The Dividing Line Between Christians and Assholes

I would like to think of Christians as a peaceable people, and Christianity as a humanitarian religion.

The spiritual tenet of loving one's neighbor as oneself is a humanist ideal.  In encounters with Christian authority figures, this tenet is quite frequently cited as evidence of Christianity's benevolence and gift to humanity.  Though the tenet is neither unique to Christianity nor invented by it (despite Christian attempts to assert precisely that), it is a truly benevolent thing, and I would be willing to reserve all judgement against Christians if they would abide by it.

Though the bible has many literal contradictions (Was Christ born in Nazareth, or Bethlehem?  Was he the biological child of Joseph, or not?), the contradictions of practice are another thing altogether.  I refer specifically to the following passage, John 14:6:

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

Having lived in South Carolina, and grown up around fundamentalists, it is my displeasure to say that this sentence represents the absolute worst, least humanist aspect of all Christians in modern practice.  This is the passage that promotes intolerance towards other faiths and justifies the hegemony and superiority of Christians.  Again, I am talking about, in practice.  There is no reason that this literal passage, even in the context in which it is delivered, need be interpreted to mean what modern Christians and Christian fundamentalists have deigned it to mean.

Though my mother was a Christian, it was heartbreaking to hear these words spoken at her memorial service.  I won't go into details about the priest or church, but suffice to say that the attitude was exactly that of paranoia towards lackluster church attendance while promoting increasing intolerance (the church in question split from the Episcopalian ministry because of the institution's positive stance on gay marriage).

It was sad to watch.  As my wife said, churches should be ecstatic to have people in them.  They should say "come, we have cookies!"  Instead, church attendance is waning.  I find it somewhat amusing that of all the possible causes being evaluated, no one is looking at demographics or changes in public attitudes towards issues such as gay marriage.

Christians have a great potential to be the humanitarian religion that Jesus would have wanted.  In practice, however, it has fallen quite short of its ideals.  Perhaps someday its leadership will realize that in order to survive the 21st century, it must resolve its contradictions in a way that puts the needs of human beings over its own narrow dogma.

Life in a Post-Ferguson World

A New Normal

In the Kübler-Ross model of grief (which, by the way, is complete bullshit), our reaction to a loss goes through "Anger," then "Bargaining," the "Depression" followed by "Acceptance."  I had originally intended in this blog post to discuss the Ferguson tragedy through this lens.  However, before I even embarked on this post, there has been a deadly shooting of a 12 year old boy followed by another non-indictment of an officer who used a deadly choke-hold, on camera, in broad daylight.  It's getting impossible to keep up with all the bad news!

So it is in this spirit that I'm just going to skip it all and go right straight to Acceptance, because, well, I am a realist, and there is no way to tease out things like Anger, Bargaining, and Depression in an environment of continual trauma.  All of those things will have to just be wrapped up into Acceptance of the New Normal.

I consider myself a realist, because:

1. I'm not the kind of idiot who thinks things are continually getting better.  It should be obvious, but things are just not getting better, for so many reasons.
2. I'm not the kind of idiot who thinks he can actually change the world by being part of a physical protest somewhere.  Very sorry, but the police state has gotten crowd control down to a science, as I've sadly witnessed firsthand.  They have all the money, all the equipment, and all the power.  The end result is that dude in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square.  Not only will we never know who he was, but he has been deleted from all electronic versions of history.
3. I'm not the kind of person (I'm not going to say "idiot" here because I don't want to insult anyone's religion) who thinks there is an afterlife that will somehow correct the injustices that are currently going on.  All I know is that this world, the physical world, actually does exist, according to all my observational evidence, and as such, it is in my best interest to want to make it the best world possible.

Note that I haven't given up all Hope because, well, I'm writing this blog, and the box has to have something left in it.

Race Relations

In better terms than I could express, Chris Rock said this [interview link last accessed December 4, 2014]:
 

Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before...So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Superb work, Chris.  But can we really produce nicer white people in this nation?  I have my doubts.  I haven't really seen attitudes change all that much, except a profound improvement in how easily we can tune out anything that makes us uncomfortable.  I know I have a tendency to blame social media for this self-selecting phenomenon, but it's really been around since the dawn of time.  Technology's only improved upon it.  We're the same assholes we've always been, only, we're much faster, more concentrated assholes.

