Serge's lil' Blog

One Thing Opponents to Gay Marriage Get Right

Serge Boucher — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 22:27:14 +0000

While doing research for another article, I came across this list of "ten reasons why homosexual marriage is harmful and must be opposed". Predictably, most of it is preposterous bullshit, but one point struck me as interesting if not particularily original:

Legalizing gay marriage validates the homosexual lifestyle

For the sake of argument, let's pretend the author isn't a raging homophobe writing for other raging homophobes who think the "homosexual lifestyle" involves bi-weekly orgies, masturbating in the street, and infecting strangers with AIDS for fun. Since the real "homosexual lifestyle" is similar to the "heterosexual lifestyle" in all aspects but gender preference for sexual partners, this "validation" is arguably the most valuable goal of legalizing gay marriage.

Some of my liberal friends here in Europe have decidedly mixed feelings about marriage in general, and often express surprise when gays push for marriage equality. Couple stability rests in practice on personal commitment to each other and each other's children, not on religious or state recognition for their union, so why would progressivist gays cling to this quaint and outdated institution?

It's not that gays are desperate to get married. It's that denying them the right to marry is society's way of telling them that their union isn't as good as that of heterosexuals. As long as marriage is the sole prerogative of heterosexual couples, homosexuals will remain second-class citizens, reduced in the eyes of society to perpetual bachelors, who may very well engage in long-term relationships, but yet can never grow up to become adults and start "real" families.

This is a profound disgrace. We know now that homosexual love is similar to heterosexual love in all respects but the sex of the desired person. We also know that same-sex partners can raise a child just as well as heterosexual couples. This wasn't always obvious, and it's a shame that as a society it took us so long to discover this moral truth. Remember though that we humans are kinda slow at morals generally: it wasn't that long ago that white people had a broad consensus against blacks being fully humans. Today we know better, both about blacks and about homosexuals, and it is time our laws reflect this relatively newfound knowledge.

So our homophobic nutjob friend is entirely right about this: legalizing gay marriage does, in fact, validate the homosexual lifestyle. It's bloody well time.

Best Thing Ever

Serge Boucher — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 17:15:24 +0000

I didn’t grow up wanting to be a square-jawed individualist or join a heroic quest; I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behavior to save civilization.
OK, economics is a pretty poor substitute; I don’t expect to be making recorded appearances in the Time Vault a century or two from now. But I tried.

Paul Krugman's introduction to a just issued deluxe new edition of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy.

Blasphème et lois mémorielles

Serge Boucher — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 21:40:11 +0000

Unusually, a post in french, about serious philosopho-societal stuff. Don't worry, I'll be back soon talking about the iPhone 5 or something.

Le débat récent sur le "film" innocence des musulmans puis sur les caricatures de Charlie Hebdo a fait ressurgir une question importante : pourquoi en Belgique est-il légal de choquer des millions de musulmans en caricaturant le prophète, mais illégal de choquer des millions de juifs en niant l'holocauste?

Je pense qu'il existe une réelle différence entre se moquer d'un mythe religieux et faire fi d'une réalité historique. Je pourrais détailler le propos, mais d'autres l'ont déjà très bien fait, donc je préfère référer le lecteur vers le billet récent de Nadia Geerts, qui dit bien mieux que moi ce que j'aurais envie d'exprimer sur le sujet.

Néanmoins, même si je nie l'équivalence stricte, je suis tout aussi opposé aux lois anti-négationisme qu'aux lois anti-blasphème. Et comme je ne vois que très rarement un auteur qui n'est pas négationiste s'exprimer pour qu'on laisse aux négationistes le droit de faire de même, ce texte, je vais l'écrire moi-même.

Je peux imaginer quatre raisons de soutenir les lois anti-négationisme et autres lois mémorielles, et aucune ne me convaint complètement :

1) l'holocauste est un fait historique avéré, et toute personne qui prétend le contraire est donc nécessairement dans une optique de désinformation. Probablement, oui, mais justement c'est une excellente raison de ne pas interdire ce discours : on n'interdit pas de dire que la terre est plate, ou que la lune est en chocolat vert. Une vérité indéniable n'a pas besoin du support de la justice pour être acceptée. Généraliser ce raisonnement serait d'ailleurs catastrophique : si on interdit de dire tout ce qui est contraire à "ce qu'on sait", par définition la connaissance ne peut plus évoluer.

