Pulling Up the Ladder

I've been watching two different arguments raging on the internet for the past week, on the issues of safe spaces in schools and the minimum wage. The arguments I've seen have been on two different places, Twitter and Facebook. They have involved two very different groups of people, academics and journalists on the one hand, and the assorted people I actually know on the other. And yet somehow the arguments wind up sounding eerily similar.

Both issues have been brewing for years but have been brought to greater public attention recently. Two universities in the US, Yale and the University of Missouri, have have protests concerning racism on campus. In Missouri the protesters were able to oust the university president. The protests have gotten a lot of blowback, though, from people who think students these days are being coddled too much. Students never used to need protection from racism, they say. Kids need to face that challenge to learn how to deal with the real world.

The minimum wage issue has become heated due to nationwide strikes of food service workers, who are trying to get the minimum wage increased to $15. They've had some local success, in Seattle, and have gotten Bernie Sanders to sign on. And on Facebook I've seen dozens of paramedics post this, which just gets more infuriating every time I see it:

Now, there's a basic factual misunderstanding here, because American paramedics make about half as much money as Canadians. We aren't in any danger of bumping into the minimum wage here. Confounding the issue, although the normal minimum wage is similar when you correct for the exchange rate, the US has a much lower minimum wage for tipped workers, which includes many food service workers are tipped. They only get about a quarter of the Canadian minimum wage.

But beyond the number issue, when I read these posts I get a real sense of anger from them, the same as in the school racism situation: “I never had it that easy, why should they?”

It all reminds me of this joke:

There's a phenomenon where people who benefit from something try to deny that opportunity to others. It's easiest to see when politicians try to cut the social safety net and it is inevitably found that they themselves only got to their position because of that help. This is called "pulling up the ladder behind you". These safe space and minimum wage fights could be related... not trying to make things worse for others, but trying to keep them from getting better.

Part of making the world a better place is that the people who come after you will inevitably have it easier than you did. And conversely, if they don't have it easier, than the world now is no better than it was decades ago.

That's what you should really be angry about.

Niqabs Again

There was a Supreme Court ruling on September 15 overturning the law banning niqabs at citizenship ceremonies. I’ve been procrastinating on this for a while, and… wait, what’s that? I already wrote about niqabs? And it’s all still relevant?

Well, that makes it easy.

So my stance for the last few years has been that I want to be on the side that isn’t telling women what they have to wear. I’m still pretty happy with this stance. As luck would have it, it turns out that Tom Mulcair seems to agree with me:

"No one has the right to tell a woman what she must — or must not — wear."

It’s nice to know that I’m in good company. Or rather, that Mulcair is in good company, because I already knew that I was right.

As with all other forms of religious accommodation, I think this should be applied across the board. That if people can cover their faces for religious reasons, they should be able to cover their faces because they are cold, or they have bad zits that day, or without bothering to give a reason at all.

If I wasn’t a citizen already, I’d show up wearing a ski mask and one of those Mulcair Beard face covering things. Just to see if I could get away with it.

It’s possible to imagine a situation where some rights could only be extended to a few people. Like in National Parks… a few people leaving the trails does negligible damage, but a hundred thousand people leaving the trails is catastrophic, so those areas are limited to parks staff. It makes sense in contexts like that. The best example of this with religious accommodations is for holidays. It’s relatively easy to give people time off for their religious holidays if they are in a minority religion, but gets increasingly difficult as that religion gets more adherents.

In contrast, sometimes the compromises made for the religious accommodation can make it something that can be made available for everyone. Like with the Kirpan case. The government argued - and I disagree with this, but will accept the premise for the sake of argument - that it wasn’t safe to have knives in school. Sikh boys are required to carry ceremonial knives. So the compromise was that they can now carry dull knives, securely strapped into the holsters. Well, once you’ve made those changes, it’s no longer unsafe to let everyone do that. At least, not unless you plan to ban metal rulers and sturdy pens as well.

But neither of these applies in this case. Citizenship will not be harmed if a majority covers their faces, or even if everyone does so. That is because the work of becoming a citizen is all done in advance of the oath. The citizenship ceremony is meaningless in itself. In fact, if I were setting it up, I’d make it like a graduation ceremony: Those who can’t or won’t attend will get their citizenship card in the mail.