I like to think of myself as having become "nicer" as a white person, but I'm not capable of really judging that.  I don't feel nicer.  If anything, I feel more angry because of the System's breakdown, what Attorney General Eric Holder says is testing the "sense of trust that must exist between law enforcement and the communities they are charged to serve and protect."  In other words, "officer-community relations," in the Chris Rock / Ike and Tina concept of "relations."

The Scary Black Man

To me, what has been strikingly different about Ferguson, as opposed to Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, or even Trayvon Martin, was the audacity of the Ferguson police department's release of the robbery incident footage.  By releasing that footage to the media, the police department was unequivocally dog-whistling to white supremacist groups and openly using the Scary Black Man racial stereotype in an attempt to turn public sentiment.

It's rarely talked about, but the Scary Black Man is really what is driving the white man's support of police officers and purchases of guns.  It is interesting to me that the Scary Black Man is such a new stereotype.  Racial stereotypes from the 1930's and 1940's depict black people as superstitious, easy to manipulate, and scared of their own shadow.  The transition during the Civil Rights Era (and the likes of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party) gave us this unfortunate new violent image.  Of course, it didn't help that in the decades that followed, many youth leaned on it for support and power, creating a very real gang culture (one that it still unfortunately very much alive in Oakland).

The Scary Black Man image has all but destroyed the average black man in the minds of white people.  Those of us who have black friends or who look at statistics know exactly how very rare the SBM is.  But, unfortunately, those in uniform have no idea how to tell the difference, and, worse, seem oblivious that there even is a difference.  It is plainly obvious from the Ferguson grand jury testimony.

America in Uniform

I want to make something absolutely clear: putting on a uniform does not immediately grant you "respect" or "honor."  I know it does for some people (I grew up in a military household, so I heard it often).  When someone is in an occupation that has to entail a certain amount of hostility, violence, or danger--that is something to be respected, without question.

But.

Respect is all about "what have you done for me lately?"

There's a joke about a Scotsman who complains about his name.  "I built twenty nice bridges, but did they call me John-the-bridge-builder?  Nooooo!  I raised over thirty huge barns but did they call me John-the-barn-raiser?  Noooo!  But if you fuck just ONE sheep..."

So it is with the military.  Once upon a time, soldiers may have been the Monuments Men, but half a generation later, they became more akin to the looters and pillagers of great art themselves.  Instead of protecting people from torture, they had become, a little too often, the very instruments of evil.  Again, "what have you done for me lately?"  Restoring trust and respect in the military takes more than a few words of apology.  Our reputation abroad may be, in fact, still broken beyond repair, because of just "one sheep."

But that's the military, not the police.  At least the military pretends to have a justice system with its courts-martial, but the police are, as we have seen, unaccountable today.

The Most Dangerous Job

Becoming a police officer should command respect, some argue, because it is such a dangerous occupation.  This might seem like a "straw man" fallacy, but I've actually heard people say exactly this.

I got some news for you: it's not that dangerous.  By most lists, it's not even in the top ten.  Here is one such list, from Forbes in 2012 [accessed 12/04/2014]:

1. Logging workers
2. Fishers
3. Aircraft pilots
4. Roofers
5. Structural iron and steel engineers
6. Garbage and recycling collectors
7. Electrical power line installers
8. Truck drivers
9. Farmers
10. Construction laborers

In other words, Mr. Police Officer, by this measure, my garbage man is more worthy of respect than you.  To be fair, in this list (2013, accessed 12/04/2014), it does manage to sneak past construction into the #10 slot.  But you are twice as likely to be killed or injured working on steel, or five times as likely on a fishing boat, than you ever are on your beat.

Soft Power

I rather enjoy reading the works of P. G. Wodehouse, specifically the Jeeves and Wooster series of books.  One thing I've noticed is that, during the time it is written about, police officers are seen as ineffectual, bumbling fools.  And yet, when a suspect is cornered, the suspect announces, "it's a fair cop" and is taken in without a struggle.  The depictions of American police officers in the books are a stark contrast--armed with a gun, shooting first and asking questions later.

