I wish they'd taught this in sex ed, instead of the anatomy and physiology. (One could go an entire lifetime without knowing what a vas deferens is.) But instead, I had to learn these things on my own. And sometimes I still need to remind myself.

1. Casual sex is culturally expected of you, especially if you are male. It is not that hard to get if you really try, but it is also not all that satisfying and usually not worth the effort and risk.

2. If you are comfortable in your sexuality at 16, you must have a very boring sexuality.

3. Men and women aren't all that different actually, and neither are gays and straights.

4. Most people lie about their sex lives. Men generally round up and women generally round down. If you are having less sex than your men friends say and more sex than your women friends say... most likely, so are they. You are normal.

5. Men: Women's Studies classes will tell you that rape is a subtle line that's easy to cross by accident, and you must be paranoid about consent in order to avoid doing so. Ironically, date rapists agree. This is completely untrue. Refusal signals are not at all hard to detect, and I say this despite being mildly autistic. This means that the men who cross the line almost always know they are (they even admit in surveys that they force women to have sex). Even better, it means that you don't actually have to worry about crossing the line by accident. If you're at all worried about crossing the line, you won't cross the line. So you can free your mind from the paranoia of asking for explicit consent at every single step. It's still possible to apply psychological pressure without meaning to; but when it comes to outright coercion, you're just not going to do it without intending to. All you have to do is this: Take no for an answer.

6. You are not as kinky as you feel. Again, people lie. The best data on real kink prevalence is the revealed-preference data from porn sales. Suffice it to say that asking people (even in anonymous surveys) gives very misleading results.

7. Men: Your penis is big enough. Unless you suffer from micropenis, in which case there is surgery available (and micro fetishes also exist). You may find some people who demand larger penises, but they're a minority. You can find plenty of sex without those people.

8. Women: Your breasts are big enough. Even if your chest is completely flat, many men like that. And again, if you find a man who thinks your breasts aren't good enough, don't date him. There are plenty of other men in the world.

9. You will never be what society wants you to be. No one is. A few people get close, but they're spectacularly boring. (And a lot of people are just lying.)

10. Sex is emotionally intense. It's supposed to be. If it's not, you're doing it wrong.

11. If the emotion is there, you're not doing it wrong, even if your technique isn't perfect and your body doesn't do everything you expected.

12. Premature ejaculation is very common and not a serious problem. If you really want to extend the time you can have sex without ejaculation, you can learn to control your pubococcygeal muscles using Kegel exercises, and this has a number of other benefits, including firmer erections and more intense orgasms. But in fact most people who suffer from “premature ejaculation” really suffer from insufficient foreplay.

13. Thinking of sex as a race to the finish misses the entire point. It's like thinking of friendship that way.

14. Somewhere in the world there are people you will meet who will one day make you happy. They are not perfect, but neither are you, and that's all right.

15. The Disney ideal of “true love at first sight” is a fantasy. Love is real. Don't confuse them. Cynics will tell you that believe in love is believing in Disney love; they are wrong.

16. When you seek out love, you will get hurt—and you will survive.

I just realized what it is that bothers me about most economists. When they explain firm behavior, the assumption is perfect rationality. When they explain consumer behavior, the assumption is perfect rationality. When they explain government behavior---combo breaker---the assumption is widespread stupidity, irrationality, and corruption.

So I ask you this: Why does being democratically elected automatically make people corrupt? Why does being bound to public opinion instead of quarterly profit statements make your decisions less responsible?

Just to be clear: I'm not saying government is perfectly rational; I'm saying consumers and firms aren't either. Apple can make boneheaded mistakes just as well as Congress can, and I think we've all seen how stupid the average consumer is.

JDN 2456093 EDT 17:36.

I'm tired of you calling me judgmental, because I occasionally criticize your consumption of meat. I have an analogy that may help you understand why this is such an absurd accusation.
Imagine you were living in a society run by cannibals. Cannibalism is an accepted practice; human meat is sold over grocery counters and in futures exchanges. Your entire society is built around the mass consumption of the dead. Thousands of people are killed every day in order to be eaten.

