Category: believers

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Rationalism: When did we decide that a premise is true if it leads to absurd conclusions?

reductio ad absurdum, the new mark of a sound argument

I don’t know how it happened. Maybe the bodystealers murdered Rationality and gave the skinsuit to Madness. My theory is more reserved: I think there was a recent change in the fabric of the universe. Either way, something happened that reductio ad absurdum is no longer a method of falsification. It’s now the sign of a good argument. Today, every visionary idea in Silicon Valley, from “cure for death” longevity research, through the full gamut of AI speculation, to Dark Right social accelerationism, stands on the new standard of logical proof: that a premise is true if it leads to absurd conclusions.

If you need a refresher, reductio ad absurdum is supposed to falsify an argument by seeing it all the way through. It’s a type of falsification by contradiction. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. shows the value of the method in US jurisprudence. Should the right to free speech be entirely unlimited? Well, if it was, people could falsely cry “fire” in a crowded theater. That can’t be right! Therefore, the principle of free speech should have some limits. When I was a child, easily led astray by the others, my elders would ask “If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you follow?”. Their point, which hit eventually, was that I have to think for myself what’s right or wrong.

In neorationalism today a premise is true if it leads to absurd conclusions.

TREACLES

I always found reductio ad absurdum to be the most fun and colorful form of falsification. In today’s mad world, it’s still colorful, but it’s no longer falsification. Now, absurd ideologies based on lazy extrapolation are treated like they stand on compelling logic. Accelerationism is the argument that we should force techno-utopian revolution by accelerating society’s decline. Not only should you jump after your friends off the cliff, you should take as many people as possible down with you. Many of our new paragons of rationality buy it, and the idea continues to grow.

Today, influential ideologies like accelerationism, existential risk, longtermism, transhumanism, “extropism” (I’ll unpack these in a bit) are all parts of the ideological framework for the most extreme and future-focused thinking in the SF Bay Area’s Silicon Valley. If you peel back the surface of any major techno-utopian trend in the last decade, you’ll find one of these mindworms wiggling around justifying indifference to the issues of today and an obsession with the fanciful issues of tomorrow. What are they?

Existential risk (“X-risk”) is the idea that human extinction is infinitely worse than any non-existential problem (poverty, oppression, and even climate change). Under this belief, future events that could pose an extinction threat, such as asteroids or rogue AI, are the important focus for today’s brightest minds, even when the chances of those events are incredibly small. If you’re close enough to the Bay neorationalist scene, you know people who think we must put all our focus on preventing/accelerating the doom/salvation of AI. As the logic goes, any real bad problem of today is quantitatively less bad than an infinitely bad future problem, no matter how unlikely, while any present good is less good than the infinite good of some Maybe-Tomorrow.

Longtermism, which sounds nice at first, is the idea that we’re ethically obliged to incorporate the well-being of future people in altruistic calculations of today. Since there are probably many more people in the future than today, we reach X-risk’s conclusion by another path: the world’s problems of today are nothing against the possible problems of tomorrow.

Next are extropism and transhumanism, the schools of thought interested in extrapolating social and ethical thought into a world in which humans are no longer bound by physiological or physical limits. Whether through biological immortality, or sci-fi consciousness uploads to an ethereal Internet, both imagine a humanity without limits. Scoff if you like, but it’s the logic of every other faith tradition, afterlife included.

Why is this happening? I think proof by contradiction can be hard to tell from simple induction in the wild. And that’s awkward because contradiction shows things to be false, and inductions shows them to be true. Let’s treat yelling “fire” from the other end, as a proof of free speech absolutism. If I accept that it’s OK to falsely yell fire in an empty theater, and I can prove it’s OK to yell fire for a partially populated theater if it was OK to tell when there was one fewer person there, then Holmes’ argument can be read as a claim that, by induction, any true free speech devotee should, in fact, falsely yell fire in crowded theaters. I think the mindworms are based on this same confusion between induction and contradiction, and it’s fueled a bit by an ideology that treats the claim to be tested as the premise to be assumed, and the masterstroke moment of contradicting that premise as its logical consequence.

Aside from that I also think there’s some political economy at play. Must an “absurd” conclusion be a false one? Not if it’s profitable. Investors don’t want to fund a new company, they want to fund a new future. When the way of thinking that always made you square lets you rebrand as a self-made philosopher or visionary entrepreneur, it’s easy to get sloppy.

Utilitarianism: One logic to rule them all

If you’re seeing similarities between these ideologies, it’s because they’re kin. All of these ouroboran arguments come out of utilitarianism, the rational approach to ethics first developed in the late 19th century by thinkers such as Bentham and J.S. Mill. Have you been asked whether it’s OK to save five lives by diverting a runaway trolley to kill only one person? If so you’re familiar with the ethical calculus of utilitarianism. Trolley-ology, also known as contemporary moral philosophy, has seen a resurgence in the last twenty years as philosophers discovered that people pay more attention with lurid examples. “Rationalism” and “effective altruism”, the neoutilitarianisms, have had real sway among young people disaffected by our less civil, more political age. The promise of an objective, dispassionate approach to the world’s problems has made these ideologies an attractive refuge with a rich tradition.

Following Bentham, utilitarianism grew to tackle a wide range of problems. I read the trolley problem was first developed by philosopher Philippa Foot to understand the ethics of abortion. On its path through the 20th century it attracted a variety of adherents and critics. One notable critic was Robert Nozick, the economic theorist also famous for developing the logical foundations of libertarianism. His 1974 book “Anarchy, The State, and Utopia,” awarded Best Title For A Philosophical Treatise by me in 2015, argued that society can maximize individual liberty despite the inherent oppression and violence of states. His angle is that if humans can be guaranteed the power to always leave their current state for another, then it would create market competition among would-be dictators for citizens. Nozick’s exit-based utopia, “the market for tyrants,” has become the template for libertarian dreams for our future. Try to miss it in Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, or Srinivasan’s “Network State”, both of which offer up decentralization technologies like the Internet as the very models of an exit-based social order. My own research approaches the ecosystem of self-hosted web servers (including Minecraft servers) as a perfect Nozickian market for tyrants. When techno-utopianism and libertarianism finally tied the knot in 21st century California, Nozick gave the toast.

I have to control myself to be kind about these ideas—I’ve always kept my choler up by hate-reading libertarian theory—but the basic idea is sympathetic: we can logically derive what is right and good from simple premises and sober reason. I love that kind of thing. It’s exciting to imagine that the world may be as simple as our models for it, especially when you see how new technology can make the dream so. It’s that appeal that has made so many bright young people flock to San Francisco in the last decades.

Libertarianism and utilitarianism, each an ethical theory grounded in reason, both benefitted from the fundamental contributions of Nozick. In addition to building the classic logical arguments for libertarianism, he also gives us some of the most influential thought experiments in utilitarianism. His two most famous are the colorfully named “experience machine” and “utility monster.”

In Nozick’s “experience machine”, advanced technology (actually “superduper neuropsychologists”) can put you in a coma, wire you up, and induce any fantastic life experiences you desire while you’re under, as faithful as any actual experience you’re due for in real life. But there’s no coming back. The question: should you plug in?

In Nozick’s “utility monster”, we imagine a being infinitely stoked. Anything anyone likes, it likes better. The question: is the public good maximized by diverting all social resources to the utility monster’s infinitely superior capacity for satisfaction, at the expense of everyone else?

At some point in Silicon Valley today, these thought experiments became blueprints. They are directly inspiring tech’s wildest ideological projects. Transhumanism, and to some extent AI, are projects to create experience machines. Existential risk, premised on infinite negative utility, is the utility monster run backwards. All of the isms in the Silicon Valley ideological complex — Transhumanism, Extropianism, Neorationalism, Effective Altruism, Existential Risk, Longtermism, and also Singularitarianism and Cosmism (collectively named TESCREAL by Gebru and Torres; but for our purposes, TREACLES will do), fall one way or another out of the idea that it’s immoral and destructive to do anything but pursue outlandish infinite goods and prevent outlandish infinite bads.

The Twist

Like I just said, Nozick made fundamental contributions to both of the major ideological pillars of Silicon Valley. But while his contributions to libertarianism were “PRO”, his contributions to utilitarianism were “ANTI.” Nozick was not a utilitarian. The experience machine and the utility monster are both arguments against utilitarian thinking. Each is a proof by contradiction, showing that when you push the premises of quantitative ethics to its extreme, the result is absurd.

Of course a delightful imaginary life is not a replacement for life!

Of course we should not commit all social resources to one infinitely good or bad thing!

Does 2 = root 2? No. Logically extrapolating to infinity is a classic blunder ➡

Is 2 equal to 1.4142…? It is if you’re not careful about replacing the stairs in your staircase with infinitely many infinitesimal stairs. When “AI alignment” tells you that AI has to be like you or it’ll replace us all with paperclips (actual supposedly rational concern), that’s not a problem of aligning AI, it’s a problem with using infinity carelessly in logical arguments.

