Part 1: Spending and Investment

Part 2: Military spending

JDN 2456350 EDT 19:57.

 

There is a certain class of questions that people will ask, thinking they are encouraging you to be a dreamer. In fact, they only make sense for people who are not dreamers, people who have poor imaginations and very limited horizons. When asked of someone who really is a dreamer, the questions reveal themselves to be nonsensical.

(Tangentially, I have a funny story about my intensive Japanese class. I was asked by my sensei, Patrick-san-no yume-wa nan desu ka? "What are your dreams?" I was unable to articulate my answer in Japanese, honestly I still am, so my response was Watashi-wa wakarimasen. "I don't know." But in fact I do know; indeed I have richly defined dreams that haven't substantially changed in the last 15 years. I'm gradually getting close to achieving them, though much stands in my way. The reason I answered wakarimasen was simply that I don't know how to articulate my dreams in Japanese.)

 

The questions are things like this:
"If money were no object, what would you do?"

"What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?"

"If you could achieve anything you wanted, what would it be?"

"How would you live if no one could get in your way?"

 

The answer they want you to give is something like this: "I'd write a novel." "I'd be a teacher." "I'd become an astronaut." They're really asking for your dream career, what you'd like to do with your life if all the petty obstacles were removed.

But in fact, what they have asked is more like, "What would you do if you were omnipotent?"

If money were no object, that would imply that economics is no object, and I am limited only by laws of physics and human imagination. I could build a billion Dyson Spheres, colonize the galaxy, make everyone immortal.

If I knew I couldn't fail, well I'd be even more powerful. Now I seem to have logical omnipotence, the ability to achieve anything as long as it is logically coherent. My galactic civilization now consists of beings of perfect wisdom and morality, instantaneously teleported wherever they desire.

Achieving anything I want sounds about the same, so that leaves only how I would live if no one could get in my way. That's more limited; it's perhaps still economically constrained, but no longer ideologically or politically constrained. I'd eliminate religion, end world hunger, establish a world government, and reverse global warming.

Clearly these are not the questions you really meant to ask, because they're quite trivial; I can't actually do any of these things, and there's no reason to think there is anything I could do that would change that fact. They are pie-in-the-sky fantasies, nothing more. At best maybe I can nudge the world slightly in that direction so that maybe it gets there in a few centuries (or more).

 

I think these are the questions they meant to ask: "If you knew you would be financially secure, what career would you like to have?" "If you were going to found an activist organization, what would its cause be?" "What do you hope to achieve in your life?"

Apparently, people who aren't dreamers can't distinguish between those two classes of questions. I find that somewhere between amusing and disturbing.

JDN 2456343 EDT 15:53

 

A review of The Male Brain by Louann Brizendine.

 

As soon as I saw that the birthday gift I had opened was a book called The Male Brain, I was worried it would distort science in the service of gender stereotypes.

 

It turned out to not be quite as bad as I feared, but it does have a lot of the flaws I expected. One of the most ubiquitous is a tendency that seems subtle at first, but turns out to be quite insidious in its effect: This is her tendency to shorthand "Studies show that to men are more likely to X" as simply "men X".

Occasionally she does it right, offering the necessary hedges such as "boys more often than girls will go behind their parents' backs to take risks and break rules" (p.15) and "In cultures around the world there is a lot of variability among fathers" (p.81); but much more commonly she omits the "more often" and the "usually" and the "statistically" and just says things like, "boys tease and reject other boys who like girls' games and toys" (p.19), "boys can't understand why girls like to talk and text so much or why they need to share every minute detail" (p.41), and "sex doesn't always lead to love, but for the male brain, it is a necessary part of getting there" (p.62).

Compounding this error, she also ignores the variation within each sex, and makes generalizations that apply only to neurotypical, extroverted, non-sensitive heterosexual cisgender men (since the topic is gender, I can forgive the cisgender and maybe the heterosexual, but the rest?). For instance, she asserts things like "Research shows that it takes extraordinarily intense sensations to activate the reward centers of the teen boy brain, and homework just doesn't do it" (p.35) and "The amount of stimulation it takes to make an adult cringe will barely get a rise out of a teen boy" (p.37). Well, that might be true for non-sensitive boys, but it is certainly not true--not even remotely close to true--for sensitive boys.

Indeed, about half of what she said was true about "the male brain" simply wasn't true of me; "Men accuse women of being too emotional and women accuse men of not being emotional enough" (p.95) rang particularly hollow, as one of my most painful failed relationships came from precisely the opposite dynamic.

I realize that I am hardly a typical man; I am intellectual, autistotypic, introverted, sensitive, and bisexual; I am unusually high in IQ, emotion, and empathy; but as I was reading I came to realize that there's something wrong with this whole search for "typical men" in the first place. Suppose we did find this elusive creature, who actually fits every stereotype, aligns with every statistical trend; where is he? And suppose such men exist; they must be pretty rare, right? It is in that sense perfectly normal to be atypical. (The statistics are pretty mind-blowing for most people: If there are 10 traits, each of which 90% of people have, the odds of having all of them are only 35%. If there are 20 traits, the odds drop to 12%. Of course, that's assuming they are all independent; but even with realistic correlations, it's easy to have a set of traits for which the majority has each of them but only a minority has all of them.)

As a result, the book creates a false sense that men and women are categorically different: men are aggressive, women passive; men are stoic, women emotional; men are competitive, women conciliatory; and so on, all down a long list of stereotypes. Brizandine does do a good job of citing her sources; as far as I can tell, all the trends she cites are indeed statistically valid trends. But they are just that, trends, and in some cases the effect size is actually quite weak. A study will find a 4% difference, which might even be significant only due to publication bias, and then it gets repeated and embellished slightly several times, on down the line until in books like this it's made to sound like a vast chasm. (A few actually are vast chasms, like the 20-fold difference in testosterone production. Men are about 8±2 mg/d, women 0.4±0.1 mg/d. Even using the larger male standard deviation, that's a 4-sigma difference.)

