other people from other planets. They don't all look like you, some of them aren't even close, but you can't be racist at all when you start dealing with other planets or you will ruin everything. You folks are special to yourselves, and a little bit special to me, but that doesn't really count for much. The other people I've worked with, they're special to me, too. I love them very much, and I will be very upset with you if you don't treat them with respect and dignity.

"Final remarks: stop listening to Fred Phelps. That guy's an idiot. So is Bill Donohue, and the Pope, for that matter. Ahmadinejad's an idiot, too, and so is that Bin Laden guy. So-called 'president' Mugabe, the guy who's ruining Zimbabwe, he's also an idiot and nobody should listen to him. In fact, if this were fourteen hundred years ago, I'd probably be smiting all those people right about now. But they're still people, so I won't. It's up to all of you to stop listening to those idiots and start teaching them about what it really means to be civilized: you accept other people despite their differences, and you work at getting along even when you can't get your way. That's really all there is to it.

"OK, I have to go now. I'll be back in a few hundred years, just don't kill each other in the meantime and maybe we can get things right this go-round. What do you say? Well, I guess I'll just warn the other people about you if things go sour, so don't screw up or you'll be left out of the galactic party. Capisce? All right, I'm gone."

With those last words, God disappeared inexplicably.

Poison for Your Brain: NSFW! NSFW! NSFW!

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