Politics in the Internet Age: The Totals So Far

I wrote last month about candidates being worth to withdraw due to internet comments, and today I wondered just how much it’s been happening. I couldn’t find this list anywhere on the internet, so I had to actually research it. Legitimate journalism! So here are all the withdrawn candidates I could find, including both social media gaffes and otherwise.

May 12 - Chris Lloyd - Conservative - Just running as an art project

June 20 - Ray Fox - Liberal - Facebook - Racism, sexism

August 7 - Buddy Ford - Conservative - Pot charges

August 7 - Augustin Ali Kotoko - Conservative - Actually an NDP supporter

August 10 - Morgan Wheeldon - NDP - Facebook - Israel

August 18 - Ala Buzreba - Liberal - Twitter - Lots of profane stuff

August 21 - Gilles Guibord - Conservative - Comments Sections - Racism, Sexism

September 7 - Tim Dutaud - Conservative - Youtube - Crank Calls, Ableism

September 7 - Jerry Bance - Conservative - CBC News - Pissed in a Mug

September 10 - Joy Davies - Liberal - Facebook - Marijuana

September 15 - Blair Dale - Conservative - Racism, Sexism

September 16 - Chris Austin - Liberal - Jian Ghomeshi comments

September 22 - Louis Robicaud - Conservative - Unknown

September 24 - Stefan Jonasson - NDP - Israel Comments

The score right now: Conservatives 8, Liberal 4, NDP 2. I think the list is comprehensive up to September 16… it’s mostly based on this list, with three additions from early in the campaign and two additions from this week. There might have been more this week, I’m not sure.

The nominations will be finalized on September 28. I wonder what will happen after that? It seems likely that anything unearthed by opposition researchers has been hoarded, so that candidates can be targeted when they no longer have the chance to withdraw. It will be interesting to see what people have come up with… I wonder if there are any candidates left without embarrassing things somewhere in their pasts?

Certainly most of the candidates won’t have criminal charges, won’t have made national TV pissing in a mug, and won’t secretly be members of some other party. Unlike Ala Buzreba, most of them will have gone through adolescence long before the ubiquity of social media. And yet, I suspect we have only seen a fraction of the mud that will get slung around after next Monday.

The Inevitable Kim Davis Post

I just realized while going over my financial records that I’ve worked 120 hours in the last 12 days… so maybe I shouldn’t feel too guilty about letting the blog lapse a little. There really aren’t any consequences for doing so… except now and then a missed opportunity to say “I told you so”.

One of the bigger pieces of political news last week was a county clerk in Kentucky, Kim Davis, who is refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Her office is an elected one, so she can’t simply be dismissed for failing to do her job… she has to resign or be impeached. Impeachment is very unlikely given the current state of the Kentucky state legislature.

After weeks of impasse a solution was found… a court order was given requiring her to issue the licenses, and when she breached it she was jailed for contempt of court. Reportedly this was chosen over a fine because her supporters would have paid any fine she incurred, leaving it ineffective as a punishment.

I have no doubt that would be the case, there seems to be an unlimited pool of money in the US for reactionary conservatives who commit all sorts of crimes, high or petty, everything from gunning down children in the streets to refusing to sell flowers to a wedding. There’s little doubt a fine would have been meaningless to her, unless it was the sort of grossly unreasonably fine that would bankrupt small countries.

Had I staked out a claim at the time I would have recommended a fine anyway. I’m not what you could call a “Carceral Liberal”, I don’t like prison generally. I don’t recommend it for any cases except where the criminal is a danger to the public. But it’s especially bad in this case. It fires up that wingnut welfare machine, guaranteeing that when she’s released (which has already happened) Kim Davis walks away with wealth and fame and no lasting consequences.

A far better approach, I think, would have been an escalating fine. Start it out small… a few day’s pay for her first day not working, perhaps. Then double it for the second day. Double it again for the third day. If the wingnut welfare comes, let it come! I’m sure Kentucky can find a use for vast hoards of ill-gotten treasure.