2) le discours niant ou minimisant un génocide est profondément offensant pour les familles des victimes, et pour tous les membres du peuple qui a été ciblé. Je pense que c'est cette raison-là qu'ont en tête ceux qui accusent les laïcs opposés aux lois anti-blasphème de "double discours". L'idée que l'état devrait rendre illégal ce qui peut choquer pose de multiples problèmes. Comment légiférer sur ce qui offense ? Pourra-t-on jamais mesurer le degré de désaroi causé par un discours donné, et, en attendant, que tolérer, que condamner ? Est-ce qu'un message qui heurte une personne très, très fort est plus ou moins condamnable qu'un message qui gène légèrement plusieurs millions ?

En tant qu'athée laïc, j'ai une tendance naturelle à être d'avantage choqué par le déni d'une vérité historique que par des railleries envers un personnage religieux. Je suis d'un autre coté conscient que dans une société multi-culturelle, mes sensibilités personnelles ne peuvent à elle seule constituer une base légale. Est-ce qu'un propos négationiste est plus ou moins heurtant pour "le juif moyen" qu'une caricature de Mahommet l'est pour un "musulman moyen" ? N'étant ni juif ni musulman, je me sens désarmé pour répondre à cette question. Je suis par contre convaincu que personne d'autre ne peut y répondre de façon objective. Tout cela me suggère qu'on ne peut pas interdire une parole uniquement parcequ'elle choque.

3) le discours négationiste, aussi distant soit-il des faits historiques, risque d'attiser l'antisémitisme chez le lecteur peu informé. Ce n'est évidemment pas un hasard si les milieux où court l'antisémitisme et ceux où le négationisme s'exprime sans complexe sont souvent confondus. D'où le désir pour tout anti-raciste de faire disparaître le discours négationiste. Objectif tout à fait louable, mais avant de prôner la solution législative, on doit se poser une question: est-ce que ça marche ?

Malheureusement, je ne pense pas. Malgré la loi, celui qui cherche un milieu où le négationisme est accepté le trouvera facilement, que ce soit sur internet ou entre amis partageant la même vision du monde. Est-ce qu'il y a moins d'antisémitisme dans les pays condamnant le négationisme ? J'aimerais voir une étude scientifique sur cette question, mais, en attendant, mon impression est que ce n'est pas le cas. Je dirais même que l'interdiction offre une aura rebelle au négationisme, pour les mêmes raisons qui font que l'adolescent en crise est plus séduit par les drogues illégales que par celles qui sont socialement acceptées.

4) enfin, et malheureusement on ne parle presque jamais de ça, les lois mémorielles offrent une caution morale au pays qui les promulgue. L'holocauste (pour prendre le génocide le plus connu) n'est pas que la responsabilité d'un fou, mais aussi de tous ceux qui l'ont suivi, et de ceux qui ont regardé sans rien faire. Si un pays est responsable de quelque façon pour les actes de ses citoyens, alors l'Allemagne, l'Autriche, la France, la Belgique, la Lithuanie et beaucoup d'autres ont, en tant qu'entités légales, une part de responsabilité pour ce qui s'est passé dans les années 40. (Tous ces pays comptaient d'héroïques opposants au nazisme, mais cela ne les dédouanne pas de leurs collaborateurs.) Ces pays ont réagi de diverses façons à leur mauvaise conscience, mais tous ceux que j'ai cité ont d'abord rendu illégal l'expression de toute opinion minimisant ce crime contre l'humanité.

Il sera difficile de jamais pardonner la complicité des pays européens dans le programme Nazi d'extermination des juifs, des homosexuels, des gitans, des franc-maçons, des malades mentaux et de tellement d'autres… La première étape nécessaire est pour moi d'accepter publiquement cette responsabilité. Certains pays l'ont fait, pas tous. Ensuite, promouvoir des politiques qui luttent non seulement contre l'antisémitisme mais également contre tous les autres racismes, pas au moment où le racisme s'exprime, mais à sa source, en luttant contre la peur, l'obscurantisme, et l'ignorance des autres cultures. Certains pays essayent, mais fort timidement.

Il faut avouer que l'éducation, c'est difficile. Donc, à défaut d'avancer dans l'efficace mais difficile, la France condamne Vincent Reynouard en 1992 à un mois d'emprisonnement avec sursis, puis à six mois ferme en 2004. Ça ne sert absolument à rien : ses écrits et vidéos sont largement disponibles sur le net, et ses fans le considèrent comme un martyr de la pensée unique. Il a fallu plus de 50 ans pour qu'un président français présente des excuses — fort timides et circonstanciées — pour une seule des atrocités commises par le régime de Vichy. (La rafle du Vel' d'Hiv, Jacques Chirac, 1995) C'est pitoyable. Mais bon, on emprisonne un gars qui a écrit un bouquin, donc ça va.

