Thoughts Explained

Defending Necessary Arbitrary Choices

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 06:30:00 +0000

With my last post, I created an elegant definition of Guacamole and Smashed Avocado. Those definitions don't really fall in line with the historical background of Guacamole, although the sources I could find for making that declaration were less than ideal. However, the definition I created does seem to me to fit the modern understanding as Guacamole is described as a 'value-added' product from the original avocado, implying that it is more complex than just mushing it up.

The question I got back from Sweetness, who liked my solution, was why is it when 3 ingredients are combined with avocado is guacamole created? It seems like 3 is a completely arbitrary choice to be a defining characteristic of something, so why not 2, 5, or 10? It's true there is no real reason to pick 3 that can be pointed to other than the support that I gave that Smashed Avocado was based on its simplicity so the number of ingredients should be indicative of that simplistic nature.

Yet anchoring my definition to 3 and 3 being arbitrary doesn't make the definition wrong or even bad. There is a necessity in many situations (the drinking age, driving age, age of consent, military age) where a number has to be picked. It could be argued that there could be a merit-based solution where some system of merit could be used in substitute of a number so that it wouldn't have to be arbitrary, but that solution could be expensive, time-consuming, or hard to achieve. What would a merit-based test for being able to drink alcohol?

Take any of those issues and pick a number. Now that number could be just as defensible as other numbers so that it would be a reasonable choice or it could be less defensible. With the Smashed Avocado when I was thinking about it I thought that both 3-4 ingredients were the best solution. Both 2 and 5 were also reasonable choices and could have been chosen, but one seemed a little too simple and the other was starting to become too complicated, while the rest of the choices, 0 or anything above 5, looked awful. This is the same for the drinking age and military age where anywhere between 15-19 seems reasonable and each age beyond those numbers becomes increasingly hard to defend.

This displays the arbitrary nature of making age-related choices, but it also alludes to the necessity of having restrictions on those choices. There are good reasons to want to exclude 8-year-olds from driving a car, or voting, reasons which, in general, slowly become invalidated as a person becomes older.

In the case of Guacamole vs Smashed Avocado, there didn't seem to be any other way to create a definition based on history or consensus so it seemed to necessitate the arbitrary definition. The whole situation reminds me of a great quote from the movie Argo, "This is the best bad idea we have, sir.' [Side note, I swear there is a famous quote that is roughly equivalent to that quote but made by a famous politician, but I could not find it after about 30 minutes of searching...I would be very grateful for anyone who knows that quote I'm thinking about to add it as a comment.]

Setting an arbitrary number like this really also shifts the burden of proof back onto anyone who wants to criticize that choice, as through the act of picking an arbitrary number and making the argument that it is as good as any other number the situation has been created where someone then has to attempt to show why that number is worse than any other number or that the number isn't needed. Anytime an arbitrary number is picked it then has the benefit of not having to be better than any other choice, but simply not having to be worse.

With that, my next post, which I've already mostly completed, is about a situation where necessary arbitrary choices fail.

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 01:14:00 +0000

Guacamole? Smashed Avocado?

I have been inspired to write off and on but haven’t really made the time for it in a while. I’m going to make more of an effort to write something once a week or so, especially when something worth writing about, that is also fun to write about pops out of the ether and into my mind. That is exactly what happened the other night with a friend when we started talking about Guacamole. We started talking about it, but soon the alternative of Smashed Avocado came up. He was talking about a very simple Guacamole, so I stated that I think that might just be a Smashed Avocado and not a Guacamole. We talked about this for entirely too long while another friend just wanted to eat and got increasingly hangry as each minute of the conversation ground by.

The rest of this post will be a summation of what we thought about the definition of Guacamole vs Smashed Avocado and the conclusion that I came to the next day, with the added bonus that I’ll give my recipe for Guacamole! In no way is it possible to skip to the end and just get the recipe if that is what you wanted to do, you’ll have to buckle in, strap on something and read every word, possibly twice, and only then will it appear at the bottom.

So, the topic of Guacamole is brought up and then I introduce the idea of Smashed Avocado. First, there was some disagreement that Smashed Avocado is a thing, but it was verified that it was a defined thing. After that, an important distinction was made that Smashed Avocado and Guacamole didn’t exist like a Venn Diagram where there was an overlapping definition. These circles were apart and each existed independent of the other! With both Smashed Avocado and Guacamole agreed to exist and exist independently from each other the question was then what separated the two?

My friend was confident in a Seinfeldian definition that Guacamole that ran along the lines of how Jerry defined Sex.

Elaine:

Hey, Jerry, when do you consider sex has taken place?

Jerry:

I'd say when the nipple makes its first appearance.

In this case,

Your Dashing Hero:

Hey, Sweetness (that’s his real name), when is Smashed Avocado transformed into Guacamole?

Sweetness:

I’d say when the lime juice and salt makes its first appearance.

This seemed too simple to me, why lime juice and salt? Did Sweetness as a child get lost in a patch of Cilantro, lose his favorite white sneaker in the depths of the leaves and escape with only a dirty foot and lifelong aversion to the plant? He did live on a farm, so I thought it was the possible answer, but he confirmed that he liked cilantro and wasn’t part of people who found it to taste like soap, possibly due to genetic variants in olfactory receptors (if it smells like soap it tastes like soap). Still, why no cilantro, cumin, chipotle, onion, or garlic? Why was it specifically lime juice and salt? The debate raged on while the third friend, a famished man, threatened to take someone’s life if we didn’t stop talking about food and instead went to get food.

The conversation ended for a while as lives were now at stake, but the topic reemerged when Sweetness’s order ended up coming with Guacamole on top of it or was that Smashed Avocado? We debated a little more again as the third party, Johnny Sunshine, now that he had food in front of him, was back to his beaming-self and lives were no longer at risk. Sweetness stuck to his guns and thought that it was lime juice and salt, but I couldn’t live with that definition and was very unhappy with it.

The next day I wasn’t thinking about it but a conclusion as to the definition hit me that I was very satisfied with. The Alligator Pear from the Testicle Tree turns into Smashed Avocado when it is mushed up and then combined with more than two ingredients and whenever a third ingredient is added then you no longer have the simple ‘Smashed Avocado’; It is the complex Guacamole. This works because Smashed Avocado is defined by its simplicity and the prominence of the Avocado whereas Guacamole seems to imply that there has been enough added to it that it is no longer just a smashed Avocado, enough has been changed that it becomes a Guacamole. Lime juice and salt?! Not enough in my books!

What that the world has been made an intelligible place once again and so it is time to snack on some Guacamole, as it has more than 3 ingredients so it can be known that it is a Guacamole.

The Moral Guacamole

4-5 - Ripe Avocados (If they aren’t ripe don’t bother! You want to be able to push your finger into them a bit and be able to mash them easily with a fork)

2 -Tablespoons of Lime Juice

1 – Chipotle in Adobo Pepper (2 if you like things a bit hotter as I do)

3 to 4 - Cloves of Garlic

1 – Tablespoon of Cumin

1/2 Cup of Chopped Cilantro

1/3 Cup of your Favorite BBQ Sauce (You want anything a little Sweet, Tangy and a bit Spicy)

Salt (to taste)

Directions:

Scoop out the Avocado into a bowl and mash it with a fork. Mashing with a fork gives a little bit of a textural difference and you want to stop before everything is evenly mashed so that there is the odd little chunk of Avocado.
Chop the Garlic and Chipotle pepper up into very small pieces.
Combine all ingredients into the bowl and mix until well mixed.

Give it a taste and feel free to add anything if you want more of it but that’s been pretty tried and true for me for several years. The Guacamole will be a little sweeter than you're used to with the BBQ sauce, but it should be balanced pretty well between the sweet and the hot while having a lot of flavors.

*Bonus note - if you want to turn it into a Smashed Avocado recipe remove any 5 ingredients.

Nathan for You and Psychics

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 08:55:00 +0000

I really enjoy the show Nathan For You for many reasons, it's funny, creative and different from anything else I've watched. Yet, I think why I really enjoy it so much is that Nathan has the ability to draw attention to the ridiculousness of everyday people, as he shows that it takes very little to reveal the strangeness that exists within all of us. Getting a musician to play a smoke detector as a musical instrument to skirt international shipping laws, having a large man offset his weight through the use of balloons so that he can go horseback riding, meeting people who would camp overnight and solve endless riddles for an $11 gas refund and, in the same episode, having the gas station owner talk about the benefits of drinking the urine of the young.

What is happening could be described as a suspect business version of the Milgram Experiment where people are pushed or are willing to do things that they wouldn't normally do because someone is asking them in such a way that it seems that their personal responsibility towards the end result is diminished.With that, Nathan's seriousness isn't a secondary feature of the show, but a necessary quality. That seriousness is his lab coat that, along with the cameras, creates the situation where his ideas can be followed.

Yet, once and a while, as was the case with the gas station owner, there isn't a need to push or diminish personal responsibility as the weirdness openly existed in the people and not the situation created. While that is true of some individuals, an entire profession shows that same quality. The absurdity of the psychic is not below the surface, but inherent in the position. In the 'normal' businessman/businesswoman it is the strange business proposition that has to create a novel situation where Nathan can press his determination and seriousness to create the absurd. In the case of the psychic, the absurd is always there, and while his strange idea accentuates the absurdity, it doesn't have to create it.

Nathan has three episodes where psychics are involved and each demonstrates the absurdity of the psychic.

1. The Ghost Realtor
The idea: A realtor could take advantage of the 50% of people who believe in ghosts by guaranteeing that the houses that they sell are ghost free.

Notable quotes: Psychic - "You know what an incubus is? It's a ghost that will have sex with someone until they die." Realtor - "Wow, that's like what I experienced when I was in Switzerland."

Exorcist - "Do you have any health issues? Are you constantly getting sick, do you have headache bothering you all the time?"
Nathan - "I do have one thing but it's kinda personal, it's uh..hemorrhoids."
Exorcist - "Yeah, that's demonic. Oh yeah. So how do you say that again? I do not say this name very often. Ham-ar-oids?"

Nathan - "Can it [exorcism] help with penis size?"
Exorcist - "Yeah, you see if it's demonic yeah I can cast out the demons from that. I don't have say for the thing to you know to increase your size or whatever."
Exorcist than places his hand on Nathan's head - "In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ I command all of you demons, if there is a demon there..um..you know..um affecting this mans penis, male organs, making it smaller, whatever, if there is any demon there lodged in his penis right now, COME OUT IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST, come out."

The Take away: Don't be surprised to find emails about exorcisms for penis enlargement in your junk folder.

2. A Celebration (It's a clip episode where he catches up with people from old episodes):

The idea: Just catching up with the Ghost Realtor (She really embraced the Ghost Realtor branding and became the Ghost Realtor)

Notable quotes: The new psychic – "So I’m known as a psychic medium, but I’m also clairsentient so I feel my angles and I’m clairvoyant so I can see. I’m also clairaudient so most of the time I hear, I hear voices and I also do financial advising."

Ghost Realtor – "Do you want to ask a question?"
Nathan – "For Ron?" (the previous, now deceased, psychic)
New Psychic – "Yes"
*I skipped a couple less interesting questions*
Nathan - "umm…I know on the show that he worked on the OJ trial, now that he’s on the other side does he have any clearer info on maybe who the real killer was?"
New Psychic – "He does but I don’t. I’m not getting a name or anything like that right now."
Nathan – "He knows who the killer is?"
New Psychic – "Yeah, yes."
Nathan – "Was it OJ?"
New Psychic – "This isn’t coming from Ron, it’s coming from me and that answer is yes."
Nathan – "But Ron’s not telling you that?"
New Psychic – "Every time I present him with that he steps back"
Nathan – "Who's telling you then?"
New Psychic – "My own connection with my own spirit guides"

The Take away: The possibilities have been narrowed down to either OJ did or did not kill Nichole Brown and Ron Goldman, thanks to Ron and the new psychic.

3. Miss Maria Garcia

The idea: That instead of advertising in a general way that you're an accurate psychic, instead pick out an extremely popular name and create individualized, targeted advertising that is in actuality not individualized at all.

Notable quotes: Psychic - "I've placed ads before and I haven't see a lot of return from them."

A person named Maria Garcia calls and the Psychic calls her back with Nathan there to schedule an appointment.
Maria - "Hello?"
Psychic - "Hello, is this Maria Garcia?"
Maria - "Yes"
Psychic - "My name is Dora, I'm a psychic"
Maria - "Hi"
Psychic - "Hi"
Nathan - *Whispers to the Psychic* - "Say you had a vision about her."
Psychic - "Ok"
Psychic - "I had a vision about you."
Nathan - *whispers again* 'and it was a strong vision'
Maria- "Oh"
Psychic - "And it was a really strong vision and it came to me in a dream."

The Take away: If a person generates and ensures the predictions that a physic makes happen, then the psychic was correct.

The multiple psychics and the exorcist on the show were each funny to watch and listen to independent of the situation Nathan created, they simply needed only screen time.

Nathan doesn't have to be a skeptic or even take a skeptical stance to make a skeptical point, as the only real difference between his show and a show like the Lond Island Medium is that Nathan isn't a true believer and the footage isn't being cut in a way that points out the hits and ignores the misses.
When much of mysticism is unpacked and shown in a way that doesn't accentuate or build up what is going on it is really effective in showing how underwhelming and silly it all looks. It is the difference between expectation vs reality.

If that second burger, the reality of psychics, was shown more consistently in the way that Nathan shows it then psychics would be a lot less appealing in general. Without showbiz magic, the real magic of psychics is a couple of stale tricks that sandwich a wrinkled fraud layered in cheese.

This highlights the effectiveness of the approach in it takes away the Us/Them conflict, as Nathan is more of a supportive neutral and the format of comedy is more disarming than any formal type of investigation would be. For those reasons, Nathan For You might be the best source of psychic skepticism I've seen on TV.

I'd be really interested to hear what someone with a strong belief in psychics thought of those episodes. Maybe my view is different in being a skeptic and the psychics on the show don't look as bad or as silly as I think they do, or maybe they would pull a Lamar Keene and conclude that those psychics were bad those weren't typical .psychics.

Dragons Need Balance - Two Dragon's Den Pitches Uncomfortably Familiar to Power Balance

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 17:47:00 +0000

I used to watch the CBC show Dragon's Den when it first came out and enjoyed it quite a bit. I even played soccer with someone that was on the show which was kinda neat, shout out to Wonton Crunch. With that, it is disappointing that my attention has been drawn to two pitches from the show's 12th Season that each makes the claim that they can instantly improve your balance. Those companies are Neuro Reset and New Age Performance (Seriously that's the name...with that name you're getting lucky to get away with simply not being more balanced for $50, I'd expect 'New Age Performance' to sell you an $1199 dollar pair of cleats that shock your feet and realign your charkras).