When Rationalism tells you that everything real around you is a worthless distraction from the imaginary problems that really matter, that’s not a critique of everything around you, it’s a critique of Rationalism. If anything, it’s the future problems that are worthless because, by the same carelessness around infinity, there is no tomorrow! Zeno’s Arrow of Time, which I just made up, says that to get to tomorrow we have to get halfway there, and to get to the halfway point, we have to get halfway to that, and half way to that, and that, and that. Therefore, you should live for the present.

Sound logic applied to an unsound world is unsound. You can’t extrapolate on just one parameter in isolation when the system you’re modeling, society, has many that all interact. These arguments exist to make a mockery of utilitarianism and its whole flawed TREACLES brood. They aren’t reasonable arguments about society, they’re arguments against using pure reason on society.

Well, they used to be. Turning dials to 11 was once satire, but now it’s the fashion. Due to a recent change in the fabric of the universe, or maybe lizard people, reductio ad absurdum is now the gold standard for Bay Area visionwork. In this brave new world, up is down, left is right, and amoral utilitarianism, Nozick’s punching bag, Silicon Valley’s absurd religion, is the logical end of crystal clear, razor sharp, cold hard reason.

Shot from Spinal Tap (1984), which used to be satire

Shot from Spinal Tap (1984), which used to be satire ➡

Postscript

This argument has been cooking for years, and has taken so long to get out. The main reason is I thought it was obvious, especially to the kind of person who would put the word “rational” in their self identification. I was wrong. But at least I’m less wrong than a bunch of Harry Potter fanfic.

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When knowing right means doing wrong: Ethics on the frontier of knowledge

Observing right and wrong for the first time

The common understanding of moral knowledge is that you learn it from your parents, read it from a book, or innately know it in your biology.  In these views, you already “know” right from wrong, and your only challenge is to abide by this pre-existing moral wisdom. 

What this view forgets is how much of right and wrong we learn experientially, in trial-and-error fashion. We act, we feel, we update. By reflecting after the fact on how our actions played out, and what did or didn’t feel right, we gain new insight into what is right by us. In this view, we’re all Pinocchio’s without a Jiminy Cricket to guide us; we’re alone and have to make our own mistakes. Put simply, a big part of ethics is empirical.

(Quick definitions: The word “empirical” is just a science-y word for experiential or observed. “Ethics” and “morality” are different ideas but I’m not a philosopher so I’ll go back and forth between them a bit loosely. Empirical morality is the right and wrong we learn by experience, guided by our reflections on our new experiences rather than pre-existing moral knowledge. It’s opposite is received morality, the kind we read in books.)

Empirical morality is not a quibble. It’s a major category of moral experience. No matter how old humanity is, new ethical frontiers are popping up all the time. The Bible asserts that there’s nothing new under the sun, but that’s what the Bible needs to be true, or it wouldn’t be any good as a one stop shop for moral guidance. And there are literally new things under the sun. The first nuke created a sun under the sun, with all kinds of ethical fallout afterwards.

Therefore, the ethics of the unknown, or not-yet-known, needs a larger role in how we understand moral behavior in general, particularly on “moral frontiers,” the new areas of human moral experience created by science, technology, and our steadily growing understanding of just how differently we all experience reality. Genetic engineering, algorithmic bias, artificial intelligence, and the surveillance state are just a few areas in which technology has created new dilemmas that can’t be easily sorted out only on the basis of society’s knowledge to-date. 

We tend to think that it is the ethicist’s job to think through these new challenges for society, so we let them sit shotgun on the edge of experience with a typewriter on their laps, clattering out the rules of the road as society hurtles down the highway. But it is our practitioners — social psychologists, wet lab biological technicians, military drone operators, and corporate AI researchers — with the most direct access to how things are, how they could be, and the nuance of what feels right and wrong in each moment. These actors are the most direct (or least indirect) recipients of the moral weight of each decision they make.  They are moral empiricists, and their experiences of what feels right and wrong on moral frontiers play a vital role in the moral systems society develops.  So what are the properties of empirical morality, what can it learn, and what are its pitfalls?

The dartboard of right and wrong

In a strictly empirical morality there are actions, they can be right or wrong, and we can’t know which are which until after doing them. Imagine playing darts blindfolded on a board of unknown size, shape, dimension, and dynamics. The contours of the dartboard represent the unknown slowly shifting boundary between right and wrong. After each throw the thrower will either hear the satisfying thunk of the dart against the board (Right) or an awful crash as it misses and hits something else (Wrong).  The empirical moral agent’s mission is to accumulate data about hits and misses and use it to develop a strategy for guiding action, a moral system. 

This moral system can be seen as a classifier. It labels prospective actions as right or wrong before having to commit them.  Building a classifier is fundamentally about managing tradeoffs.  Is the goal maximum ability to discern right from wrong (overall classifier accuracy)?  It may not be.  In fact it’s most likely not.  Moral systems often have an asymmetry in which types of error they penalize. They are, possibly by definition, much more concerned with properly preventing actions that may be bad (theft and treachery; the “miss rate”) than properly permitting those that may be good (swing dancing and reading comics; the “false negative rate”). When right and wrong are unknown, a moral systems as a classifier might seek to minimize false negatives specifically (trying to only hit the dartboard) or the overall misclassification rate (trying to learn its shape). Put simply, an empirical ethics has to choose whether its goal is “do no wrong” or “discern right from wrong.” And either choice forces big implications for right and wrong in society.

We will consider the implications of an empirical morality under both goals, ‘do no wrong’ and ‘know right from wrong.’ The main contribution of this essay is to show that both have serious problems. These problems are evident even outside the simple world of the model, in the more realistic worlds in which the boundary between right and wrong is blurry or dynamic, classifier goals intermingle, and in hybrid moralities, part empirical and part recevied. In fact, the more the problem description deviates from the simple model toward reality, the worse the consequences.

The “Do no wrong” ethic and its failure

Taking the first, let’s imagine that your goal on an ethic frontier is to do no wrong (never miss the dartboard). This makes sense if you are developing experimental pathogens to better treat disease.  Zero can escape, even the harmless one, because you don’t really know what’s harmless. Under this goal, the best strategy is as follows: throw darts until your first hit — or ask around among your fellow “moral explorers” for someone who has already gotten a hit — and aim every future dart for the same spot.  Take the first pathogen you find to be useful and harmless and student that one endlessly.  As you explore its most minor deviations, and miss intentionally or by accident—as your darts to the lower left give a crash instead of thud, you might adapt up and to the right, and adhere to that offset. After enough experience with what minor mistakes are acceptable, you can assemble a moral theory that’s never wrong by defining moral action as anything in the target region, and immoral action as anything outside of them. Because you are playing it safe and mostly trying to hit the same spot over and over, the only source of novelty is the novelty that can’t be helped, such as that which derives from noise and execution error.  

This “do no wrong” approach has the benefit of yielding as few as zero false positives (it will mistakenly label the fewest bad actions as good). But it’s downside is an unbounded false negative rate: unlimited potentially good actions will be labeled bad. Given our premise that many real moral theories are so biased, this is a positive feature of the model, not a shortcoming. And since the thrower sticks with the region of their first thud, they leave potentially huge areas of action space ethically unexplored. This is consistent with our common understanding of the most strict and orthodox moral systems, that they are so concerned with preventing wrong as to permit strategies that conservatively forbid actions that may be right.

The high false negative rate of “do no wrong” yields a major problem: non-uniqueness. Under “do no wrong”, two dart throwers in front of the same board under different initial conditions could stake out non-overlapping regions of action space and end up with moral systems that a) are perfectly internally consistent and b) completely exclude each other. Why is it that even the most careful, closely related religious denominations develop moral standards that exclude each other’s practitioners? A morality that is only interested in never doing wrong, with know interest in learning more about the space of right and wrong, is not only at risk of conservatively forbidding huge amounts of action space, it can also developing lead to multiple mutually incompatible moral systems.  While we hope that two visionary founders who try to live right end up with the same ethic, this thought experiment shows that their conservatism, applied to such a rich space of possible behaviors, can easily lead to those sincere founders developing moral systems in which the other is stuck in the wrong.

The “Know right from wrong” ethic and its failure

If “do no wrong” is so flawed, let’s examine the other potential goal of empirical  morality, learning right from wrong. In the language of the dartboard metaphor,  this looks like maximizing overall accuracy over the entire space by learning the contours of the dartboard by experience. Here is the problem with trying to learn the shape of a dartboard one thud at a time: you have to miss. It is impossible to adaptively learn the shape of a boundary without sampling from both sides of the boundary between right and wrong, particularly if throwing darts is inherently noisy. 

The problem for an empirical morality based on learning the boundary between right and wrong under all actions is that it is impossible to learn the difference between right from wrong without doing wrong. If there exist actions that we can only morally evaluate after the fact, if cognitive limits make some actions inherently morally unsimulatable and we must sometimes “feel” an action out after doing it, then even a completely earnest, virtuous scientist, who wants only to understand the moral contours of their new area of human inquiry, must sometimes go too far. 

So both goals of an empirical ethics have serious problems. If your ethic is to do no wrong, you will produce a morality that is incompatible with any other “do no wrong” ethic that’s not identical, all while limiting your followers to an artificially small backwater of human experience. And if your ethic is to learn right from wrong, then you have chosen an ethic is which the only way to “be” right is to sometimes “do” wrong.