Le cas de l'Autriche est encore pire. L'antisémitisme courant dans ce pays durant la seconde moitié du vingtième siècle défie l'entendement. (Un exemple parmi tant d'autres : selon un sondage de 1973, seulement 21% des Autrichiens étaient favorables au retour des juifs autrichiens ayant survécu à l'holocauste.) En 1986, le pays chosi comme président Kurt Waldheim, un ancien officier de la Wehrmacht poursuivi par plusieurs pays pour crimes de guerre. Et en 2005, la police Autrichienne arrête l'historien négationniste David Irving, et le garde en prison pendant plus d'un an. Cela ne sert, encore, à rien.

Vincent Reynouard et David Irving sont des fascistes, je ne dis pas le contraire. Mais il est extrémement dangereux d'interdire à ceux qui ont tort de s'exprimer. Il est illusoire de croire que condamner l'expression publique d'une opinion raciste va de quelque façon diminuer le racisme. Et si l'Europe dépasse un jour l'horreur de l'holocauste, ce sera en assumant pleinement sa responsabilité, en favorisant le dialogue interculturel, et en permettant à tout le monde, aussi bien les victimes que les historiens de tous bords, de s'exprimer. Même ceux qui nient l'évidence. Surtout ceux qui nient l'évidence. La meilleure façon de révéler le négationisme pour l'arnaque haineuse qu'il est, c'est de le laisser s'exprimer au grand jour.

Bien sûr, tout cela a déjà été très bien dit par le regretté Christopher Hitchens, dans un débat à Toronto sur "la liberté d'expression implique le droit à la haine":

Youtube ads are Broken

Serge Boucher — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 17:37:30 +0000

I never liked ads. About 5% of them are funny, interesting, or in any other way worth watching, but the rest is fluff you have to endure so you can watch whatever it is you really want to watch. In the era of broadcast TV, like 15 years ago, that seemed like a fair deal: stations have to make a profit, yadda yadda yadda. When an ad was especially good I'd remember it and walk away with a positive feeling towards the brand. When it sucked, as it usually did, I didn't mind.

But that was broadcast TV, and now we're in the age of on-demand internet content. And Youtube ads. And in this age, for the first time, some ads offend me by their very existence. I'll search for, say, a Sarah Bettens song, and find it among the first results, and I'm all excited and amazed at this awesome interconnected world that brings wonderful music to my ears, a single click and I can listen to the song — oh, wait, no, actually there's an ad for Gilette I need to get through first.

I understand the reasoning. Disk storage and bandwith aren't free, of course, and if I – the consumer – am not paying for them then somebody else has to. So, ads.

Except that they don't work. One minute ago I had neutral-to-positive feelings towards Gilette. Like all non-Unix-guru males I discovered shaving as I went through puberty, had to choose a razor brand and chose Gilette for no good reason. (Most decisions one makes as a teenager are ill-informed.) For 15 years I wasn't convinced that Gilette was superior to Wilkinson or store brands, but it was what I was using and I couldn't be bothered to rethink that original decision. Having committed to the brand ages ago, I was content to buy new blades every week without thinking too much about it.

Until now. Just this minute, Gilette has stopped being a benevolent partner in my personal hygiene and became the faceless corporation standing between me and a song I love. It is now the enemy. Whether Gilette shaves closer than Wilkinson I still have no idea, but for the first time in 15 years, thanks to a campaign that Gilette paid for, I now have an active interest in doing the comparison.

Google paid 1.65 Billions for youtube thinking it was the future of television, and maybe they were right. But what's obvious is that TV advertising can't transfer easily to Youtube advertising.

Social Sharing Needs to go

Serge Boucher — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:53:38 +0000

Four times a week I watch an episode of The Daily Show on the web, and four times a week I get asked whether I'd like to share my "Daily Show activity" on Facebook. No, I don't. Facebook's push for media consumption oversharing is ridiculous.

Not that I'm against sharing. I share links every day on facebook and twitter, but I choose to do so. When I find something good that my followers might be interested in, I share it with them, and hopefully they find some value in that. But I don't want to share everything I read, not because I read embarrassing stuff, but because the mere information that I've read something is completely meaningless. I read lots of things. Some of them prove to be a waste of time. If those were shown on my facebook timeline on par with those I found really interesting, my feed would lose what little value I think it has today.

Specifically, I watch every single episode of the Daily Show. My friends know this. Activating social sharing would give them only one additional piece of info: the time at which I watch specific episodes. Which is worthless.