You would, presumably, not wish to participate in this horrible carnage. But when everyone around you expects it of you, refraining makes you seem weird. Bringing up the obvious fact that there is mass murder going on around you makes you impolite. You would probably even be tempted to use violence to stop the horrific slaughter, but we will stipulate that you are opposed to violence in general and moreover note that a violent response on your part is unlikely to make any difference.

Now suppose that there are certain murders which people actually care about; when certain people are killed, there is mass outrage. If the victims were rich enough, or of the appropriate race, perhaps. Or if they were part of your family or friends. But people raised in pens and murdered for their meat? Obviously those murders are quite justified.
Consider how you would feel in such a world: You are surrounded by the most outrageous murder and hypocrisy. You take yourself out of that system as best you can (maybe you can't entirely, for all the orthotic shoes are made with human skin, and you have to participate in an economy where every transaction you make feeds someone else's cannibalism). In certain cases you speak out against the atrocities. But you are always calm and nonviolent. And then the cannibals dare call you judgmental?

This is the world I am forced to live in. You are cannibals, if not in the most literal sense than in one only mildly extended: You eat the flesh of other sentient beings. You torture and slaughter, or rather pay people to torture and slaughter for you because you are too squeamish to do it yourself. You force me to sit idly by as holocausts are perpetrated around me, and when I dare speak up, you have the audacity to call me judgmental.

It's not that you think the welfare of animals is irrelevant. When Mitt Romney ties a dog to his car, when Michael Vick trains pit bulls to fight, you're outraged just as much as I am. When a psychopath vivisects cats in his basement, you're as appalled as I am. But when the exact same horrors—or horrors far worse—are performed by our meat industry, you shrug and continue to enjoy your hamburger. When chickens are driven mad by their conditions and then have their faces cut off to stop them from killing each other, that doesn't bother you. When pigs have their tails removed without anesthetic, you have no objection to make. When cows are raised in their own excrement and become so sick that they must be constantly fed antibiotics in order to stay alive, you don't care.

You are so mind-blowingly hypocritical you make Bernard Madoff look like a paragon of moral consistency. You are a murderer who claims to be opposed to murder. You may even give to the Humane Society as your lunch undermines all that humaneness stands for. You are outraged by dog-fighters and cock-fighters, yet on a daily basis you fund cruelty orders of magnitude more terrible than anything they have ever attempted.

And when I point it out, you dare call me judgmental?

And be motivated to action, before it is too late.

JDN 2456091 EDT 23:17.

You see, you live in only the third generation of Homo sapiens in the history of the Earth for which two things have been true.

1.  There is a man who can push a button. If he pushes this button, human civilization will be immediately and completely destroyed. The Earth may in fact become an irradiated wasteland, inhospitable to all life. Of the 310 million people who choose this man and put him in charge... 46% think the Earth is only 6000 years old. We are surrounded by idiots, and at any moment one of them will be put in charge of deciding whether or not to destroy the world.

2. The Earth's ecosystem is on the verge of total catastrophic collapse. If current policies are not only halted but indeed reversed on a global scale in a matter of decades, we will fall over the cliff and face a mass extinction event comparable to what happened at the end of the Cretaceous (you remember, when there were dinosaurs, and then... weren't dinosaurs anymore?). If this happens, humans may or may not survive; if we do, it will be after an equally catastrophic political and economic collapse that causes war, famine, drought, and general death counted in the billions of people. 

The time to act is NOW. Actually, the time to act was fifty years ago, but we can't go back. So now is better than tomorrow, and tomorrow is better than a year from now. The more people who really understand just how important this is, and the sooner they do, the better. We still have a chance to prevent these catastrophes. We are uniquely positioned, one way or another: We will either be the first generation of human beings who willfully acted to save the future of humanity---or we may well be the last generation of human beings.