Both pitches are of the same nature and make the same claim. People come out, talk about having a product that improves balance by adjusting something, one of the dragons has their balance tested and they are shakey, the product is used and instantly the dragon's balance is now perfect. The dragons are amazed and compete with each other to become partners with the people making the pitch.

For those around for the momentary craze that was Power Balance (I actually wrote a post about Kingston Police selling them in a fundraising campaign) both pitches seem a little too familiar, as they all involve a balance test, a change that doesn't seem to have an impact on balance, and then instantaneously after the product is used the person's balance has dramatically improved.

How is this done? Well, Brian Brushwood over at Scam School documents a variety of ways that it could be done and explainings the trick of instantaneous improvement in balance. Brian does such a good job that from watching the video once I've now been able to perform the trick on other people and explain how it was done. It's pretty easy to do, and I could see how someone could trick themselves into thinking that something else was the cause of the change in balance. The way to invalidate the balance test so that a person feels off balance in the first test and then when tested again feels that they have much more balance is pretty simple. When you want a person to be off balance push or pull that person at an angle that is away from their center of gravity (pretty much at any an angle away from where their feet are) and if you want them to feel more balanced push/pull towards the center of gravity (towards where their feet are works well). If you watch the Dragon's Den clips you can see that change taking place.

See a difference?

Look at the direction of the wrist

When Power Balance was required to show that their claims we different from the trick described above it resulted in a lost court case and a 57 million dollar settlement. Now, those bracelets have to make their claims in the vague way that Q-Ray bracelets do after they too lost a lawsuit involving unsubstantiated claims which resulted in the company having to return 87 million dollars.

With that background, the specific companies and the scientific backing for their claims can be examined, as each has company has a page dedicated to 'science'.

Neuro Reset is said to work through a "subtle energy pattern that wakes up the sensory nerve receptors", That pattern effect is said to be the product of 7 years of clinical research...which doesn't seem to be time well spent because that research wasn't even worth publishing on Neuro Resets's own "The Science" page explaining how it worked, let alone being research published in an academic journal.

This one is more obvious

Check out his fingers and wrist

Further, it is interesting that a technology that could improve the function of joints in the back and spine is being marketed to golfers and isn't being used to help people with medical issues that could be resolved if the claims being made were true.

Neuro Reset even does the classic woo tactic of using the word 'quantum' as a justification in a way that doesn't make any sense, as the device's communication is said to work through quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement is complicated, and I won't do it justice here, but it can be broken down into the understanding that when two particles are entangled and the same measurement is made on those particles the result will be the same regardless of the distance between those two particles in what was measured. What is important here is that entanglement shows no way to effect neuropathways in their functioning, and the No-Communication Theorem points out that there is probably no communication between the entangled particles.

On the other hand what is encouraging is that, despite its name, New Age Performance does have a legitimate science page and makes a plausible, non-quantum, claim. The page even has a few real published studies about how bite alignment improves athletic performance and a double-blinded study that found significant results for the New Age Performance style mouthguard. This science page was night and day from Neuro Resets mumbo jumbo, unfortunately, even if those tests were correct none of those tests remotely demonstrated the balance affect seen on Dragon's Den. That test was misleading, unethical and unnecessary, because if the product worked in the way that is documented on companies science page it wasn't needed.

Yet it doesn't seem that the evidence on the side of New Age Performance. While the studies linked on their webpage are positive, there are many negative follow up studies that are ignored, 1 (although it did have an effect on the hight of jumps), 2 (no positive effects), 3 (no positive effects), 4 (no positive effects), 5 (positive effects with power, but otherwise negative), 6 (no positive effects).

It seems that the study into the theory of jaw alignments effect on performance is much more negative than positive, and this isn't just my conclusion it was also the conclusion of the British Advertising Authority. The BAA reviewed similar claims made by Underarmour Performance Mouthware and despite Underarmour having a similar science page to New Age Performance, it was ruled that on multiple claims their ads were misleading and lacked substantiation.

I think the major lesson is that if something is claimed to immediately change your balance through a mechanism that seems strange or is hard to understand then it is likely taking advantage of a balance trick. That said can't the Dragons Den get one Marc Cuban style shark that displays a smidgen of skepticism? They did say it sounded 'too good to be true' it's a disapointed that the questioning stopped there and only further disapointment that each of those companies got offered deals and were legitimized by the whole process.

Sam Harris, Meditation, Mental Illness and a Question from British Columbia

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 06:11:00 +0000

Picture from ABC News

I'm going to preface this post by saying that I like and respect Sam Harris. I think he is one of the preeminent popular intellectuals that is currently active and I am in agreement with him on the majority of issues which he speaks about. I think his takes on identity politics, free speech, religion, and many other topics are largely correct.

In addition to that, one thing I really appreciate about Sam is how thoughtful he is. That thoughtfulness can be heard in his podcast in the respect he has for his guests, in how he wants his guests treated by his audience after they are on the podcast and in what he wants the experience of being on his podcast to be like (https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-limits-of-persuasion) about 28 minutes in.

In addition to that, he shows his thoughtfulness in his approach for donations to his podcasts where he asks for donations, but limits his request to those who can easily afford it. This may seem trivial, as someone who doesn't have the money to donate, probably wouldn't donate anyway, but it shows how he is expressing a feeling for his listeners that often isn't expressed. I respect him making that statement and the thought that went into making it.

Yet, I do have an issue with something Sam said in response to a question asked at The Orpheum Theater in Vancouver that was recorded in his most recent podcast. I think in answering the question he missed the thoughtfulness that he usually gets right.

Question: "Hi my name is Randy. My question is for Sam. I wanted to know what role meditation has played in your mental health, I guess. Have you been more resilient to depression or anxiety? Because it seems like your always kinda being attacked by somebody either Batman or having Charles Murray on your Podcast. Because I'm at a point where I'm kinda done with antidepressants, psychotics and mood stabilizers. I want to try something new, so what's your take on meditation as a mental health treatment?"

Answer: "Well, I think it can be incredibly useful. I think there are certain people who probably shouldn't go on intense silent meditation retreats so I wouldn't recommend the most intense meditation experiences for everybody. There are people who find going into silence for a week or a month destabilizing and that's a tiny percentage of people but you should be aware that it is possible to have a bad experiences doing a lot of meditation.

The kind of meditation I recommend is just learning to pay much more careful attention to what it is like to be you. When you pay attention, you begin to notice all the ways in which you are suffering unnecessarily. The universe didn't have to be this way, but is just so happens there is a direct connection between seeing more of what is actually happening in your own mind and ceasing to suffer in many of ways that are unnecessary. Honestly, it is the most important thing I've ever learned, but it's not necessary to learn most other things, it's orthogonal to almost everything else we care about intellectually. It's not that I don't suffer in all the ordinary ways that I suffered with before I learned to meditate. The half-life of suffering, the half-life of something like anger or anxiety or embarrassment or fear or whatever the negative mindstate is, it's cut way way down and also behavioral consequences of those negative emotions, the door is closed to those.

When you think of the difference between being angry 10 seconds and then actually letting it go and being angry for an hour, right, it's an enormous difference, because in that hour you can get up to doing all kinds of life deranging things on the basis of anger and feel good about doing those things, right, because you damn well should be doing those things because you're pissed. Just shorting the time of all these negative states is [an] enormous benefit. Meditation is a great tool for that."

I didn't want to judge Sam's response and write this without looking into the efficacy of meditation as a treatment for depression and there is some pretty solid evidence [1, 2] that meditation may be as effective a treatment as antidepressants for depression, but this is to be taken with some precaution. The general results from different studies tend to point to mindfulness being more successful at dealing with stress than anxiety or depression, which each have smaller effect sizes. There does seem to be an effect for meditation in the treatment of mental illness, what I presume Randy was suffering from, with meditation.

However, there are two larger problems pointed out by Steven Novella.

1.The problem with this research is that it is largely preliminary, as the specifics that makeup mindfulness is not always consistent, and there remain questions about what type of people benefit the most and with what severity of condition mindfulness is most effective at treating. This is fine as the results seem to be trending in the right direction of it being an effective treatment, but there are issues that remain to be settled.

2. The control measures used as opposite of mindfulness are not adequate. Mindfulness is tested against medication and placebo medication, but not against relaxation or sham mindfulness. This is problematic, as it makes it unclear if there is something specific about mindfulness that is helpful or if it is a product of relaxation which isn't specific to mindfulness.

That being the case and my expectation that Sam, who is likely more educated on the subject than I, should have had a more thoughtful response to that question. I am fine with him talking about his experience and how it has affected his life, but I think that his response lost track of the context of the question being that, the person asking the question is someone with serious problems talking about ceasing to take all their medication. Somewhere in that response there needed to be a caveat about talking to a doctor about his decision or getting some kind of medical advice before just stopping his medication.

Sam's response, unfortunately, reminded me of the type of response that is characteristic of proponents of alternative medicine, 'Here is my personal experience of it working and it was good for me.' In that, I expect a higher quality response for Sam Harris and maybe he simply lost track of that part of the question, but I was disappointed that it wasn't there from someone who usually gets those parts correct. Further, he didn't mention the evidence in support of meditation being used to help treat mental illness which is also disappointing, but that bothered me less than not addressing the context of a person threating to stop taking all their medication.

Given that there is some medical evidence for meditation being helpful am I over-reaching in my criticism of Sam's response? Does he, as a proponent of meditation, have an ethical responsibility when someone is asking a question like that?

Book Summary: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 15:47:00 +0000

The last summary, Society Against the State, was received fairly well, so I decided to also publish a similar summary assignment I wrote for Jurgen Habermas's, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This text was a chore to read and understand, as it is written with a sentence structure that made it harder to follow than a text should be, as there were many sentences which were subdivided by multiple explanations, imagine there being three elaborations like this within a common sentence but only longer and more complex, within the book.

Outside of that literary criticism, I also think that the degree of rationality and the adherence to rational thought doesn't reflect how people actually act; Habermas thinks people are rational to a greater degree than would be empirically supported.

That said Habermas is saying something interesting about how a society should function and describes a phenomenon which is commonly referred to without ever really being flushed out. The feedback I received on this summary was that I didn't get deep enough into the economic conditions and the meaning those conditions have on the public sphere, but that was a conscious choice. I didn't think that, that amount of depth was needed to explain how the functioning of the public sphere was actualized in any given period of time. That may be a mistake, so if someone is assigned a similar project it may be beneficial to expand that area. Anyway here is my summary of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – Summary

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Habermas is attempting to track the existence and transformation of the public sphere. The public sphere is an elusive and perpetually evolving concept which transforms in response to different social pressures and requires Habermas to embrace historical, philosophical, economic, and sociological sources of information to encompass the totality of the range of effects that cause changes in the functioning of the public sphere. Those fields, when used together, are able to account for the complete history of the public sphere from its non-existence in feudalism, to its emergence in the separation of private and public in the early capitalist commercial economy, to its near ideal functioning in the bourgeois public sphere and finally in the breaking down of the public sphere in modern society through the collapse of the private/public distinction from which the public sphere once emerged. Despite historical accounts of the public sphere the task in this work is not that of a historian. Habermas isn’t simply explaining the emergence, proliferation and deterioration of the public sphere, he is active in imputing his thoughts about the ideal public sphere and how it should function. His recommendations sit numerously among historical details of representative publicity, the use of letters and changes in suffrage. In this way Habermas’s task in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is similar to that of a medical doctor; Habermas diagnoses the health of the public sphere as it transitions through history, tracking its functionality against the ideal of an informed private populous participating in rational-critical debate to ‘subject domination to reason’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 117).

Habermas begins his book with the description of a few key terms that are widely used, but he makes critical distinctions to his definitions that if not understood would cause misreading of his conclusions. Two definitions stand out as being of paramount importance, public opinion and the public sphere. In the opening section, Habermas lays out qualifications for something to be considered public opinion. There is an essential requirement of public opinion to be created by a ‘critical judge’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 2). The understanding of what defines a critical judge is best explained in Habermas’s criticism of modern society when it is stated that, “…it [opinions] could only be realized in the measure that these personal opinions could evolve through rational-critical debate of a public into public opinion—opinion publique.” (Habermas, 1991, p. 219) This expresses that a private idea becomes a public opinion through the act of that idea being subjected to rational-critical debate. However it is not enough that an idea is debated publically, it has to be debated by an informed literate public as those are the ‘kind of opinion[s] capable of becoming public’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 247). This is of great importance as Habermas’s criticism against modern society is based on the loss of not only the lack of critical judgment, but the impossibility of people to be ‘critical judges’.

The public sphere is then understood as the totality of the societal conditions that support the formation of public opinions (public places) and the public opinions/actions themselves. To explain the public sphere Habermas references the Greek model of society where the agora is the public place, lexis is the public sphere in discussion and praxis is the common actions of a group all of which constitute the public sphere (Habermas, 1991, p. 3). This creates the foundation, but it is vital to detail the importance of private/public distinction, as it will be significant for discussing the functioning of the public sphere in different societies. People with no political power, office, position or who are not able to participate in debate would have no publicness and would be excluded from the public sphere (Habermas, 1991, p. 11), while the private sphere is classically attached to the interior of the household where the individuals have no effect on state interests. The reproduction of life, the labor of the slaves, and birth and death are all described as part of the private sphere (Habermas, 1991, p. 3).

With those definitions, it is then possible to understand the first diagnosis in Habermas’s medical examination of the public sphere. His first examination is of feudal society in the High Middle Ages. The diagnosis is that the public sphere is non-existent due to the lack of separation between public and private (Habermas, 1991, p. 5). That lack of separation between public and private leaves the public sphere unable to exist as its own entity, and due to that there exists only a representative publicity entwined with private power.

This can be seen in the as the defining characteristic of feudal society where ‘lordly’ and ‘publicus’ could be used interchangeably with no loss of meaning (Habermas, 1991, p. 6), where the King enjoyed being synonymous with ‘publicness’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 7) and where the nobleman could be an authority to the degree that he displayed having such qualities (Habermas, 1991, p. 13). This means that the entirety of what would constitute a public sphere is encapsulated within the lord and the lords household, leaving nowhere for the public sphere to take place (Habermas, 1991, p. 5). In feudal society publicity and publicness is a ‘status attribute’ to those with power (Habermas, 1991, p. 7).

After the High Middle Ages there is a transition period between feudal lordships and the budding capitalism where Habermas makes no diagnoses of functioning, but instead limits himself to describing the changes that allowed for the creation of the bourgeois public sphere. This period took place after the Renaissance, specifically when representative publicity broke down. At that time there becomes a need and use of specific words to designate private people from those who had public positions thus generating the first private and public sphere in the modern sense (Habermas, 1991, p. 10-11). This was a time of transitions for the public sphere, the first public budget was separated from the rulers private holdings creating public interests separate from private wealth (Habermas, 1991, p. 12), the economic conditions changed from feudalism to being early capitalist creating ‘horizontal economic dependencies’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 15), the press created public discourse when news letters were printed in ‘political journals’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 20), and feudal authority was transformed into the use of ‘police’ over private people (the addressees of public authority) (Habermas, 1991, p. 18).

