Top ten reasons giving birth sounds more fun than having a migraine

9. They both last about a day, but labor pains don't come back a week later.

8. Labor pains generally don't come with an aura of visual hallucinations.

7. We actually know what causes labor pains, and we can treat them based on this knowledge.

6 You won't ever just start giving birth one day for no apparent reason.

5. You will never have recurrent chronic labor pains on a daily basis.

4. No one will ever blame your labor pains on stress or depression.

3. No one will ever doubt that your labor pains are genuine.

2. Most workplaces offer maternity leave; what accommodations are offered to people with migraine?

1. At the end of labor, you get something really cool: A baby.

Maybe labor hurts more, I don't know. But for all these reasons, I think women need to stop complaining about labor, especially to those of us who suffer from migraines.

A scientifically sound sabermetrics

Think instead about the fundamentals of baseball. What does each position do? Batters get bases and try not to get out. Fielders get outs and try not to get errors. Pitchers get outs and try not to give bases. There are only certain things each player can do, so don't hold each one responsible for the whole team.

So, we should rate in the following way:

Batters: Bases earned per opportunity, call it BEPO.

This would be calculated based on current statistics as:

BEPO = (singles + 2*doubles + 3*triples + 4*home runs + walks + hit-by-pitch bases + stolen bases)/(at-bats + walks + hit-by-pitch bases)

Fielders: Errors per out, call it EPO. (Obviously you want to minimize this.)

Straightforward to calculate:

EPO = (errors)/(outs)

Pitchers: Bases given per out, call it BGPO. (Again, you want to minimize this.)

This would be calculated as:

BGPO = (singles + 2*doubles + 3*triples + 4*home runs + walks + hit-by-pitch bases)/(outs + other-player errors)

[The other-player errors are included so that pitchers aren't held responsible for fielders' mistakes.]

Unfortunately, most statistical resports don't give out separate scores for singles, doubles, and triples (just "hits" and "home runs"), so it's hard for me to give you any specific examples of what this would mean.

I can tell you a few things, though: A batter who has a 0.250 average but usually gets doubles and home runs would have a high BEPO—and would be a good batter. A pitcher who repeatedly loads the bases but manages to escape without a run scored would have a high BGPO—and indeed, most would agree, is not a very good pitcher. Right now, that batter would be rated poorly and that pitcher would be rated well—and this seems wrong to me.

The permissible/allowable distinction and hate speech

For a typical example, what is to be done with neo-Nazis who claim that Jews are inferior to Whites and deserve to be enslaved, imprisoned, or murdered? What is to be done with fundamentalist Christians who say that homosexuals are criminals against God and deserve to burn in eternal fire? As a less familiar yet no less significant example, what is to be done with people who profess something called "moral relativism" and claim that all moral claims are meaningless, that the beliefs of Nazis or nihilists are as sound as the beliefs of liberals or utilitarians?

This sort of speech is not the same as direct incitement to violence—"Jews should be killed"/"Homosexuals should burn" is not the same as "Kill that Jew"/"Burn that homosexual"—nor is it the same as any of the other sorts of speech liberals would ordinarily restrict, such as irresponsible lies that directly endanger people (e.g. yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire) or perjury in a court of law that would hinder the process of justice. Yet clearly this sort of speech is wrong, not just in a factual sense, but in a moral sense as well; hate speech constitutes a declaration of moral beliefs which are not only false, but harmful, immoral and dangerous.

As such, it seems (at first glance) that we ought to restrict hate speech, make it illegal and punishable in the same way that we make murder or theft (or, more analogously, perjury) illegal and punishable. But then we have a system in which the government has a right to legislate moral statements—and it seems a slippery slope to exactly the sort of "thought police" that liberals most fear. If hate speech is permissible, it is not immoral; but if it is impermissible, should we not make it illegal?

The answer lies in an important but often-neglected distinction: Between that which is permissible—what it is morally acceptable to do—and that which is allowable—what good people ought not to use violence to prevent. (Attack not my etymology, for these are technical terms; I realize that in common usage "permit" and "allow" are close synonyms.)

Obviously, all that is permissible is allowable—one should never use violence to prevent acts that are not immoral!—but importantly, not all that is allowable is permissible. There are acts which are morally wrong (impermissible), yet which are not so wrong that it is justified to use violence to prevent them.

\[ \forall x \in P: x \in A \]

\[ \exists x \in A: x \notin P \]

\[ P \subset A \]

\[ A \not \subset P \]

Hate speech is precisely the sort of act which is impermissible but allowable. Another such act is cutting in line; another is making rude insults. I'd put public nudity in the same category, and probably software piracy as well. Often, these are simply violations of custom, rather than deep moral rules; they are wrong because in these social circumstances they violate contractual obligations of acceptable behavior, not because they are intrinsically harmful. Hate speech is actually a case where we might say that the act is intrinsically harmful—but in this case, the act is still allowable because the cure would be worse than the disease.