Coined in 1990 by political scientist Joseph Nye, soft power was defined as the ability of an entity to influence the behavior of others to get the outcome you want.  In essence, it is the only truly important measure of power, since traditional "hard power" is fleeting.  Simply put, the soft power of our peace officers is quickly eroding.  This is not only going to make it harder for police officers, but for citizens as well.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

"Who watches the watchmen?"  Not only is accountability eroding (if it is ever said to have existed at all), it should concern us all that our police have become increasingly militarized.  One solution proposed would be to increase surveillance by requiring police to have cameras while on duty.  While I think this isn't a bad idea, it reminds me of something Alan Moore said in an interview [accessed 12/04/2014]:

To me, one of the biggest surprises of these recent surveillance revelations is how surprised people are. The level of surveillance we’ve had over here for the past 20 years now is ridiculous — and useless, I would add. Eerily enough, the security cameras on every street corner of Britain was instigated by the incoming Blair government in 1997, which was when I decided, back in 1982 or so, to set the first episode of “V for Vendetta,” which had cameras on every street corner. So yeah, we’ve had those for awhile; they’ve proliferated and multiplied for decades. More recently, there have been troops of police who have said that all these things are useful for is alienating the public. [Laughs] They are not actually useful in the prevention of crimes, or even actually apprehending their suspects.

Here’s the thing: If you’re monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. [Laughs] How are you going to process that amount of information? That’s when you get all these wonderful emerging paradoxes. Recently over here, there was a case where it was suspected that the people who monitor security screens were taking unnecessary toilet breaks and gossiping when they should be watching us. So it was decided that the only sensible thing to do was to put a security camera in the monitor room. [Laughs] This is answering the question that Juvenal asked so succinctly all those years ago: Who watches the watchmen? The answer is more watchmen! And yet more watchmen watch them, and of course it will eventually occur to them to ask: Can those people who are watching the people doing the watching really be trusted? Much better if they were under surveillance.

So, we have the Surveillance State as well as the Police State.  Great, this all keeps getting better and better.  Even scarier is not the possibility that there is an endless, useless surveillance, but the realization that the slippery slope quite likely ends in the domain of artificial intelligence.

A Post Ferguson Dictionary

I didn't want to write this part, because of how angry, cynical, and plainly offensive it is.  But after all that's happened, how could I not?  The police have already given us this gift.  I am merely passing the information along to anyone who might be listening.  Please don't shoot the messenger, but welcome to the dictionary of the new age.

• badge: a nigger-hunting license.  "Hey, did you hear that Jeb just got his badge from St. Louis Academy?"
• broom handle: a sodomizing device used to keep black prisoners in line.  "Don't make me get out the broom handle."
• grand jury: the mechanism to clear the murder of a black man through white channels.  "That grand jury really convinced me!"
• hands up: a gesture that requires a victim to apologize to their abuser.  "The St. Louis Rams are always giving the hands up!"
• speed bump: a dead black man in the road.  "I don't drive in Missouri anymore, too many speed bumps."
• stolen: an object that, if in possession of a black man, means a death sentence without a warrant or a trial.  "That cigar was stolen!"
• taser: putting a bullet in the brain.  "I really tasered that kid on BART the other day."
• wallet: a dangerous weapon, meriting a barrage of forty or more shots.  "Did you see that guy just reach for his wallet?"

Again, I didn't come up with these definitions.  These are already in use.  I'm just documenting them.  I'm especially upset about the usage of the "n-word."  It's not a word I like to use ever, even when quoting people.  I feel I don't have the right to use it.  I grew up in the South and had a great-great-grandfather who apparently owned a KKK hood.  I prefer Spike Lee to Quentin Tarantino any day of the week.

Acceptance

This brings us back to Acceptance, that last stage of grief.  I have to accept the things I cannot change, after all, just like everyone else.  Welcome to the New Age.  I'm white and I'm very, very sorry the world hates black people so much.  To quote Ben Folds, "it never was my idea.  I just drove to the store for some Preparation H."

On Religion and the Faulty Generalization

A number of ideologies depend on a logical fallacy called a faulty generalization.  It's probably the single biggest shortcoming of being human.

It's the classic tale of the old, blind men and the elephant.  Each man touches a different part and describes the elephant as something entirely different, and none of them see the entire elephant for what it is.

Folks, we have to grow outside of the boundaries of our own individual selves in order to reach any sort of enlightenment.  In order to do that, we have to abandon arguments from faith as well as from individual experience.  I'm not saying that individual experience isn't important--it is--but only that it is the germ of a discussion, the beginnings of reasoning, not the end product.

Here's an example of one I heard from the Carly Fiorina / Barbara Boxer debate (2010) that sticks with me.  When asked about her stance on abortion, Carly Fiorina replied that she was pro-life.  The reason for her stance, she said, was that her husband's mother almost decided to have an abortion.  Instead, she made the decision to keep the child, and it turned out just fine.  The fallacy, of course, is the assumption that "it turned out just fine" could be universally applied to anyone pondering the decision of whether or not to have an abortion.  It ignores the statistics outside of that one specific instance--her husband.  It is also arguing from a position of privilege.  If you are one of the lucky ones, then you can pretend the odds don't matter or that they are unimportant.