If you're worried about budget deficits or gay marriage or abortion or animal rights or whatever else... it's getting beside the point. It's not that these things aren't important; just that there is something much, much more important, and that is preserving the survival of the human race. 

I wish I knew what I could say to make people understand just how incredibly important this is. We need to fix politics, because nuclear war could kill us all. And we need to fix ecology, because global warming is waiting in line to do the same. We must stop these existential risks---before they stop everything.

If you do nothing else, please take a moment to give to the Union of Concerned Scientists and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Both are highly respected nonprofit organizations administered by experienced scientific professionals, and they are working toward things so mind-bogglingly important that they knock pretty much everything else off the scale. The life you save may be your own.

JDN 2456085 EDT 14:48.

I realized something today. I was reading some websites like Atomic Rockets which scientifically challenge most of the major tropes of science fiction, and it made me feel sad somehow, that the stories we like to tell of space opera are probably completely unfeasible. I also thought of Isaac Asimov's short story “The Last Question” which I had read last night; it too made me sad somehow, reflecting on the ultimate fate of the universe.

And I got to wondering: Why should these things make us sad? Why does knowing that we are probably alone in the universe (or if not alone, then the aliens who exist are far, far away and so vastly different from us that we cannot relate to them in any way) make us feel so lonely? Why does knowing that long after we are dead, and everyone we know is dead, and everything we've built has rotted away, the universe itself will die, make us feel so hopeless?

I think it is because we project upon the universe itself our own hopes and fears; we do not want to be alone as individuals, and so we hope that we are not alone as a species. We do not want to die as individuals, so we do not want the universe to die. But why do we do this? Why does it feel so important? Why do we make it cosmic

And so I try to trace these feelings, see what thoughts and beliefs ultimately drive them. Why does it make me feel more lonely about myself as a human individual to reflect upon the cosmic loneliness of the human species? It seems to project somehow—like the two are correlated because they are causally linked, that solving one would solve the other. In fact this is completely untrue; but it feels true sometimes.

Likewise, my own ultimate fate of death seems linked to the ultimate death of the universe, and yet they really aren't. Both have something to do with entropy, but that's their only similarity. In fact, entropy would have killed me long ago if I didn't keep taking in energy; and there will still be plenty of energy left to take in when I die, I just won't be able to use it. Indeed, it seems I should be more concerned with the death of the universe if I think that I won't die long before it; I should be worried that I might actually have to watch the planets burn and stars fade. As it is, I won't; when eternity comes at last, I will be “anesthetized”, to use Dawkins's word.

And nor can it be that I think this ultimate death will mean the death of all I hold dear; for I already knew that death was coming, sooner or later, maybe a thousand, maybe a million, maybe even a billion years—but surely no more than that. I already knew that one day there would be no art, no science, no literature, just as one day not so long ago these things did not exist. I think I had almost come around to accepting this fact, rejoicing in the fact that we had these things at all, as most possible universes—and most planets in this universe—surely never will. We have them for the blink of an eye, but better than not having them at all.

But then I made it cosmic, and it came to feel that the ultimate death of the universe matters somehow, maybe even matters ultimately, that something so big must be important. I feel like young Alvy in Annie Hall: “The universe is expanding!”

This may be why most people aren't deep thinkers. It's disadvantageous to think about such things, because it takes you to dark places. As Nietzsche said, “stare too long at the abyss and it stares back at you.” How much easier it would be to live blissfully ignorant of all these terrible facts, and delude yourself into thinking God is in charge and we'll all live forever in Heaven. That way when you make it cosmic, you don't feel bad, because you've convinced yourself that the cosmos runs just like you'd want it to.

But of course Alvy is wrong, isn't he? It shouldn't actually matter all that much to us what is to happen billions of years from now... right?

JDN 2456084 EDT 21:55.