That transition had effects on both authority and economics which led to the emergence of the public, public opinion and the functioning public sphere that would develop into the bourgeois public sphere. This was done through the steps detailed in the previous paragraph, which were able to create both a private/public distinction and the possibility of rational-critical debate (Habermas, 1991, p. 28-29) and culminated, in England, in the founding of the Bank of England, elimination of censorship and the first cabinet government (the precursor to the full parliamentiarzation of state authority (Habermas, 1991, p. 58).

With the effects of the transition period in place, economic and social pressures were able to create the bourgeoisie public sphere. It is this public sphere which Habermas finds comes closest to identifying and actualizing the existence of the ideal public sphere, as there is a literate and informed public that critically-rationally debates ideas which is able to create a state responsive to and forged by public interest (Habermas, 1991, p. 158 and 246). Habermas still finds fault with one aspect of the bourgeois public sphere, as it is largely limited to property-owning men and, “A public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete; it was not a public sphere at all.”(Habermas, 1991, p. 85). Habermas makes the attempt to posit that so long as there is the allowance for the possibility of universal access to the public sphere then that criticism wouldn’t hold, but the limitation of the public sphere to property owners put those property owners in a position to protect and limit the public sphere (Habermas, 1991, p. 86-87).

Even with the problem of exclusivity the bourgeoisie public sphere came close to being a completely healthy functioning public sphere for Habermas. That proper functioning is epitomized by the salon, as Habermas writes glowingly, “Only the name of salon recalled the origin of convivial discussion and rational-critical public debate in the sphere of noble society.” (Habermas, 1991, p. 45). It was where men and women could both step out of the private sphere and into the public sphere (Habermas, 1991, p. 45-46) to debate publicly the issues able to constitute a public opinion (Habermas, 1991, p. 98). The barrier of being a property owner or man didn’t exist in the salon, which is important as it constituted the major problem with the functioning of the public sphere in bourgeoisie society; making the salon the ideal public sphere.

The social pressure created by public opinion and a well-functioning public sphere created, “…The constitutional state as a bourgeois state [which] established the public sphere in the political realm as an organ of the state so as to ensure institutionally the connection between law and public opinion.”(Habermas, 1991, p. 81). The public had become ingrained into the state and was no longer an element of society, but society’s defining feature (Habermas, 1991, p. 88).

The public sphere would then undergo another major transformation into the modern public sphere. This transformation erodes most of the positive features of the bourgeois public sphere and leaves Habermas to diagnose the modern public sphere as non-functional. The modern public sphere is suffering from the ‘refeudalization’ of society. Refeudalization is the exact malady, as it is the return to an inability to separate public and private that Habermas views as the cause of the dismantling of the public sphere and public opinion.

The public sphere adopted the interests of civil society which resulted in a feedback loop, instead of private people debating to create public opinions, the public civil society was influencing the opinions of itself; the public was defining itself and blurring what was private (Habermas, 1991, p. 142). Amplifying the blurring the public/private distinction was the transfer of public functions to private bodies (Habermas, 1991, p. 142). Those two effects created a social sphere where, “…the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ could not be usefully applied.” (Habermas, 1991, p. 142).

This refeudalization then inhibited the formulation of public debate. Private reading, the precondition for being rational/critical, was the necessary condition for a person to contribute to public debate. The intersection of refeudalization and reading is that reading is the act of a private individual and as such the pressures of refeudalization pushes private people away from it and into acts where there is a privacy among other people (watching television as a group) (Habermas, 1991, p. 158).

Those problems created by the pressures of refeudalization would be enough to threaten the existence of the public sphere, but it is refeudalism’s ability to create the private citizen as a public consumer that is the death blow for the public sphere. Private enterprises are able to manipulate people to the point that, “…in their customers the idea that in their consumption decisions [private decisions] they act in their capacity as citizens…” which causes the public to ‘address its citizens like consumers’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 195). The citizen and the consumer cannot be the same person if there is to be a private/public distinction. It is clear that Habermas views the option of voting with your wallet as no public vote at all, and a choice separated from the public realm.

Habermas expresses two ways forward from refeudalism that can be distinguished in the final section On The Concept of Public Opinion. The first way forward is through the implementation of qualifications of private people to form public opinions based on ‘autonomous hierarchical qualities of representation’ which, when simplified, means that the ‘best informed’, ‘most intelligent’ and ‘most moral’ are who can debate to form public opinion (Habermas, 1991, p. 238).This suggestion implies that there are informed people capable of creating a public sphere in the modern environment. The problem is that current societal conditions make that spheres existence, in the near-universal way that existed in the world of letters, impossible, so public opinion is needed to be formed to the scale in which it is conditionally possible.

The cost of this solution is high, as, “The element of publicity that guarantees rationality is to be salvaged at the expense of its other element, that is, the universal guaranteeing general accessibility.” (Habermas, 1991, p. 238). This seems like an extreme option, but in reality it would amount to the creation of a representative public sphere based on merit, not unlike the ideal for representative democracy in government. It is elitist, but not exceedingly so and if Habermas is correct in his diagnoses of the modern public sphere than it may be akin to valuing beneficence over non-malfeasance when examined in ethical medical terminology.

The second option is expressed near the end of the book and is also centered on the proper relationship between information and debate to create informed decision making. Just as some individuals are capable of creating a functioning public sphere, there is another group Habermas observes with the same potential. By function with informed private opinions which are critically debated to form conclusions that can be trusted, the intraoganization is the other entity capable of forming a public sphere. At the intraorganizationial level there are the conditions for the public sphere in the ‘mutual correspondence between the political opinions of private people’ that create a ‘quasi-public opinion’ (Habermas, 1991, p. 248). That functioning can be transferred to attempt to inform society where, “…a public can be brought about only in this way: through a critical publicity brought to life with intraorganizational public spheres, the completely short-circuited circulation of quasi-public opinion must be linked to the informal domain of the hitherto nonpublic opinions.” (Habermas, 1991, p. 249-250).

With those recommendations, Habermas no longer sees a universal public sphere as a viable option, and instead, the public sphere needs to be limited to individuals still capable of forming public opinions or the intraorganizations that have the framework of a ‘quasi-public opinion’ within their structure. Society needs to amputate itself from the head down .

Works Cited

Habermas, J. (1991). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. (T. Burger, Trans.) Cambridge: MIT press. (Original work published 1962)

Book Summary: Society Against the State by Pierre Clastres

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 22:14:00 +0000

I had to write a summary of the book Society Against the State for school that focused on the main argument that Clastres was attempting to make in the book, so I thought I'd just post it here as it may be helpful. It has some page numbers and quotes if someone is doing a similar assignment that would be useful. Generally though the book did teach me a lot about primitive societies and made me dust off a lot of the knowledge that I hadn't used since reading Guns, Germs and Steel, so for that I think this quick summary may be worthwhile to read for the understanding of the typical structure and functioning of small (150 people or less) primitive societies.

The one major problem is that Clastres really only describes one type of primitive society, the ones with a power structure equalized amongst everyone, and excludes any other society with a different structure that may still be commonly be described as 'primitive' without ever clearly making proper distinctions. I spent much of the book being bothered by that, but near the end, to his credit, he does limit his definition of the societies he is describing to those that are small (of about 150 people). I just wish he had made that clear from the beginning. Further the sources I looked up, verify that Clastres is accurate in his descriptions.

Society Against the State

Pierre Clastres makes the case that various native groups can and should be looked at as examples for an alternative model for societal living. That alternative model has been sitting in the open and partially documented yet remained unseen, obscured by the Western standards used in the judgment and understanding of primitive cultures. That bias has resulted in the underestimation of three parts of primitive societies, the cohesion between small primitive cultures, the amount aggregate people living in those cultures and, critically, how politically active those societies are. When that bias is mitigated those societies can then start to be understood in their own terms, which, largely, amounts to the realization of how power differs between ‘advanced societies’ and ‘primitive societies’. This difference in the use of power, for Clastres, creates a binary distinction between modern Western societies where power exists as coercion and primitive societies where coercion doesn’t exist. This doesn’t mean that there is an absence of power in primitive societies, only that, that power is distributed evenly instead of coercively amongst the population. This difference in the distribution and use of power leads to the essence of Clastres book which is expressed in its title, that primitive societies shouldn’t be seen, as they commonly are, as lacking a state, but rather they are people that are fundamentally against the state. The argument put forth in support for that conclusion is most successful in its attribution that it’s the difference in power within primitive societies and how power is distributed within those societies that can account for why it is correct to view people in primitive societies as not lacking a state, but actively choosing to live in an alternative way.

Clastres (1989), begins Society Against the State through attempting to illuminate the bias that has caused his later conclusions to remain unseen for so long. The depth of this bias can be documented in the distinction of why primitive societies exist in with the structure they possess. Instead of the understanding that people in primitive societies make active choices affecting the structure of their society, or that systems may be purposefully different in other types of societies observers are often looking and judging those societies from the understanding that modern Western societies are the standard in which all other cultures and societies are to be compared and judged with. This can directly be seen in the type of words which are commonly used as descriptors of primitive societies, which include ‘embryonic’, ‘nascent’ and ‘poorly developed’ (Clastres, 1989, p. 16). Those evolutionary terms posit that there is a clear direction in which a society is supposed to aim towards, a natural progression with steps to be made in which ‘the state’ is the destiny of every society (Clastres, 1989, p. 189). This necessary unfolding is emphatically denied by Clastres (1989) as he writes, “This is what needs to be firmly grasped: primitive societies are not overdue embryos of subsequent societies, bodies whose, ‘normal’ development was arrested by some strange malady; they are not situated at the commencement of a historical logic leading straight to an end given ahead of time, but recognized only a posteriori as our own social system.” (p. 199)

This is of paramount importance as it amounts to a ‘Copernican Revolution’ where society can’t fairly be described or defined by progress to arbitrary markers. There is no objective standard which society can be judged by despite how often ethnologists make that error and express their opinions in such a way that it would affirm an evolutionary view where there is an upward progression from savagery to civilization (Clastres, 1989, p. 190).

This pervasive error of assumed progression led to specific individual errors. The first of which is the myth of the subsistence economy which is thought of as “…one that barely manages to feed its members…In other words, archaic societies do not live, they survive.” (Clastres, 1989, p. 13). Two other problems created by that bias, one, the exaggerated separation of small primitive tribes are examined in the chapter entitled, ‘Independence and Exogamy’, and, two, the underestimation of the number of people living in the pre-Columbian America’s which is documented in a chapter entitled, ‘Amerindian Demography’. Each of those problems caused by bias is damaging to the understanding of primitive societies on their own merits, yet they don’t approach the significance of two other consequences of the bias of Western examination. The two most important factors caused by ethnocentric bias are the attribution of the lack, or even non-existence, of power and due to that lack of power the attribution that primitive societies are apolitical (Clastres, 1989, p.12 and p.20). Power and politics are conceptually linked to coercion as there is, “…the unquestioned conviction that political power is manifested within a relation that ultimately comes down to coercion.” (Clastres, 1989, p. 11).

Each of those errors, the view of the subsistence economy, the viewed separation between primitive tribes, the underestimation of the population size of the Americas pre-Columbus, the lack of politics and the lack of power are examined by Clastres. The subsistence economy may be accurate in description as the people are getting what they need to survive and not a great deal of other things, yet it is, “…a concept that reflects the attitudes and habits of Western observers with regard to primitive societies more than the economic reality on which those cultures are based.” (Clastres, 1989, p. 14). Rather than working to barely survive many societies with economies that would be described as ‘subsistence economies‘ produce a great deal more than that society can use, and they often don’t have to work particularly hard to meet the needs of the society (Clastres, 1989, p. 196).

The chapter on Independence and Exogamy documents how the group structure of primitive societies has been described in an inaccurate way, as there is cohesion between small tribes and sharing in the practice of exogamy. This was documented in the Forest People, where the Tupi are given as an example of a situation where authority is divided between multiple groups, yet where each group retains its identity (Clastres, 1989, p 71-73). Exogamy, the practice of out-group mating, allows the entrance and continuity of political alliances between tribes (Clastres, 1989, p. 65), which could then be called upon to work together in times of war (Clastres, 1989, p. 74). This means that while individual primitive groups are small in number, they can be linked into groups that can transcend those smaller numbers without the loss of identity or without top-down authority.

Further, the details of judgments surrounding the density and total populations for Pre-Columbian native societies made by anthropologists are largely shown to be in error and in direct conflict with firsthand accounts from other sources, which themselves would be reduced by the amount of depopulation from earlier epidemics (Clastres, 1989, p. 96). This fact Clastres presents does beg the question though if germs are a result and consequence of population density, than the pre-Columbian native populations must have existed below the densities required for disease to flourish, as while European explorers brought with them a litany of diseases the ‘Columbian exchange’ of disease was tremendously disproportionate (Merbs, 1992), and only Syphilis is seen as being a disease transferred back to Europe which originated in the Americas (Diamond, 1998, p. 212). Even with that caveat Clastres documents errors, which if correct, make the lowest population estimates impossible to be believed outside of a politically motivated viewpoint (Clastres, 1989, p. 98-99).

Those biases are each problems, but problems that are subservient to the obscuring of politics and power from primitive societies. Clastres illustrates that power is both measured and constituted in advance by the concepts of Western civilization for ethnologists (Clastres, 1989, p. 16). Due to that power is looked for in a hierarchical way, which renders the power that exists in primitive societies to remain unseen, unable to be viewed from that narrow perspective. With that understanding it is then easy to understand why those societies were viewed as existing without power as a strictly ethnocentric view exists in a state of ‘conceptual poverty’ unable to correctly interpret the data being received. Clastres gets away from that ethnocentric viewpoint by rejecting that power has to be linked with violence or constructed in a hierarchical way (Clastres, 1989, p. 22).

Both that power exists and that it exists in a way incompatible with the Western understanding of power can be shown through the examination of the role of the chief for Clastres. The chief, in primitive society, has three expectations, to be a peacemaker, to be generous with their possessions, and to be a talented orator (Clastres, 1989, p. 29). Yet, while entitled as ‘chief’ that leader is unable to use coercive power, the chief must instead rely on prestige, fairness and verbal ability (Clastres, 1989, p. 30). The chief has to rely on those abilities, due to his role being humble in scope and controlled by public opinion (Clastres, 1989, p. 37). Clastres describes the leader of primitive society as “…a planner of the group’s economic and ceremonial activities, [yet] the leader possesses no decision-making power; he is never certain that his ‘orders’ will be carried out.” (Clastres, 1989, p. 37). Primitive society has built in to the role of chief the means of controlling that role and making sure that it doesn’t entail the inequality between people, as, “The same operation that institutes the political sphere forbids it the exercise of its jurisdiction: it is in this manner that culture uses against power the very ruse of nature.” (Clastres, 1989, p. 46). This creates a situation where, “The chief is there to serve society; it is society as such – the real locus of power - that exercises its authority over the chief.” (Clastres, 1989, p. 207).