Going further

These are not the last dilemmas facing those on moral frontiers. Simply being on the edge of right and wrong is enough to be viewed suspiciously by a more general population nestled safely in the interior terrain of familiar right and familiar wrong. How does an empirical morality interface with a culture that generally subscribes to a learned morality with no trial and error, no vast unknown spaces, and no conflict between know and doing right? 

Social morality’s interactions with empirical morality only adds problems. People who have learned what is right in a new area by doing a lot of right and wrong can attempt to serve their society by incriminating themselves and sharing their stories from the frontier. This would help prevent the rest of society from having to also do wrong to learn right. Is the alternative more moral: protecting themselves, leaving the boundary unlit, and letting all future comers make the same mistakes? 

The challenges facing ethical entrepreneurs may explain the general suspicion of those who work in morally fraught areas of technology. How many books and movies are driven by the scientist or technologist who “went too far”? Workers at moral frontiers are suspicious for the very good reason that they are morally compromised, not necessarily for any personal shortcoming, but merely because of the nature of work on a moral frontier.  Even the most earnest practitioner can only serve society if they are prepared to be judged as amoral or immoral. The only people who can see that a good person must sometimes do wrong are your peers on the frontier.

Will some hybrid approach demonstrate a complementarity that solves the problems of an empirical morality? A classifier tuned between the extremes over minimal misses and maximum accuracy will not magically benefit from the synergy of both. A mixed approach between empirical and received morality can’t prevent these shortcomings. Only a tremendous faith in moral simulation, a perfect ability to anticipate unanticipated consequences of our actions, can eliminate the risk to a society in mapping moral frontiers. The other option, leaving them unexplored, is conservative at best and at worst completely opposed to science and the spirit of inquiry.

Living it

I didn’t come up with this playing darts, but building organizations where I had to balance the demands of consensus with my own inner compass, or serving organization, like the Walt Disney Company, with unprecedented data on unprecedented populations of children’s and families. I’ve made all kinds of mistakes.  After all of it, I’ve come to the conclusion that science is inherently morally compromising. And even more controversially, i’ve decided that the solution isn’t to stop doing science, but to be OK being compromised. This model is what I came up with to get that across.  I have presented a simple model of morality for scenarios where it can only be learned by experience. It reveals a basic distinction between the moral goals of doing no wrong and knowing right from wrong. I show that either one you chose, you’re going to have big problems, either the problem that no distinct pair of moral systems are mutually ethical, or the unsettling idea that a person cannot be right without doing wrong, or at least tolerating other who do wrong for them.  I’m sharing this because I think it’s important to make mistakes, and to promote the possibility of an ethic in which the greatest moral failures are worthy of our admiration as long as they proceed with care, sincerity, and a spirit of discovery.

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Knives and pens in dialogue


If you can’t stand how old liberals put so much on civility when the world is burning or, if you’re baffled that today’s cultural extremists have thrown freedom of expression under the bus, or if you just think there’s too much infighting all around, then there’s a solution.

It’s actually not hard to reconcile the ethics behind broad-minded liberalism and emotionally charged bad faith confrontationalism into one framework. It’s not hard to explain how they’re both good and important, can co-exist, and actually always have, serving different purposes.

The dialogue- and politics- first spaces: Pens and knives.

The worldviews seem incompatible because they exist in two different spaces built on different assumptions. These are the “dialogue-first” and “politics-first” spaces. I think of it as pens out versus knives out. Dialogue-first spaces exist when there is physical security and everyone can assume the good faith and ability of everyone else. These get you the familiar ideal of older liberals: unity is a goal, good intentions behind a bad action matter, civility matters, due process is divine, there are no bad ideas, you attack the idea not the person, speech is free but yelling doesn’t work, content trumps style, you can discuss abhorrent ideas, defend people with abhorrent views, due process is respected by all, and reason prevails. You’re in dialogue space when you can ask challenging, ignorant, vulnerable questions and count on sympathy, patience, and an explanation. Think close family and friends, sometimes the classroom.

Politics-first spaces are wild: none of the above is true. You don’t feel safe, you don’t trust those engaging with you, you cannot assume good intentions of others who have wronged you. In this space you should go hard: attack people rather than ideas, vulnerability is weakness, interest in other cultures is appropriation, race and other identity differences are recognized and even emphasized, affiliation and trust are based on those identities, the judicial system is a cruel game, the legitimacy of your input depends on them, mobbing is legitimate, civility is patronizing, gaslighting, or a powerplay, a witchhunt is a tactic, silence is assent but self-censorship is tact, shutting someone down is fair game, how you come off is as important as how you are. You immediately see the value of these attitude in the middle of politics-first space, any time you become a challenge to structural inhumanity on social media, in opinion columns, during protests, and even in a bad relationship.

It’s tricky because a knife can pass for a pen, to everyone

That could be the end of it: what tool we hold depends on if we’re safe and we feel safe. The catch is that a space can claim to be dialogue-first but be politics-first in secret. That’s dangerous because when a political space projects dialogue values, the emphasis on good faith makes it easier to hide abusive dynamics. For example, if there’s no blatant evidence of an instance of sexual assault in the group, and good faith requires taking the assailant at their word, then the veneer for dialogue-first dynamics can perpetuate awful behavior. The threat lurks in every dialogue space all the time.

Creepiness can’t lurk as easily in politics-first space. Reality comes down to appearance, meaning you only need to be loud to be heard. Callouts, cancelling, and other seemingly unaccountable tactics are fair game, even strategic, in political space. Safe spaces are a humane survival strategy.

On the very edge of social change and activism, dialogue is naive because the consensus conspiracy of institutional violence has bad faith at it’s core. That bad faith stays invisible without a civil rights movement, Apartheid resistance, BLM, or Alinsky’s joyously bad faith Rules for Radicals. In those cases, the politics-first headspace is the appropriate headspace.

It’s tricky because you can make my pen a knife just by saying so

The only truly dialogue-first spaces are those that maintain consensus from all participants all the time. If one member’s experience is that they don’t believe others are acting in good faith, it’s literally not a dialogue space anymore, no matter how many other people still believe. A member saying their pen space is a knife space instantly makes it true. That sounds like an overstatement, but look: If a member of a dialogue-first space claims another has covertly violated trust with harassment or assault, do you take the claim seriously or not? If you think they’re sincere, you’re acknowledging that bad faith is happening somewhere. And if you don’t, then you just made it true by denying their sincerity. One way or another, the consensus is broken. All that’s in question is if your hands are red with it.

Since anyone can call bullshit at any time, true dialogue-first spaces are fragile. They need constant nurturing. You can’t just wish that away. It’s easy to get nostalgic for a time when people could just talk about ideas without getting mobbed on social media. But there are real humans who say that that time only ever existed for you. If you don’t accept their experience as true, then you are making it true by perpetuating their marginalization. When minorities in universities say that academia isn’t actually a field of pure ideas that rewards all equally, they are saying that they are experiencing the university’s founding ideal of dialogue as just a veneer. If that’s their experience, then good faith means assuming they’re right unless proven otherwise. I’m actually proud that universities today are listening, accepting with grace that they can’t wish themselves back to dialogue-hood without asking critically whether that founding ideal really exists for everyone. That has upsides and downsides. Firing profs for assigning Huck Finn is the other side of the coin of finally being able to fire them for sexual harassment. And it will continue this way until affected communities feel ready to buy in again to the university’s idea. The thing about the university’s fragile ideal is that it’s not real if it’s not fragile.

To plowshares

Everyone deserves to have a dialogue space they connect with. Dialogue space is less stressful and creates more room for growth. It’s important to want and have dialogue-first spaces. But it’s also important that whatever space you’re in has the right name. So within both spaces there are important things to do.

In a dialogue-first space. The first thing to do is take a person seriously when they are challenging the consensus. Victims who come out to expose violence in superficially dialogue-first spaces often get hostility for questioning the consensus, when they should get rewarded for finding the right name. You listen to such challenges because you cherish your space enough to question it. You don’t have to be an uncritical advocate, you just have to show sincere interest in finding the truth.1

Another thing you have to do is protect the consensus from needless undermining with appropriate vetting and onboarding of new members for their own willingness to maintain good faith.

In a politics-first space. The fragile consensus of dialogue-first spaces is hard to build from nothing. But it happens, and you can do it if you have the capacity. Capacity is how much bullshit you can take before losing patience, getting frustrated, or otherwise dropping the pen. People don’t get to pick their capacity, and many don’t have much. Your capacity might be higher because of your personality or your privilege or your training.

Another thing you need is a foundation of trust built the old-fashioned way, with long personal history or shared identity group membership.2 I’ve seen that people who live in a world hostile to their existence are often tuned for politics-first exchange, and you should understand it’s a very rational stance. They can have a frustratingly high trust bar for vulnerable dialogue with outsiders like you, and you have to respect it.

Who must bring a pen to a knife fight

To get two people assuming good faith from neither assuming good faith you need one person to assume good faith. That first mover should be the person with more capacity.