Once again, Jerry Coyne dogmatically insists that compatibilism is rubbish, without actually listening to the arguments actual compatibilists actually make. I've come to realize that this is a general problem. Sam Harris does the same thing. Other incompatibilists in general have their own ideas about what free will must be, and if what compatibilists are saying doesn't fit that precisely, then we are just playing word games, because obviously moral responsibility requires magical powers outside causality.

That's the part they don't seem to get: We aren't trying to defend magical powers. We aren't even trying to defend free will, if by that you mean “what most people believe about free will”. We are trying to defend moral responsibility, which is incredibly important—one of the most important things in the universe—and our arguments for this point are completely ignored by incompatibilists.

So here's a short list of really awful arguments that incompatibilists almost always use, which compatibilists have already refuted dozens of times. If you want to convince me of incompatibilism, you should start by not using any of the following arguments.

  Continue reading →

JDN 2456081 EDT 14:29.

I just finished Drift: The unmooring of American military power. The TLDR is that you should read it as soon as you possibly can, for it will fundamentally change the way you look at American government and the military in particular.

The central thesis is clearly correct: America has become more militarized, ironically, by making the military less visible to the public. We have diverted resources from the mainstream Army, Navy and Air Force to the CIA, the NSA, the NSC; thus our wars are conducted in secret. We have privatized military contracts, and lost all accountability for military behavior. (The things that those private military contractors do will make you sick: Having been excused from the Army code of conduct, US law, and local law, DynCorp contractors immediately proceeded to hire teenage girls as sex slaves.) Congress no longer declares war; instead the President declares “police action” or “combat intervention” or whatever euphemism it takes to start a war without calling it one. We have abolished the draft, and destroyed the distinction between Reserves and enlisted forces. Now there is only the 1% who serve in the military and the 99% who do not.

All throughout, Maddow displays her top-notch skills in investigative journalism, and manages to reveal the truth about a series of horrific events while still maintaining a sense of humor. She talks about systemic patterns, and doesn't try to blame anyone in particular; her criticisms fall upon Republicans and Democrats alike.

Continue reading →

JDN 2456080 EDT 21:42. 

I actually agree with most of what you're saying. But you need to learn how to say it better. A lot better, or you're going to spend all your time arguing with people like me who already believe in equality, instead of the people out there who actually want to oppress women. (Also, you need to grow some guts and criticize religion. A few of you do---but not nearly enough. About 80% of all the world's sexism is justified in the name of religion, and that's a conservative estimate.)

Why would you end up arguing with people who believe in equality? Because the whole idea of a vast system of patriarchy is bullshit.  There, I said it. It's bullshit. There is no grand conspiracy. All the world's rapists do not read a single manual. Muslims who mutilate genitals and demand burqas are not holding secret meetings with Christians who want to ban contraception. (In fact, they hate each other, almost as much as they hate queer atheists like me.) When a man disagrees with you, or says something stupid or insensitive, or even harasses and degrades you, he doesn't score points on his Misogyny Club membership---there is no such club, and misogyny is done by individual people for individual reasons. There is no one grand "system" guiding it all. 

Continue reading →

I'm not sure I agree with Sam Harris's account of suicide bombing, but here is what I would say: No one else seems willing to even consider the hypothesis. It's just too taboo, too abhorrent, to imagine that religion could have anything to do with violence. It must be something else, right? We'll find something! It's politics, or culture, or, you know what would flatter my preconceptions even better? Let's blame American policy. It's always American policy.

This is not to say that American policy is never harmful (of course that's not true; I mean, look at Vietnam!). It is not to say that violence is always caused by religion---of course there are many other causes as well. It's not even to say that suicide bombing has a unique connection to Islam---though this is something that could be true.

But if you are unwilling to even consider the idea that religion could have anything to do with violence, you are not being fair to Muslims, you are not being liberal and fair-minded. You are rather being deceived, manipulated by the cultural norms that forbid any criticism of religion. You flinch at the thought that religion could have anything to do with it, so you will look for any other explanation you can find.