Also, the book is highly reductionistic, which I suppose is typical for neuroscience. In its worst example, it explicates romantic attraction as if it were basically just a matter of lining up pheromones and seeing what matches; it takes complex human interactions and tries to reduce them to simple chemistry. I wouldn't be surprised if pheromones have something to do with it (in fact even this has not been conclusively shown), but there is clearly a lot more to it than that. (Honestly, if it were that simple, you could get anyone you want to sleep with you by spraying the right pheromones.)

Part of it might be that we assign so much significance to being the proper gender. If it were not an insult to be seen as "less of a man", but merely a simple statement of personality, like "less introverted", then perhaps we could characterize masculinity in some quantitative way and then say that some people are more or less masculine. Maybe ultimately this is what we should aim for? But for now, it feels deeply unsettling to be told that because I don't like sports, have intense emotions, and am sensitive to loud noises, this means that my brain is not truly a "male brain". What is it then? Last I checked I have a penis.

Brizendine claims that her goal is to encourage compassion and understanding between men and women, but in fact I think her book is more likely to have the opposite effect. Compassion derives from understanding individuality and accepting diversity, not shoehorning people into rigid categories. The Male Brain gives sexism an air of scientific respectability. As such, even though most of what it says is based on sound science, the presentation makes the book very dangerous indeed. 

JDN 2456341 EDT 15:44.

 

In Freefall, Joseph Stiglitz, one of the great economists of our time (Krugman called him "an insanely great economist"), outlines what caused the crisis in 2008, the depression from which we are still recovering today. He saw it coming at the time, and tried to warn regulators, but they wouldn't listen. (If you're reminded of Keynes in the Great Depression, the comparison is apt on many levels.)

He describes himself as a centrist, and he basically agrees with Eisenhower or maybe Nixon; as you can imagine, he is derided as a far-left socialist by Republicans and Libertarians. That's how far right we have shifted in this country; the mere suggestion that markets sometimes fail and need to be corrected by careful taxation and regulation is now considered radical socialism.

Stiglitz believes in capitalism; he just doesn't believe in it blindly. He understands that it has faults and limitations, and understands that government and nonprofits have important roles to play. One role he'd like to see more of: Academics and nonprofit leaders in regulatory agencies. For too long, there has been a revolving door between Wall Street and the people who are supposed to be regulating it. The fox guards the henhouse, and has for decades.

Indeed, Stiglitz shows us a striking fact about the 2008 crisis: It wasn't really capitalist at all. It wasn't socialist either; no, it was something else, some terrible third alternative. Corporatism, corporatocracy, maybe even crypto-fascism. The government refused to help homeowners and the unemployed, because that would be socialist; but doling out trillions of dollars in free loans to banks? That was just fine. Moral hazard was considered a grave concern when it came to saving people's jobs and homes (I mean, my god, what if someone got a nice home and didn't quite deserve it? It would be the end of the free world, I'm sure), but not when it came to writing a blank check to the banks whose insane risks had toppled the world economy. Government became, not a regulatory framework for markets, not a safety net for the helpless, but an ATM for business executives. We did install some new regulations (some very long and complicated new regulations that I don't think anyone fully understands), but on the whole we put the same people back in charge who had caused the crisis in the first place.

Stiglitz chronicles abuse after abuse, actions that range from unethical to criminal. Securities were packaged without anyone having the faintest idea what risk they contained. Accounting rules were fudged to make failing banks look solvent. Financial products were sold as the highest quality when the people selling them knew they were destined to fail. Exorbitant fees were charged at every level. Some banks even spent their entire bailout funds paying "retention bonuses" to their executives. Our entire system of banks, credit rating agencies, and regulators failed on a catastrophic scale. A few people became spectacularly rich while the rest of us suffered.

Stiglitz is highly critical of Republicans, but he is also critical of Obama for failing to stand up to Republicans. Where America needed a unified Keynesian response, our leaders faltered, succumbing to the demands of far-right radicals (Why would you want deficit reduction in the middle of a depression!?), and muddling through with far too many compromises. As Stiglitz rightly points out, a larger, more regulated stimulus would have seemed like a big expenditure; but in fact, the route we took will be far more costly in the long run.

Everyone should especially read chapter 4, "The Mortgage Scam". This one hit close to home for me (literally, I suppose), because my parents are still facing foreclosure as a result of the unethical and fraudulent practices of too-big-to-fail banks. Our equity has gone under water, our interest rate has exploded, now we're waiting for our foreclosure hearing with some unknown investor we've never met who apparently somehow owns our loan (or the majority share or something; it's all so complicated I'm not sure anyone understands it really). When we financed, we were promised that we were taking a low-risk plan, that the market for homes was rising steadily and we would never have to worry about losing our equity. We fell for it; and of course, so did millions of other people, including most economists.

It all started when HSBC bought our mortgage, and I want you to think about that phrase, "bought our mortgage"; a mortgage is not a thing, it is a promise. How can you buy a promise? We never signed a contract with HSBC, and would not have if they had offered one. Instead, we signed a contract with another bank, who went behind our backs and signed a contract with HSBC, and yet... somehow we are the ones who have to pay HSBC, not the bank we originally signed up with. How is that a free market?

Many people said at the time that "we had no choice" but to bail out the banks with trillions of dollars in unsecured debt that may never be repaid. Stiglitz does an excellent job of debunking this claim, pointing out all sorts of alternative policies that could have worked better, faster, cheaper, and with less moral hazard. One of his proposals is one that always made sense to me: Why not have the government refinance every mortgage in America at 3%? (Funded by the Fed discount window at a profit, or by selling Treasury bonds at break-even. Honestly, don't a 30-year T-bill and a 30-year mortgage seem like they're made for each other?) Would that be "socialist"? No, it really wouldn't, seeing as people are still paying for things and getting what they pay for. It's just a fair interest rate without excessive middlemen, and apparently unfair rates and middlemen have come to define what we think of as "capitalism". Indeed, what we actually did involved an unprecedented level of government intervention into the financial system, costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars for very little gain.