If you’ve been blessed with high capacity, the tax on that blessing is an obligation to create a world that is dialogue-first for everyone. That’s hard because you can only build dialogue conditions in knife space. It’s on you to stand by dialogue-first ethics and also remain compassionate, humble, and cool in the boiling pot of politics-first exchange. You need courage and strength to be the only one holding a pen, holding yourself to the high standards of both at the same time.

Does that sound unfair? You might be more of a knifer than you realize. Are you over that time you were called out unreasonably?3 Are any of your perfect rational arguments against wokeness motivated by a sense of grievance? If your approach to defending rationality, reason, discussion, open-mindedness, freedom of expression, and other good stuff ever sneaks in sarcasm or dismissiveness or even frustration, then there’s a chance that you’re just an agent provocateur, claiming you support dialogue-first spaces while undermining them with your own corrosive bad faith. You should consider getting out of the way to work on yourself. The tension between the spaces is an opportunity, not a warzone, and making war of it is a fundamental betrayal of enlightened dialogue values. So find someone with the capacity to maintain dialogue-first presence, model its value, put being effective over being right, and absorb political blows until some knifers finally start to let their guard down. Then become one.

A good first-mover actually needs a bit more than capacity. They have

  • The ability to take the perspective of people who have suffered. This empathy and sensitivity can be gained from books if not experience. One byword for this is being trauma informed.
  • Group membership.
  • The integrity to not be a creep yourself. This is extra hard if you have the blindspots that come from needing to identify as the protagonist in your fights.

Wrap

This is a model. It succeeds at explaining a lot of the contradictions faced by people who are both sympathetic and wary about social justice. It explains why a lot of things that seem ugly about that rhetoric are adaptive in context, and what a space needs to be ready for civility discourse. It also gives a strategy for moving forward. And it gives you something to aspire to if you’re a rational type who feels confused or aggrieved. Hopefully this makes it easier for you to understand what’s going on with society right now, and articulate your place in change.4

  1. With capacity you must believe you can do the impossible passably: respect a victim’s claims with credence and respect due process at the same time. ↩︎
  2. Requiring group membership is a violation of dialogue-space, but in politics-space it’s the oldest and least bad trust signal, from before we had societies in which general good faith was possible to assume. To make a difference in a space of queer black radicals, you either have to be a queer black radical, or connect with one through whatever other identity label you can find in common. ↩︎
  3. I am over the time I was called out unfairly, but it took a while. Several years. It was a friend I approached carefully, sincerely, and humbly with questions about the antioppression movement and I got piled on. I was confused and resentful for about 8 years before I found a friend to complain to and talk it through with. I’m lucky to have gotten the head start on this framework for reconciliation. ↩︎
  4. This essay is my attempt to get pithier and pithier at communicating this older more fleshed out version of the argument. ↩︎

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The project of developing leaders when freedom is an endless meeting

When you stumble on an excerpt that says what you want to say better than you could ever say it, you switch very eagerly from blogging to quoting. This is a long excerpt from Francesca Polletta’s 2002, “Freedom is an endless meeting,” and incredible historical book about participatory community organizing. You can tell from the title that she’s interested in the fact that all solutions come with a pet tension for struggling with. Recounting story after story of early civil rights organizers balancing idealism and pragmatism, you understand how she gets so easily to realism, and you wonder why everyone in the democracy scene hasn’t. This bit tackles the eternal question of what leadership means when your goal is cultivating leaders and the biggest threat is your own effectiveness.


The literature on organizing is rife with injunctions against leading: organizers should rather help residents articulate their own agendas and build their leadership. Yet, in the process, organizers are often expected to help identify goals, push people to question their preferences, and rally them to act. How can they do that without thereby undermining the leadership capacities of those whom they are organizing? Myles Horton’s answer was to ask questions. “I use questions more than I do anything else. They don’t think of a question as intervening because they don’t realize that the reason you asked that question is because you know something…. Instead of you getting on a pinnacle you put them on a pinnacle.” Horton described a Highlander director in a workshop who “asks one question, and that one question turned that workshop around and completely moved it in a different direction.” Was the Highlander workshop leader leading? Should one ask questions that open the whole enterprise up for scrutiny? That purposely move a discussion in a new direction? In SNCC, asking questions later became a way for organizers to hold onto their radicalism without feeling that they were imposing it on the people whom they organized. The tactic ended up alienating people more than involving them. What comes across in the stories that Horton tells, in SNCC workers’ tales of the best organizers, and in the broader literature on organizing is good organizers’ creativity: their ability to respond to local conditions, to capitalize on sudden opportunities, to turn to advantage a seeming setback, to know when to exploit teachable moments and when to concentrate on winning an immediate objective. Sometimes you insist on fully participatory decisionmaking; sometimes you do not. Albany SNCC project head Charles Sherrod urged fellow organizers not to “let the project go to the dogs because you feel you must be democratic to the letter.” Horton recounted on numerous occasions an experience that he had had in a union organizing effort. At the time, the highway patrol was escorting scabs through the picket line, and the strike committee was at its wit’s end about how to counter this threat to strikers’ solidarity. After considering and rejecting numerous proposals, exhausted committee members demanded advice from Horton. When he refused, one of them pulled a gun. “I was tempted then to become an instant expert, right on the spot!” Horton confessed. “But I knew that if I did that, all would be lost and then all the rest of them would start asking me what to do. So I said: ‘No. Go ahead and shoot if you want to, but I’m not going to tell you.’ And the others calmed him down.”

Giving in would have defeated the purpose of persuading the strikers that they had the knowledge to make the decision themselves. But Horton sometimes told another story. When he was once asked to speak to a group of Tennessee farmers about organizing a cooperative, he knew, he said, that since “their expectation was that I would speak as an expert… if I didn’t speak, and said, ‘let’s have a discussion about this,’ they’d say, that guy doesn’t know anything.” So Horton “made a speech, the best speech I could. Then after it was over, while we were still there, I said, let’s discuss this speech. Let’s discuss what I have said. Well now, that was just one step removed, but close enough to their expectation that I was able to carry them along…. You do have to make concessions like that.” What better time to make a concession than when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun? Horton presumably knew that he could get away with refusing to be an expert in the first situation and not in the second. Perhaps the difference was that he was unknown to the farmers and was known to the strikers. But one could argue that a relationship with a history could tolerate aberrant exercises of leadership while first impressions die harder. In other words, extracting rules from the stories that Horton tells is difficult. When to lead and when to defer, when to ask leading questions and when to remain silent, when to focus on the limited objective and when to encourage people to see the circumscribed character of that objective—the answers depend on the situation and are not always readily evident.

p. 76

I love how that first bit about questions turns the patronism of the Socratic method right on its big self-important head. I also like the focus on process, what Polletta calls “the developmental project of democracy.” I think the single biggest force acting against democracy is the experience of everyday people in their first organizing role trying and failing to get others involved, and coming reluctantly to the conclusion that it just doesn’t work, that people want to be told what to do. Your bad experience cultivating democrary wasn’t a lens into the fundamental architecture of human nature. You’re a person in a social reality trying to fine tune a smaller reality within it. You’re in a project, and a project has to get where it’s going by starting where it’s at.

From a developmental perspective, no compromise from your ideal is really a compromise. A compromise is a step away from the ideal, and your steps are still toward the ideal away from the status quo. They don’t approach the ideal directly, as the crow flies. They follow the landscape and its contours, avoiding the mud as much as possible. Following the hills is only a compromise in the sense that obeying gravity is.

To keep the navigational metaphors going, what does it mean to navigate by the stars? When we follow a star, it’s not with the goal of getting there. You follow a star to reach a place on Earth that’s closer to it. And that’s a meaningful, deeply idealistic journey even if, in a cosmic sense, every place on Earth you could possibly go is ultimately the same number of years away from the light. Even if, as your North Star takes you climbing along the sphere to its pole, less and less of your motion is up toward the star and more and more is sideways to the pole. That’s just physical law. Obeying gravity is not a compromise.

An especially exciting thing about Polletta is her critique of prefiguration. Prefiguration is a popular framework for activism and radical change because it offers a way to pursue an ideal in this non-ideal world. It proposes that one create little microcosms of the ideal within the real, and that your perfect bubble grows and grows until it’s as big as the world. In the prefigurative view, the root of the power of participatory approaches to community is that they prefigure the global approach by enacting it. Seems hard to fault. But Polletta holds the developmental project in contrast to the prefigurative project, arguing that prefiguration works in relation to itself, with no more influence from the outside world than is necessary, while the developmental project is about the outside world. The project of pursuing the ideal becomes the project of finding the most idealistic way of relating to the rest of the world as it is, and that being that way in this world changes the world. The great thing about Polletta is it’s all examples and history first, so these ideas are grounded in actual things that happened, giving you nuance for free. From the page before the quote above:

One can also contrast this developmental rationale for participatory democratic decisionmaking with the prefigurative commitment that commentators have attributed to SNCC and the new left. Where a prefigurative commitment envisions change through personal self-transformation and moral suasion rather than through institutional political change, a developmental commitment is not in conflict with an explicitly political one. To the contrary, its very purpose is to produce activists and organizations capable of taking on powerful officials and agencies. From early on, Horton said, he had been “more concerned with structural changes than I have with changing the hearts of people.” A prefigurative commitment tends toward absolutism since the object is both to “oppose” a current regime and to be truly “opposite”; a developmental commitment tends more toward an acceptance of the conventional. The two projects have very different views of organization. A prefigurative project is suspicious of organization, concerned that it molds people in its own image, valorizing efficiency and conformity over the purposes for which the organization was created, raising means to the level of ends. Enacting the ends in the means, committing to the “here-and-now revolution,” favoring community over organization—all these counter the oligarchical tendencies of organizations. By contrast, the broader organizing strategy of which a developmental project is a part sees organizations as one of the key arenas for developing political efficacy, leadership, and accountability and, not least, for securing power. An organization is doomed to failure unless people have a stake in its preservation, however. Participation in decisionmaking provides the sense of ownership and the pleasures of learning that sustain people’s participation.