Nowhere is this as evident as in the duty for the chief as the speaker of the society. In both primitive and modern societies, there is a relationship between speech and power (Clastres, 1989, p.152). Yet while power exists with speech in both types of society there is a differential role as the foundation for the use of speech, “If in societies with a States speech is power’s right, in societies without a State speech is power’s duty.” (Clastres, 1989, p. 153). The primary example of this difference is in the chief’s daily speeches, which while expected of the chief, are largely ignored by the members of the tribe (Clastres, 1989, p. 218). The chief doesn’t have to be listened to because his words hold no power or even authority. In the act of compelling the chief to speak than ignoring his words “…what the Savages exhibit is the continual effort to prevent chiefs from being chiefs…” (Clastres, 1989, p. 218).

This is the nature of power in primitive society, it is the negation of power for the individual and the control of power by society. That nature of power is further reflected in the enforcement of social roles and the written laws of primitive cultures. That primitive society’s share a group power can be seen how social roles are enforced. Despite having no one making coercive rules, there are strict societal roles, i.e. who can use a bow/basket (Clastres, 1989, p. 107), what a person may sing about (Clastres, 1989, p. 113), or societal codes, in how food is distributed (Clastres, 1989, p. 114) and even in defining who is a man and who is a woman (Clastres, 1989, p. 109-110). These social conventions are kept in place through the use of shame and fear, as there is shame for a man that would do a woman’s work, while there fear for a woman that would attempt to do something defined as being a man’s job (Clastres, 1989, p. 107). While power is equalized amongst the people in primitive society this doesn’t mean that anything goes, as can be seen in the strict prohibitions on the roles of men and women.

Whether chiseled in stone, painted on the skins of animals, or drawn on papyrus the laws of a society is where the power of a society exists and it exists in writing. This is the same as primitive societies in a more abstract way, as the canvas they use is the body of their population and the tool of writing is aptly described as torture (Clastres, 1989, p. 180-181). There is an initiation into society that comes with coming of age in which ‘the essence is torture’ (Clastres, 1989, p. 182), and the purpose of which is to mark both the body and mind of the initiate (Clastres, 1989, p. 184). That act of initiation ingrains the law on the body of the person, which Clastres describes as having the result of showing three things, physical endurance, membership to society and further the lesson of the prohibition of inequality; that the new citizen is equal, but no more important than anyone else (Clastres, 1989, p. 186). Together this links three things together for primitive societies the body, writing and the law (Clastres, 1989, p. 187). This is a powerful display in the power of primitive society over the people that live within it which literally engraves itself onto its people.

This demonstrates that far from primitive societies being pre-political or without power, there is power and politics in primitive societies that exists in an equalized way amongst society in a way that is foreign to western society; power that is given and immediately negated, society that refuses the state. That was the main argument posed by Clastres (1989) in Society Against the State. The support for this argument came first from eliminating and bias that caused the nature of primitive society to be misunderstood. With that bias eliminated it was possible to examine the use of power in primitive societies, which found that instead of existing as a coercive force wielded by those in leadership roles power was distributed in an equalized way amongst the members of society. That distribution of power when coupled with instantaneous nullifications led to a balance of power both unseen and impossible from Western perspectives. “Primitive society is the place where separate power is refused, because the society itself, and not the chief is the real locus of power.” (Clastres, 1989, p. 154).

Works Cited

Clastres, P. (1989). Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert Hurley in collaboration with Abe Stein.

Diamond, J. M. (1998). Guns, germs and steel: a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. Random House.

Merbs, C. F. (1992). A new world of infectious disease. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 35(S15), 3-42.

I'm Blackface Broke Right Now

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 07:03:00 +0000

I'm not sure if it is completely appropriate to use the term 'blackface broke' as it could easily be mistaken as being a racial attack, but I think it is the most accurate description of the situation in which I currently find myself. I usually write on non-personal topics, but this post will be more of an examination of a few insights of an obviousness that while understood, is hard to truly appreciate without having been in similar circumstance.

I've been concentrating on school, balancing that with a daughter that has only begun to lose her new car smell, while looking at finding a job that is in my field of study. In the year previous to this, I had saved up a fair sum of money to do this before I took time off to complete my masters.

It was all going pretty well until recently the bank account numbers start to get smaller and smaller, I started to avoid activities that I would have regularly done, I stopped driving as much as possible, started buying more inexpensive food...all sorts of reasonable attempts to maximize the amount of money I had left.

Then it happened, although I'm not sure when, something shifted. I started to not make decisions based on the maximisation of the money I had left and instead based decisions on how much it 'hurt' to spend money or to think about how much less money I had then before. I caught myself not buying gas and driving home to make it with the gas light on because that way I wouldn't have to spend anything, but this actually cost me more because the only gas station that is close has higher prices. I think there is a point where a person regularly is no longer attempting to maximize the money they have left and instead is attempting to avoid the emotional reaction to facing how much money they actually have. This is where I found myself, where I had to actually focus on making rational economic spending decisions and had to face the reality of the situation. Maybe other people have faced similar insights in similar circumstances?

I even almost changed my mind on the lottery...almost, I can understand the appeal (there doesn't appear to be any other solutions, you lose 2 dollars and you're only slightly worse off then you were before and the only real way out is something significant which the lottery represents). Yet, it's made my opinion more negative about the lottery, as I can appreciate how predatory it is to take advantage of hope and desperation. It is that demographic that, proportionally, is hit the hardest by any wasted money, which the lottery unequivocally is.

Anyway, back to 'blackface broke'. This is the term I think is an apt description of my current situation as I am not truly broke. I have money that I could get too if needed, and support from my family around me, but I think I have experienced enough, not to say that I really know what it is like to face the desperation and hopelessness of having no money, but to know within a magnitude of degrees what that would feel like. I think this experience is similar to a person using 'blackface' to understand what it is like to be an African American, as they would experience a degree of racism, but only to a degree that was orders of magnitudes away from the racist reality. In either case, I think that that experience is enough to understand that it sucks and appreciate some of the effects it could have on the decisions you make, but not how awful it could really be.

What Field Hockey can Teach us About Science

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 02:44:00 +0000

I had almost completed writing a post that responded to many of individual questions raised in the comments to two (1, 2) posts regarding B. Allen Wallace and his appearance on a couple of different skeptical podcasts a few years ago. Yet the format of answering questions didn’t make for the most interesting or easiest of reads, but through the act of writing those responses I did come to a unifying comparison that encapsulates many of those responses.

Field Hockey Vs. Science

I will compare the rules for the game of field hockey which were created in the Australian desert in an attempt to limit Canadian dominance of sports with hockey in the name and the rules of science. Take for instance this comment from Andree,

“On Eastern there are a plethora of explanations about consciousness based on introspection observation, and this is also falsifiable method just like looking through a microscope. But to reproduce an experiment you have to be trained with this instrument, meditation, just like a scientist have to be trained with microscope to see a cell. But Western science just reject meditation as a consciousness observation method, and prefer to find the answers through correlation between physical properties of brain and mental phenomena. The last method is not wrong, but why reject a direct method?”

There are multiple things to address as a few interesting points are being made in that comment. The first question is, is introspective observation a falsifiable and measurable method, equivalent to looking through a microscope? To his point when someone looks through a microscope and comes to a conclusion they are seeing something subjective and independent, which is similar to someone undertaking the act of introspection and making observations. The only difference is the person is ‘the microscope’ in his example, but there is a barrier of effort that limits scientists to becoming the microscope that Eastern people sometimes dedicate themselves into becoming. Further, there could be years of experience needed in recognizing the results observed by looking through the microscope that doesn’t allow someone else to see those results, the same way that a person wouldn’t be able to understand the subjective introspection.

I think this is a very strong argument, but first-hand reports of subjective experience don’t exist with the same reliability as something seen under a microscope. Someone can be standing by and confirm the observation in a way that is simply not possible for subjective experience. It may be argued that each person would require training and the finding wouldn’t be able to be verified by anyone else, but a picture or video can be taken of the microscope results which can be examined thoroughly by numerous people in a way that subjective experience cannot be examined. A person can undergo the same training and experience something like what that other person is describing in the eastern tradition but this wouldn’t be the same as the examination of the same microscope results. That person would be experiencing their own version of that phenomena and not, as with the microscope, viewing that same material. This would, admittedly, be harder for something like pain, but there are still correlates which can be looked at.

While I point out reasons to doubt the microscope to personal introspection analogy as being successful, it does lead to the more fundamental question, are the methods of science biased against eastern understandings? This is where field hockey rules can add to the understanding of science and bias.

Field hockey was created with the intention of keeping the Canadian's from taking over the sport. There was a process of which had Trey Parker and Matt Stone, in a collaboration with Australia, purposefully make the rules of field hockey to be biased against Canadians. The Australians and South Park creators knew that research has shown that Canadian hockey players are more likely to be left-handed shots, so they made it so field hockey has the rule where only right-handed sticks are legal.

Similarly, science could be seen as having rules that are purposefully biased against eastern knowledge or ways of finding knowledge. Both field hockey and science are biased, as field hockey hates Canadians and science doesn’t accept eastern knowledge.

Yet there is an important distinction that can be made, field hockey rules are purposefully biased against Canadian’s in an attempt to keep Jean McMaplepoutine down and science's rules are basic and limited in nature. While it is the case that field hockey could have left-handed sticks without changing the game and it would work, the same isn’t true about the broadening of the scientific method.

Science can be stripped down to being based on falsifiability and measurability. To be able to test, measure and retest, rules of which cannot be broadened to include other methods that are subjective and/or largely unmeasurable as their inclusion would change science in such a way that it would no longer be science. To that end science isn’t biased against eastern understandings in themselves it just can safely ignore them as interesting, but not science until there are ways of testing them with measurability and falsification. Take for instance the claim that with mediation there isn’t the need for food or water, that’s interesting, testable, result of the subjective experience and has been tested. Claims of a similar nature have been made by 'the Iceman' Wim Hof which are very interesting in the regulation of body temperature, but also in other areas, although they seem to be exaggerated. There was a reasonable skepticism about those claims, but they can and were tested in the same way any other claims would be.

This shows two different systems, one where rules exist in a way that is purposefully biased for arbitrary reasons and one where the opposite is true and rules exist in a purposeful non-arbitrary way.

Bonus Take! – Psi Will Never be verified by Science due to how it is ingrained with materialism which disallows it or it will never be verified because it is so biased against Psi that verification is impossible

I think many of the commentators to previous posts have the attitude that expressed in that description. I am not attempting to make a straw man, so if that isn't a fair summary than I am willing to change it, but I think that kind of arguments by psi proponents fundamentally underestimates the amount that scientists want to prove phenomena to be true, psi included. Any substantial finding in that area would instantaneously cause fame and fortune as it would be one of the most important findings in the history of science.This is why Daryl Bem and his tests received so much attention. Those tests were fairly well done and came to surprising results, but they failed to be replicated.

The argument could even be made that science, as it currently exists, is biased in such a way that it would lean towards the proving the existence of psi-phenomena, due to there being a huge publishing bias towards new interesting results and the lack of interest in the publication of replications of other studies. Far from being ‘ingrained in materialism’ or having a system that works against Psi, the system is set up in favor of proving Psi, so long as it can be measured. I think this fact is a huge condemnation of the field, because if it existed in the way in which many people think it does then it takes a grand conspiracy to explain why it hasn’t been scientifically observed, on the scale of the level of conspiracy needed to believe in ‘chemtrails’ or ‘flat earth’. The type of conspiracy so large that it falls apart under its own weight.

NFL Players Shouldn't Kneel During the Anthem, but Not for the Reasons you Might Think

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 05:07:00 +0000

In my past posts when I’ve picked a topic to write on I’ve usually done a fair amount of research and came to a conclusion where, while possibly wrong, I had a fair amount of conviction that I was on the ‘correct’ side. This topic is an interesting one, as I don’t possess that same level of certainty, but I do have a few interesting ideas and some evidence that support my ideas. The position I’m going to take is that Donald Trump has picked a smart battle in his opposition to NFL players kneeling during the national anthem and this is beyond the topic simply being a distraction from more serious topics. It a good topic for him due to the differential moral reaction in relation to sanctity.

To understand that claim is in necessary to understand the studies of Jonathan Haidt (Mapping the Moral Domain) on Moral Foundations Theory shows which breaks down moral concern into five different individual moral concerns (Harm/care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/respect and Purity/sanctity). When moral concern is broken down in such a way and people are asked moral questions in relation to those categories a trend develops where conservatives and liberals are shown to have different levels of moral concern for the different moral categories of action. Liberals put higher values and are more sensitive to acts related to Harm and Fairness, while conservatives have higher concerns for acts related to Ingroup, Authority and Purity.

Understandably kneeling during the anthem wasn’t a pressing issue when Moral Foundations Theory was being created, so it wasn’t examined, but something analogous was tested in the permissibility of flag burning. These are both acts of protest, while flag burning seems to be the more extreme, both are acts where the sanctity of the act is the major moral component. A LiveScience article quotes Haidt as saying, “The best predictor of how much a conservative will hate flag-burning is how strongly he or she feels that some things are sacred, he said.”

Kneeling during the anthem is a great topic for Trump due to the disproportionate level of passion from the sides of the debate, where there is the potential for conservatives who value sanctity highly being very impassioned, but where the liberal side would care to a lesser degree. The liberal issue is the freedom to protest, and, more specifically, the freedom to protest by kneeling during the anthem.

Three factors further complicate the issue and point to it being a good issue for conservatives.

1. The sanctity of the anthem is a constant, while protest can be done in an array of different ways. This means that anyone is bothered by the act of kneeling during the anthem will be motivated to be angry at the act, yet the right to protest is not the same. The right to protest isn’t universally in question, which means that some people, likely people who value sanctity highly, will face the conflict of supporting the right to protest, but preferring that it was performed in some other way. This fractures the group that would be in support of the act of kneeling in an act of protest during the national anthem.

2. Kneeling during the anthem is able to be conflated with meaning many different things unconnected to the act or anthem. Take for instance an awful article written in the National Catholic Register, which equates the act of kneeling during the anthem to represent, “[a] show contempt for their country”, “…a slap in the face to people who risked their lives for our country or lost loved ones doing so.”, which, “Corrupts the usually fun and patriotic atmosphere before a football game.” And quotes a Facebook post stating, “They dishonor the real MEN who fought for our country and Died so these boys could act like the babies they are.” This deeper meaning, unconnected, but attributed to the act further broadens the group of people who would be morally troubled by the kneeling during the anthem and how egregious the act is viewed.