The only downside I can see is the delay. Jailing Davis, however temporarily, allowed weddings to proceed unobstructed for the last week. If she refuses again, and is jailed again, they will presumably continue again this week. My escalating fine scenario would have resulted in a delay… not much of one, geometric progression being pretty fast, but some. This might have had lasting consequences, such as happened when the when a US soldier with breast cancer died while her prospective marriage was being appealed. But in such cases I think all those fines could be used to transport people to the next county over.

Anyway, she’s out now, and apparently none the worse for wear. She now has throngs of followers. The Republican presidential candidates are falling over themselves to praise her. She has vowed to continue defying the court order, so she’ll probably go back to jail sometime this week. And nobody will be safer or better off for it, leaving only the cold comfort of the schadenfreude.

I do wish I’d staked out this position in advance. But by waiting, I did manage to avoid a couple pitfalls… there was a tweet from someone pretending to be Kim Davis, comparing her to Rosa Parks. Lots of excellent rebuttals of that, but since Davis never actually said that they were all a little misplaced.

And the slut shaming… oy, the slut shaming. Libby Anne, who I’m not sure I’ve ever disagreed with about anything, dealt with that nicely. Pretty much all I can say about it is this: Come on now, we should be better than that.

The Enemy of the Good

Hey, remember that time when I used to have a blog? That was fun, right?

So I’ve been a little too busy to write lately. Not in a “working” sense of busy, but… every since the smoke rolled into the Okanagan I haven’t been able to run. So I’ve been walking instead… usually two-three hours every day. That’s lots of time to listen to podcasts, not a lot of time to write.

As a consequence I now have a big backlog of things I want to write about, so today will be sort of a theme and variations. Today’s theme is the nirvana fallacy. This fallacy is best explained by aphorisms. “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” “Give them the third best to go with, the second best is too late, the best never comes.” “Striving to better, we oft mar what’s well.”

I regularly read a web forum that has a tendency to pick fights in pursuit of ideological purity. It’s a fairly small forum… such groups are inevitably small, because they exclude people that would be close allies but for one little flaw. It can be infuriating to watch groups of good people split or self-destruct. I personally don’t comment there much, because sometimes it seems like anything I post is likely to offend someone somehow… and it’s so much easier to not post there than to be continually apologising. It’s still worth reading, but it would be dangerous to take it too seriously.

I think this is closely related to the tendency of political parties to go to the extremes. Take the current Republican primaries in the US, for example. Jeb Bush isn’t a pure conservative, because he is seen as weak on immigration. Rand Paul is seen as weak on social issues, Ben Carson is too weak on abortion… so each candidate is pushing all the others farther and farther to the right.

You see the same on the left, of course, all the time, though the party nominations are obscure enough that it tends to play out in general elections. So the Liberals and Greens are attacking the NDP for not being left enough, the NDP is attacking the Liberals and Greens for not being left enough… oddly, the Liberals and Greens are tending to not attack each other, probably because the NDP is the front runner right now.

I’m not by any means immune to this tendency, just because I know about it. That’s not how cognitive biases work. In politics, Thomas Mulcair was actually my very last choice for the NDP leadership, I think 10th on my ballot. His selection was very much a deliberate choice by the party to go with mainstream electability over ideological purity. This is what makes the attacks on him for having a background with Quebec provincial liberals and negotiating with the Federal conservatives about joining so funny… those were well known at the time, and part of why he was chosen.

This fallacy doesn’t just play out on grand political scales, of course. It’s everywhere. I probably could have easily written six new additions to my ongoing “Too Tired to Write” series, each with maybe one or two jokes cribbed from my facebook posts, and that would have been better than writing nothing at all. But that wouldn’t be perfect, so it didn’t happen.

Maybe I ought to try doing that tomorrow. Just because I might not have time to write an in-depth analysis of an important topic doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do anything at all.

Politics in the Internet Age

We’re in that magical interval between when parties choose their candidates and when that choice becomes official. Now is the time when politicians say embarrassing things and then suddenly decide to spend more time with their families.