The relationship underpinning a developmental democratic project is a pedagogical one. People learn to articulate concerns and evaluate options by doing so. At the same time, they learn from each other, and they may also learn from a facilitator or teacher, someone who encourages, guides, questions, and challenges them.

p.74

The tough thing for me about a good book is it takes years to read because I keep going into reveries. It’s been 2 years probably and I’m only 75 pages in. Here’s another great quote from earlier in the book, redeeming meetings:

Local people have really begun to find a way that they can use a meeting as a tool for running their own lives. For having someone to say about it.


That’s a line from Bob Moses, an organizer for the civil rights movement in the US South. It offers such a striking counter narrative to the modern “meetings are bad; fewer meetings” atmosphere that work culture creates. I think what’s happened is that there has been a change in the meaning of the word “meeting”. The way it is used in those quotes is as a bottom-up gathering of community members to discuss a matter of shared concern. That is so much different from what the word means today. If I were weaving conspiracy theories, I’d say that part of the project of undermining democracy has been capturing and corrupting the word. I think there’s a case to be made that meeting, not voting, is the fundamental unit of democracy.

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I found the place in Chico where the world was created

“… The raft came ashore at Ta’doikö, and the place can be seen today.”

That’s the ending to a story that captured my imagination over 15 years ago in this 2007 post. It’s the creation myth of the Maidu indians, a people that lived in today’s Northern California all along the Sierra foothills, north of Sacramento, south of Redding, centered around Marysville Butte and Chico, CA (The full creation myth is here; I love it.).

Unfortunately according to the Wikipedia page the place Taodoiko has been lost.

Except that I found it, in this 2008 post. The key was in a map from the Handbook of the Indians of California (1967) written by the father of Ursula K. LeGuin, Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber.

The key with Maidu (instead of Miwok) names for these places is on page 394 of the book.

With help from some historical maps of the area (in which the stream landmarks haven’t been developed away), that places Tadoiko right between Chico and Durham, CA.

You’d think I would have gone sooner. But I finally made it to the place, now a Walnut Orchard off of Fimple Rd. in Butte County twenty minutes south of Chico. The place where the world was created.

It was special to go. Where it describes thing coming from the North, I can see the north. Where it describes the sun, I could point. As in the story “And all around were mountains, as far as the eye could see.”

Another powerful thing about the piece: The companion to this story of the Earth’s creation is the one of humanity’s creation, which takes place in a different location, Marysville Butte. I’d always treated the like two separate stories but upon going it’s clear that they’re the same: from Tadoiko, Marysville Buttes is one of the most prominent features.

Less powerful of the place is that there’s no sign of it. It has ben replaced by walnut tree fields as far as the eye can see. I’d be curious if, among the residents, there was any inkling that their far is at the place of an old storied settlement.

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Beyond first-order skepticism

In our culture, there’s a great shortcut to the high ground: the bold skeptic who doesn’t believe any of your ignorant mainstream rot. You see it everywhere. The bold skeptic is deeply and widely appealing, instantly recognizable, and so easy to fake. It’s almost as easy to fake as the other shortcut: the underdog. If underdog billionaires can complain about “the elites,” and underdog top (as in literally mainstream media) pundits can rage at mainstream media, then calling a good thing bad is nothing.

So: to instantly amaze your friends with your intellectual depth, take something everyone believes and reject it. That’s the first-order skeptic.

First-order skepticism in itself is common, and fine. It isn’t very deep to be a contrarian. But it’s something. The problem with the first order skeptic is this: a lot of what us sheeple believe, we believe because it’s true. Floor down, sky up, grass green, sun big. It can be tricky maintaining a skeptic identity without being easily cornerable into untenable positions. This is the big problem at the ground floor of skepticism. But you can solve it with work, by going deeper.

A second-order sceptic doubts both the common wisdom and the first-order skeptics. What a first-order skeptic has on the normies, a second-order skeptic has on on the first-order skeptics. “The earth isn’t flat or round: it’s a geoid!” Then there’s your third-order skeptic, who doubts the zero-, first-, and second-order skeptics, and so on. “Sure the earth is a geoid, but that’s not really a definition of a kind of shape, it’s really more our name for whatever shape earth is“. A hippie first-order skeptic will reject microwaves and dish washers for being too gadgety and commodity, while a second-order hippie will embrace them for being energy and resource efficient. Michael Moore rejects recycling because putting sustainability work on consumers is a drop in the bucket up against the magnitude of corporate waste. That’s a second-order skeptic. 

If a first-order vegetarian rejects meat on ethical or squeamish grounds, a second-order vegetarian might use ecological grounds, which reject animal agriculture, but will eat hunted goat in the tropics, or hunted moose in the arctic, ecosystems that can support those game at those levels of prevalence. A third-order vegetarian thinks that’s fine, but a little too naive in its embrace of the bold individualist. At the third order, your vote is naturally for the the most ecologically, ethically sound protein source of all. You argue that we should farm and eat bugs. 

As you go further and further down, you occupying increasingly unlikely, creative positions, and become more and more of a character, with more credibility with each level. At each level, you have to be more informed. Each level is harder to fake. Every take feels like IcyHot: spicy freshness and stone cold logic in the same package. Many of my biggest moments of admiration or respect boil down to a moment of seeing someone lodged in at level three or four casually blowing my mind. One of my most influential professors was so radically higher-order in her feminism that she exclusively wore dresses, because she saw the trend to sell women on shirts and pants as nothing but a fashion industry ploy to get women to spend twice as much on garments. And deeper isn’t always better, I also admire consistency at medium depth. Jacobin Magazine, and The Baffler before it, are just solid reliable consistent second-order skepticism. I always think of Jacobin taking down Foucault for admiration of capitalism.

I’ve seen that sometimes if you fly too high you wrap back around to incredibly norm-y positions. I’ve found many of the friends who are best at it become absolute curmudgeons. I’ve seen the second- and third- orders get faked as well. But overall, it’s a sign of quality. As an idea it’s like “Galaxy Brain” but the result of work and investment. It’s a sign of real thought. It’s something I look for in the people I follow. I don’t know if originality exists, it’s possible it doesn’t. It’s possible that no deep originality is more than a sum up from zero stopping at third, or fourth, or fifth order skepticisms, increasingly faithful to original with every extra pass. It’s also the perfect cudgel for all those bold skeptics.

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A recent history of astrology


I made a site this summer—http://whatsyoursign.baby—that’s a sort of glorified blog post about what happens when you go ahead and give astrology a basis in science. I wrapped it up with an explainer that was hidden in the back of the site, so I’m publishing the full thing here.

The history

Before the 17th century, Westerners used similarity as the basis for order in the world. Walnuts look like brains? They must be good for headaches. The planets seem to wander among the stars, the way that humans walk among the plants and trees? The course of those planets must tell us something about the course of human lives. This old way of thinking about the stars persists today, in the form of astrology, an ancestor of the science of astronomy that understands analogy as a basis of cosmic order.

Planets and the earthbound objects that exert the same gravitational pull at about two meters away. If you don’t believe that a shared spiritual essence binds the objects of the cosmos to a common fate, keep in mind that the everyday object most gravitationally similar to Uranus is the toilet.
It was our close relationship to the heavenly bodies that slowly changed the role of similarity in explanation, across the sciences, from something in the world to something in our heads. Thanks to the stargazers, similarity has been almost entirely replaced by cause and mechanism as the ordering principle of nature. This change was attended by another that brought the heavenly bodies down to earth, literally.

Physics was barely a science before Isaac Newton’s insights into gravity. But Newton’s breakthrough was due less to apples than to cannons. He asked what would happen if a cannonball were shot with such strength that, before it could fall some distance towards the ground, the Earth’s curvature had moved the ground away by the same amount. The cannonball would be … a moon! Being in orbit is nothing more than constantly falling! Through this and other thought experiments, he showed that we don’t need separate sciences for events on Earth and events beyond it (except, well, he was also an occultist). Newton unified nature.