The whole value of sharing is that you choose what you share. Facebook's misnamed "Social" sharing destroys this. It needs to go.

Advanced Bullshit

Serge Boucher — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:36:44 +0000

Besides giving the best solution ever to the problem of dealing with overwhelming and irreconcilable commitments, David Allen's Getting Things Done introduces the interesting concept of advanced common sense, i.e. ideas that seem trivial at first glance but are revealed as profound after you work on them for a little while.

The flip side of this coin can be called advanced bullshit: ideas that look insightful at first glance, but are revealed as completely worthless after a little investigation.

Exhibit 1, a photo montage apparently shared by all my facebook friends and their brother:

Wow. A guy whose only crime was sharing music on the internet got 50 years in prison, while murderers get away with 20 years or a few months. What a sick sad world we live in.

Or do we? Let's dig just a little deeper.

I couldn't find any corroborating evidence on Miguel Carano, the "middle guy". But a man convicted of rape and murder getting 20 years in prison is hardly news. Some would argue he deserves the electric chair, or at least life in prison with no possibility of parole. I think we can all agree that anyone who commits such a heinous crime should be put away for a very, very long time. Which is exactly what reportedly happened here. Not news.

The main story I took from that picture, and I'll guess most viewers did as well, was about the two extremes: one guy got 50 years for sharing music, another didn't even get 3 months for killing 24 men, women and children.

The latter's story is complicated. At one point he was by all accounts a great kid, who chose to serve his country by enlisting in the US Marines around the turn of the millennium. In 2005, that lead him to patrol duty in contested areas of Iraq. At that time, a convoy under his direction struck an IED, which literally cut one of his comrades in half.

The events that followed this will never be precisely known, but they clearly led to the death of 24 civilians who had nothing to do with the bomb that triggered the massacre. Whatever happened, Frank Wuterich was the commanding officer of the group that killed civilians, and as such he certainly bears responsibility for the death of innocent people. According to several testimonies, he straight out executed innocent civilians as retribution for the deaths of his comrades. Again, we'll never know exactly what happened, but had I been on the jury, I'd have made the case that he shouldn't ever be in a commanding position again (which seems to be the case), and I'd have argued for a lengthy prison sentence as well.

And yet, to say that this man "killed 24 men, women and children" without any context whatsoever seems to me an unacceptable simplification. I don't know about you, but when I hear about killers, I think of cold-blooded murderers who don't give a shit about human life. I'm certainly not one of those, but if I ever see one of my close friends blow apart before my eyes, I can't totally rule out going insane and committing unpardonable crimes. We've known for a long time that wars make good people do unspeakable evil. Should those people be held accountable for their crimes? Undoubtedly. But assimilating those crimes with those of psychopaths who, under no particular threat, slaughtered human beings only because it was convenient, seems morally indefensible to me.

So what about the first guy, Kim Dotcom Schmitz, who only shared music on the internet yet was sentenced to 50 years in prison? Well, the first thing of note is that he's done quite a bit more with his life than sharing music. He was convicted of fraud and embezzlement a decade ago, and his activities since then have been shady at best. By all accounts he's a ruthless businessman who's only in it for the money. Nothing wrong with that, but describing him simply as a guy who "shares", Jimmy Wales-style, is a tad disingenuous.

More importantly, he has not been sentenced to 50 years in prison. He's only been arrested during an ongoing investigation. What sentence he faces for his alleged crimes is anyone's guess, but the "50 years" figure seems to me 100% made-up. Maybe I should have started this post with this fact, which proves the whole premise of this picture is complete bullshit. In reality, the only thing Kim faces at the moment is extradition from New Zealand to the US, where he'll face charges of copyright infringement or I don't know what else (IANAL). Those charges might add up to a lot, I have no idea, but those "50 years" seem to me a completely arbitrary number, which was devised not as a realistic estimate, but as some figure that would suggest the other two criminals got away easy.

Maybe I've been reading too much Kahneman lately, but this picture strikes me as a perverse use of the halo effect masquerading as social critique: you like file sharing, thus you assume Kim Schmitz is a really good guy who's being unfairly treated. You dislike the Iraq War, thus Frank Wuterich is surely a blood-thirsty murderer who deserves to rot in prison for the next century or so. None of this helps you or anyone else think any clearer about the legality of file sharing or the appropriate way to prosecute soldiers who kill civilians. The only thing it does is fuel righteous indignation, which may be psychologically satisfying but really doesn't help in the long run.

Now, don't get me wrong: if you believe military personnel who abuse their power and commit atrocities towards civilians should face harsher punishment than they currently do, I entirely agree. If you believe current anti-piracy laws are at best ill-designed and in practice unduly harsh on infringers, again, I completely agree.