One of these embarrassing things was from Ray Fox, the Liberal candidate for Battlefords-Lloydminster. It followed the usual pattern, a crude joke followed by a prompt dismissal. No different than in any other election in the past.

Three other resignations have been a little different. Gilles Guibord, Conservative candidate in Montreal, was found to have said racist and sexist things in internet comment sections in past years. Ala Buzreba, Liberal candidate in Calgary, was found to have written offensive tweets as a teenager. Morgan Wheeldon, NDP candidate in rural Nova Scotia, was found to have accused Israel of genocide in internet comments last year.

Of these three I think Ala’s story is the most interesting, because she was so young when she made those tweets. We’ve finally reached the point where there are candidates who have been broadcasting their private lives to the public, and it’s keeping them out of office.. The internet is forever, it seems. And the consequences of things said on the internet are also forever. It is beginning to appear that the real purpose of a blog is to make oneself unelectable. It remains to be seen how long this stays the case… surely once the candidates from all parties have committed the sin of being 17, that sin will no longer be considered unpardonable.

In any case that time has not yet arrived. For now, politics will heavily favour those who did all their growing up out of the public spotlight… and outside of any private spotlights that can readily be made public.

Allies

I spotted a twitter thing last night that was fairly interesting, #ThingsFeministMenHaveSaidToMe. And i think the time has come to address the issue of Allies in social justice movements. Allies are those people not directly affected by a form of discrimination, but who are supporters of the social justice movement to limit that discrimination. They can be found in (around?) every movement, and sometimes they cause problems.

Take feminism, for example. There are a lot of men who support feminism, including me. Some of them identify as Feminists and some do not. I’ve heard conflicting advice on whether men ought to call themselves feminists, some women have suggested that men call themselves feminist allies instead.

I’m partial to Allison Kilkenny’s advice in this: Men can be feminists, but only if they don’t make it their brand. Only if they don’t take up speaking slots that could have gone to women, and write books that could have been written by women, and print “Male Feminist” on their business cards. Because at some point they’re hurting the movement rather than helping.

There can be some confusion about who gets to call themselves an ally, as well. I use a sports metaphor here. Coaches and support staff are definitely allies, they might even get their name on the trophy. Maybe you could consider them part of the team… but when they’re talking about the players, they should probably say They instead of We. Sponsors could be considered allies, but not for one single day after the money stops flowing. Cheerleaders, well, you could probably consider them allies. They probably help out somehow, though the best sports do without them entirely.

The fans… they don’t get to be called allies. No way. It’s weird and creepy when Seattle does their “Twelfth Man” thing, we don’t need to bring that mentality out into the real world. A good rule of thumb is that if the team wouldn’t notice that you didn’t show up one day, you aren’t an ally.

I think I could be considered a feminist ally in this case. I’ve promoted it, argued for it, donated money to it. For LGBT stuff… well, I’m not sure if I’ve ever sponsored anything or spoken out much. I could probably be considered more of a fan than anything else. It would be shady as hell to start calling myself a queer ally.

Maybe Ally should be a title that gets bestowed rather than one you claim for yourself. On the other hand… remember when I wrote about the “We Were Children” screening? One of the first nations activists called us “Our Greatest Allies” and I’ve got to say, we did not earn that. We didn’t do anything! We just showed up, watched the movie, and asked what I hope were decent questions. I can’t say that having that title bestowed upon me makes me any more likely to describe myself that way.

I made a joke in that post about the cookies… it’s a reference to the idea that there are no ally cookies, you can’t expect to be rewarded just for basic human decency. It’s a reasonable idea. After all, if the movement is a success it will result in lessening discrimination and helping bring oppressed people up to par, not giving them an advantage. So why should allies get an advantage?

We Are Experiencing No Difficulties, Please Stand By

I’m having a hard time mustering any outrage today… it’s just all gone so well. After a long day of not getting paid yesterday, I got paid to sleep. Then I got paid even more to stay a little late… but only after I finished my breakfast. Then I spent about three hours wandering around Enderby, and only came home because I had a pot of chili in the slow cooker. Made it back before anything burned! Then I went biking at the trestles for another couple hours, and I didn’t even get robbed this time.