What, then, is the proper response to hate speech? More speech! Answer these hateful and atrocious lies with truths, and sound arguments to defend those truths. Minimize the harm now, and attempt to persuade others not to say these words. But remember always that these words, however wrong, are allowable—you have no right to use violence or legal punishment in order to stop them. You need not hold your tongue—indeed, you ought not hold your tongue—but leave laws and guns out of the matter.

Thus, Richard Dawkins' God Delusion and Lily Allen's Fuck You are precisely the correct action to take, and should be applauded as such. When a science teacher tells his student creationism is false and superstitious nonsense,  he is doing precisely what he ought to do—and it is a travesty of justice that this act was punished, for it is not merely allowable, not merely permissible, but outright good, while the creationism he attacked can only achieve the level of allowable.

Why I oppose NOMA

Typically, these scientists object to the statements of other scientists—also good, respectable scientists like Richard Dawkins and Will Provine—that science is fundamentally opposed to religion, that science is actually true and not just "one way of looking at things," that some opinions are better than others, that a scientific mindset will never be compatible with a faith-based approach to the world.

I hold this latter position—indeed, I have trouble relating to scientists who do not. I try to; I recognize that many respectable scientists support NOMA, scientists who continually make scientific achievements of a degree I can barely aspire to.

Of course, as I noted, many other respectable scientists agree with my position as well—so I'm left with little choice but to say that many respectable scientists are wrong.

In fact, I increasingly find strange scientific and philosophical errors made by scientists who support NOMA—but I can't be sure if I am merely looking for these sorts of errors due to my own biases against NOMA itself. (Maybe Dawkins has made similar errors and I've ignored them?)

For instance, Niles Eldredge writes in The Triumph of Evolution (note 2 to chapter 6): "[…] I agree with one of the letter writers, who noted the one great gap—inherently and in principle 'bridgeable,' but not in actuality so between humans and any other form of animal life known: the consciousness that we humans have. As the writer of the letter pointed out, human behavior is purposive in the sense that it is consciously pursued for survival. […] In other words, I do not think that even the wisest chimp knowns, and can therefore contemplate, the fact that it will die someday."

This seems to imply that Eldredge agrees with Descartes that all animals other than humans are unthinking automatons, without sensation, experience, or emotion. He agrees that human beings evolved from other animals—indeed, he argues forcefully for that conclusion—but doesn't seem to realize that this strongly suggests consciousness is a quantitative, not qualitative, trait—that cats and rats and bats all have a conscious experience comparable to our own, that sharks, octopuses and lizards probably have a simpler consciousness, but clearly have some conscious experience, and that more ancient organisms like worms and beetles may well have some rudimentary consciousness as well.

When challenged with the fact that chimpanzee behaviors show cultural patterns of transmission, Eldredge bites the bullet in the most absurd way imaginable: "[…] perhaps the patterns of geographic variation in simple tool use and other aspects of chimp 'culture' do connect on a sliding scale with human material cultural traditions—with the further implication that consciousness itself is not a prerequisite for the development of culture or perhaps even cultural traditions, as exemplified in the toolmaking traditions of the Paleolithic." I might as well say that consciousness is not necessary to write books about evolution, and Niles Eldridge may well be an unthinking automaton! Though no one has ever convincingly solved the problem of other minds once and for all (has anyone ever convincingly solved anything once and for all?), the most plausible solution in both theory and practice is to infer, as Alan Turing did, that structure and behavior indistinguishable from consciousness implies consciousness. This means that the following inferences are very probably correct: When a dog lays lethargically over the fallen body of his mate, he is really grieving; when a cat stares at a ledge for a few seconds before jumping up to it, she is really reasoning; when a chimpanzee makes a tool in front of other chimpanzees who then proceed to make similar tools, he is really teaching. Consciousness is ubiquitous in the animal domain—hardly unique to parochial Homo sapiens. Indeed, I might even go so far as to say that if you show me an evolutionist who is not a vegetarian, I will show you a hypocrite.

But even though Eldridge is clearly wrong about consciousness, this does not imply that he is wrong about NOMA; indeed, he is clearly right about many other things, so his credibility is scarcely tarnished by one obvious mistake.

So I should take a step back, try to consider NOMA on its own merits, and attempt to discern what consequences it would have if correct.

Catchy phrases like "Science tells you how the heavens go, religion tells you how to go to heaven" really don't help; after all, clearly the word "heaven" doesn't mean the same thing in the first clause as it does in the second (if you meant "outer space," science tells you how to go there too!), so this statement is no more sound than "Nothing is better than total eternal happiness, a saltine cracker is better than nothing, therefore a saltine cracker is better than eternal happiness."