But these are important debates, and we should address them from rational bases, grounded in real, ascertainable facts. My point is that an artificial juxtaposition of Kim Schmitz and Frank Wuterich, and the sentences they face, accompanied by ridiculously incomplete background info and utterly made-up numbers, doesn't help these debates at all.

Nobody Cares About Apps

Serge Boucher — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 02:25:14 +0000

Via Daring Fireball, I came upon a post by Mark Damon Hughes arguing that Apps Are the New Apps, or in a few more words, that success in the smartphone market is "all about who has the most good apps." Ergo, Windows Phone 7 is doomed.

I'm not so sure. Windows Phone 7 may or may not succeed commercially, but if it fails I don't think it will be primarily because of its App Market. Although Hughes' argument seems plausible at first glance — all computing platforms, game consoles, etc. are only as succesful as their apps are good — for me it starts breaking down around paragraph 2:

Right now, and for the forseeable future, that's iOS. Android's store is mostly junk, often outright frauds or viruses, but it's on the chart. Everybody else is in the gutter, under 50,000
[…]

[Developers] ship on the best platform: iOS. If you have time and money, you maybe target the also-ran Android […] This costs a lot, because us iOS devs are not cheap; even Android devs aren't as cheap as you'd think. […] Developing on the gutter platforms like Symbian, Blackberry, or Windows Phone 7 won't even pay the bills.

Small problem with this argument: by market share, the also-ran is iOS. How is that possible if what people look for in a smartphone is a huge number of good apps? Yet Hughes seems absolutely convinced of that:

When you ask people what they do with their phones, they talk about apps. […] Small talk now consists of "check out these awesome apps I found!"

I think the issue here is sampling bias. Hughes is an iOS developer, and presumably knows disproportionately many people who use iOS and are excited about apps. Talking with my dev friends, I also hear: you should try this app! Most often it's an iOS app, sometimes it's an Android app (I use both) but yes, apps are exciting. Among devs and tech-enthusiasts.

Outside this bubble, things are very different. When one of my non-geek friends, and yes I do have a few of those, asks me for advice on what smartphone to buy, apps almost never enter the picture. (By the way, phones in Belgium are only sold unsubsidized, so these "non-geeks" are still ready to spend more than 500€ on a phone. We're not talking about luddites.) Here's a typical request: "My mom wants a smart phone. She wants to be able to show her friends pictures, answer emails, go on facebook or other random sites." All current major platforms can do this without third-party apps, and for some use cases, Windows Phone 7 might be the best.

Obviously smartphones are much better with apps. But what they really need is a few good apps. Mail, twitter, facebook clients. Kindle. Angry Birds. Maybe Spotify. Windows Phone 7 has all of these, and it has much better games than Android. Sure, it doesn't have anything like the breadth of creative, high-quality apps that the iPhone has, because indie developers are much more likely to make money on iOS than on any other platform. However, the "must-have" apps are not built by indie developers. They're financed by big firms like facebook who want their mobile apps on every platform.

If Windows Phones become as desirable out-of-the-box as the competition, and arguably they already are, people will try them in the store, confirm with the vendor that, yes, facebook works, and buy them. Granted, someone who already bought 40 apps on another platform is unlikely to switch, but those are a minority: many people have yet to buy their first smartphone, Apple has less than 30% of the smartphone market, and Android users rarely buy apps.

I also disagree with John Gruber about the problem of WP7 dev tools being windows-only:

I also suspect, like Hughes, that it’s a big problem for Microsoft that developers need to use Windows to develop for Windows Phone. Sure, a majority of all “programmers” in the world may well still be using Windows, but because of iOS, an overwhelming majority of the best mobile app programmers in the world are on Mac OS X.

My guess is that many, perhaps most of these programmers switched to the Mac because of the opportunity provided by iOS. They're still familiar with Windows. If demand for Windows Phone 7 development increases, they'll simply dual-boot Windows 7 and start coding.

Now I'm not saying that this will necessarily happen. Microsoft is perfectly capable of screwing this up. Customers may fail to warm to the platform in spite of its critical appeal. Perhaps the carriers will insist on pushing Android no matter what. And yet, as long as the big guys continue to target Windows Phone 7, which seems to be the case, and Microsoft continues improving what is already a remarkable platform, reports of WP7's demise seem highly premature.

Sexism, Science and Journalism

Serge Boucher — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:35:50 +0000

Earlier today I stumbled on a Slate article by Mark Regnerus pondering Why Young Men Have the Upper Hand in Bed, Even When They’re Failing in Life. It raises many interesting questions, the most prominent of which being, Why on Earth is this dumbass writing for Slate?