Come to think of it, maybe instead of this being a good day I’m just out of outrage because I haven’t had time to read the news. I suppose that just means I’ll have twice as much outrage prepared for tomorrow.

Thoughts on EA and AI

Did I write about the EA kerfuffle yet? No? Great! I have something easy to cover today!

I signed up for EA Origins yesterday to try to buy the DLC for Mass Effect, and it turns out it’s not available anymore… they want me to buy the deluxe edition of the whole trilogy instead, even though I already own two of them…

Wait, never mind. Wrong EA.

So there’s this video game publisher, Electronic Arts, which is generally terrible and makes terrible things. They buy up other, better companies, and turn the whole product line to crap.

But there’s another EA, Effective Altruism. It’s a sort of movement thing that has been growing for a few years or thereabouts, and I found out about it when I inadvertently wound up in a party of theirs last December. Awkward! I tried to pretend I knew what they were all talking about, luckily I had read on of their foundational texts just a few months before, but I don’t think they were fooled.

xkcd.com/451/

Effective Altruism is historically about finding those charities which can do the most good. The easiest to measure - not that it’s at all simple - is in saving lives. The most cost-effective ways to save lives tend to involve investing in basic sanitation and medical care in very impoverished countries.

EA can branch out, though, into reducing suffering, or helping animals, or such things. You can track donations other than money… it turns out each blood donation doesn’t actually save three lives, though I don’t know if anyone was ever fooled by that sort of advertising.

So there was an EA conference earlier this month, and though I didn’t go I did read this very interesting article about it from Dylan Matthews… along with a dozen rebuttals and concurrences and myriad angry tweets.

Apparently this conference had a big focus on existential risks. These are things that can end the species… big asteroid impacts, the sun exploding, that sort of thing. All well and good, I too am concerned about such things. So should we all be. The trouble is, as Matthews points out, that though you can quantify the number of deaths (the world population, give or take) it’s very hard to estimate how much effect your efforts will have in preventing this outcome.

Some proponents of the existential risk focus also account for the loss of all the potential future people who might never be born… that’s a bit too far, as far as I’m concerned. If humans went extinct through some peaceful means - playing too many video games instead of going outside, for example - that would be a bad thing, but it wouldn’t be hundreds of billions of times worse than the deaths of the presently alive people.

When it comes to existential risks I tend to be most concerned about those I can have an affect on… climate change, biodiversity loss, antibiotic resistance, vaccine resistance, that sort of thing. But this conference was in Silicon Valley, it was attended by computer programmers, and they ended up focusing on the risk of a malevolent artificial intelligence taking over the world. We need to invest in AI research to prevent such an outcome, they proclaim!

I feel like I should point out that in Mass Effect, which I’ve become far too familiar with this week, the future human civilization prevents hostile AIs not by investing in AI research, but by banning all AI research and paying my character to shoot AI researchers in the face. It would be foolhardy to base Effective Altruisms on such fictions. But how much better than fiction is a speculation unbounded by the burden of fact?

As for me, I’ll make my usual donations to OXFAM and MSF, content in the knowledge that I am trading uncertainty for certainty. And who knows, if traditional EA works well enough, I might help some sick children in Malawi grow up to be AI researchers.

Stupid or Evil: Escaping the Political Dilemma

There is a recurring idea in politics that one’s ideological opponents must be either stupid or evil. Why else would they be doing things I don’t like? Either they don’t know what the consequences of their decisions are, in which case they are stupid, or they know but don’t care, in which case they are evil.

I’m not a big fan of this characterization, despite how funny and satisfying it can be. I just don’t think it’s a very productive way to answer questions or resolve disputes, it puts people on the defensive right away and makes it far less likely that they will listen to your arguments. And if you make the assumption that your opponent is stupid, you'll probably underestimate them. I’ve made several attempts to find a way out of the dilemma, but sometimes I keep falling back into it despite myself.

Take for example my last blog post, on r/K selection. I really thought I'd found a working framework there. But it turned out that both I and the fascists I looked up consider ourselves to be K-strategists and our opponents to be r-strategists. This makes it pretty clear that the r-strategies map closely enough to “Evil” to become something neither side will admit to doing.