I even felt some personal connection as he discussed the rise of brokerage fees; I currently have a stock portfolio that has made money, but not for me. All my stocks have risen in price, but not enough to pay back the ridiculous fees my online broker charges me. (And I've looked it up; my broker is actually one of the cheapest available, charging $10 per trade where most charge $20; of course, most trades actually cost something like $0.00001...) It actually acts like a regressive tax; the larger amounts you trade, the less you feel the fees (often they even waive them for large accounts!). So basically, it's a good way of keeping the middle class from meddling in the stock market, which obviously belongs to rich people. It's also a good way for brokers to make money regardless of how the market goes. (If $10 doesn't sound like a lot to you, I want you to think about the fact that a 1% gain on a stock in a month is pretty good. So that $10 gets wiped out if your trade is for any less than $1000.)

I shared his exasperation at the concept of "high-frequency trading", in which computer algorithms execute trades on the order of microseconds, to the point where speed-of-light limitations are becoming a problem. Why do we need that? What could it possibly do, except distort our market and make it unstable? Well, I suppose it does do one other thing: It skims off money for those who own the computers. It's a good way to get rich, in much the same way as bank robbery.

I like so many things about this book--seriously, go read it--that it's hard to pick my favorite, but if I had to, it would be the final chapter, in which talks about the "moral deficit", the way that our market has been taken over by corrupt psychopaths whose sole goal in existence is making more money for themselves. We've lost our way as a society; we've forgotten that our lives have a purpose besides narrow self-interest. You want to talk about moral hazard? That's our moral hazard.

JDN 2456336 EDT 13:14.

 

I got into a very strange Facebook argument yesterday (you may call it a siwoti), with someone I actually agree with about 95%. We both believe in reason and science, we largely agree on moral and political issues. Yet this argument somehow became fierce.

The question was this: Is it possible to make moral arguments without axioms or assumptions? I insisted that it was not, but that this isn't really a problem, because some axioms are much safer bets than others. But he would not have any of this; he insisted that axioms in general are to be avoided at all costs, and he said he had a theory of morality which required no axioms at all.

Naturally, I thought this unlikely; what would a theory look like, with no assumptions? How could you even get it off the ground? Maybe you could do mathematics that way... but then, even mathematics depends upon some assumptions (like the Axiom of Empty Set and the Axiom of Equality), doesn't it? Are those things we can simply define to be true, without tying them to the real world in any way? If so, how does mathematics have practical applications?

It took me over an hour to even get him to state his theory. He was whining the whole time about how I wouldn't give it a fair hearing. I actually placed a bet, appointing a mutual friend as an arbitrator; if the theory worked or if I treated it unfairly, he would receive a 10% stake in all future proceeds from The Science of Morality (or $20 cash today if he preferred that, though he'd be silly to take that; my book option is surely worth hundreds, if not thousands, though perhaps he's just that risk-averse). He still kept whining about how he didn't think I'd treat his ideas fairly, but finally I did coax him into revealing his brilliant theory.

What was it? Why, it was just the standard evolutionary account of moral emotions, which I'm already thoroughly familiar with and use rather extensively in The Science of Morality. It's basically Frans de Waal and E.O. Wilson stuff, with perhaps a bit of Richard Joyce. My interlocutor's claim was that this involves no assumptions at all, which is just frankly so ludicrous I don't even know how to interface with it.

I pointed out off the top of my head half a dozen assumptions it depends upon. Some were the fundamental axioms of science itself (like "we are not systematically deceived, e.g. by Cartesian demons" and "mathematics is consistent"), which I can see why he wouldn't count, but he really should. Even worse, in the form he stated it, his theory depended upon a couple of assumptions that most people, including myself, disagree with (like "the behaviors that maximize genetic fitness are the same as the behaviors that maximize moral goodness"). The theory was rife with assumptions, mostly reasonable but a few quite dubious. I pointed this out, and he did the argumentative equivalent of a rage-quit, disappearing from the discussion, but not before he had accused me of being a scientific anti-realist and a postmodernist simply because I pointed out that science depends on certain normative principles.

But the fact is, science does depend on certain normative principles. That is not reason to doubt science, it is reason to trust those normative principles. Honesty, openness, autonomy, beneficence; they teach these ethics in science classes for a reason, as the practice and principle of science depends upon them.

I think my friend's behavior is symptomatic of a larger problem, which is that rationalists have largely conceded the moral domain to religion. Even basic assumptions of morality that no one sane would disagree with, like "Suffering is bad" and "The Holocaust was wrong", are treated as special assumptions that can't be trusted. Moral arguments depend on such assumptions, so moral arguments can't be trusted either. Meanwhile, we can't admit that science is dependent upon similar axioms, or else we'll make science subject to the same failures. My friend even said, "You're one of those people who thinks that science is a house of cards." (My reply was ignored: "No, I'm one of those people who doesn't think that depending on assumptions makes you a house of cards.")

Yes, science depends on assumptions. Factual assumptions, like "the world is not an illusion", and also normative assumptions, like "we should be rational". And yes, in principle, one could doubt these assumptions. But in fact, I don't know anyone who does. So it's stupid to worry about hypothetical doubters who don't actually exist and wouldn't survive long if they did.

It's really just Aristotle and the tortoise again: "What if I don't believe in logic?" Well, then, uh... you're not going to get much done, now are you? And it's clearly not worth talking to you, for much the same reason it's not worth talking to a rock.

"What if I don't think suffering is bad?" Then perhaps I should make you suffer until you do? (This was Avicenna's medieval solution.)

These are not good arguments. Yes, they are logically valid; but there's more to life than logical validity. In fact, a lot of the best arguments aren't logically valid in the strict sense; they are just highly, highly probable. For example, I cannot prove that the Earth is round; but you can, you know, go up and look at it if you have a big enough rocket (or download photographs from people who have done so before you). I cannot prove that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor, but the probability of this not being true was estimated at 1e-2860; yes, that's a decimal point, followed by 2859 zeroes, followed by a 1. I think it's a pretty safe bet.