Indeed, another thing I noticed in this video was that the other people want to criticize "religion in general", as if there is something unfair about saying that Buddhism is better than Islam. No, it would be unfair to say otherwise. It would be unfair to all the people (especially women) who suffer under Islamist governments. It would be unfair because a significant minority (15-25%) of Muslims explicitly support suicide bombing and other terrorism (about 5% say 9/11 was justified!), while the fraction of Buddhists who do is, if not zero, then negligible.

No one would doubt this if it were not for the special status of religion. No one thinks that we have to criticize belief in Bigfoot exactly as much as we criticize
"9/11 truthers"; no one thinks that if we give a little more respect to acupuncture than we do to homeopathy we are being unfair. No one thinks that astrology is as bad as Scientology. (Indeed, if you find someone who does say any of these things, you have just found me an idiot.)

Our duty as rationalists is to criticize every false idea---but to do so in proportion to the prevalence, absurdity, and harmfulness of each. A widespread system of utter nonsense that does tremendous harm (like, ahem, Islam, or Christianity!) deserves more criticism than an idiosyncratic unfounded speculation with no apparent harm (like Roger Penrose's quantum theory of consciousness). Both are probably false; but one is far, far worse than the other.

People can be driven to violence by a lot of different things, and Islam is certainly not unique in this regard. But the Qur'an really does say all the things Harris says it does, and there really are millions of people who insist they believe the Qur'an is infallible. If that's not terrifying to you, I contend you have a very defective theory of the world.

JDN 2456075 EDT 09:01

If it were, you'd probably understand it better. This is especially true if you are the sort of apologist who would pull out the “atheism is a religion” argument. But it's probably still true if you are any sort of religious person at all, because it's a rare few who can simultaneously understand atheism and continue to believe in religion.

If atheism were a religion, you could understand why we would be trying to convince people—it's proselytizing, which every religion does but some focus more on than others. (Jehovah's Witnesses appear to exist for no other purpose, while Unitarians only proselytize by offhandedly telling people not to.) You could understand why we are passionate about our beliefs, because you're supposed to be passionate about your faith. But then when we say “No, you've got it wrong; I'm trying to present you with evidence, and I'm passionate because of the evidence.” you get confused, because that's not how religion works. You're not supposed to have evidence, that's why it's faith. You're supposed to believe for no reason; so why are the atheists giving reasons? Your best analogy at this point in the conversation is to think of us as basically theologians, and nobody takes those guys seriously, for good reason. What you're missing is that we're actually more like scientists—it's not about what you believe, it's about how the world is. It's not about wearing the right hat and saying the right password to be accepted into the right tribe; it's about being right, about understanding reality. And until you get that, you will never understand atheism.

You see, we don't have a magic book that we think contains all knowledge. Ray Comfort thinks we do, and that is why he published his own version of On the Origin of Species. He thought that by handing out copies of “our book” with his special introduction that tries to refute it, he would thereby raise doubt in our minds. But because On the Origin of Species is not a magic book, not a holy text, not something we consider “infallible” or “inerrant”, you can go ahead and point out a flaw here and a contradiction there, and we will nod, and shrug, and go on believing in atheism and evolution because of the overwhelming evidence in their favor. (In fact Ray Comfort wasn't even very good at pointing out the flaws.)

We don't have a special place we congregate every week to hear a man in special clothing tell us what to believe. It's true, we do have gatherings, and usually someone is in a leadership position, and we often hold them weekly. But the group is usually informal, the guy in that leadership position is almost always elected, and we schedule weekly just because monthly isn't often enough, daily is too often, and doing something like “every nine days” would be incredibly confusing under our present (Christian) calendar. There are no special clothes or special chants; we don't eat special food or sing special songs; and we aren't constantly complaining that people aren't fulfilling their duty of showing up every time and doing whatever the man in special clothes says. (In my recollection this sort of complaining was about 30% of the church experience. And they wonder why people don't like to come?) Atheist organizations are above all secular organizations; they have the character of the Democratic Party or PeTA or the Michigan Checkers Club. And it's true, some churches have this character too; you can thank the Enlightenment for that. We've taken most of the religion out of you too—still working on finishing the job.