The core argument of the article seems to be:

Women have little interest in sex except as part of a long-term relationship leading to marriage and children
Many observed sexual relationships aren't long-term nor destined for marriage or children
It follows that men currently have the upper hand on the dating scene. To explain why, we turn to "sexual economics".

My beef is mostly with proposition number 1. First, while I certainly have no knowledge of Mr. Regnerus' sexual prowesses, I can't help but mention that while I'm a computer nerd who never hits the gym, I've been lucky enough to personally establish some anecdotal evidence that his premise is bullshit. But never mind that, let's see how he justifies it:

[O]n average, men want sex more than women do. Call it sexist, call it whatever you want—the evidence shows it's true. In one frequently cited study, attractive young researchers separately approached opposite-sex strangers on Florida State University's campus and proposed casual sex. Three-quarters of the men were game, but not one woman said yes.

So scientists have found that approaching strange women and offering to take them to your place so they can have sex with you is not a very effective strategy. Who knew?

How dim do you have to be to read this result and unequivocally conclude that women want sex less than men do? Really, you can't think of any other reason for this result? Let's think about it for about twelve seconds: I bet more than once you've heard a promiscuous girl being berated as a "slut". You're just as likely to have heard a promiscuous guy admired as a "stud". Can you even imagine the reverse occurring? Do words for "male slut" or "female stud" even exist? What do you think that says about social views on promiscuity? Don't you think that might play a role in how members of both sexes react to offers of casual sex from total strangers? And that's without even considering that the overwhelming majority of sexual predators are male, and that everyone knows this.

Now, as a general tip, whenever you hear or read anyone saying "I know this sound outrageous, but the science says…", make sure you check the science. Here's that frequently cited study:

Of course, the sociological interpretation — that women are interested in love while men are interested in sex — is not the only possible interpretation of these data. It may be, of course, that both men and women were equally interested in sex, but that men associated fewer risks with accepting a sexual invitation than did women. Men may be more confident of their ability to fight back a physical assault than are women. Also, the remnants of the double standard may make women afraid to accept the man's invitation.

Another general tip: if you must quote an article in writing, unless you enjoy looking like an idiot, you should probably read it first.

Back to Slate:

I know: Women love sex too. But research like this consistently demonstrates that men have a greater and far less discriminating appetite for it.

This is not entirely wrong, but it's incomplete. It's worth mentioning that mostly-heterosexual women are much more likely to experiment with homosexual sex than mostly-heterosexual men are. (Again, not to question Mr. Regnerus' social life, but this is the kind of knowledge most people eventually pick up just by virtue of being alive.) This would seem to put a serious dent in the whole "women are mostly into sex for the children" theory.

But, more precisely, women are much more likely to report having flirted with same-sex experimentation. We don't know what men and women are actually doing, we can only compare what they admit they're doing. And this applies to just about every study about sex drive and promiscuity.

And yet everybody pretends these biases don't exist. What's the word for "male slut"? "Womanizer" is defined as "A habitual seducer of women." Compare that with "slut: (countable, derogatory) a sexually promiscuous woman or girl." How can one ignore that kind of societal reality when discussing how the different sexes react to offerings of sexual gratification?

This affects a lot more than sexuality. Among my crowd, it's hard to escape the fact that computer science and engineering are male-dominated fields. Even feminists such as myself who deplore this reality are not sure what, if anything, should be done about it. Quotas are far from a perfect solution. Other policies take ages to have any effect. And, yes, it's not impossible that there exists benign reasons why these fields are less attractive to women than men.

But one would be crazy to argue that the current imbalance is the result of a level playing field. I could list many reasons why potentially great female engineers never even consider the career, but Zach Weiner makes this point more elegantly than I can.

I'm not saying that women necessarily have the same sex drive as men. Nor that there cannot in principle be any differences in abilities for different tasks among the sexes — although everything I've seen tells me that the often heard "girls suck at math" is completely false. My point is that as long as these unacknowledged prejudices are entrenched in our society, it is extremely hard to draw any conclusion on what each gender is fundamentally good at, or what it fundamentally wants. (Arguably those "fundamentals" are really meaningless, because all relationships take place inside a social context.) But as long as we overwhelmingly accept these prejudices as "truths", those who fall outside their bounds will be less happy, and contribute less to society than they could.

Also, if you're writing a paper about gender attitudes towards sex, and you ignore this entire societal context, you're a fucking idiot.