As I tried to explain to my friend, we have better things to do than worry about such probabilities. The chance that I am a brain in a vat, or that the world is a simulation, or that Cartesian demons deceive us all, may not be zero--but it might as well be, for all the action potentials it's worth expending on them (too many have been expended already).

Morality is not an abstract exercise for philosophers. It is an urgent engineering problem, upon which literally the fate of humanity rests. We stand upon a precipice, our species more fragile than it has been since the bottleneck 70,000 years ago. With nuclear weapons that already exist, or nanotechnology, biological weapons, or artificial intelligence that could very soon, our whole species could be eliminated in a matter of hours. With global warming or antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we could die out slower, but no less permanently. That's not to mention the possibility of asteroid impacts and supervolcanoes which have always been a threat (and may have caused that very bottleneck). Actually for the first time, we might have the chance of defending ourselves against such things (perhaps those nuclear weapons will be our salvation, if they deflect an asteroid trajectory or stabilize a magma chamber); but only if we make a dedicated effort to do the necessary research and make the necessary preparations. Even if we avoid such catastrophes, we already know that millions of people are dying from preventable poverty and illness and millions more will die from global warming.

I don't mean to frighten you--well, actually I suppose I do. I mean to frighten you with the real dangers of the world, not the silly paranoia that prevails in our 24-hour news cycle. I mean to impress upon you the real urgency of moral science, the billions of lives that hang in the balance if we do not solve these problems quickly enough. We can't afford to waste time arguing about whether suffering is really bad or genocide is really wrong or maybe poverty is a good thing. There are plenty of things we don't know, so let's stop wasting precious time on things we already do.

And in the process, we must fear not our own axioms. When someone says, "How do you know suffering is bad?" or "What if the Holocaust wasn't a bad thing?" we shouldn't take them seriously and try to engage with what is essentially a troll; we should say, "Seriously? That's your argument? You're going to waste our time on that?"

This is how we respond in science when someone asks an equally pointless question, like "How do you know evidence is the way to find truth?" or "What if mathematics is inconsistent?" It is time we respond the same way in morality.

And no, this does not mean that you can assume whatever you want and everything is up for grabs. When someone actually makes an assumption that is legitimately in question--something like "maximizing genetic fitness is the same as maximizing moral goodness"--we have a right and indeed a duty to question that assumption. Often arguments come with hidden assumptions that aren't stated, which can make them all the more insidious. For decades, economists used models that assumed perfect information, which is frankly the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard (it is tantamount to assuming that everyone on Earth is omniscient!), but it was hidden in the mathematics, so people thought they were proving much more than they were. In fact, Myerson and Satterthwaithe showed that if you remove this ridiculous assumption, you find that not only aren't markets always perfectly efficient, in fact, they never are. It's a really mind-blowing theorem; you'd think there'd be some way around the asymmetric information, but there isn't. It's possible to do better by some methods than others (obviously we did better in say 1992 than in say 1929), but there is absolutely no way to guarantee efficiency. The Invisible Hand isn't just invisible; it's imaginary.

So yes, if you actually have a serious objection to one of my moral assumptions, by all means make it. But it should be a sincere and serious objection, not this sort of sophistic "But how do you know for sure?" that does nothing but stall the debate. If you actually think that the world is a simulation, well, you probably need clozapine. But if you're doubtful that science is a good source of moral truth, now that's something we could talk about.

It's not true that there are no stupid questions. There are no stupid sincere questions, and that makes all the difference.

JDN 2456327 EDT 19:20.

 

We often say that a genius such as Leonardo or Newton is "ahead of their time"; I doubt most people realize just how accurate this is. In what is called "the Flynn effect", IQ scores have been increasing steadily at a rate of about 0.3 IQ points per year since we have been keeping track of them. This means that in the past century we have risen an average of 30 IQ points, which is the difference between average and the top 2.5%, or the difference between the bottom 8% and the top 8%.

We obviously haven't been increasing this fast since Newton and Leonardo; if we had, Newton's IQ of, say, 160 the year he died would be an IQ of only 74 today (borderline retarded). Leonardo's IQ of, say, 180 when he died would become a mere 30 today (chimpanzee). That's pretty ridiculous. So let's assume that the increase started around 1850; in that case we spot them the same 50 IQ points, and Newton's 160 becomes 110 while Leonardo's 180 becomes 130. They'd still be smart, but not outlier geniuses. And indeed, if you tested them on standard IQ tests, I'm pretty sure that's what you'd find.

In Are We Getting Smarter? James R. Flynn (yes, the effect is named after him) charts this meteoric rise, and seeks to answer the question on all of our minds: Is this a real rise in intelligence, an artifact of bad tests, or something else?

Flynn leans toward "something else," but he also thinks "real rise in intelligence" is worth considering. He pretty clearly demolishes the idea that it's just bad tests; we ask the same questions today we did 50 years ago, and people just plain do better at answering them. Moreover, these aren't questions that require a lot of domain-specific knowledge; they're things like pattern completion and recalling strings of numbers. The most domain-specific category is the vocabulary section, and it's based on words that have been in common use for decades.

Flynn's theory is that the change has been abstraction, or what he calls "scientific spectacles"; we train people better now to think in terms of scientific categories and abstract relationships. Consider the question, "What do a fish and a crow have in common?" Most people used to say "A crow can eat a fish", which is very concrete and won't score well on an IQ test. Now most people say "Both are animals", which is more abstract and scores higher. High-IQ people say "Both are vertebrates", which is abstract, precise, and scientific.

Flynn also thinks we could do even better at teaching scientific attitudes than we already do, and I'm inclined to agree, given the prevalence of Creationism and global warming denial. But even I have to admit, today's Creationists use more scientific language than the Creationists of yesteryear. It's bad science, pseudoscience; but it shows how highly valued science is in our culture. You simply can't get away with saying "Science is of the devil" anymore, you have to say "Science reinforces the Bible".