We don't have a guy in charge whose ideas are considered infallible. It's not just that we don't have a god, we also don't have a pope or even a pastor. You can point out something stupid that Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or even Daniel Dennett said sometime, and if it is indeed something stupid, I'll nod and agree. (Hints for players at home: For Harris, look for something on free will. For Hitchens, focus on Bill Clinton. Dawkins and Dennett are a bit more challenging, but it can be done.) See, I've got next-to-nothing invested in defending these guys. If you point out something stupid I have said, I feel embarrassed for saying it. If you point out something stupid they have said, I might be concerned that it could hurt the public image of the atheist movement. But I'm only going to try to defend what they said if I think it is actually right. This makes me different from a Christian who has been confronted some of the many (many) terrible Bible passages or a Catholic presented with something awful the Pope has said; in that condition they must defend it, or else abandon fundamental parts of their belief system. As a result, they will make some of the most pitiful and ridiculous excuses you will ever hear emerge from a human mouth. They'll tell you that genocide was “a different culture”, that rape and murder are “just for the Jews of that time”. They'll say “it's a metaphor” when even today there are millions of people who read it as literally true. As an atheist, I never have to do this sort of thing! You see, I was never committed to the claim that these men are the infallible conduits of magical beings.

This is why religious people are baffled when atheists agree with them on criticizing particular individual atheists and their statements. It's why the “Stalin was an atheist” argument carries no weight; see, we don't think of ourselves as on a team. It's not a matter of one side scoring more points (“Foul: Purges! Penalty ten million points.”). We aren't trying to win the game.

Team-based scoring comes very naturally to humans, so I'd like to spend a little more time on why it's wrong. We evolved to organize ourselves into tribes, and so we have a very difficult time resisting this impulse. We talk about “gaffes” made by politicians of whatever party, and we're always on the lookout for salacious gossip on them, because that means more points for “our team”. A good Democrat is a point for Democrats; a good Christian is a point for Christians. Tally up all the points and see which team wins; that's how it works right?

Well, in politics it's almost like that, because the person who gets power is based on how people vote, and they tend to vote based upon this sort of stupid reason. But this is actually a really huge problem; it's why bad policies get put in place and then kept there, because removing them would requiring many people to give up on “our team” “winning”.

One very good patch is to redefine how you think of the “teams”; instead of being on Team Democrat or Team Jesus, think of yourself as being on Team Reason and Team Justice. Instead of wanting to exclude other people because they vote for “the wrong team”, you make democracy your team, and refuse to accept any limitations of voting rights. Then when a Christian says bigoted things about gay people or a Democrat votes for indefinite detention, you can say, “That's a treason against the real team we should be on!” instead of feeling conflicted because someone on “your team” did something terrible. Now when they do something terrible, you kick them off the team!

This is of course not a perfect solution, and Christians already do something similar when they say that Nazis and Crusaders were not “true Christians”. Yes, they obviously were—they were at least as Christian as you are—but because they were bad, you don't want to claim them on your team. You make excuses for how they aren't really Christian, even though they believe basically the same things about Jesus and the Bible you do—often much more than you believe it.

Of course, Christians are wrong here: You can't kick someone off a team that has to do with beliefs, if they actually do have those beliefs. You can't kick Stalin off Team Atheist—he was definitely an atheist. If you're kicking him off a team, it has to be Team Justice or Team Liberty or Team Good. And if you're still stuck identifying yourself with a team that has a lot of bad people on it, that's not a good sign; maybe you're on the wrong team.

Or maybe not! This is why it's a patch, not a fix; because it turns out that good ideas can have bad adherents. All the world's murderers can believe the sky is blue, and that doesn't make it green. All the world's idiots can insist the Sun is shining, and that won't make it rain. If all the smart people and all the nice people disagree with you, that's a bad sign; but it doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong—because when you get right down to it, it's not about what team you're on, it's about reality.