Is Facebook Too Crowded?

Serge Boucher — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:59:43 +0000

Uncrunched via Strategyist:

[M]ost of us aren’t going to spend the time removing friends on Facebook. Instead many of us are using new social networks, like Path (we’re an investor) and the upcoming Just.Me (we’re also investors, guess how much we like this space) to start fresh. Facebook is for thousands of people you don’t know. The start fresh new services can be finely crafted from the start to include only your actual friends. And they’re made for mobile.

Michael Arrington isn't making any sense. If taking a few seconds to remove an unwanted friend from facebook takes "too long", what about rebuilding your entire social network from scratch ? What about doing that regularly, each time a new up-and-coming social networking platform looks promising, because you never know what's going to take off, and anyway the last one is now "too crowded"?

I made a similar mistake about a year ago when I stopped using RSS readers. I was following so many blogs that I spent a ridiculous amount of time just trying, and failing, to keep up with the flow. I then noticed that this was much less of a problem on twitter. Because it doesn't care about "read" and "unread" items, twitter makes you feel a lot less guilty about not reading a few updates. So I uninstalled NetNewsWire and started following my favorite blogs on twitter instead.

This worked well for a while, but over time I gradually realized that for some of these blogs I really, really want to read every single post. Twitter does not make that easy, for the same reason that made it attractive to me at first: it doesn't keep track of read articles. Thus you need to manually skim lists of tweets, trying to remember which ones point to blog posts you've already read. I ended up just regularly visiting my favorite blogs by typing URLs in the good ol' fashioned browser. Of course, not knowing when a given blog had been updated, I spent much time loading pages without a single new post, or scrolling down a lot looking for the latest thing I'd read.

Only a few weeks ago did I reflect on my ridiculous behavior long enough to remember that there's a cool 12-year old technology that makes for a much-smarter way of doing things. So I reinstalled NetNewsWire, but this time I'm only subscribing to the blogs I absolutely want to read exhaustively. And if this list changes for any reason, I will ruthlessly unsubscribe from low-quality time-wasters.

Well, I wish. If history's any guide, a couple months from now I'll have 2000 unread posts on 43 different blogs. There's still a lesson behind this story though: Before you give in to frustration and look for a different platform, make sure the problem doesn't come from your expectations and behaviors.

If your expectation is that you can follow dozens of blogs, never skip a post, do something useful with your life and not feel completely miserable, no platform can help you. Some may be more efficient than others, but that will give you only incremental gains at best. At worst, the added efficiency only encourages you to subscribe to more feeds. Similarly, while OmniFocus can be a more efficient task manager than Excel, as long as you regularly review and cull your lists, Excel does the job very well. On the other hand, if you don't do reviews, even OmniFocus won't really help you make the best use of your time.

So the way to deal with facebook overload is not to look for a better platform, but to change your behavior. You can friend everybody you ever meet. You can read all the updates from all your friends. You can spend less than 8 hours a day on facebook. But you can't do all three. Pick.

Sure, facebook's news feed can quickly become overwhelming. Everyone is on facebook, and many of them are playing MafiaWars or FarmVille or some other hell fresh out of Zynga's Factory of Doom. But it gives you tools to help tame the flow, for example by blocking certain users or apps. If that's not enough, you can unfriend people. Or you can do what I do, and stop caring that maybe you're missing out on stuff. If it's that important, you'll learn about it outside facebook.

I'm not saying facebook is perfect. Of course, I wish it gave me even better filtering tools. But to think that a just-released platform is going to do a better job, in fact such a better job that it's worth rebuilding your entire network over there, that's just madness. Yes, my timeline is cleaner on Path than on facebook, but that's entirely because it's easier to organize updates from 7 friends than from 500+.

Actually, I'm pretty sure Arrington doesn't mean what he says. His post is only a transparent attempt to generate publicity for the social networks backed by his fund. I'm happy to play along with this, because I really like Path. (I haven't tried the other ones.) It's not going to replace facebook, nor I think is it intended to. But it's a beautiful little app, and you should try it out. Just don't think for a moment that it would be better than facebook at doing what facebook does.

Meet the Santorums

Serge Boucher — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:13:06 +0000

There is a lot of discussion on liberal blogs about how social über-conservative Rick Santorum's wife might or might not have had an abortion. I find the coverage of this story troubling on at least two levels.