I would hope that the steady rise in world IQ (which varies from nation to nation) would silence the sort of people who believe in an Idiocracy-style eugenic crisis where our population becomes dumber over time. But of course it won't. In fact IQ is inversely correlated with birth rate, but it's also inversely correlated with death rate, so it's not clear that people with less IQ actually have any more children who survive to breeding age. But even if that turns out to be the case, the fact remains that overall IQ scores are rising at a remarkably fast rate due to environmental pressures. If our genes are making us dumber, our environment is making us smarter a lot faster.

The book itself is full of data tables and statistics, which makes it a little dry. You can't fault his scientific rigor, but beware that you will be bombarded with long lists of means and standard deviations. Also he has a tendency to report things like "3.284 plus or minus 1.261", which is a really weird kind of precision. How about "3.3 plus or minus 1.3", seeing as we already have a wide margin of error?

The reader is kept awake, however, but Flynn's fascinating insights and his occasional barbs at academic culture. He clearly doesn't like a lot of things about how our academic community is organized. He goes through long lists of papers that contain basic factual errors, and spares no criticism for university administrators and funding agencies. It's hard not to agree, given some of the examples of bad science he talks about that have gotten published. My favorite is this one: "The silliest piece of social science I have seen was not in psychology but in politics: a thesis on nonvoting in the Washington metropolitan area. The candidate was unaware that the Hatch Act banned the residents of the city proper, the District of Columbia, from voting in Congressional elections. [...] They constituted one-fourth of those sampled. The supervisor's attempt to defend the merits of the thesis was fascinating." (p.181) In short, why is voter turnout so low in DC? Maybe because people who live in DC aren't allowed to vote? Who published that paper!? They should be fired.

A large section of the book is dedicated to showing that the measured differences in IQ between White males and others are due to sociological, rather than genetic, causes. Flynn chides other IQ researchers for leaping to genetic conclusions; but he also chides others for not being willing to face the facts and do the actual research at all. Rather than assuming that genes are not the cause, we should be able to marshal evidence for that; and this is what Flynn tries to do. His case is pretty convincing; the sociological evidence is compelling, and the opposing arguments are pathetically weak. At times I felt that he actually went too far in the direction of being charitable to his opponents, some of whom clearly are racists and sexists. If you're going to be so harsh against papers with bad statistics, how about you direct some of that toward blatant racism?

One argument that keeps turning up is that because IQ is highly heritable, it must be largely genetic. This argument is not just wrong; it's ludicrous, as can be seen from a simple example. The heritability of the trait "speaking Japanese" is quite high, as you might imagine; most people who speak Japanese had parents who spoke Japanese, and most people who speak Japanese have children who speak Japanese. However, speaking Japanese is entirely environmental; as long as you have the basic genetics required for speaking any human language (you are not so retarded as to be nonverbal, your ears and mouth work normally), you can learn Japanese just as well as anyone else if you are exposed to it from a young enough age. Japanese parents who adopt an American child will have no problem raising that child to speak Japanese.

Yes, smart people tend to raise smart children. This because they live in smart environments, provide smart opportunities, and live in smart nations. It could also be because they carry smart genes, but you need to actually show that; it doesn't by any means follow from the heritability coefficient itself.

My favorite chapter of the book is chapter 7, "The sociological imagination", in which Flynn derides other researchers in psychology for being greedy reductionists who ignore cultural and social causes and try to make everything about brain physiology. I've been saying this for years, and I will continue to say it; trying to understand human behavior purely in terms of the brain would be like trying to understand the Internet purely in terms of quantum mechanics. Humanity really needs to get over the long-standing mistake that things are defined by the stuff of which they are made, and not by the function that they do. You are made of neurons, yes; but that does not mean you are neurons. A house is made of wood, but a pile of wood is not a house. A vat full of neurons would not be Mozart.

It's the failure of sociological imagination that leads to another ludicrous argument Flynn's opponents make, which once again he gives more credit than it deserves: Women and Black people couldn't score lower for sociological reasons unless there were some mysterious "factor X" that only affected them and not White males, something highly implausible and impossible to verify. What mysterious phenomenon harms Blacks and not Whites, women and not men, gays but not straights? I wonder what it could be? It's called discrimination, you idiot. It's not mysterious at all. (And indeed, as Flynn shows, countries that discriminate less show smaller differences in IQ scores between various groups.)

It's particularly amusing how he shows that the fact that women in college have a lower mean IQ than men in college doesn't mean that women are dumber in general; instead, it just means that women have an easier time getting into college without being as bright. On average, women are the same as men in IQ; it's just that women can get into college with an IQ of 95, while men need an IQ of 100. Flynn uses data on dropout rates and conscientiousness scores to argue that the reason is basically that women work harder, and as a result can pass the thresholds into college without having as much raw intellect. This certainly meshes with my own experience; everyone I know who is brilliant but lazy is male, while everyone I know who is of average intellect but works their ass off to succeed is female. Personally, I'm working on being brilliant and industrious both... but how the laziness tempts.

The chapter I feel most ambivalent about is chapter 4, "Death, memory, and politics", in which Flynn tries to argue that we should adjust our IQ thresholds for the death penalty in light of the Flynn effect. I did not know this before, but apparently it is illegal in the US to execute someone whose IQ is below 70, on the grounds that below that level they must be mentally retarded and unable to understand the consequences of their behavior.

It seems to me that this system is really founded upon an outdated concept of free will, in which you must be "really responsible" for your actions before it's legitimate to punish you for them. We can't execute someone who is too stupid to understand why they murder people! Well, why not? After all, they murder people, and we don't know how to stop them. These, for me, are pretty much the reasons we'd execute someone. I'm not terribly concerned about the question of whether they murder people rationally; indeed, it's pretty clear to me that almost no murders are rational, because it could only be rational to murder someone in a society where murder wasn't reliably punished severely. Even then, it would still be wrong, but at least maybe it could be rational. (And don't try to pull out self-defense or just war exceptions: Those are by definition not murder, and wouldn't carry a death penalty. In fact, they are usually not prosecuted at all.)