Or take the authoritarian approach. I keep coming back to Robert Altemeyer’s work here… he divides Conservatives into authoritarian followers and sociopathic leaders. Well, that’s close enough to Stupid or Evil as to be interchangeable, only adding in the complication that some of them are stupid and some of them are evil and very few are both.

I’ve considered the possibility that the left wing and the right wing are both making rational decisions based on different discount rates of expected future costs and benefits. Thus ignoring environmental damage could be considered rational if the costs would not be paid within your lifetime, for example. But this is pretty much the definition of selfish which is close enough to evil that I can predict both sides will try to pin it on their opponents.

So it occurred to me that maybe some apologetics and counter-apologetics could come in handy here. Why not try tackling the political dilemma with CS Lewis’s trilemma? This was the “Lunatic, Liar, or Lord” approach to the divinity of Jesus which was a feature of his apologetic writings, but was most memorably recounted in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:

"Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth."

This set of possibilities is incomplete and the various counter-apologetic debunkings have generated a similarly alliterative rebuttal: Mistaken, Misquoted, or Myth.

Looking at these six possibilities, Liar is the closest to Evil in the dilemma, but it helps show why Evil is so lacking in the first place. Knowing that someone is lying does not tell you their motivations, which could be good or evil or selfless or selfish or anything else you can imagine.

Lunatic and Mistaken both correspond to the Stupid half of the dilemma, and they help show how lacking Stupid is as a label here… and, I suspect, everywhere. Someone could, of course, be delusional. And this would not necessarily be something that could be detected at a glance, despite what the professor in the quote seems to think.

I think Mistaken ought to be further subdivided into incidentally, systematically, and wilfully ignorant. There is a large gulf between people who just haven’t stumbled upon a particular set of facts yet, people who need a ground-up education to understand a topic, and people who have the necessary background education but refuse to look at the facts presented to them. Only the first group will prove amenable to argument in the short term. The last group might be unpersuadable no matter how much time and energy you commit… though some of them might surprise you.

That group in the middle, that need a ground-up education to understand something, can be divided again. Some will think they know enough about the topic, because they can’t begin to comprehend how complicated the topic is… this is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. Some will have chosen to listen to the opinions of experts, and have simply chosen the wrong experts to believe. These are misled… actually, I think Misled might be a distinct enough category to deserve it’s own place in the Mistaken, Misquoted, or Myth counter-apologetic.

Misquoted… well, if you look closely, you might find that someone doesn’t actually believe what you think they believe. This is the biggest objection to Lewis’s trilemma among Christian biblical scholars, who generally acknowledge that the earliest writings about Jesus don’t have any mention of him claiming divinity. Now, modern journalists and historians are far more reliable, and would never make such a simple mistake as concocting a… I’m sorry, I just burst out laughing and couldn’t even finish writing that. Yeah, someone could be misquoted easily enough.

Myth, I think, has little place in political arguments. Generally speaking if I’m arguing with someone about gun control I can be reasonable sure of the existence of both the person I’m arguing with and the guns in question. Unless I’m arguing about phasers.

Finally, it’s worth considering the Lord part of the trilemma. Someone I disagree with might actually be right! It’s hard to believe, I know. But any time you doubt you could be wrong it’s worth considering all the things you’ve changed your mind on in the past. I for one have changed most of my political positions at least once at some point in my life. My opinion on gun control seems to vary with the phase of the moon. My opinions on nuclear power and fracking flip-flop so often that if they could be attached to a generator it would be a sufficient source of clean energy to render both wholly unnecessary.

I’d like to think I’ve been getting better opinions as I go along. Honing in on the truth, so to speak. But to say I’m right about absolutely everything would be to say that I don’t expect to learn anything else ever again, which is a bit of a stretch even for me.

So where does that leave us, on Team Evil or Team Stupid? Adding it up I think that makes it one kind of almost-maybe-Evil, and five kinds of almost-maybe stupid, none of which really deserve to be branded with that label. Along with Team This Question Has A False Premise and Team Actually I’m The One Who Is Wrong. In this game, maybe we should just hope to be rained out.