In a response to The Myth of the Enlightened Self-Interest, Part 2, Taliver brings up an important point: that the ideology of acting solely for self-interest (in a Tragedy of the Commons) is based on imperfect information.  Any ideology that follows directly from imperfect information (e.g., based on blind faith in something) without allowing itself to adapt for new information (e.g., statistics, science) is condemning itself to eternal faulty generalization.

One example that has come to my attention lately is the "Austrian School" of economic theory, which should have died a long time ago but seems to have enjoyed a recent resurgence due to the Koch brothers and the Tea Party.  Any school of thought that is based on a priori generalization is succumbing to the faulty generalization.

The Debt Ceiling and Multiple Payoff Games

First off, yeah, I know it's been a while (December--gads) since my last post here.  It isn't that I haven't had anything to write about (got that double negative?  Good.).  Too many projects, never enough time.  Anyway, I post here when I can and when it's relevant, not according to any specific schedule.

Folks may remember the series on "The Myth of the Enlightened Self Interest."  (Part One) (Part Two) (Part Three).  These were some of my most active posts, generating lots of very interesting discussion.  Since I've posted those, obviously I've had plenty of time since then to dwell on some of the finer points and peoples' comments.

I've also had the opportunity to let multiple payoff game theory sink in as a concept and wrestle awake the sleeping snake of my rusty matrix math.  For example, when Mordicai pondered the idea of a "greatest total payoff"--really what he means is sort of a Nash-equilibrium concept across all independent variables.  A Nash^2 or Nash' equilibrium, if you will.  It's a great way to reduce some games into a single payoff game.  However, it should be obvious to anyone that not all games can be so easily reduced.  In fact, the M. Zeleny [1974] paper proves this.  Different players may have different value functions where one payoff may be exchanged with another.  These value functions may be wholly non-linear.  For example, you may want ice cream and to take a hot bath, but if you can only have one, sometimes you'd prefer to have neither.

As the debt ceiling debacle unfolded to its inevitable conclusion (and is still continuing to have grave consequences), it occurred to me that what has been plaguing Washington is an epic multiple payoff game that reduces down to a classic game of chicken.  In our case, the variables are 1) the debt ceiling itself (and the budget), which forces all other variables to compromise, 2) partisan political power (Democrat, Republican, and Election 2012), and 3) political ideology (Tea Party).  Unfortunately, both 2) and 3) are at odds with the principal 1).

The only solution in our matrix that reduces correctly to a long-term livable game requires a hold on 2) and completely dismissing 3).  That solution requires restoring taxes to pre-Bush levels, reforming entitlements, and drastic spending cuts--something nonpartisan economists such as Alan Greenspan have been saying for years.  Unfortunately, even if Washington doesn't get it, the rating agencies certainly do, as we will soon find out (I'm really hoping I'm wrong here, but unfortunately I'm probably right).

I plan to talk a bit more about ideology in my next post and how it is not only at odds with 1) and 2), but for now I'm going to punt and blithely assume that rationality trumps ideology.

Anyway, I considered writing out the multiple payoff matrix for this "dilemma" but decided to punt on that, too.  I hate it when I'm lazy, but now the damage is already done and it wouldn't matter anyway.

The important thing?  That multiple payoff game theory is quite possibly one of the most important areas of further study for the future and has real-world applications that we can use today.  Time for Gort?

Prayer Is Actually Bad for You

Millions of dollars have gone into studying the effects of prayer.  Most of this money comes from faith-based organizations such as the Templeton Foundation.

One interesting study actually shows that prayer is bad for you!  Specifically, if a sick or injured person is being prayed for and they are aware of that activity, their chances of recovery diminish by as much as 7%.

This may seem a contradiction with previous studies that show a positive correlation between recovery and some form of personal prayer or meditation, but there is a key, subtle difference between praying and having someone pray for you.  The former may only improve your chances, but the latter provides only a source of additional stress.

In other words: keep your faith to yourself!

The Little Old Lady Experiment, Revisited

Back when I wrote about the Little Old Lady Experiment, some folks were a bit skeptical.  Cynical, perhaps, or perhaps even correct.  After all, in a personal account in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, a Montreal police strike on October 17, 1969 resulted in robberies, murders, and riots within hours [Video], dispelling the author's own personal belief in anarchism.  It's hard to argue that our basic state is a moral one (not to mention what it says about a belief in anarchism and lack of authority as a sociological ideal).