Gravity—poorly understood to this day—causes masses to be attracted to each other. It is very weak. If you stand in front of a large office building, its pull on you is a fraction of the strength of a butterfly’s wing beats. The Himalyas, home of the tallest peak on Earth, have enough extra gravity to throw off instruments, but not enough to make you heavier. Still enough to matter: Everests’s extra gravity vexed the mountain’s first explorers, who couldn’t get a fix on its height because they could couldn’t get their plumb lines plumb.

So is the gravity of faraway bodies strong enough to change your fate? And if so, how? Following the three-century impact of science on thought, modern astrologists have occasionally ventured to build out from the mere fact of astrology into explanations of how it must actually work; to bring astrology into nature right there with physics. Most explanations have focused on gravity, that mysterious force, reasoning that the patterns of gravitational effects of such massive bodies must be large, unique, or peculiar enough to leave some imprint at the moment of birth.

But by making astrology physical, we leave open the possibility that it is subject to physics. If we accept astrology and know the laws of gravity, we should be able reproduce the gravitational fingerprint of the planets and bring our cosmic destiny into our own hands.

Refs

Foucault’s “The order of things”
Bronowski’s “The common sense of science”
Pratt, 1855 “I. On the attraction of the Himalaya Mountains, and of the elevated regions beyond them, upon the plumb-line in India”

About

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2018 and is filed under believers, science.

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Change your baby’s astrological sign with physics!

My summer project this year was a little non-academic web app project.

http://whatsyoursign.baby/

The premise of the site is that the mechanism of astrology is gravitational influence, and that since small nearby things have influence comparable to large things far away, it should be possible to tune your child’s astrological sign by giving birth around specifically arranged person-made objects. As a pop science site, you’ll see that it is a pretty soft sell: not telling anyone that astrology is wrong, instead trying to channel the interest in astrology into relevant subjects of physics.

I haven’t even released the site yet, but as a summer project it’s already a big success. I developed my frontend skills a bunch, and learned how to use astrological ephemeris databases. I also learned that astrology has a big open source community. I learned that there is a .baby and .amazon top-level domain for web addresses. I also learned a bit more about how to teach web programming students, hopefully showing the bones of the Internet a bit and making code a bit less intimidating.

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A strong identity is no defense against hypocrisy (a good offense is a bad defense)

Take a look at these five people, and see what they have in common

  • The young contrarian so repulsed by his lefty friends’ sheeple-ness that he becomes a reactionary, only to become an ideologue himself.
  • The brave young hipster who has called himself a feminist for so long that everyone is blind to his violence against women, including himself
  • The pastor whose consuming identity as a servant of God makes him blind to his own embezzlement or abuse
  • The downtrodden who become toxic after rejecting that victims of oppression are capable of acts oppression.
  • I see it all the time in science too. For example, T.C. Chamberlin, a 19th and 20th century “dean” of American geology, within decades of extending his fame with a classic warning against dogmatism in science, had become such a toxic antagonist of the theory of plate tectonics that he probably singlehandedly set its acceptance back by decades.

You have hypocrites in all of these examples, but name calling is beside the point here. Each of these characters started out sympathetic, and changed in a very human way into something unhealthy. Considering what they went through—the actual etiology of hypocrisy—empowers us to move past imperiously impugning the fallen, and actually protect ourselves from the same ugly fate.

Each of those people probably began with good strong intellectual defenses against some threat. But eventually, they all excused themselves from the need to constantly re-evaluate themselves. They stopped questioning their standing, and lost it. It’s like you have a big strong wall around you, but you slowly let your identity balloon to include it. You start to be impressed by how forbidding the identity is, and how much easier it is to maintain than the wall’s bulky brick and mortar. Eventually, you let the balloon take over as the wall crumbles. But a big ballon is a superficial and misleading defense. Or, to trade some faithfulness for concision, you have a big strong gate keeping out the riff-raff. You want to make it even more formidable, so you light it on fire, and that works for a while, until you’re down to nothing.

Using identity as a defense against hypocrisy is a really subtle and insidious trap, but naming it and describing it makes it easier to guard against, which is why I like to think about these things.

Still, I’m no exception. I’ve caught myself in it before, several times, and that’s why a basic part of my intellectual hygiene is never letting myself think that my current intellectual hygiene is enough. Hopefully that’s enough to protect me, except, well, if I think it’s enough then by definition it isn’t.

Self-doubt is an awful foundation for knowledge, but, when you’re all too human, it might be less bad than anything else.

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Is it immoral to not read the newspaper?

Is it immoral to not educate myself about political issues that affect thousands and millions of lives. If I’m a voter? If I’m a resident of a (the) superpower? If I, as a scientist, try not to have opinions?

I ask these questions from the far extreme. I get my current events by reverse engineering jokes on the Daily Show. And I rationalize my ignorance with a language game. In science, especially social science, total ignorance is the default state. Exceptions to that are mainly brief, trivial lapses into insight.

A few years ago things were going badly, and I wanted to stop making unqualified judgements about the state of the world. I asked my friends to kick me in the nuts every time they caught me speaking as if I knew what I was talking about. It didn’t really work — no one wanted to kick me — but it was a fun exercise, and it represented something I still want to cultivate. Maybe I’ve taken thing too far, but I believe that the ultimate purpose of science is nescience. I think that the best way to survive feeling like an idiot all the time is to love the feeling of ignorance. That’s awe.

So what happens when someone with those habits ends up in a political conversation? Ignorance is considered bad in politics, as if we have a choice but to be 90% ignorant about the causes and effects of social phenomena. I think that that ignorance of ignorance continues on down to the American social fabric. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Or even better: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” So if you ask me to say something definitive about some current event, I’m either going to tell you that I don’t really know, or I’m going to throw something together from the thin fabric of my prior beliefs. And I’m no exception.

When I look around, I get the feeling that the people who identify as politically informed are those with the strongest opinions. As I write that, I realize I must be a strange creature, because when it comes to society, I believe its delusional to have strong opinions.

My attitude as a social science, the only non-delusional attitude that a social scientist can adopt, is that every informative declarative statement about society is wrong and riddled with exceptions. Race? What about light-skinned black people, dark-skinned white people, Arabs (“white”), Latinos, multiracial Americans, multiracial immigrants, 1/64 black people now, 1/64 black people 100 yeas ago? The race of each of these people depends on what and when they were born, what they do and who they spend their time with. And its never so simple that this person or policy caused that social catastrophe.

Now imagine a politician who adopts the same view — treating a social system less like a machine with buttons and levers and more like the ecology of a national park. The job of a politician is to do stuff, is to intervene boldy and confidently in an inherently unpredictable, unknowable system that determines the fate of millions. Kids smashing blocks together. I don’t think that’s immoral. I think its necessary. I’ve done it myself on a smaller scale. But I did it conscious that it was all based on flimsy premises. Believing in change doesn’t make it any less audacious.

And that’s the riddle. Because not doing anything, this responsible, careful, outsider’s cultivated ignorance and equinimity is also based on flimsy premises. I’m not an outsider. My daily habits, however normal, perpetuate values that I don’t support. My opinions, and my lacks of opinions, influence how other people think and what they say and where society goes.

So what do I do? I’m not going to read three books about every newspaper article. I’m not going to start a foundation, or become a citizen journalist. A part of me wishes I wanted those things. In the long term maybe I’ll try to start caring more, or maybe try to get angrier about social problems. And in the mean time, I’ll just have to be honest that I’m unjustifiably hiding behind my justified ignorance.

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Militant atheism is oppressive atheism. c.f. Portugal

Wikipedia’s list of religious slurs contains the Portugese slur “Ateu-graças-a-Deus.” It translates to “‘Thank God’ atheist,” and its what you call someone who is only atheist in public, but who secretly believes. Fortunately American culture doesn’t yet have a need for that kind of atheist. Its symptomatic of an atmosphere in which believers are coerced into acting like non-believers. I think its a failure, and I also think that its the kind of thing that must fall out of the religious bigotry of Dawkins and the other most prominent Western atheists. But, thanks to the mistakes of communism and fascism, and the lessons learned from them, I don’t believe atheism will swing so far over that it becomes oppressive. I hope not.

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Never too smart to be very wrong

A lot of my life choices and habits of thought have been devoted to never letting myself get permanently attached something that’s wrong. That would be my hell, and I think that there’s always a risk of it. Somehow there is no being humble enough. As an exercise for myself, and as an illustration of the risks, I went on a hunt for examples of famous scientists who got stuck and went to their graves as the last major holdout for a dead discredited theory. I figure I might learn some of the signs to watch for in myself.

It has been one of those things where you don’t fully understand what you’re looking for until you find it. The understanding happens in the process of sifting through lots of examples that you thought would fit and finding just one. Slightly different from what I described above –– the existential to my universal –– is the otherwise-incredible scientist who proposes a batshit theory that never catches on. There are lots of those, and they’re listed separately. I value them less because, well, I’m not sure. It probably has something to do with the subtle differences between superceded theories, pseudoscientific theories, fringe theories, and unscientific theories. [Ed. It took me a day, but I’m interested in the difference between attachment to a superceded theory and to a fringe theory. I’m focusing on the former, and I think its more dramatic.]