In Which A Joke Falls Flat And Goes Awry

Is there a way on Facebook to send something to only people who appear on two friends lists? I just thought of a joke that could only ever be appreciated by people I have tagged as "Progressive" and "Scientific", but I can't figure out how to make that happen. I guess the blog is the only option.

So here goes: When a politician is opposed to both Planned Parenthood and public education, the (R) after their name stands for r-strategist!

See, they get it.

We can infer that they prefer catastrophe to stability, aren’t too concerned with extending lifespans with medical care, and want children to sexually mature earlier.

I guess not even they found this part funny.

So as I was writing the joke I started to think this might actually be a real thing. It reminded me of a half-forgotten article by David Brin. I went through a libertarian phase in high school, I’ve half-forgotten a lot of David Brin articles. He was talking about the differences between Americans and Europeans, and speculated that Americans were genetically superior because all the bold entrepreneurs from Europe chose to emigrate.

Yeah, that’s about the usual level of libertarian discourse. Better than usual, even. Good thing I outgrew that before I learned to talk to people, or I’d have a lot to live down.

Anyway, it occurred to me that a big part of any political differences between America and Europe could be due to the r/K selection thing. That certain political policies and ideologies will be favoured in an environment where most of the inhabitants have been exterminated and resources are ripe for plucking.

Around this point it occurred to me that I might not have been the first person to think of this. So I searched for “r k selection politics” and… wait, what’s this? Is everyone getting this wrong except for me? Dozens of articles, all the top results, are saying that liberals are the r-strategists! They all seem to point back to this book, The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics.

I sure hope there’s a compelling explanation for why liberal r-strategists would pursue policies that result in fewer but better children, but the page advertising the book gives no such indications. Instead it’s based on the mistaken idea that investing in offspring means loyalty to a pack, utterly ignoring the myriad examples of animals that have few children and also live solitary lives… Well, there’s no way I’m going to spend one moment of my time reading that book. I mean, just look at that webpage, it’s dreck. It’s almost as bad as my webpage.

I’m not sure how someone could get this so badly wrong. But then, I’m hardly an expert on selection theories. I suppose I ought to learn more. But instead of reading that polemical pamphlet I think I might have to go back and read from the people that invented selection theory. Rumour has it that EO Wilson has a new book out, maybe I should give that a try.

I promise, for the next post I'll either stop trying to be funny or at least try a lot harder.

Set the World on Fire

An NDP candidate in Toronto, Linda McQuaig, has said that in order to meet climate targets some of Alberta's oil will have to go undeveloped. This is, well, pretty obvious. In order to meet a maximum 2 degree rise in global temperatures, the majority of recoverable fossil fuel reserves will have to stay in the ground. Inevitably that total will include some Canadian oil, perhaps the majority.

The same is true for even specific local goals, like limiting Canada's carbon emissions. All parties have a commitment to limit emissions… even the Conservatives, though their pledge won’t take effect for another 35 years.

The trouble is that most politicians have been trying desperately to avoid acknowledging this. NDP leaders like Tom Mulcair and Alberta's Rachel Notley have avoided the issue, preferring “sustainable development”. Green leader Elizabeth May is opposed to pipelines, but if she’s trying to shut down the oilsands entirely I can’t find any mention of it.

It's understandable that this would be a difficult issue... that oil represents a significant fraction of Alberta's wealth, and at least a few percent of Canada's wealth. Giving it up - or giving up that potential - is going to be deeply unpopular. Politicians who are trying to win elections have a vested interest in avoiding such subjects until later. But anyone planning to leave the difficult questions until after their last campaign is in trouble, because they don’t know it’s their last campaign until they’ve already lost.

Kudos to McQuaig for saying the obvious. Hopefully more politicians join her before we all burn.

Wizards vs Goblins

I’m going for the “Most Misleading Headline” championships. This one might be hard to top. But it’s a lot more interesting than “Analysis Of Canada Post Labour Dispute Settlement”

Over the past week there has been a problem at Canada Post in Saskatoon. An anti-abortion group, the Centre for Bio-ethical Reform, has been distributing flyers with graphic images of aborted fetuses, graphic enough that they couldn’t be published in the news article. Many of the letter carriers refused to distribute the flyers.