If you can find a better way to stop the murders, well, let's do that instead. But then, this raises the question: Why not always do that? Why kill some murderers and not others? If imprisonment works just as well as execution, why use execution at all, knowing it is costly, controversial, and irrevocable?

It would make some sense to me to execute psychopaths and not others, as we know that psychopaths are especially dangerous and especially likely to charm parole boards into releasing them. And I suppose it's probably true that murderers of higher IQ are more likely to be psychopaths (this could certainly be tested easily enough). But we have standard tests of psychopathy, which are not dependent on IQ and don't show the Flynn effect over time. (Oddly enough, tests of narcissism do show a Flynn-like effect, in that certain narcissistic traits have become more common in the population over time. We're not really sure about the causes or the significance of this; it could well be another book worth writing.)

Also, Flynn's argument that we should adjust scores to the current averages doesn't quite sit right with me. It seems to rest upon a notion that moral responsibility is a purely relative measure, which isn't true. Homo sapiens are smarter than Pan troglodytes, which are smarter than Canis lupus. As such, we grant more rights and responsibilities to humans than to chimps, and more to chimps than to dogs. But if the world were changed somehow so that all the really stupid animals died out (all the insects and worms are gone, but somehow we survive without them), we would not thereby conclude that dogs deserve fewer rights because they're now closer to the bottom. Likewise, if human beings died out, it would be wrong to say that chimpanzees should vote and fly airplanes because they are now the smartest apes (Planet of the Apes notwithstanding).

If IQ is really important to moral responsibility, then rises in IQ should also entail rises in moral responsibility. And if it isn't, why are we using it to decide who gets executed? Flynn tries to argue that what we really care about is retardation, which (he presumes) isn't decreasing over time, always representing a steady 2.5% of the population. He then makes the additional assumption that retarded people would always score lower on IQ tests than non-retarded people, even as all the IQ scores rapidly improve over time. Both of these assumptions strike me as entirely unsupported; maybe the IQ gains are actually due at least in part to improved treatment and prevention for mental retardation! In any case, if we're not going to base our decisions on IQ tests, how about we come up with a new test that actually measures what we really care about?

In fact, Flynn himself hints at the idea that rising IQ should entail rising moral responsibility, though not in so many words. He briefly analyzes the history of political debate, showing that the complexity of arguments used has increased over time, especially in arguments used by politicians and economists toward one another. He particularly compares William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, which is rhetorically brilliant but almost content-free, with more modern economic commentators like Paul Krugman, who regularly cites tables and graphs. Apparently, the arguments that politicians give the masses aren't changed as much, which is rather disappointing but not terribly surprising. ("Change we can believe in!" I like Obama for the most part, but come on; what does that even mean? "It's not a coincidence that you use R to go back and D to go forward!" Yes, actually, that's exactly what it is.) Also, there's a study saying that the Tea Party caucus displays a lower level of cognitive complexity than mainstream Republicans or Democrats, which is amusing but also not surprising.

With this in mind, the future is bright: We can predict that a smarter population will also be a morally better one. As support, I offer Pinker's observation in Better Angels of Our Nature that violence is decreasing over time. Science shows people are getting smarter and nicer! How's that for good news?

 

JDN 2456326 EDT 12:55.

 

"Freedom" is a word we use all the time in America, to the point where it begins to lose its meaning. There is actually a group on the University of Michigan campus called "Young Americans for Freedom", because apparently other people don't believe in freedom (they were also the ones who staged "Catch an Immigrant Day" a few years back, which should tell you what sort of 'freedom' they believe in).

There are really two different kinds of freedom, and sadly the most important one is the one least often spoken of. Perhaps because it is also the most demanding.

The one we most often speak of is negative freedom, freedom "from". I have negative freedom whenever no one is actively preventing me from doing something. Negative freedom of speech is a lack of censorship. Negative freedom of movement means a lack of immigration restrictions (which tells you a lot about "Young Americans for Freedom").

The more important one, the one that really affects our lives, is substantive freedom, freedom "to". I only have substantive freedom when I can actually do something. Substantive freedom of speech means not only a lack of censorship, but also access to blogging, or publishing, or some way of reaching large numbers of people. Substantive freedom of movement means a transportation infrastructure that makes it easy to get around without being wealthy.

Substantive freedom is more demanding, there's no doubt about that. All I have to do in order to give you negative freedom is... nothing. A rock is the paragon of negative liberty.

But negative freedom is almost meaningless. I have the negative freedom to land on Mars. I have the negative freedom to build a Dyson Sphere. Starving children in Africa may well have the negative freedom to eat, but that won't help them.

Indeed, because a rock is such a paragon of negative liberty, the ideal world of negative freedom would be the total extinction of all sentient life. We may suppose it was an asteroid impact, something no one had any responsibility for causing. And then, it true negative freedom fashion, no one did anything to prevent it. After that, no one would ever interfere with anyone ever again.

If you think that would be bad, then clearly negative freedom isn't the only thing you care about. You believe in a kind of freedom that means actually doing things, living life and achieving goals. And that means substantive freedom.

Substantive freedom means that we have responsibilities to each other; it means that sitting there like a rock and doing nothing isn't actually fulfilling all your moral obligations. Some of them, sure; you're not raping or murdering anyone. But you're also not feeding anyone, or teaching anyone, or loving anyone; and you should be.

It also means that government can enhance freedom. Not always, of course; a bad government can certainly undermine freedom, sometimes dramatically: There's very little liberty to be had in North Korea or under Stalin. Even the best real-world governments sometimes take away liberty, as when the USA PATRIOT ACT was passed in the US. But in certain cases, the imposition of military security, infrastructure, and yes, taxation can actually give more people more real opportunities in their lives. In fact, a good system of government can actually make everyone more free, by taking a fair share in taxes and then spending it more efficiently than anyone could have on their own. The game is nonzero-sum. (And if you don't think government can be more efficient than private spending in some cases, you need to read up on public goods and externalities. Not all cases, sure; but some cases.)