So let's take NOMA to be the proposition that science tells us only about nature, not ethics, and religion tells us only about ethics, not nature—and furthermore that nature and ethics are sufficiently separate that views on one are orthogonal to views on the other.

This proposition has three parts, all of which are clearly false.

1. Science does tell us about ethics: It informs us of the consequences of our actions, it enhances our ability to effect changes in the universe—including morally-significant changes. Science can tell us what organisms are sentient and what happens when we die. Furthermore, there are certain ethical values which are essential to science: Honesty, openness, fairness, a commitment to resolving dispute by reason and evidence instead of violence. These may not be enough to define a complete ethical system by themselves (actually, they get us pretty close!), but certainly they are ethically significant.

2. Religion does tell us about nature: Most religions claim that human beings—and only human beings—have something called a "soul" which provides consciousness, something separate from the brain. Most religions claim that when people die, they don't really die, but instead are transferred in some sense to a different place—either better or worse. Nearly all religions claim that certain special human beings can hear messages from invisible beings in the sky. Nearly all religions claim that the laws of physics are optional, the whims of invisible entities. These are very strong, significant claims about nature—these are literal factual claims, and they are completely and utterly false.

3. Nature and ethics are not orthogonal. Many of our deepest ethical truths depend upon truths about nature, truths that science can demonstrate. If it were in fact true that people who die really go to some wonderful happy place, then murder would not be immoral—I dare say it would be good, maybe even obligatory. It it were in fact true that the laws of physics were optional, science would be pointless, technology would be unreliable, and all solutions to all the world's problems should be effected through prayer and sacrifice to the gods. If religion's claims about nature were true, we would not be appalled by the woman who killed her son claiming it was God's command—on the contrary we would count her a great hero, someone brave enough to obey God at all costs. Further, the enterprise of science—the way we discover nature—depends upon certain ethical principles of honesty and fairness without which it would be impossible.

Indeed, the pro-NOMA camp is surely wrong about something else as well: They generally seem to think that, regardless of its false claims about nature, religion is a good source of at least ethical and political values (Eldredge., p.152): "I would no sooner place our future strictly in the hands of scientists than I would see it placed in the hands of movie stars—or, for that matter, lawyers and politicians. I think the problems facing humanity at the Millennium are so great that we need the input of all segments of society to deal with them, and here I refer specifically to perhaps the greatest sector of society to which one can point: the global community of organized religion."

Most importantly, it is clear to me that organized religion is not one community, but many communities, communities constantly vying for power, usually through massive, genocidal violence. The history of humanity is largely the history of war, and the history of war is largely the history of religion. The Egyptians fought the Jews, the Romans fought the Egyptians, the Christians fought the Romans, the Trinitarians fought the Areans, the Christians fought the Muslims, the Protestants fought the Catholics, the Nazis fought the Jews, the Christians fought the Communists, now the Muslims fight the Jews and the Hindus and the Christians. (And the Christians and the Muslims fight the secularists, though so far with only a minimum of actual violence.)

Religion, unlike science, refuses to resolve debate through reason or evidence, and so it must resolve it through violence. Religion's answer to any question has always been to assert an answer without evidence, then kill all those who doubt or disagree. At present, this is easy to forget, since many nominally "religious" people operate primarily under principles of secular science. (The oxymoronical Vatican astronomer is my favorite example: It is his holy duty to learn about the heavens, but he realizes that holy books won't actually help, so he does what has been proven to work: He actually looks. He uses not religion, but science. And in doing so he unwittingly undermines everything that the Vatican stands for.) But there was a time when religion ruled the world: People were burned at the stake for "heresy" and "witchcraft," invented "crimes" so deeply religious that the modern, secular mind can scarcely even understand how one would ever consider them criminal.

Secondly: Movie stars? Really, does Eldridge think so little of the scientific community that he considers us—himself!—no wiser about the course of humanity than a few thousand spoiled rich people who just happen to be lucky and pretty? Does he really think that science is no better an anchor for human decisions than petty contract negotations or tabloid gossip? It might be right to say that scientists are no better at making human decisions than lawyers and politicians—but actually I don't think I agree with this either.

For increasingly I see the world in terms of three groups: The leaders, scientists and philosophers—the moderate-sized fraction of human beings whose intellect and rationality supports the world against collapse; the destroyers, terrorists and dictators—the tiny fraction of human beings whose selfishness and dishonesty seeks to destroy civilization from within; and the laborers, all the rest—the vast majority of people who simply live their lives neutral to this ongoing conflict, doing their best to survive, but quietly desperate for meaning. Really, it's not quite so stark as this, since most people do live largely productive lives, as engineers, teachers, construction workers, secretaries, soldiers, firefighters, police officers—not the leaders who plan and shape the future, but the workers who labor to make it possible.