First, I can hardly believe how callous every journalist writing about this seems to be. Don't get me wrong: I have slightly less respect for the Senator than I do for toxic pond scum. But even pond scum don't deserve to go through such a horrific experience. We're talking about a couple who saw their fourth child die in just about the worst way imaginable, nearly taking his mother with him. For me the story only confirms how immoral and dangerous the Santorums' "values" are, but can't we show a little compassion for what they went through, no matter their somewhat creepy reaction to it? The only trace of sentiment I've read comes from Irin Carmon, who feels "uncomfortable about having gone this far up Karen Santorum's womb." So pain and fear and sickness and a child dying in his father's arms while his mother fights for her life don't faze you, but you're really uncomfortable talking about anatomy? Unbelievable.

The more important question is why are critics content merely with charging Rick Santorum with hypocrisy? It is by far the least onerous charge you can make about him based on this story, and besides, it is completely false. On the contrary, this confirms two things about Santorum's position on abortion: he and his wife fundamentally believe in it, and it is unambiguously immoral.

Shortly after having undergone risky intrauterine surgery to correct a malformation while 19-weeks pregnant, Karen Santorum develops a high fever and rushes to the hospital with her husband. The doctors quickly tell them that she is only hours away from life-threatening septic shock and needs antibiotics. They also say her body is going to react by miscarrying to expel the source of the infection, and that they can give her drugs to ease the process. Karen answers "We’re not inducing labor, that’s an abortion. No way. That isn’t going to happen. I don’t care what happens." Later when labour starts as predicted she asks her doctors to "make it stop". They refuse. The baby is born, and dies a couple of hours later.

As gut-wrenchingly sad as this is, it also shows moral confusion on a scale that almost defies comprehension. What is the principle behind Karen saying "[…] that's an abortion. No way. That isn't going to happen. I don't care what happens."? It can't be the sanctity of life. If all human life is sacred, surely delaying labour is wrong when it puts a viable life at risk while doing nothing to save a doomed one. If the principle is not to artificially oppose nature, or God's will, then why attempt to correct the initial malformation with surgery? The only coherent way to reduce the Santorums' actions to fundamental principles is if one of these unquestioned principles is "Abortion is wrong. No matter the circumstances."

In the aftermath, Rick Santorum said: "Obviously, if it was a choice of whether both Karen and the child are going to die or just the child is going to die, I mean it's a pretty easy call." Indeed, that seems a devastating but inescapable conclusion to me. But it is one that they only came to at the last possible moment. Of course no-one can blame them for what either of them said or did during such an emotionally trying event, but this sentence is not a direct quote relayed by innocent bystanders. Rather it is one of the rare quotes from the story as told by the Santorums themselves, after the fact, and they, with the benefit of hindsight, still chose to include the "No way I'm having an abortion" line. I can only assume they think this stance is morally laudable, despite the eventual inevitability of making the "pretty easy call" that, as Brad DeLong opines, is "one that Rick Santorum claims to be in favor of making a crime."

Athough most in the media apparently don't want to mention it, this moral confusion is not unconnected to the Santorums being catholic fundamentalists. Don't get me wrong: I know many Christians are horrified at the idea of making a life-saving operation criminal. Even in the United States, nearly two-thirds of Catholics don't agree that abortion is morally wrong in all cases. Catholicism is neither a required nor a sufficient condition for making the wrong moral choices in these matters. But I can't for the life of me imagine how a secular person could ever reach the moral position the Santorums found during this story. Their stance on abortion doesn't come from the sanctity of life, nor from respect for natural law. It is all about the church declaring that abortion is evil. If you genuinely believe the Pope to be the Vicar of Christ on Earth, this is likely to trump all other considerations, be it medicine, common sense, or your responsibility to your already-born children. The sheer untenability of this position goes some way to explain falling church attendance in much of the world.

Thus the scariest thing about the Santorums is that they're not at all hypocrites: they're perfectly sincere. In matters of life-and-death, their first reference is the preachings of their church, above what the doctors tell them, above what simple common-sense would tell them is in the best interests of all their children — including those already born. And they believe this gives them the moral high-ground. Not only is Rick Santorum defending a position that many consider morally repugnant, he wants those who'd make a different choice to be prosecuted as murderers. And he thinks this gives him the moral high-ground.

In perhaps the most quoted passage of John Stuart Mill's autobiography, he describes his father's attitude towards religion thus:

"As it was, his aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind as that of Lucretius; he regarded it with the feeling due not a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality; by setting up factitious excellencies — belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind — and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues; but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals, making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful."

Yes indeed, former Senator and presidential hopeful Santorum's "values" are not connected to the good of human kind, or even of this own family. Mill's father died in 1836, Lucretius around 55BC. Yet in the 21st century, their argument on religion's potentially toxic influence on morality remains frighteningly relevant.