3. It isn’t clear if this is the case or not, but the degree in which people are bothered by the perceived disrespect of kneeling during the anthem seems to be disproportionate to the support to protest in that specific way. If there is the large difference that seems to be apparent than it would amount to people being very angry about the act vs. people being mildly or moderately in support of the act. The result is that people who disagree would say something like. “It’s his right to make a peaceful protest and I support his ability to do so” vs how those disagreeing might say, “That guy is a son of a bitch who is disrespecting our country, the people that died for America and the heritage of the United States.”

It is for those three reasons that I think this is a great issue for Trump as long as he sticks to the act being disrespectful and keeps the opposition fractured by not making it about the overall right to protest. This approach keeps the opposition both at the lowest level of motivation and keeps that opposition group to its smallest population. This is the type of issue that seems great for one side in partisan politics and the type of issue that Trump should take advantage of…conversely, I think the NFL players should stop kneeling for those reasons and find a different avenue for their protests, not because I think the act is wrong (I agree with and have no problem with their actions), but simply because it is an approach that minimizes the positives of their protest.

The Punishment Shouldn't Fit the Crime

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 00:34:00 +0000

What I’m here to write about is why retribution should be completely eliminated as a goal of punishment. There are numerous goals and functions of punishment and different societies, organizations and even families use these goals often without the realization as to why the specific punishment is being used.

A famous rehabilitated bike thief, but probably due to financial sucess

At the family level deterrence stands out as the main outcome, as “You won’t take that bike again!” seems like the desired outcome for some Canadian teens. When the problem seems to arise from being around specific people or places parents may try, another goal of punishment, incapacitation. ‘Uh-Oh’, ‘You’re grounded!’ might be the sound of incapacitation in action, but if your being grounded for breaking something, or stealing something you might unfortunately also hear, “And you’re going to get your brother a new bike!” This may be true even if your brother's bike was a rusty old banana seater that left you feeling like you’d have rather spent a night in prison after a couple of kilometers. This new bike is an added level of deterrence to be sure, but it has a more pointed goal of restitution or paying someone back for the harm you have done them.

If the problem keeps happening then parents can keep raising up the deterrence level through increasing the punishment for the undesired action, but at some point, if stiffening the consequences isn’t working punishment needs a different goal, rehabilitation. This is where the behavior is tried to be changed in more constructive and intensive ways.

Those are 4 of the 5 goals of punishment, deterrence, incapacitation, restitution, and rehabilitation, but underlying and often answering how much or how long is retribution. If a bike was borrowed without asking the punishment should be greater than if a bike is stolen and not returned, or more generally small punishments for minor offenses and larger penalties for greater ones. Let the punishment fit the crime is the classic summation of retributive justice.

This leaves the five goals of punishment as:

Deterrence – The use of punishment as an example to keep people from committing a similar act.

Incapacitation – Removing the possibility of reoffending for a period of time.

Restitution – The restoration of what was lost.

Retribution – Punishments are to be proportional to the crime committed.

Rehabilitation – The changing of behavior patterns to attempt to stop recidivism.

This makes it so one could imagine punishment on a switchboard with five knobs corresponding with the five goals of punishment. Each society or punishment giver has these knobs set at different levels, as any decisions will begin to toggle the dials in different directions. Strict parents or states with strict laws unquestionably would have the deterrence, incapacitation and retribution dials turned up while in easier going places those three dials would be turned down.

The point here is that while these dials can be adjusted in different ways, there are probably optimal settings for these dials in different situations, but more to the point indicated in the title, there is evidence that the retribution dial should be turned off completely if people could move beyond the primitive need for proportional justice.

This evidence comes from studies on the modern understanding of free will, which I like to call:

Two Unpopular and Often Ignored Facts About the Brain:

.1. Your brain makes decisions before your consciously aware of them

2. Your brain lies to you

One: it has been known for quite a while at least since the experiments the late of Benjamin Libet, who pioneered studies on actions and when people become conscious of them. He had people hooked up with EEG electrodes and then asked them to do simple tasks and log the time when they made their choice. What Libet found was that through looking at the activity recorded on the EEG machine he could know what the person was going to do before the person themselves came to a conscious decision. This study was similarly repeated a few years ago by scientists at the Max Planck Institute and they found they could predict people’s behavior up to 7 seconds before theperson recorded conscious awareness. Meaning in the time it takes to become aware of some decisions a person could have been 7/8ths of the way through a bull ride. The implication here is that cognition is a process where the parts of the brain make decisions and then people become consciously aware of them, which creates problems for the idea of free will. Obviously, some decisions are made and acted upon in less of a span than 7 seconds, but the underlying principle is what is the important takeaway.

Two: your brain lies to you. It creates post hoc rationalizations on the fly to justify the decisions that were made at the unconscious level. There are a few studies that stand out as more important than other studies and really create a foundational understanding, Zambrano's prison experiment and Milgrim’s work on obedience to authority, and Asch’s work on conformity. Those studies created a better understanding of the mind and explained some of the mystery of human action and Gazzaniga’s work with split brain patients should stand right along with them. Among the many things his work demonstrates is the post hoc rationalization that the brain performs without our knowledge.

The corpus callosum is the thin layer that connects the two halves of the brain, but as a last resort for people with epilepsy, this layer is cut, leaving the two halves of the brain separate. This is interesting as the different halves of the brain have different functions.

Importantly speech is located in the left hemisphere of the brain and that can be exploited. A person can be shown something in their left eye, which connects to the right side of the brain, and they will see that image and have knowledge of that image, but it will be unknown to the side of the brain that can verbalize that knowledge. If a split brain person is shown a picture of a cat in their left eye they will say they didn’t see anything, but when they are asked to guess at which picture they saw from a variety of pictures they will pick the cat.

It only gets more interesting from there, when both eyes are shown different pictures and a person is asked to point at the image he saw, their two hands will each point to a different picture. While that’s pretty neat what happens when the person is asked why they are pointing to two different images, as they don’t seem puzzled at all. The answer given is something to the effect that, “I’m pointing at the shovel and the chicken because you need the shovel to clean out the chicken coop.” The mind is making up out of whole cloth a story to make sense of the situation, the problem being that, that story has no relationship to the actual reason the person was pointing at the two objects.

These facts are ignored for numerous reasons. They aren’t what people want to believe so confirmation bias works against them. They are incompatible with religious beliefs and there is a general discomfort about where responsibility and accountability when personal choices are knowingly coming from an unconscious level. Yet, while the reasons for our decisions and the impulses seem to come from the unconscious level there has been some clawing back of control with the findings of dFMC studies, where consciousness seems to hold a veto power over the impulses that are presented to it.

Marcel Brass and Patrick Haggard had people make choices and then watched them using an fMRI machine. Like in the previous tests the person making the choice was to press a button, but this time the person could change their mind after their initial decision. When the person changed their mind the left dorsal frontomedian cortex (dFMC) was engaged. There is a correlation across people between inhibition-related dFMC activation and the frequency of inhibited actions, or as Michael Shermer simply puts it, “…the more you learn to suppress your impulses, the better able you are to activate your dFMC to further suppress future impulses.” Page 340 The Moral Arc.

Now given that the evidence shows that people are unconscious in many of the motivations and that the mind is capable of rationalizing after the fact it makes the retributive part of punishment almost irrelevant, as the severity of the crime has to be at least partly mitigated by the lack of conscious decision making behind any crime.

There is an example of this type of diminished capacity in the case of sleepwalkers, as they are acting out and their mind has a great deal of control, just these people lack the conscious awareness of what they are doing.

Science has shown that we are all sleepwalking to some extent, as are conscious thought is made up of rationalizations that differ completely from the real reasons for a given action. This masking of reasoning creates a situation of diminished control, not a complete lack as in the case of sleepwalking, but enough so that punishing a person for the sake of punishment doesn’t seem very just. The punishment should be an optimal balance between the interests of society and the person being punished, not a judgment to be anchored to the crime committed. Let the punishment fit the goals of society and the offender! Well, that doesn’t quite have the same simplicity and ring to it, but big issues can rarely be simplified in such a way anyway.

This leads to the idea that all crime is mental illness, as it is the programs of the mind creating poor choices and an improper functioning of the dFMC that failed to control those impulses that lead to the crime being committed. If the brain was working correctly and weighing the choices correctly crime should not exist at all. This is assuming that laws and punishments are created in such a way that it wouldn’t be worth the consequence of the action. This is where the severity of punishment can start to be linked back with the potential gain of the crime committed, as it takes more server/differing punishments to make different crimes not to be worth attempting. As the potential of hours of community service should be sufficient to stop small thefts but wouldn’t be sufficient to ward off large-scale heists.

That’s the argument for a differing scale of punishment based on deterrence, but the other three parts of justice also require specific consequences for different actions. Rehabilitation should be interworked as a science-based medical approach that should be integrated with sentencing, especially with so much crime involving drugs or diagnosable mental illness. Incapacitation also ranges greatly from the type of offense as Louis Theroux shows in A Place for Pedophiles. Lastly, and most obvious is that the amount of damage done by different crimes differs, and as it differs so should the punishment for that crime.

This means that even in a completely deterministic system where people have no control over their actions and no freewill there still has to be punishment, as it is necessary not because the person is at fault, but because punishment is required for laws to work. Not only does there have to be punishment, but that punishment should be different based on society’s goals for punishment and the goals of the offender. This does beg the question of the necessity of laws, as I have presumed that they are necessary, but the necessity of law is the subject of another post altogether.

It may have been noticed that twice I have referred to the goals of society and offender, and the thought may come that only the goals of society matter after a person has committed a crime. Let that thought die, as when society becomes unfettered by the goals and respects of the individual true atrocities can be and will be committed. Without taking into account the goals of the individual, there would be no reasons at the level of the society to not just purge those individuals that are hard to incapacitate, impossible to deter, unable/unwilling to be rehabilitated, or lock into servitude those who couldn’t repay their actions.

It's been a while, but thanks for reading

-The Moral Skeptic

Two Types of Self-Interest

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 07:15:00 +0000

Well, I haven't posted in a while, but that will change, as I've written a few essays for different classes that I will post soon. I recently was listening to Point of Inquiry and Richard Wiseman mentioned how people would come up to him and ask him how to write better, and he just asked them, "Have you written anything today?" To become a better writer...write! That was his message, and even if Gladwell was wrong about 10,000 hours, it still takes time doing something to become good at it.

Anyway onto the topic at hand, I was recently watching a presentation that first started talking about self-interest, and it threw the term around without ever really explaining what it meant, and in what sense he was using the term. More specifically, was talking about two different types of self-interest without ever distinguishing between the two different types. There is a rational self-interest in an understanding of what would be the best for the individual in a given situation (if there was a plate of cookies it would be best for me to take them all and not share any) and a biological self-interest that isn’t a single calculation, but one ran over numerous generations (trimethylamine oxide being developed in the cells of the Greenland Shark due to it spending time in areas where those cells would normally freeze). The presentation talked about the self-interest of bee's and compared it to self-interest in people, but never took the time to explain the distinction made above.This led me to ask a question after the presentation, and I received a really strange response.

The question in question was, “There is a difference between biological self-interest that is calculated over thousands of generations and a rational self-interest in what you think would be best for yourself. People cannot make biologically self-interested choices, as they don’t have access to what would be successful in that way, so in what senses are what you talked about self-interested?”

The answer I received was a strange one, “First, I disagree with your premise that people don’t make biologically self-interested choices, and second I think that the poem on talks more about biological self-interest.” Now this left me baffled, as it seemed apparent that this person thought that to make a moral decisions (it was a class is ethics) someone consciously weighted out all the evolutionary advantages to doing something, and acted on what was best, or they innately knew what was a good evolutionary decision and always acted on it.

The first way is easily shown to be flawed because, 1) even if someone made a calculation there is no way to be sure of what the future holds, so it necessarily has to be something that is determined over time and never at a single instance and 2) there is no way to way a person has access to all the information needed to make the decision in the first place, or even enough to consistently weigh a small portion of that information to make a quick decision.

The second way is also just as deeply flawed, as Dawkins shows when he talks about society and biology in The Selfish Gene when he points out the ‘unnaturalness’ of the desirable welfare state. He explains that, “What has happened in modern civilized man is that family sizes are no longer limited by the finite resources that the individual parents can provide. If a husband and wife have more children than they can feed, the state, which means the rest of the population, simply steps in and keeps the surplus children alive and healthy. There is, in fact, nothing to stop a couple with no material resources at all having and rearing precisely as many children as the woman can physically bear. But the welfare state is a very unnatural thing.”

This pretty much sums it up, if people innately knew what was naturally best for them then they would be acting in accordance with what Dawkins said and be completely abusing the welfare state, until it became a version of the tragedy of the commons. There is a commonly understood ‘evolutionary lag’ where evolution is always a step behind changes to the environment, as it takes time to have the number of generations that adjust to it. Another phenomenon is that evolution is limited to what is available in positive genetic changes: evolution can’t take backward steps. This means that evolution can’t go in a different direction that would be better in the long run, if it would cause decreased fitness for an extended period. This means that even if evolution determined decision making existed with no evolutionary lag, the process of evolution still wouldn’t necessarily be able to make evolutionarily optimal decisions.

All this reminds me of J. B. S. Haldane quote when asked if he would risk his life to save a drowning brother, he responded, “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.” I think this quote alone is enough to point out the point out the absurdity of evolution directly controlling moral decision making, as no one thinks in this way and that’s why it’s funny. It doesn't have to micromanage each individual decision, as it can instill general principles that are effective. This is different than making evolution the decider of morality, and instead makes it create a general framework.

Anyway, people can make decisions that they view as in their self-interest and this may or may not be in line with peoples biological self-interest, but if you’re talking about what self-interest is, especially when jumping back and forth between people and animals, it would be important to note the distinction.

Groundhog's Day Agian! Two Lessons from Phil Connors

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 11:43:00 +0000

Well for those of you dying for the next installment here it is and I think there is some interesting and valuable information. Along with Camus and the implication of the ending Groundhog Day, which I wrote about in my last post, there is also is something to be learned about life, infinite loops and I even throw in a criticism of Murphy's Law. These things from the movie probably classify better as interesting bar room conversation than deep philosophy, but I guess that's kind of what this blog is about anyway. (If you want a summary of the movie so this makes sense here is a link to my last post)

1. Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence of the Same:

For those unfamiliar with Nietzsche and the idea of the eternal recurrence, I'll give you how he explains it, fairly straightforwardly, in The Gay Science. A hypothetical situation is given, by a demon where,

"This life as you now live it have live it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and with you it..."

That is the paragraph that most clearly states the problem of the eternal recurrence, but the power and scope of the situation outlined in the paragraph above are created in its limitations. It is the finality and the lack of change that creates the real problem. Now the person stuck in a Groundhog's Day situation is slightly different. Instead of living their life over and over again they are forced to re-live one day.