Someday, maybe not too far away, we will have the substantive freedom to go to Mars. That will happen because governments made it so, most likely NASA. Hopefully soon everyone in the world will have the substantive freedom to eat a healthy diet; certainly we have enough food, and development economists estimate it would be remarkably cheap for us to get over the tipping point, about $100 billion a year worldwide (or 0.1% of GDP). Maybe someday we will even have the substantive freedom to build a Dyson Sphere. But we don't get there by siting around doing nothing; we will get there by working hard and working together. 

The Onion does a pretty good job of satirizing things, and here they satirize sexual objectification.

While I see the point they're making, and it isn't completely wrong...

I think part of what is wrong with our society is the very fact that we think "sex object" is a coherent notion, that sexuality makes you into an object, a thing, a piece of meat. I can't deny that many people think that way, but honestly I think it completely misunderstands what sexuality is (or should be) about. 

For me, "sex object" sounds like "friendship object" or "companion object"; it's a fundamental category error. You can't have sex with an object, any more than you can be friends with one. Any being worth having sex with is a being worth valuing as a person. 

I tried to explain this to someone once; she started by complaining that someone had "hit on her", but it quickly became clear from the conversation that he had sexually assaulted her. He was touching her breasts and buttocks without her permission. That's not hitting on you! Honestly he didn't even want to have sex with you, not the way I would want to. He wanted to use you as a masturbation instrument. If that's what "hitting on you" has been in your life, I must apologize on behalf of my entire gender; they are doing it wrong, completely wrong. 

Like I said, not everyone thinks that way. But I think this kind of talk, even as satire, encourages the idea that this is what sexuality is. It encourages us to think that sex is degrading, violent, oppressive; it supports what is essentially a rapist's attitude that sex is something you do to someone to hurt them. 

It's good to call attention to this sort of attitude---but we must respond by undermining it, not by reinforcing it. To say that someone is beautiful or sexy must not be to make them into an object, and until it isn't we have work left to do.

JDN 2456319 EDT 15:29.

 

This post will probably offend a lot of people, because I have nuanced opinions that ideologues of all stripes are bound to dislike. While I mostly agree with feminist principles, I am really a classical rationalist egalitarian of the Enlightenment tradition, and sometimes I don't toe the line of feminist ideology. So I'm probably going to make people on both extremes mad, and I'm okay with that.

 

1. It's not really rape.

 

Even Whoopi Goldberg said this one, an about an incident that frankly would be "rape rape" even if we made that ridiculous distinction. He drugged an underage girl, for goodness' sake. I could almost understand if you used this to describe the charges against Julian Assange, for which the sex was consensual but the lack of a condom was not.

 

Rape is sexual activity without informed consent. Anything that fits that definition, is rape. Yes, some rapes are worse than others; fondling a woman who is too drunk to remember isn't as bad as the mind-bendingly horrific assault that recently happened in India recently (read at your stomach's own risk). But they are both rape, which has degrees just like murder (you know, first-degree murder, second-degree murder?).

 

2. She was asking for it.

 

Asking for... what? Sex? Perhaps. But rape isn't just sex, it's sex without consent, which means that pretty much by definition you can't ask for it. If you ask for it, that's giving consent, which means it's not rape. (It could be a rape fantasy, or really rough sex, or something like that; but that's completely different.) And I don't care if she's a bitch, or a prude, or a horrible person in whatever way; that doesn't mean she deserves to be raped.

 

3. Why was she dressed so provocatively?

 

It was particularly appalling when people said this about an eleven-year-old girl who was gang-raped. I don't care if she was fucking naked. It would be illegal even if she had wanted it, and she obviously didn't.

 

In fact, wearing revealing clothes is a risk factor in being raped. But this is simply because rapists are opportunistic; high-functioning psychopaths that they are, they know that anything they can do to shift the blame to the victim is to their advantage. Since they know there is a cultural narrative saying that "dressing like a slut" makes rape your fault, they use this to avoid being punished.

 

4. Some men can't help themselves.

 

Actually, this one is probably true: About 1% of men are low-functioning psychopaths who are so impulsive that they can't control their own violent behavior. Of course, the response to that is obvious: Lock them up and throw away the key. There is currently no effective treatment for psychopathy, all we can do is keep these dangerous men out of society until we find one (or they die). If this is actually a rapist's defense for his crime, we should consider him to be signing his arrest warrant.

 

5. Women often lie about being raped.

 

The rate of unsubstantiated rape reports is about 8%. That's actually an upper limit; some of these unsubstantiated reports aren't lies, they're just cases where evidence isn't available. 8% is not zero (see below), but it's also not very many. The vast majority of reported rapes are actual rapes, and unfortunately there are a lot of actual rapes that never get reported. We should be encouraging people to report being raped, making it as easy and safe as possible. There will be some false allegations, but that's what courts are for.

 

6. You can't get pregnant that way.

 

This is what Todd Akin was blathering on about with his "legitimate rape" comments. It's simply false. You can get pregnant from rape about as easily as you can get pregnant from sex in general. In fact, rape would be evolutionarily baffling were this not the case.

 

Statistically, rapes are more likely to result in pregnancy, but probably because rape victims are more likely to be young and healthy (and hence more likely to be fertile).

 

7. If you enjoy it, it's not rape.

 

Well, usually you don't enjoy it. But suppose you did; in fact, suppose you had an orgasm. This happens, actually; it has something to do with the overloading of the sympathetic nervous system. How does having an orgasm, or enjoying something, imply that you consented to it beforehand? Even if you really wanted to have sex with someone, the fact that they didn't ask you first is morally problematic. Consent isn't retro-active!

 

8. You should fight back; if you don't, it's not really rape.

 

Most rape victims report that they felt unable to move; it's the same "play dead" instinct that possums use when faced by a predator. About 10% of rapes involve the use of a weapon (typically a knife or a gun). Your body may not even allow you to fight back, and if it does, fighting back might just turn your rape into a murder.