I found other side-categories over the course of refining my main list. There are enough Nobel Laureates going off the deep end that they get their own section. There are plenty examples of experts adopting wacky views outside their area of expertise. I also eliminated lots of potentially great examples because the scientist’s wacky commitment was one that was reasonable to believe at the time –– take physicist Einstein’s discomfort with quantum mechanics, anatomist Paul Broca’s affection for phrenology, and evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson’s pretty violent and unreasonable dismissal of plate tectonics.

There are also people who flirted with a crazy idea but didn’t let it get the better of them and those who, while they believed crazy stuff, didn’t accomplish enough for me to say “this person is way way smarter than everyone I know.”

I did my best, and I learned a lot, but I couldn’t research all of these totally thoroughly. If I had any doubt about someone’s being in the “way too smart to be a paleo holdout” category then I put them in one of the less impressive lists.

The vast majority of these examples are from other people’s brains. The branches of the taxonomy were also influenced as much by people’s comments as my own here-and-there experiences of dissatisfaction. Biggest thanks to Micah Josephy, Finn Brunton, Michael Bishop, all the people here, and at less wrong.

“I’m smart, but I will never stop believing in this wrong theory”

The most interesting cases are where a contested theory became consensus theory for all but a few otherwise thoughtful holdouts, like:

  • Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle who never accepted the Big Bang.
  • Biologist Alfred Russel Wallace who campaigned against vaccines
  • Physicist Heaviside against relativity.
  • Physicist Phillipp Lenard against relativity, thanks to Nazi Deutsche Physik (Nobel).
  • Physicist Johannes Stark against relativity, also from Deutsche Physik (Nobel).
  • Physicist Nikola Tesla against relativity.
  • Tesla against other chunks of modern physics.
  • Chemist Joseph Priestley‘s sustained defense of phlogiston.
  • Statistician and biologist Sir Ronald Fischer‘s rejection of the theory that smoking causes lung cancer.
  • Physicist and early psychologist Ernst Mach‘s rejection of atoms! (and relativity). He was arguing for a very subjective philosophy of science well after Einstein’s pre-relativity work to confirm the kinetic theory of gases.
  • Biologist Peter Duesberg‘s rejection that HIV causes AIDs, and his advocacy of alternative causes like drug use.
  • Biologist Trofim Lysenko‘s rejection of Mendelian inheritance, thanks to Michurinism, the Soviet Lamarckism.
  • Psychologist B. F. Skinner‘s rejection of the idea that humans have mental states (from his books, like About Behaviorism; This is cleverly falsified by Shephard and Metzler’s wonderful 1971 experiment).

Honorable mention

These people, despite their notability, didn’t make the list, either because they saw the light, because they weren’t a scientist, or because they are part of an ongoing controversy and might still redeem theirselves. Erdös and Simpson make it because of how badly behaved they were for the short time before they realized they were wrong.

  • Mathematician Erdős and the simple elegant Monty Hall problem. He was adamant about the solution until he was proven wrong. In fact, an embarrassing chunk of the professional mathematics community dismissed the female who posed it until they were all proven wrong. Recounted in The Man who Loved Only Numbers.
  • George Gaylord Simpson’s violent attacks on plate tectonics. Bad form Gaylord. He accepted it when it finally became consensus (p. 339 of this).
  • Florence Nightingale on miasma theory and always keeping the windows open in the hospital. She doesn’t make the list because she’s not really thought of as a scientist.
  • Psychologist Daryl Bem’s recent work on psi phenomena might count towards what I’m after, if the recent failures to reproduce it are definitive and Bem hasn’t recanted.
  • Recently, Luc Montagnier mingling in homeopathy and wacky autism theories (Nobel mention).
  • Maybe this is too political of me, but I’m going to add Noam Chomsky’s rhetorical maneuvers to make his linguistic theories unfalsifiable.
  • René-Prosper Blondlot and N-rays. Thanks to Martin Gardner, he’s usually considered to have taken these to his grave. He was deceiving himself, but I’m guessing he probably recanted after the big embarrassment.

“My pet fringe theory”

There are lots of examples of an otherwise good scientist inventing some crackpot theory are swearing by it forever.

  • Linus Pauling on Vitamin C (that it prevents/cures cancer) (Nobel)
  • Linus Pauling on orthomolecular medicine (Nobel)
  • Similarly, Louis Ignarro on the positive effects of NO on your heart (Nobel)
  • Physicist Gurwitsch on biophotons
  • While working on radios, Marconi was apparently v. predisposed to thinking he was talking to Martians
  • William Crookes on “radiant matter”
  • Ernst Haeckel’s pet continent Lemuria
  • Wilhelm Reich’s pet power Orgone
  • Tesla may have gone over the deep end for wireless energy transfer
  • Physicist Albert Crehore and the Crehore atom, recounted in Martin Gardner’s pretty purple book on fringe science
  • Biologist Alfred Russell Wallace’s allout occultism
  • Nobel Laureate Brian D. Josephson, ESP and homeopathy and PK and cold fusion
  • Carl Reichenbach, chemist, and the Odic Force
  • Physicist Samuel T. Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb, and of “red mercury” nukes

“Sure I considered and even experimented with this wierd idea but I probably didn’t let it get the better of me”

Another less exciting category for people who redeemed and thus disqualified themselves from consideration above.

  • A lot of early 20th century scientists on established supernatural and extrasensory powers, incl. Albert Einstein, William James, and many more.
  • Jagadish Chandra Bose on sensation/perception in plants and inorganic compounds
  • Maybe Thomas Gold and abiogenic petroleum

“I’m smart and I believed this crazy thing but back then everyone else did too, so no biggie”

These are just people who believed in theories that became superceded, and there are more examples than I could ever enumerate. These are just the ones I sifted through looking for better examples

  • Anatomist Paul Broca and phrenology (covered in Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies)
  • Isaac Newton and alchemy, the philosopher’s stone, and all kinds of other occult topics
  • Johann Joachim Becher and phlogiston
  • Einstein’s and Jaynes’ discomfort with QM
  • Astronomer Simon Newcomb was very skeptical that human flight would be possible, until it became possible. He was probably just being a good skeptic — after all, it is something people wanted to be true.
  • Michelson and aether. He accidentally disproved it and put lots of effort (too much?) into trying to show that his first experiment was wrong. Again, that’s maybe just good science.
  • Mendeleev’s coronium and the abiogenic theory of petroleum

“I’m not qualified to say so, but I’ll insist that this well-established thing in someone else’s field is a crock”

You’ll see that Nobel Prize winners are particularly susceptible

  • Hoyle against the Archaeopteryx
  • Hoyle on microbes from space
  • Lord Kelvin on microbes from space
  • William Shockley and eugenics (Nobel)
  • James Watson and his wackinesses (Nobel)
  • Kary Mullis off the deep end (Nobel)
  • Nikolaas Tinbergen’s controversial approach to autism (Nobel)
  • Arthur Schawlow and autism (Nobel)
  • Physicist Ivar Giaever against climate change (Nobel)

“I’m utterly fringe or worse”

Again, more of these than could ever be listed. These are just the ones I sifted through while hunting for better examples

  • Chandra Wickramasinghe carrying Hoyle’s panspermia flag
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaru_Emoto
  • Andrew Wakefield and vaccines
  • Terence McKenna & timewave zero
  • Cleve Backster & primary perception
  • Franz Mesmer & animal magnetism

Recaps of the Nobel Prize winners

These are the best resources for learnings about Nobel Prize winners going off the deep end

  • http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
  • intelligent design specifically: http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/seven-nobel-laureates-in-science-who-either-supported-intelligent-design-or-attacked-darwinian-evolution/
  • http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/11/23/luc-montagnier-the-nobel-disease-strikes/
  • and two guys not on either source (thanks), Johannes Stark (the other Lenard), and Arthur Schawlow (autism)

Leads I would go to if I was looking for more examples, and also relevant or cool stuff

I’d love to continue to grow this manifest. Ideas welcome.

  • Many medical professionals and focal infection theory
  • Any big names that got caught up in polywater, cold fusion, and the hafnium bomb. I don’t know any.
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theories
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_science
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_science
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_as_pseudoscience
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_mother_theory
  • http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/11/23/luc-montagnier-the-nobel-disease-strikes/
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly#Later_career
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Henry_Gosse and Omphalos
  • Chalmers and Searle are dualists
  • The aiua of Leibniz
  • Barbara McClintock’s haters
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka and
  • Kronecker against Cantor’s revolutionary approach to infinity

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Seeing the Earth, in the sky, from Earth

Uncountably many photons have come from the sun, bounced off of me, and shot back into space. One day one of them is going to come back. Photons turn as they pass heavy things. A photon retreating from me is being turned, slowly, over billions of empty years, all the way around. A black hole can turn them around in one shot. Ancient photons are returning simultaneously, from all over, right now.
What it means is that we can see ourselves in the sky. At least one of those dots is the Earth in the past. If we manage to see it at all, we won’t start out seeing much more than a fuzzy dot, “Yep, there it is.” But there could be thousands or millions of earths in the sky. Each fragile broken circuit of light is a channel, or rather a mirror, showing the earth as it was or wasn’t 1, 2, 5, 8 billion years ago. Between them, you have the entire history of the earth being projected back to it at each moment.
The most interesting action is in the past millions and thousands of years. To open up the Earth’s human past we would need a black hole very close, within a few thousand light years, like V4641 Sgr, 1600 light years away. I want to watch the decline of Rome. Going further back, I want to see the earthquake that split the temple curtain. And I want to look in the sky and see an ancestor’s eyes as they look up to God. Not to be God, but to make eye contact full of love, and excitement, and no answers.