This can be used as a measuring stick for life with two different measures. The Eternal Recurrence is a measure where the balance of a person's whole life, up to that moment, must be measured and weighed, versus the Groundhog Day measure where each day could possibly be the one you are forced to relive, so each day must be weighed. If you wouldn't want to relive either one then it could be a statement that you aren't living your life in a way acceptable to yourself, but if you are alright with it then you are comfortable with what you have done.

It is clear that Phil Connors (Bill Murray's character) is not taking part in the eternal recurrence because he is able to change what he does each day and isn't forced to live through his choices again, but instead is able to make different choices.The eternal recurrence doesn't apply to Phil Connors, but it does to every other character with one difference.

Everyone else is trapped in a loop where the choices they made that day are the ones they have to relive over and over again, but Phil Connors has the special ability to change that and get them out of the loop. Phil Connors is a superhero in that movie situation where he and only he can save a person from being forced to relive a bad choice, like when he helps the couple that is going to get married get over their cold feet. Yet, his power is extremely limited as he much chooses who to help each day and change what decisions were made, and he is limited by the laws of time and space...which brings up a peeve of mine about the infinite.

2) With the infinite anything is possible!

The infinite causes may paradox's and strange things to be possible, like the hotel that is full but always has room, yet it is important to note that the infinite doesn't make anything possible. Groundhog Day is a surprisingly good example of why that is that is the case. Groundhog's Day has a system in place where the same thing that happened on Groundhog's Day happens again and again, where only Phil Connors can create change. This is a system like our universe, a system built on rules.

In each system change can take place, right now events could take place differently than they had been before, just as Phil Connors can change what happens at any specific moment, but in each case, there are rules that limit the possibility of the things that are able to happen. No matter how long time goes on the speed of light will be a constant and a speed limit for the universe. The hypothetical situation in Groundhog's Day is also limited as Phil Connors can only do so much in a single day and only cause a limited amount of difference, so not everything is possible in that world either, no matter how long it goes on.

There is one slight difference in these two worlds thought, if this universe is eternal, then even some things that would be likely to happen won't if something changes. It could be possible that I will win the Olympic gold in hurdling four years from now, but it is a race that is only run once, so after it is completed it falls into a category where it was something possible that still didn't happen in an infinite universe.

In a side note, this is also something that bothers me when people talk about Murphy's Law, as people often say when something goes wrong, that "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." Yes, if a situation is left for an infinite amount of time with the possibility of it going wrong, then Murphy's Law works. The problem with that is that's not the world in which we live, not everything that can go wrong does, and often it doesn't. Stating it as it is, really just means, that what happened had a chance of happening, which is useless information that doesn't add any additional information at all. It's as if you are saying water is water, but in this case, the person thinks they are saying something intelligent because they are referring to a law.

Anyway, the situation isn't the same for Phil Connors, because he gets a chance to do things over again, making it so anything that is possible could be achieved in the Groundhog Day world if Phil Connors made the choice to do it.

With the infinite not everything is possible, and not even a sure thing like me winning the gold medal in hurdling is guaranteed to happen.

Thanks for reading,
-themoralskeptic

Groundhog's Day - Phil Connors is a Pitiable Killer

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 08:04:00 +0000

   Groundhog's Day is one of my favorite films and I can't really put a finger on why exactly that is, but I can think of many reasons why I like the movie so much. I don't think I need to announce that this post will contain many spoilers for the movie, but I just did anyway. This post also ran a little longer than I like to aim for in a blog post so it will be broken into two riveting parts, and I can only hope that excitement can be contained until the second installment is posted.

     Anyway, I first saw Groundhog's Day before I knew what philosophy was and just appreciated how funny, yet the odd tale was, but later I realized how interpretable this film is. There is a lot to think about in this film and I'm only going to write about what I thought about on one a sleepless night not so long ago, but before that, I'll give a brief summary for those unfortunate philistine's who haven't seen the film.

   The movie starts with Bill Murray playing the main character, Phil Connors. He one of the great miserable asshole's Bill Murray has played in his career and also a TV weatherman for a medium-sized TV network doing a segment in a small town for, you guessed it, Groundhog's Day. He ends up getting stuck in a town he hates because of snow and wakes up the next morning to find out that it is Groundhog's Day morning again. The same things that happened to him yesterday are happening again today; He is stuck in a loop which doesn't seem to have an end.

     Phil Connors then goes through a progression of different goals for the day. He just lives it up having fun and gorging himself with food and women, and then gets hopeless and tries to kill himself.After that he tries to find meaning by saving an old homeless mans life, but alas, but as Bill Murray's character repeats each day, this meaning also dies each time at around midnight.

    After numerous attempts at all sorts of things, the right answer is found when Phil stops being the miserable asshole and starts being a genuinely kind and good person. This is the secret and after a day of being a good person he gets the girl, they live happily ever after and it's a good ending...or is it?

    When Phil Connors travels to the next day at the end of the movie it is celebrated with cheers of triumph. Yet, when Phil is kissing the hotel manager out of happiness, one person isn't enjoying the festivities, as when the loop ends the homeless person Phil was staying to save is no longer reborn. In traveling to the next day Bill Murray's character has ironically found the only way to really kill the man he earlier was so desperately trying to save. If he had not closed the loop the man would have continued to be reborn and lived his life forever. Morally Phil Connors might have been in a position to try to stay in Groundhog's Day forever if he knew the consequences of his actions.

   There is another interesting consequence of the loop being closed at the end of the movie. It could be taken further and argued that Phil Connors shouldn't have been celebrating the end of Groundhog's day, and instead been mourning its demise.

   Albert Camus would view the situation that way as he explains in The Myth of Sisyphus. In Camus's view what matters most is not the type of life lived, but the amount, as the continued struggle against the absurd is what matters. People would argue, as Bill Murray's character surely would, that if Phil Connors doesn't travel to the next day of his life than his life is meaningless because there is no progress or time. The major question than is, is there a meaning of life?

42 jokes aside, there isn't an external meaning of life that can be found and pointed to and Camus realizes this, making life a battle of living without meaning, or in short an absurd existence. In this battle for meaning the absurd is where one can find enjoyment, even if you are only rolling a rock to the top of a hill for eternity. In fact being able to continue that fight for eternity makes you not someone to be pitied, but someone to be envied. Phil Connors didn't have a rock to push, but he did have the potential to fight against the absurd and reflect on life for an eternity thus making him a hero. Instead through celebrating the ending and closing of the loop he is no longer the Sisyphusian hero, and instead a nice guy and a killer.

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic

Kingston Police Doubles Down on Power Balance

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Sat, 12 May 2012 01:53:00 +0000

The amount of disappointment I have towards the decisions of the Kingston Polices choice to promote Power Balance is hard to match, but the overwhelming condemnation of their choice should inspire a lot of hope that at least next time they will do a background check into products they put on their website and spend uniformed time selling.

Kingston Polices twitter responses to Matt Watson shows why there isn't much hope for optimism yet though. Here is a copy of the twitter conversation between the two:

Matt Watson: @KingstonPolice you're selling those bracelets knowing full well they're advertising false benefits. Shame!

Kingston Police:@at0mat Oh my, we've already addressed this. Don't endorse any purported effects. Most buy b/c they simply like the look, goes to good cause

Matt Watson:@KingstonPolice pardon the pun but what a cop-out. Selling them at all is endorsement and contributes to the perception they're effective.

Kingston Police:@at0mat Pun pardoned. Raised $1,000s for @SOOKingston2012, only you & 1 other has complained in 6 months, selling candy bars worse effect.

Matt Watson:@KingstonPolice that just goes to show people perceive them as legitimate and don't question the pseduo-science.

Kingston Police:@at0mat Thanks Matt. No one is forcing you or anyone else to buy them. You're welcome to simply donate $10 to the Special Olympics instead.

Thanks to Matt for arguing pretty well in the 140 character space. The logic and ethics lying behind whoever is representing Kingston Police is completely perverse, they are doubling down with their chips on stupid. Advertising and providing legitimacy for a product that is actively deceiving its buyers was bad enough, but it is only worsened by the horrible logic used to defend their choice.

There are 3 things that stick out from what was tweeted.

1. By putting a disclaimer Kingston Police can excuse itself as endorsing Power Balance:

This is a complete joke, first of all they advertise effects on their website which includes the statement that the benefits of negative ions (The 'good ions' that are in the Power Balance Band) are higher levels of focus and concentration, increased feeling of serenity and well being, improved strength, flexibility and balance, elevated relaxation of body and mind, restful sleep, lessened recovery times and an injury or workouts, improved athletic performance, and relief from chronic joint and muscle pain.

Which is a false list of effects of negative ions and not Power Balance, so even if Kingston Police doesn't support the product it is unclear if they think that the effect of negative ions are as listed above.

Just having to write that list makes me want to look for some chronic joint relief. At least in that state of mind maybe I could begin to understand how listing the benefits of a product on a police webpage and having uniformed officers selling Power Balance bracelets doesn't equate to an endorsement.

2. It's better than selling candy bars:

Well I'd disagree that supporting a product that actively deceives the buyer is better than selling a product that isn't healthy, the whole thing is a false choice. The choice wasn't between a candy bar or power balance, as Kingston Police points out in their last tweet that says they could, and can still, take donations without the bracelet.

Personally I wish they had sold Placebo Bands, which have the same hologram that impressed the Police and comes 100% Bullshit free and are a non-profit product.

3. If nobody complains it's alright:

Only you and one other has complained in 6 months.....so what? I guess if a tree murders someone in the forest it doesn't make a sound. Unfortunately, right and wrong doesn't rely on complaints, and whoever is representing the Police surely acts this way in most situations, but from some reason has compartmentalized this instance.

It's disappointing when you point something out that is clearly wrong and the person just sticks with what they believed before, a phenomena that Chris Mooney does a great job at pointing out in his Point of Inquiry interview.

I do remain hopeful that given increased attention and complaints that the Kingston Police will stop advertising Power Bands on their website and stop selling it in uniform.

Feel free to email Chris Mcfie cmcfie@kpf.ca and point it the hypocrisy if you see it in person, although that may be for the brave, as uniformed officers don't have a history of responding well to criticism, no matter how well founded.

Thanks for reading,

-the moral skeptic

Kingston Police Selling Power Balance Wristbands

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:10:00 +0000

I was aghast at Cost-Co on the weekend, and it had nothing to do with low prices or 50 lbs. bags of dog food. As I was entering the store I saw a strange union set up at a table beside where the cards were flashed to gain entrance. I blinked and took a second look, but, unfortunately, it only made the picture more clear. The Kingston police were selling Power Balance wristbands.

I looked around for the same disbelief that must have sat registered on my face smeared on anyone else, but I didn't see it. I could forgive the lack of awareness for the people around me, but from the police, I could only find contempt for their negligence and stupidity.

The police are people who investigate things and are trusted to make good decisions, but any quick search will show that this was a boondoggle from the start. Power Balance wristbands are a rubber bracelet with a hologram inside it, that is claimed to improve strength, athleticism, and balance, by working with the body's natural energy fields and frequency. The only problem is that it's a known and proven scam.

The J ournal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies studied them and found that "Results indicated that there was no statistically significant mean change in balance performance brought about by either the placebo or the Device." The BBC tested them and the headline of the story explains the conclusion, "Power Balance band is placebo, say experts" and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry took former Olympian Dominique Dawes and 14 other people test them and found that Power Balance bracelets are "A bust". Look up any independent test of them and see the conclusions.

In fact why even look for independent tests, here is the word from Power Balance themselves, "We admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims and therefore we engaged in misleading conduct in breach of s52 of the Trade Practices Act 1974." which they published in Australia after losing a battle with the trade commission there. Power Balance has also been fined in Italy and the Netherlands for making unverifiable claims.

All the evidence points to the bracelets being a scam, and also shows that Power Balance is run by a company who actively deceives the public. Why on Earth would the Kingston police support this and even advertise for it on their own website? They give the disclaimer that, "Kingston Police dose not guarantee or endorse the effects and benefits claimed from this product." only after listing a clear message that Power Balance would only dream of.

The only redeeming quality is that some of the money goes to help the Special Olympics, which I can tell you as a former Personal Support worker for people with special needs is a great cause. I encourage donations to the Special Olympics, but am dismayed at the Kingston Polices ignorance, negligence, and lack of investigation into a proven swindle. The police are supposed to be protecting the public from things like this, not actively taking part in it.

In Australia the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has ordered Power Balance Australia to refund all customers who feel they were misled by the supposed benefits of Power Balance bracelets and in Canada we have the Police raising money with it....

Thanks for reading,

-the moral skeptic

Jesusaurus Rex FC

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 19:00:00 +0000

I was playing an X-Box live game one day when I was matched up with an opponent named 'Jesusaurus Rex' which I thought was a pretty funny name. It's really hard to narrow down what someone finds funny about something but I think I appreciated the novelty of the name and the contrast between the two ideas of Jesus and the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

It looks like I'm not the only one either, as there are songs entitled Jesusaurus Rex, a pretty funny youtube video, a Wikipedia style page and a few pictures on Google images, which are all pretty funny, although I didn't find the songs particularly enjoyable.

Anyway, after playing against this person I've unabashedly stole the name and used it for quite a few things when forced to name something. My trivia team, a name for my computer, and whatever happens to come up. It turns out that a few of my friends liked the name as well and one of them used the name for his Rec soccer team.

This seemed pretty lighthearted and silly, as Rec soccer usually is, but another friend didn't like the name. I don't have any problem with not liking the name as taste is pretty flexible, but the reason for not liking it was something I did disagree with. He didn't like the name because he found it to be derogatory against people of faith.

This is something I don't really understand because there is nothing inherently bad with Jesus or the Tyrannosaurus, so putting the two together shouldn't be a cause for offense. It isn't derogatory, mean spirited, or meant to imply ridicule. Yet, maybe there is one problem?

Would it fall under the third commandment of taking the lords name in vain? Well from what I've read (1 2) taking the lords name in vain has very little to do with swearing, as in vain usually applies to some kind of falsity. We looked for ketchup at the supermarket in vain or I tried to muster up the courage to say, "I don't want Dairy Queen" in vain. In fact, at least one page says that saying God dammit is pretty much the opposite equivalent of saying god bless, and neither should be offensive to anyone.

Historically taking Gods name in vain meant to put God's providence for something that God didn't really say. God tells me we will win this game! It was by the power of God that made apples taste better than oranges! God said go jump off that roof! Would all be examples of taking the lords name in vain and would violate the third commandment, but saying, 'god damn it' when you want god to damn something, or making a name like Jesusaurus Rex which makes no reference to what God would have done does not violate taking the lords name in vain.

What if the name instead was Muhammadaurus Rex would that make it worse? It seems like it would to me because Muslim sensitivity is so high. Muhammadaurus Rex shouldn't be any more offensive, but it is, not because the name is more derogatory, but because the people who believe in Muhammad are more inflexibly offended. The problem then isn't with the name, but the people.