I procrastinated enough writing this that the dispute now has a resolution: the protesting posties don’t have to distribute the flyers so long as they can find compliant coworkers to cover for them. This is a pretty terrible temporary compromise that won’t hold up to legal scrutiny and will fall apart as soon as the patsy posties protest, so I’m going to show where they went wrong.

So to start off, I should note that I have a lot of sympathy for the protesters here. It sounds like these flyers are pretty awful, and I don’t disagree with their opinion at all. But they ought to deliver those flyers anyway.

That Canada Post needs to get those flyers delivered is pretty obvious. They are a public service, they can’t go engaging in viewpoint discrimination. We don’t need to jump off that slippery slope, not when _______(party you dislike) is __________(in power / about to seize power / not yet fully vanquished / only mostly dead).

The issue of individual employees, though, that’s a little trickier, and to really appreciate the problems with this solution, I need to look at what I’ve thought about contrasting cases in the past.

Pharmacists don’t want to distribute contraceptives? Well, good for them, but that’s the job, so they need to find some other job. Teachers don’t want to teach evolution? Well, good for them, but that’s the job, so they need to look elsewhere. Medical workers don’t want to get vaccinated? Well, good for them, but they need to find a job that doesn’t involve being around other people.

I’d hate to oppose these protestors just for the sake of consistency. A foolish consistency is, after all, the hobgoblin of little minds. But not all consistencies are foolish, and I think this one is grounded in some pretty sound principles. If you have a job dealing with the public, you need to fulfill the responsibilities of that position with all the public, not just those you personally agree with. You have to leave some of your personal opinions at home.

It goes the other way, too… workers shouldn’t need to accommodate the prejudices of their customers. That’s why when traveller requests a male customs agent, or a patient requests a white nurse, I think you should tell them to get stuffed.

So I just can’t agree with this deal that Canada Post has reached. It sucks when I have to oppose people on my side just on general principles, but sometimes those general principles are important. Sometimes the principle is a useful consistency, and the side you’re on is the foolish consistency. When you run into that scenario, well, it’s time to choose between what is right and what is easy.

Models of Addiction

I saw this news article tonight: Disease model of addiction doesn’t work.

It’s an interview with a neuroscientist and former drug addict named Marc Lewis. He proposes that using the disease model of addiction as a framework for treatment makes the addict feel helpless and worsens their chances of treatment.

I can’t really disagree with the premise, but that’s only because it isn’t presented in a coherent and comprehensive way. It’s a simple assertion, presented without evidence, reported without discussion, and accepted without review. I can’t tell how much of that is just due to shoddy reporting… perhaps all the answers can be found in this guy’s book?

I checked his CV. Last published in 2011, no publications on addiction, lots of work on developing habits in children. That’s not necessarily a deal breaker… he could easily be writing a pop-sci book based on someone else’s research, there’s no harm in that. But now there’s no way to know if this book is based on any science without paying for it up front.

The article starts with the phrase “For decades, the mainstream approach to dealing with addiction has been to treat it as a disease that needs a cure.” Now that’s just not true. The mainstream approach to dealing with addiction has been to treat it as a sin that needs punishment. That’s why rehab is expensive and prison is free.

Now it’s true that the medical community has been treating addiction as a medical issue, even if society as a whole hasn’t joined in. And this approach hasn’t been completely successful… drug addiction still exists. But I suspect it works at least a little. With two approaches - rehab and prison - it should be possible to compare outcomes. Both the ability to quit drugs, which is relatively easy to measure but less important, and the ability to live a healthy life whether with or without drugs, which is more important but tougher to test.

Lewis’s preferred approach can be subjected to the same test. Only… does he have an approach? The article isn’t clear. He says addicts need a change of perspective and a sense of responsibility, but there’s no mention of what that means in terms of changing recommended treatments. I guess you have to buy the book for that.

So in conclusion: a guy said some stuff. Film at 11.