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“In the days of the frost seek a minor sun”


From unsympathetic eyes, no science is more arrogant than astronomy. Astronomers think that we can know the universe and replace the dreams and the meaning in the skies with a cold place that is constantly dying.
But I think that there is no more humble science than astronomy. No science has had so much romance imposed on it by the things that we want to be true, no other science has found a starker reality, and no other science has submitted so thoroughly. They’ve been so pummelled by what they’ve seen that they will believe absolutely anything that makes the equations balance out. As the wild story currently goes, the universe is growing at an accelerating rate because invisible matter woven into the universe is pulling the stars from each other. Its hard to swallow, and we don’t appreciate how astronomers struggled to face that story. They’ve accepted that the universe has no regard for our sense of sensibility, and they are finally along for the ride. I wish it was me, I want to see how much I’m missing by thinking I understand.

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What it means to know things about early Christianity

I’ve been reading a lot about the history of early Christianity, and a lot of the theories and ideas that define it. A lot of the scholarship is totally wild, and a lot is pretty sound; some is both, but its all confusing, because these things get mixed together indiscriminately. It motivated me to create a taxonomy of “knowability” for theories about Christ and early Christianity. The taxonomy allowed me to craft a test by which I judge if a theory is worth taking seriously. For me to take a Bible theory seriously, it has to have more evidence than the suspicious theory that Jesus was a hypocrite and demagogue.

First, the taxonomy. It isn’t exactly a scale, and there is room for overlap and grey. It is still loose enough that two people could put the same theory into the pragmatic or reach categories, so this is currently only a personal taxonomy for establishing one’s own sense or the sense of a community that shares one’s assumptions.

  • Universally know: Assert the truth of. The existence of this type of knowing is justified by faith and only faith. The type of knowledge that good Christians hold for the existence of Christ and God.
  • Humanly know: know as well as its possible to know something (that I’m standing on a floor and its not demons). Beyond reasonable doubt. It can be proven wrong. The existence of Pilate, and of Jews and early Christians in the first century A.D. Probably the existence of Paul. Herod killing all those kids on 0 A.D.
  • Functionally know: Whether theory is completely satisfying or not, you can’t imagine an alternative. Not necessarily a failure of imagination; often any competing theory that accounts for the evidence is much more complicated. Existence of the apostles and maybe Paul. The books of the Torah existed around 0 A.D. and people in the Levant often knew someone who had actually read them. They were acquainted with the lore of those books.
  • Pragmatically know: Probably the best theory. Alternative theories could be maintained by a reasonable person, even the same person—there is still reasonable doubt. Every physicist knows that Newton’s billiard ball mechanics is “wrong,” but indistinguishable from the truth in an impressively wide range of problems. Existence of a Yeshua from Nazareth. Existence of Q document.
  • Reach: Theory could of course be true, but no more plausible than its opposite. Still, one may be more accepted than the other for historical reasons. Birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem and then to and fro Egypt—Could as easily have been ad hoc fabrication to satisfy prophecies in Isaiah. I’m putting here everything else that was prophesied by Isaiah, because these are things that people at the time wanted to be true: a Christ will come, he will be killed, resurrected, and seen, virgin birth/immaculate Conception, and he will perform miraculous healings (which have really gone out of fashion in modern Christianity).
  • Fringe: Theory could be true, other reasonable theories are more supported, or better supported. Existence of secret gospels from the first century.
  • Spurious: Fundamentally not knowable except below Pragmatic sense. More specifically, not knowable given current knowledge, and possibly future knowledge. Things prophesied by Isaiah, the existence of secret gospels from the first century. Armageddon happened way back in the first or second century A.D.. Armageddon will happen. Armageddon won’t happen. Mary M. and Jesus were doing it. Mary M. was an Apostle.
  • Wrong (Know not): theory has been falsified. That is, it could always wriggle its way to being true, but there exists current evidence on the subject (itself impressive when it comes to the history of early Christianity), and that evidence speaks against the thing. Infancy gospels were almost certainly not written before 200 or 300AD.

I’ll only warily assert anything into the faith type of knowing, and “beyond a reasonable doubt” is a luxury reserved for very few aspects of Biblical history. In general, I’m wary to assume that I know anything with more certainty than I know that I’ve got two feet on the ground, and even that is fair to call suspect. Going down the ladder, none of the theories I’m willing to work with can really be proven false, so I’m lowering the bar; falsifiability is too strict a standard for ancient history. Even without it, historians can establish things that are worth trying to establish. So how far down should I go?

hyperhypocracy

Now that we’ve got a scale of knowing things about the history of early Christianity, I’m going to be the devil’s advocate and pose a reach/fringe theory that Jesus was a demagogue and a hypocrite. Its purpose is to serve as a criterion for judging other theories, and for establishing the legitimacy (in my eyes) of theories of ancient history. I’ll consider your theory if it is more plausible than the theory that Jesus was merely a human demagogue.

Here is the theory: Demagogues are people who preach a populist message, often to the poor, while themselves living within the means that they criticize.* Demamgogues happen. People want supernatural, and a demagogue can convey that without doing anything impossible. Here is the case that Jesus was living large, using only evidence from the Gospels, the most legitimate accounts of the Life of Christ: getting his hair perfumed, breaking Sabbath by not fasting, the thousands of loaves, the parable for rich people. From this theory it makes sense that he would say he isn’t having wine tomorrow night, and it explains the doting entourages that retrieved him donkey and presented lepers and blind people to him.

This theory is reach/fringe, but it errs on the side of pragmatic. It obviously has lots of problems as a theory, but that’s the point. I think that a more sympathetic read is at least as plausible, but also that a reasonable person could believe all of this.

Whether it is right or wrong is irrelevant. It is at least as true as the New Testament case against (for example) homosexuality *. Things I’m willing to work with: I think Q passes the test, also the existences of Herod and Pilate *, even the existence of Godfearers.

These theories that I’m willing to work with are above the border between reach/fringe and pragmatic. That’s the line I’ve drawn in helping myself know what I think.

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Known self-proclaimed gods

The funny thing is I expected these lists to be longer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_be_Jesus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_messiah_claimants
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Messiah_claimants
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mahdi_claimants
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buddha_claimants
You’ll find more among some of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_been_considered_deities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_founders_of_religious_traditions

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2012 and is filed under believers, lists.

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The Godfearers

It is hard to find things that every strain of Christianity holds in common. One is that Christianity started with Jesus, and there were no glimmers of his visit outside of prophecy. The big prophecy at the time was apocalyptic: the End was near and a Christ would appear to take everyone there. But the New Testament is also full of more concrete social and cultural signs that a Greco-Roman Judiasm was already in the works.

The cleanest example is in The Godfearers. The Gospels and Acts are littered with God-fearers: non-Jews, many of them Romans, who believe in the Jewish God. What? How? What is their history? What was their role in the eventual growth of Christianity? What was their proportion? Were they growing? How? Why did it appeal to them? What did they think of the Jews? Of themselves? What were their struggles; what were the appealing perspectives from Greco-Roman culture that were hardest to reconcile with the compelling idea of a single fearsome creator? I have no idea, and there isn’t much on them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfearers), but there is no question within the New testament that they were there before the beginning, and they were characters in both the birth and growth of Christianity.

I’m curious about the ways in which the Hellenistic worldview was behind Christianity’s innovations beyond Judiasm (Christianity: +, Judiasm: – , Greco-Romans: ? )

  1. focus on the impoverished,
  2. the abandonment of animal sacrifice,
  3. the popularity of rhetoric and logic play in sermon and argument,
  4. the idea of personal salvation,
  5. the emphasis on idea that salvation is in deeds and beliefs rather than descent and law, a sentiment reflected in the Gospel’s portrayal of the Pharisees.
  6. the concept of an immortal and immaterial soul that is separate from the body *

I’m curious about the interaction of this worldview with the aspects of Judaism that it shared, and that Christianity retained (Christianity: +, Judiasm: +, Greco-Romans: + )

  1. prophets and prophecy,
  2. offerings,
  3. the idea of a creation,
  4. temples and a priestly classes, and
  5. Heavens and Hells

And some of which were foreign to Hellenism (Christianity: +, Judiasm: +, Greco-Romans: – )

  1. apocalypse, and even the idea that the World can End,
  2. sin, and even the idea of deities that care what you think and do,
  3. the idea of sexual immorality (as a salient type of immorality, its an idea that is largely peculiar to Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought *),
  4. the importance of Old Testament history, narrative, and prophecy

I want to learn more, but not much is known about the Levant around that time. I think its impressive that we recently proved the historicity of Pilate. I’ll read what I can, though I don’t really know where to go next.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012 and is filed under believers.