Does it belittle God? Possibly, but it shouldn't. If God is all powerful than how could a sarcastic name make him less powerful or diminish him at all? I think the one thing I got out of the God Delusion was that people need to be able to talk about belief in the same way they can talk about taxes without it becoming a personal attack that eliminates the conversation. Jesusaurus Rex shouldn't be any more offensive than Obamasaurus Rex or Muhammadsaurus Rex, any of which shouldn't be a call to arms for anyone.

Thanks for reading,
-themoralskeptic

Rape Baby Morality

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:50:00 +0000

Rick Santorum is quite the news maker and I love and hate the guy. It would be hard for me to find anyone I disagreed with more than Rick, but he talks honestly, forgoing the usual political speech that clouds what someones true view are. He even backs up what he believes with why he believes it rather than say something vague. I think he at least deserves credit for that.

Yet, pretty much everything he says makes me shake my head, and if I had the chance to talk to him I don't think we could really have a conversation. There is a fundamental disconnect about such basic beliefs that we would end up talking past each other. This can be shown in two stances we take on what should happen in the awful situation when a woman is raped and becomes pregnant.

Rick's view is that even a mother who is raped should have to carry their birth to term because every baby is a gift from God, or as he says himself, "The right approach is to accept this horribly created - in the sense of rape - but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you." I think it would also be fair to attach the co-belief that God is infallible.

There is really a blend of two arguments being put forth. The first one has the logic that (main argument) every birth is a gift from god, (unstated support) god doesn't make mistakes, so (conclusion) a person must accept what god gives them.

The second argument only makes a brief appearance when he talks about the gift being a human life. It first states that at the moment of inception a human life is created and it goes unstated that a human life should be kept alive.

From one short quote two arguments are presented, although they are both only presented in a semi-complete fashion

Now I'd argue that birth is a biological process with no special meaning, that natural processes are separate from moral ones, so a persons decision to continue with a pregnancy is their moral choice and independent of any consideration of nature/god.

Looking at the two views you can see how even two reasonable people could come to talk with the best intentions of working something out and just run into road blocks. Santorum's belief that each birth has a divine hand is incommensurable with the understanding of birth as only a biological process.

I think Ricks second view does leave some room for talking thought because the question remains whether all murder is wrong, so perhaps if the unborn fetus itself raped it's mother than it could be capitally punished. There may be no clear solution, but there is room to talking and maybe even having some progress.

The point is to recognize what people are really saying in their arguments and not all the time are even reasonable people going to get anywhere when they talk. It also shows how one belief can affect numerous other beliefs you hold, but maybe I'll post about that later.

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic

What Does the Earth Want?

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:27:00 +0000

This seems to be the fundamental question of environmentalism and it's often ignored, assumed, or not even asked. I feel like Camus, who first really put the emphasis on whether life was worth living, and put forth a fundamental question that should have been answered or at least defined before people went to work on solving problems. The cart is years ahead of the horse, and people trying to upgrade the cart to see if they can make it work better.

Now it may be argued, correctly even, that any answer given to this question will be anthropomorphizing the earth, but that doesn't diminish the value in asking the question in the first place. How the question is answered is still important because it defines your starting place and the bias's that were applied when asking the question.

Bias isn't a bad thing, its a natural omnipresent condition that affects any judgement and it is best to be aware to keep it in check. Physicists are biased with preconceptions that make it easier to believe that light is the cosmic speed limit, but that doesn't make the fact any less true.

I've came up with 4 answers to the question of what the Earth wants and will describe them and what they show.

1. The Diversity Argument - Perhaps the best thing for the earth is to be as diverse biologically as possible. A world built this way would provide for the greatest range of niches being filled and quite possibly the greatest range of the 'enjoyment' of the earth. This is to say that a mole enjoys the earth in a different way than a bat does, but doesn't say anything more than that.

If that is the goal then all species should be attempted to be saved and the importance of the preservation of different animals would go up exponentially as the number of the members of a species went down. This again wouldn't have to be limited to animal life and seems readily applicable to plant life as well.

Yet, if the greatest diversity is the core goal than people should also be trying to create new species through genetic modification and separating breeding populations to obtain quick changes in animals so that new species are created. Sure, some of these new species might expand their bounds and compete with the existing species, but than people can manage populations in an attempt to keep the greatest amount of different species alive.

This idea may sound far fetched, but at the heart of the idea that genetic diversity is important and that animals should be saved, even as their habitat disappears or in some cases becomes non-existent.

2. The Most Life - Sheer number of animals and plants could be the most important factor, as it wouldn't matter what species exist, so long as the Earth is supporting the greatest amount of life it could. A maximal mother earth wouldn't be a monoculture that is often criticized,as many more plants are able to live in a untouched forest than one where a single species has been planted, but it wouldn't be against the idea of a monoculture in principle either.

One life would be just as important as another and there would be no favorites. This would probably mean a vastly more integrated human life where nature would be intertwined with life, and where pests, would be as valuable in principle as pets and it would also be highly unrealistic and unpopular.

3. The Human First - Egoism as expressed by the bible and more recently by Rick Santorum. As the bible said the world was created for man and he got to name all the animals. Than in Genesis 1:26 "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.'”

This is the most popular view of nature, that humans matter and everything else matters as compared to what human value it has, but it's probably popular because of human exceptionalism and ignorance.

Animals can be seen as stupid or unfeeling and thus can be morally written off to have no consideration, or people can just not think of the problem and act in their own self interest. Either way results in an exclusively human perspective.

4. Earth as an ecosystem - The common solution for environmentalists is that the earth wants to be an ecosystem. The earth only provides life by the inter-dependance of the earth, water, weather system, plants and animals working together to form a cohesive self replenishing system.

Everything has value because everything functions in an integrated way.

Whats the answer to what the Earth wants? Just to restate is depends totally on what your view is and the question is only a canvas for what you believe. That's about the only thing conservatives get right about the environment, the earth may not have been put here under our dominion, but it surely doesn't care if we use up all the oil, kill all the polar bears (apology's the the bear pictured above), or turn it into a planet like Mercury.

Yet, animals, plants and people all must live here in some sort of balance and what that balance is important. The key is not to think that what exists now is perfect, that what naturally happens is the best balance or that there is any one solution to the question.

Sam Harris points out that there can be many peaks and valleys in the ethical treatment of people, and this holds for the environment as well. That's why I enjoyed the Skeptical Environmentalist so much, because Bjorn thinks things are good now, but is willing to ask the question, will things be better in the future if we say the course we are on? Whether you agree with him about whether he got the right information or draws the right conclusions isn't as important as starting the conversation and being willing to ask the question. He is a man looking for many peaks.

The point is that there are many environments that work, and the answer isn't the steady state that we need to keep everything as it was found when people first entered the area, or that we need to terraform everything to make this world any particular way.

All the points of view have some value, and although I think it isn't usually the case that everyone see's a different piece of the truth, this time all the views have something important to say.

1. The value of diversity of life and captures the understanding and wonder when we find something new and the shame and feeling of loss when something goes extinct.

2. The amount of life is also important as it lets species overcome tragedies that may happen to any number of the individuals, but this seems like a lesser core value than the other three.

3. The egoist view has ever present importance of humans in ethical considerations. Any environmental philosophy that doesn't take that into account is going to be impossible to follow, as even the people who want to preserve nature for it's own benefit don't want to preserve nature as it was during any of the numerous ice ages the earth has had. Anything calling for mass human death, or your mother to have the value of a tree just is unsupportable.

4. Shows how the earth works as a system and how nothing exists on its own.Yet, this view does have a bias to what exists now against what could exist in the future, which is the topic of another post.

What does the Earth Want? A ecosystem that functions well, values life's diversity/volume, and still keeps a prominent place for human beings. I know that's not really an answer, but what it is a rubric for what the answer should look like.

Thanks for reading,
- the moral skeptic

Is There a Social Need for Violence?

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:50:00 +0000

I have a weekend class, and a group was presenting about the problem of concussions in sports...a much better/more interesting topic than I got to present on, but three times during their presentation they insinuated that there was a social need for violence. It wasn't the type of presentation where the audience felt welcome to talk during so I wasn't sure the question would be addressed, but as they ended they had discussion questions, and they had a question framed as it is titled in this post, "Is There a Social Need for Violence?"

I addressed the under-current that ran through their presentation, and said to the same effect what I'm going to recite with better statistics in the rest of this post.

I don't think that if sports became less violent and people lost what was described as their, 'outlets for violence' that they would take to the streets looking for someone body checking someone else or start to beat up other people because there was a build up in their internal violence meter.

This isn't a caricature of the position being presented, and what may be a more common belief than expected, yet it is a belief not only wrong it's completely backward from reality. Violence tends to only beget more violence as was well stated by some oft-quoted royal doctor.

I know no better way to show this than the experiments with anger and stress management, but if you know of other ways feel free to add them to the comments. The common expression is 'blowing off some steam' and I guess that is what the people in class thought. The view that the body naturally builds up a violent steam that can be released by watching or participating in violence, to the point that if there were no other outlets underground fight clubs would pop up to satisfy base human urges.

That doesn't seem to be the case though, acting out aggression or taking part in aggressive acts tends to only make the person more vengeful; acting out aggression doesn't vent anger it amplifies it. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that effect in 1999 when it published a paper entitled, "Catharsis, Aggression, and Persuasive Influence: Self-Fulfilling or Self-Defeating Prophecies?" A number of experiments were documented in this paper and their results were counter-intuitive and largely ignored by pop culture in the same way the discovery of there being no link between sugar and hyperactivity was ignored, but that's a different post.

In the first study, it was found that,

"Participants who read a procatharsis message (claiming that aggressive action is a good way to relax and reduce anger) subsequently expressed a greater desire to hit a punching bag than did participants who read an anticatharsis message. In Study 2, participants read the same messages and then actually did hit a punching bag. This exercise was followed by an opportunity to engage in laboratory aggression. Contrary to the catharsis hypothesis and to the self-fulfilling prophecy prediction, people who read the procatharsis message and then hit the punching bag were subsequently more aggressive than were people who read the anticatharsis message."

People who hit the punching bag didn't blow off steam, they built it up.

While another study in the paper that was similar went further. It compared people doing nothing to people hitting a punching bag. To get these people 'riled up' they were given a writing assignment and received comments about what they wrote telling them that it was the worst thing that the grader has ever read. Half the individuals were left alone and half the subjects were taken to use a punching bag, individually, of course.

After using the punching bag or just sitting for a period of time they were given a second test where, if they won they could blast another person with an air horn. The people were given the options of both how strong a blast they could use and the length of time they could blast the horn. The results were generally that people, "Who did hit the punching bag were significantly more aggressive than those who did not hit the punching bag." That aggression meant that people who used a punching bag to 'blow off steam' ended up blowing the air horns at a much higher volume and for a longer duration.

This is not the only study done on this topic as a good episode of Bullshit! showed where they re-created a number of previous studies. People who used punching bags are also more likely to give people more hot sauce as a punishment and fill in blanks with more violent words. For instance the blank RA_E was more likely to be filled in as RAKE for someone who just sat to themselves and RAPE to someone who used a violent outlet for their aggression.

All this doesn't necessarily prove that there isn't some violent clock within people that needs to find an outlet, as it might have been the case that the calm people just so happened to watch a Steven Seagal movie the night before, while people who used the punching bag had an anger meter that went unchecked the night before by Exit Wounds, so there was a previous build up which is why the people wanted to also use a punching bag in the first place (two people refused to use the punching bag altogether, so they must have watched Under Siege and Under Siege 2 and had their violent meter at extra low).

Yet, it seems pretty far-fetched that all the people who had a build up would be selected to one group and also that getting to outlet their violence on a punching bag wouldn't be enough to calm them down to a level of that of an average person. For that reason the belief that people have a need for a social outlet of violence seems to be far fetched. People don't need to outlet violence to calm down, or to take part in something violent to assure that they won't do something violent in the future.

As a side note, I ran across another interesting study that shows violence in video games may not be linked to future acts of aggression at all, as personal competitiveness was a much more accurate predictor of future aggression. It didn't matter whether a person played a violent fighting game or a racing game, the people gave out the same amount of hot sauce afterwards, but the people who were more competitive were the ones who loaded on the Franks. Who knew you could learn so much from hot sauce?

I'll end with a quote because so many Stephen J. Gould essays end that way,

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. - That same royal doctor

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic

The Biological Spandrel

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:05:00 +0000

In 1979, Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin saw a growing problem in the field of biology. To combat and bring attention to the problem they saw they co-authored the paper entitled, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" which is now a classic and somewhat controversial paper in the field of biology. Gould points out in I Have Landed that, that paper is his second most referenced paper behind only his paper with Eldredge on punctuated equilibrium.

The problem Gould and Lewontin saw was that every part of an animal's anatomy was being broken up and explained as having an evolutionary purpose. The tyrannosaur's small arms were to help it get up from sleeping and the female hyena's masculinized genitalia created aggressive/larger hyena. Those types of explanations typified the attitudes of much of the scientific community, which could be described as being extremely adaptationist. Each piece or feature of an animal was broken up and weighed; if something existed it existed for a Darwinian reason. The animal as a collective whole was never thought about. Noses were created to hold glasses and ears to fit earplugs.

Yet, no matter how ideal the reconstruction of the purpose is, it remains a narrative created to explain something that doesn't always have such a simple, fitting, or, most importantly, purposeful explanation. There are numerous reasons why a feature of an animal might be the way it currently is and being a positive adaptation for increased fitness is only one of those reasons.

Lewontin and Gould point this out by way of the dome in St. Marks Cathedral in Venice, and by picking out this non-biological example they have created a platonic form for what a perfect spandrel is, more perfect and clean than any biological example could be. It is perfect because the dome was created, as many other domes were, with the four arches holding it up and the spandrels existing between those arches. Only years after construction did the spandrels get put to use and thus become meaningful/functional in themselves.

The architectural spandrel, in this instance, is a space created only because it was necessary as part of the gap between the arch and the dome. More generally they refer to an architectural constraint that is not part of the design, but instead a by-product of what is necessary from the design. Gould and Lewontin give the example also of a set of stairs with the bi-product or spandrel being space between the steps.

The example works beautifully with the biological idea, because something that can start out as a by-product of something else can still later develop an important function as happened in San Marco. This makes it clear that an adaptive narrative isn't the only way to explain how something came to be, even something that now has an important function.

A good example of this happening is the famous domestication of the Silver Fox in Russia. The only feature that was selected for in those foxes was tameness. This made tameness the adaptive feature being selected for and all other traits that changed with it would be spandrels, or features that just happened to be by-products of the result of one thing being selected for. These changes included the fox's becoming spotted, coming into heat every 6 months and becoming more 'dog-like.'