And yet, how often is our world not one of violence, compared with the results of a single, specific event?  How often do we prefer such a world to a world without violence?

Furthermore, the Little Old Lady Experiment was only formulated as a thought experiment.  It's easy to dismiss something with a lack of evidence or empirical data to back it up.  My only source was the "Bagel Man" in Freakonomics, after all.  Such a queer title, indeed, makes it easy to toss it aside without further scrutiny.

But it turns out there have been similar studies.  I was surprised to come across this mention in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

The Harvard biologist Marc Hauser, in his book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, has enlarged upon a fruitful line of thought experiments originally suggested by moral philosophers.

...

The message of Hauser's book, to anticipate it in his own words, is this: 'Driving our moral judgments is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind that evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for building a range of possible moral systems.  As with language, the principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness.'

...

Ninety-seven per cent agreed that you should save the child...

...

Ninety-seven per cent of subjects agreed that it is morally forbidden...

These "ninety-seven percent" numbers refer to a series of trolley problems (in an interesting synchronicity, my previous post talks about trolley problems) and were conducted not only in Western culture, but in native Central American communities with culturally-appropriate substitutes.

Sadly, Mr. Hauser has very recently been accused of scientific misconduct related to falsifying data in another, unrelated study.  Hopefully this does not discredit his earlier academic work or methods in general.

In another validation of what I have been blogging, it tickles me to read in The God Delusion that reciprocal altruism is very real in the biological world and that its language is "often expressed in the mathematical language of game theory," though sadly it still does not include multiple payoffs despite what I consider to be obvious ("The hunter needs a spear and the smith wants meat.  The asymmetry brokers a deal").

Similarly, this study (pointed out by Mordicai) in the iterative two-person prisoner's dilemma raises attention to Dawkins' supposition that "mathematical models can be crafted to come up with special conditions under which group selection might be evolutionarily powerful" even if he thinks "these special conditions are usually unrealistic in nature."  If the prisoner's dilemma itself is common among competing organisms, there is no reason to assume group selection would not unconsciously evolve as an emerging property among individual organisms, especially sexually reproducing ones (see also koinophilia in reference to the supporting paper).

Bias and Skepticism

Special thanks to Blogger for eating the first draft of this post.  There is a special layer of hell reserved for people who like JavaScript.

A friend forwarded a link to an interesting blog post and a reference article [PDF].  While I find a few of the conclusions from the blog post a bit misleading, the original research article is thought-provoking.  Simply put, the more we know about something, the more we are biased towards it.  Our attitudes are only reinforced through knowledge.  It shouldn't be a big surprise that we spend more energy in the realm of the familiar--as I've already discussed, conformity is the strength of inertia and it is impossible to rebel against everything.  Our neurons work by forming associations between things, and that ability helps enable us to survive.  It is impossible for us to be truly objective, since we are all human and are stuck with the apparatus of the human brain.

So, should we reach the same conclusion, that more knowledge can only hurt us?  I find the notion a bit silly, because if that were the case, our attitudes would never change.  What causes us to change our minds about things, if not knowledge and experience?  Obviously the latter has more weight than the former, but we don't always have to experience jumping off a cliff in order to know that it may be bad for us.  Also, I don't find it unhealthy to put faith in experts.  The converse--putting idiots in charge of things--is simply dangerous.

One of my objectives in starting this blog is to promote what I call "healthy skepticism."  This is "healthy" in the sense that it doesn't mean to blindly question everything (until you end up in subjective reality / conspiracy theory / Philip K. Dick space), but to question enough in order to possibly reform attitudes and be open to new information that becomes available.  It means admitting when I may have been wrong or less informed about something at a prior time, which can be a difficult thing, especially for a stubborn guy like me.

Part of healthy skepticism involves becoming aware of logical fallacies.  This is especially important when reaching ethical positions (such as my position post on homosexuality).  Another part of healthy skepticism is to question my interior monologue--what is my real purpose behind a particular ethical position?  Is it about something that benefits me personally, or something much larger than myself?  Like anyone, I appreciate peer acceptance, but I do find it less important than arriving at the objective truth (contrast Nite Owl with Rorschach in Watchmen).  I also recognize that the objective truth is much larger than my own capabilities and requires a collective input--and a diversity of opinions.