Some lawyers and politicians are in the third class of laborers—they prosecute minor crimes or vote on infrastructure legislation. Others are in the first class of leaders—they bring down corrupt corporations or lead humanitarian projects. But still others are in the second class of destroyers—they defend the corrupt corporations for massive paychecks or start wars for personal profit. I know of many scientists who are laborers (at present I am mostly one); I know of a few who are leaders (Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates); but I know of no scientists who are destroyers, and that makes us better than lawyers and politicians. (Indeed, the "mad scientist" archetype is something of an oxymoron: Insofar as one is a scientist, one is rational, and hence not mad.)

In all, I think that NOMA is dangerously wrong; it gives power to falsehood and faith against reason and science. People like Gould and Elredge wouldn't have us actually ask people to believe in science; for them, it's at best true only in a small domain; at worst it is nothing more than an intellectual game. They would teach children "this is how science works"—these are the methods science involves and the facts it has found—but apparently not "this is why science works"—because it's actually based on determining how things really are. On the one hand, Eldredge writes that it is an objective fact that there were trilobites living in seas some 480 million years ago (p.150); on the very next page he writes that we should be careful not to challenge or disrespect the beliefs of students who think the world was made in six days (p.151).

They hide behind something called "methodological naturalism," which apparently says that we should act as if there are no supernatural entities, even if there are—but how ridiculous that is! If there are supernatural beings out there controlling our fate, dammit, I want to know about it! Clearly, we should act based upon what we think actually exists—a position I call methodological realism. The most probable reason why science works so well on naturalistic assumptions is that the world really is naturalistic. This is the same sort of hypothetical-deductive reasoning that we always use in science—so why stop now, on the most important issues? If there were gods and demons, there should be evidence of that; since there isn't any evidence of them, it's most rational to infer that they don't exist!

Against expected utility

If I offered you the chance to play this lottery game, just one time, would you take it?

For $1,000, you may have a 1/1,000 chance to win $10,000,000.

Your expected winnings are +$9,000! What have you got to lose?

Oh, right: $1000. Indeed, you have a 99.9% probability of losing exactly that.

An answer often given is that the marginal utility of wealth is not constant, that $1,000,000 isn't really worth 1,000 times as much as $1,000. I fail to see how, really, but even if that's true, it doesn't solve the problem.

For, on the other hand, suppose I offered you the chance to play that game 10,000 times? If you really had the $10,000,000 to play the game 10,000 times (or say I offered you credit on which to do this), you'd be crazy not to! You really would make $90,000,000 this way, with very high probability. Your expected winnings would be your actual winnings.

If we assign a marginal utility function so that you won't play the first game, this means that we have U(x) such that (1/1000)*U($10,000,000) < (1)*U($1,000). But since this is the same utility value at each play of the second game, then you shouldn't play the second game either!

The problem is clearly expected utility itself. For games that you only play once, you can't use expectation values! Expectation values only make sense when you can play many times.

Instead, I propose the principle of most probable outcome of strategy.

If you play a long sequence of games, this works out the same: On a large number of plays, the most probable outcome of your strategy will be in fact the expectation value of that strategy. (This is why you should play the second game.)

But on fewer plays, it is often quite different: In the first game, for instance, the most probable outcome is clearly that you'll lose $1,000.

Moreover, this also provides a continuous progression of intermediate states, and there is a point at which you should just barely play: When your probability of winning more than you lose goes above 50%.

In the games above, your probability of losing it all on n plays in a row is (999/1000)^n; thus, your probability of winning at least once in n plays is 1-(999/1000)^n. Your probability of winning more than you lose is the same as the probability that (wins/10,000) > (losses); this is a little sticky to calculate exactly, but as long as we play fewer than about 5,000 times, it works out very close to the probability of winning at least once—since one win more than covers 5,000 losses, and the probability of winning twice in only 5,000 times is negligible.

Thus, we can say, to a good approximation:

1-(999/1000)^n > 0.50

0.999^n > 0.50

n*ln(0.999) > ln(0.50)

n > ln(0.50)/ln(0.999)

n >= 693

Thus, if you can play at least 693 times, you should play. If you can't, you shouldn't. The expected utility is always the same—but the most probable outcome is what you should actually be using.

Hence, I propose that we abandon expected-utility calculations in favor of the most probable outcome, since clearly the latter much better fits how rational people really behave.

(This is also why you should never play a Martingale strategy in real life: If your win probability is above 50% on each round—e.g: you are counting cards—you may as well bet normally. If not, a Martingale won't help you: No matter how much money you have to lose, your most probable outcome is still losing more than you win.)