This seems to show the existence of spandrels as pretty clear-cut, but the most interesting part of spandrels may be hidden in an article written later by Gould, "The Exaptive Excellence of Spandrels as a Term and Prototype." Near the end of that article, Gould makes the open-ended statement that,

"The human brain may have reached its current size by ordinary adaptive processes keyed to specific benefits of more complex mentalities for our hunter-gatherer ancestors on the African savannahs. But the implicit spandrels in an organ of such complexity must exceed the overt functional reasons for its origin. (Just consider the obvious analogy to much less powerful computers. I may buy my home computer only for word processing and keeping the family spread sheet, but the machine, by virtue of its requisite internal complexity, can also perform computational tasks exceeding by orders of magnitude the items of my original intentions—the primary adaptations, if you will—in purchasing the device)."

It seems that as a brain becomes more powerful, it does a more than just what is required for base evolutionary fitness. The examples of those types of spandrels have been argued to include everything from music or even language. I think an interesting area to apply the idea of a spandrel to ethics; the things people feel passionately are right and wrong, but for what reason? It could also fill in a lot of gaps in what is ethical, but can't be evolutionarily accounted for and that is what my thesis is on, so you can look forward to quite a few more posts on this topic in the future.

Thanks for reading,
-themoralskeptic

Thomas Berry - Philosophy and Evolution

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:29:00 +0000

I was assigned to read Thomas Berry's The Viable Human, which was then a person/essay, I've never heard of so I wasn't sure what to expect. Well it didn't take me long into reading his essay before I could probably guess that I was going to disagree with almost everything he had to say, except for his overall conclusion. People should take a more active stance on how they see the environment and their place within it, but Berry gets there only through misunderstanding, mysticism and idealism.

It really comes from the first page of his essay and becomes more blatant further in. I agree with his first line that, "We need to move from our Human Centered- to an Earth-centered norm of reality and value." Yet, his second line starts the path to error and he begins to lose support and respectability.

Berry qualifies the first sentence by saying that, "Only in this way [Changing from human-centered view to a earth-centered view] can we fulfill our human role within the functioning of the planet we live on." Which doesn't seem like such a big deal, but the 'role' isn't just something idealistic for Berry it's something real.

This subtle misunderstanding of evolution continues with something that most people might let slide, as Berry sums up his view of evolution, "As with every species, there was a need for humans to establish their niche, a sustainable position in the larger community of life, a way of obtaining food, shelter, and clothing." Yet, species don't get created and look for a niche, there are interacting factors and create subtle changes and create something different that is better adapted for the situation it is in, period. There is no talk of niche's or something having to fit in.

The community of life is, also a cover up for describing the struggle for life as it actually is. Animals don't fit into a sustainable position and happily fill the web of life. If a cat can kill every bird/rodent on an island it will and has, despite whatever anyone thinks about the 'niceness' of cats or how the ecosystem strives towards balance.

Thomas, has attempted to slide in his view slowly with the two quotes above and then comes out and says more strongly that, "Human society in its beginnings would not have survived if it had not had some basic role to fulfill within the larger Earth community composed of all its geological as well as its biological elements." Animals don't exist and wait to be placed where it's role will be good and balanced. Birds didn't evolve wings and wait for a role of flight. The potential for flight was always there, but it isn't a role to be filled like a casting call for a script. Berry is putting the buggy in front of the horse. Human society wouldn't have evolved if there wasn't something to exploit in the first place.

Worse than that though is what he seems to be implying. That the Earth neatly fits together into something balanced and meant to be. Evolution doesn't neatly fit something in with the geological and biological background, each animal is trying to be more successful than the next to the point that about 98% of all life that existed has become extinct.

He can argue the above because he knows that, "If we look back over the total course of Earth['s] development, we find that there was a consistent florescence [blooming] of the life process in the larger arc of the planet's development over some billions of years. Innumerable catastrophic events occurred in both the geological and biological realms but not of these could cause the forebodings such as we might experience at present."

The earth is not in a steady state which, to Berry's credit, he seems to understand, but what he doesn't seem to get is that life isn't a fair and balanced game where everything works together to create a viable world. The earth may look like it has a balance and indeed many animals have found some long term stability, but it isn't supposed to be that way, just as the world isn't supposed to be any way in particular; it just happens to be the way it is now, which inherently shouldn't be viewed as anything special. There is no blooming just an unfolding ongoing struggle to which everything will eventually lose.

Moving a little away from Berry, you can say the would should be some way, but it should never be an appeal to how the earth 'naturally was' or 'ideally would be'. Those are conceptions that are anthropomorphic and idealized. The earth has no way 'it should be' expect in the subjective eyes of the person who is telling you. Take lessons from that, don't worry about what naturally is, or what has been in the past, those aren't limits for what the future can look like.

Human's are just starting to get the power to create the environment they want, and it can and should be un-natural. Schopenhauer see's the reality of the world, not viewable through Berry's rose coloured glasses, and while it may need a little less pollution, it doesn't provide any roles or path that should be taken.

Thanks for reading,
-themoralskeptic

Cee Lo Green - Stupid or Just Religious?

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:18:00 +0000

First of all I know that the title is a false dilemma, so if your here just to point that out, congratulations for being so clever. This is my first post in a while, but I've been busy moving, getting ready for my masters program and hibernating (It's cold in Canada).

Anyway, I was getting ready to break out of the new years slump when I heard about Cee Lo Green's New Years Eve performance where he changed the words to John Lennon's song Imagine. Now I'm not a huge Beatles fan, but I don't mind them by any means and I respect what a song is trying to say when it does have a clear message, which is more than I can say for Cee Lo.

I'm also an atheist, so the words that were changed drew a lot of interest. Instead of saying, "Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too." Cee Lo chose to sing, "Nothing to kill or die for and all religion's true."

I understand the personal reasons that could have lead Cee Lo Green to change the words of the song to represent himself better, and he should have the freedom to do so, but I also have the freedom to criticize the changes he made.

The problem isn't that Cee Lo made changes to the song, it's that the changes he made ruined the message/meaning of the song. John Lennon wasn't bashing religion when he sang of there being an absence of religion. He was creating a situation where all the things that define and keep people separate from each other were magically taken away, so that people could be free to get along. That being the case I don't see why even a religious person would have a problem with the hypothetical situation, just as no religious person should have a problem with John Rawl's Vail of Ignorance.

It's a hypothetical situation created to show something, and if you don't like what you see because, you see that the world would be better off without religion than you don't have a problem with the hypothetical, you have a problem with religion. However, if you see the world as worse off without religion in the scenario 'Imagine' creates then there is no need to be offended by it, or to change the words.

That said, lets look at what Cee Lo Green created when he changed the words. Instead of there being no religion in the hypothetical situation, all religions are true. Well, that's nice to say, but how would it really work?

1. There could be one world where the rules change all the time, and then what ever your religion says comes true. It would be an arbitrary world where everyone's religion's were true, but where it would be impossible to really communicate with others because of basic incompatibilities. For instance, 2+2 would be 4 for some people and maybe other people would have a religion where 2+2 = 5 and in Cee Lo's world both of them would be correct. Yet, this complete incompatibility would leave people unable to communicate basic truths to each other and even if they could communicate them, they would be meaningless to the other person who has their own truth.

2. Another way for it to work would be for every person to have their own little world where what their personal religion says is true. This is a world where you can be happy about having the capital 't' truth that just doesn't exist now, but it is also a world disconnected from everyone else.

Either way, these are situations that seem less desirable than the world in which we currently reside, but that's alright because Cee Lo tweeted a clarification for us, "Yo I meant no disrespect by changing the lyric guys! I was trying to say a world were u could believe what u wanted that’s all.”

I have a news flash for Cee Lo, we live in a world where you can believe whatever you want! You don't have to create a hypothetical situation so see what that world looks like. There is no thought police, and the only limitations are in John Lennon's terms, what you can 'Imagine'.

So while he meant no disrespect, he did manage to take a classic song, ruin the message it had and create a new message that doesn't make any sense. If this were a game of clue we would find Mr. Green in the study humming while he urinated on John Lennon's rug that just so happened to tie the room together.

I've clearly put more thought into this than Cee Lo did, because I think anyone who knows the message of the song and then went through the implications of Cee Lo's words would come to the same conclusions I have.

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic

P.S. To those who were waiting to find out what a false dilemma was, it's when you're given a choice between a limited number of things and the answer isn't necessarily contained within the list of choices. Cee Lo Green is both stupid and religious, a choice excluded in the title.

Anton's Syndrome and Religion

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:46:00 +0000

I just learned of a new and interesting rare problem that a few people suffer from and think that it applies well to religious people and specifically how they prefer to answer one type of question. The idea to write this came from David Eagleman's book Incognito, so I'll just plug it for a second. It's a book that expands on the idea of how the mind constructs reality and the importance of the subconscious, so if I haven't jaded you from the subject it's worth a look at.

Anton's syndrome or Anton-Babinski syndrome is a problem that happens when there is damage to the occipital lobe. It causes a person to become completely blind, but the sufferers don't immediately report any problem at all. Not all that interesting so far. What is interesting is that this blindness is also coupled with two other symptoms, the lack of awareness of the blindness and the creation of the objects around them through the mind only.

All this means that the person will be completely blind, but will still think that they can see. Their condition is only exposed when someone else notices that what they say or how they act, turns out to be independent of the visual reality around them. A doctor will put up there hand and ask how many fingers they are holding up and the person will reply '3' when the doctor never lifted their hand in the first place, they will walk straight into walls and trip over anything put in front of them. What they are seeing is a complete fabrication generated by their mind and a fabrication that is independent of sensory information from the eyes. People with Anton's syndrome are living in completely in a visual world of their own creation.

This is what I feel like happens to an ultra-religious person and explains a nonsensical answer that is commonly given to a simple question. The questions of, 'Where is god?' or 'Where is the proof for god?' is commonly answered with the statement that "God is all around you." or "I see God in the leaves, the tide, and the stars....I see God in everything."

Now I have looked at many leafs and still have yet to find the God part of the leaf. These people are seeing what is an Anton's Syndrome like connection. There is something that makes it evident that God is a part of that thing that they are seeing, a part of the mind is coloring the view of what they are seeing. These people too are living in a world of there own creation that has no connection with reality, tripping over God and not noticing that the doctor's arm had never moved.

Now, it may be fair to criticize this view and say the people that are making these comments are making a metaphorical statement and surely some people are. It is always the charitable thing to take the strongest or most logical sense of what someone is saying. Yet, I don't think that the people making those kinds of blanket statements are always describing something metaphorically, they could be seeing the fingerprint of God on everything and must be taken literally when they say, "Yes, I see God in nature and not just his handiwork."

Perhaps, like in left temporal lobe epilepsy, there is a physiological mistake being made and people really are 'seeing something', but whether the connection is real or not Anton's syndrome provides an interesting way to interpret literally seeing God in the world.

Then again they would probably use Anton's syndrome to deconstruct what I'm saying in the same way, I once was blind but now can see seems to imply exactly that.

The only problem with that is, I've never heard anyone say that they 'See evolution in the leaves' or 'The big bang in the rocks', although you could say that you hear evidence of the big bang in the cosmic background radiation. You can't really see a process in a picture, in the same way you can apparently see God.

In one world I can point to the leafs and say "There are some leaves." and there can be an agreement, in the other you can look at leaves and say "I see God.", but you can't see it, and they tell you to look harder still, yet how hard must one look to see that emperor doesn't have any clothes?

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic

A New Fallacy? The Infallible Person

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Machan) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 02:20:00 +0000

I'm not sure if this fallacy has been talked about before in the depth that I'm about to talk about it or even if it is correctly identified as a new fallacy. What is clear is that it is an error in reasoning that hinders many peoples thinking without them even realizing they are making a mistake. That error is thinking that the mind works perfectly and is a perfect translator of external events to sensory information to rational understanding to memory retention and recall. Which could be encompassed in the argument from authority fallacy where any person is the authority of what they did/didn't do, but I don't think that, that description encompasses the totality of different kinds of errors being made.

Any person considers themselves the authority on what they did or did not do. I was at the casino last night and played poker, lay down my flush draw when I should have but got criticized about it, and all sorts of other things. These are the types of things people hold unquestionably true.

The mind does a wonderful job taking different waves at different frequencies and turning them into something intelligible, but it does error and on top of that it makes systematic mistakes; to err is human, and people don't understand how truly human they are. This is because the brain and body do such a seamless job, most of the time, that unless these mistakes are being consciously looked for they are unnoticed or shrugged off. Forgotten almost immediately, escaping notice, leaving no reason to doubt a personal infallibility about what is going/went on in the world.

However, mistakes are made, remotes end up in the freezer next to the popsicle's and ice cream end's up in the fridge under the cheese slices. These are the common errors that the mind makes when it is busy and concentrating on something else, the programming was there so the mistake shouldn't have been made, but it was made anyway, due to any number of reasons.


Pareidolia took this Canadian bill off the market (See the Devils head?)

There are another class of errors that aren't mistakes, per say, they are errors that are purposely made or that are there for a reason. Pareidolia, the common misconception of memory, cognitive dissonance, implanted memories, and intuitive measurement, intuitive probability (Monty Hall Problem). Yet, despite these and the more common problems like miss identification people normally don't doubt any of the knowledge they have.

This all accumulates into a host of unknown phenomena being understood as 'real'. Ghost stories have started by objects moving and no one being able to account for who moved them, extraterrestrial visits have been caused by implanted memories and a host of other things, lucky streaks happen because of the poor understanding of probability, and many other supernatural occurrences can be accounted for just with the fallacy of the person thinking that they are infallibly seeing the world, instead of seeing reality through a evolutionary crafted human lens.

This failure is mainly due to the mind working so well that its non-perfect functioning is a novel amusement (the inward nose) and (balls rolling uphill). No one really thinks about how often their brain gets something wrong and the people who do think about it might fit into the category of people who look at the brain as the work of a divine hand that could craft a brain that sees the true picture of reality, instead of a product with limitations and made not for the purpose of understanding reality, but for being a successful gene package.

Pariedolia works, it has often been noted, because the 8 times you mistake a tiger being in a bush, your only out a couple seconds of your time, but the one time you don't see the tiger in the bush you may be out your life. Errors can be just mistakes or they can built into the mind itself for enhanced survival. Mistakes exist in categories that aren't the exception, but instead the rule.

So when a lady tells me she knows that a house is haunted because one day a hairbrush went missing and turned up in the kitchen cupboard, I don't doubt that hairbrush went missing, but I question the persons memory about things they have done. There needn't be ghosts when there are so many specters of the human mind. Seeing isn't believing.

Which pretty much covers the basics of this fallacy, the fallacy that the mind functions perfectly. People think that their brain works perfectly and their version of reality is what infallibly happened, instead of the brain producing a, usually, well working picture of reality through a human lens.

Thanks for reading,
-themoralskeptic