 

9. Men rape because they can't get laid otherwise.

 

Actually, involuntary celibacy is inversely correlated with rape. This is because the kind of man who rapes is aggressive, and the kind of man who is involuntarily celibate is shy. They have radically different personality types. Most rapists actually have no trouble getting laid. This makes the notion that rape is a just response to celibacy even more appalling than it already was (I feel nauseous reading that).

 

Indeed, it's hard for me to see rape as "getting laid" at all, though I'm sure that a lot of rapists think of it that way. The whole point of getting laid, I would think, is that someone else desires you and shares this experience with you. Trying to force it on someone seems like trying to coerce someone into being your friend; whatever else they are, they're not your friend. I guess maybe the penetration itself feels good, but there's always masturbation, and a wide selection of sex toys on the Internet. Honestly, penetrating someone who is either laying there helpless or fighting back isn't my idea of fun at all.

 

In fact, as someone who was until recently involuntarily celibate, I can tell you: One of the biggest things that kept me from being assertive and confident about sex was the fact that women constantly complain about men hitting on them. They confuse wanting sex with wanting rape (see "Schrodinger's rapist" below), and make it sound like the worst possible thing you could ever do to a woman is want to have sex with her. Small wonder that a nice guy who is a little shy would hesitate to make sexual advances.

 

9. How many black men with huge cocks do you want to rape you?

 

No, seriously, I heard this one twice in a one-week period. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's something people actually say... rather frequently. It's racist, stupid, and it trivializes and deeply misunderstands rape. Frankly, I shouldn't even have to say this.

 

10. Every man is a potential rapist.

 

A lot of feminists applauded this post about "Schrodinger's rapist". Personally, I find it offensive, appalling, and sexist. Because I have a penis, I'm inherently dangerous? It's all right to treat me as a potential criminal? Would it not be racist to say that "every black man is a potential criminal"? Obviously it would. Well, the statistics that say men are more likely to be rapists are actually not as reliable as the statistics that black men are more likely to be criminals. (It's probably poverty more than anything else, also institutionalized racism in the justice system; I'm sure it has nothing to do with genetics. Still, the statistical correlation is valid.)

 

Hence, it is sexist to say that every man is a potential rapist. End of story; if you deny that, you are basically admitting yourself to be a misandrist.

 

Some of the specific recommendations about how to approach a woman without offending or frightening her are entirely reasonable. But you should be doing that because it's nice, and because it improves your chances of actually having a fulfilling sexual relationship with a woman. You should not be threatened into it by the notion that failing to do so makes it legitimate to treat you as a violent criminal.

 

11. Don't tell victims to avoid it, tell rapists not to do it!

 

We certainly do tell women how to avoid being raped. Dress conservatively, don't drink too much, go out with a friend, carry a whistle, et cetera. Some of this advice is useful; some of it isn't. But when feminists insist that we never do this for other crimes, well, it's simply not true.

 

Every parking structure in Ann Arbor carries the warning: "Do not leave valuables in your car."

 

The Department of Public Safety at University of Michigan posts fliers about watching your laptop so it won't be stolen.

 

Even "Don't walk alone at night" isn't just about rape, it's also about mugging.

 

And then there's the idea that you should just tell rapists to stop. Yeah, that'll totally work! Violent psychopaths are well-known for their responsiveness to public service announcements! In fact, the typical rapist makes excuses for why he's not really a rapist, so that he can (quasi-) honestly say "I'm not a rapist." Huge signs on every college campus saying "DON'T RAPE" would have basically zero effect.

 

In fact, rape is especially unlikely to be talked out of. Some crimes, like piracy and plagiarism, actually can be reduced by "honor pledges" and the like, because they are committed in large numbers by ordinary people with ordinary levels of empathy and conscience. Rape is not like that. The only sort of person who could even seriously consider raping someone must already have serious lack of empathy, if not a diagnosable psychopath than something close to one. I'm a high-empathy individual, and I'm honestly not sure I could rape someone even if I had a gun to my head.

 

12. Men will never understand the fear of being raped.

 

Actually, men are raped about as often as women, maybe more so. Most men who are raped are prisoners, either as convicted criminals or prisoners of war. But then, rapes of male victims are even more underreported than rapes of female victims, so we honestly don't know. Here's a study saying that women are about three times as likely to be raped than men. Here's a study suggesting that college-age men are more likely to be raped than college-age women!

 

13. Women don't rape men.

 

Clearly, they do: Here's an example right here. Here's another, a more typical date-rape scenario. Here's an even more horrific example. It does happen. The real question is how often that happens, which is frankly really hard to say; the statistics just aren't there.

 

Even worse, people believe ludicrous myths like "A man can't get an erection if he doesn't want sex." So... you've never heard of nocturnal tumescence? I guess it's less weird not to know that fear can sometimes produce an erection; but come on, you've never seen a man sleep?

 

14. Women never lie about being raped.

 

As I mentioned above, the rate of unsubstantiated rape reports is small, but it is not zero. A comprehensive study suggests that the rate of truly false allegations is about 6%. We do still need courts to determine when a criminal accusation is valid, because serious consequences are at stake. There are degrees of false accusation, some of which there's basically nothing we can do about; and some of what is called "false accusation" is actually mistaken identity or true with insufficient evidence.

 

15. Rape is a system of control used by men against women.

 

4-6% of men are rapists. That means that 94-96% of men aren't. What's more, our "rape culture", insofar as it exists, is really limited to a lot of ignorant misconceptions and victim-blaming behaviors (see above). There's virtually no one who would publicly say that they think rape is a good thing (if you scour the Internet, you can find a few, but that's because the Internet is a compendium of all human thought, both brilliant and depraved). There are systems of control in this world: government, culture, religion. And many of these do in fact oppress women (among others). But far from being "nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear", rape is committed by a minority of men with particularly high aggression and particularly low empathy. I would not be opposed to enforcing treatment upon them in A Clockwork Orange fashion. I certainly would much prefer a world where rape wasn't something that people I care about had to fear.

 

16. Rape has nothing to do with sex.

 

It's not just sex, that's certainly true. But no, it has something to do with sex, and if you can't argue against rape without denying a basic fact like that, something is wrong with your worldview. Especially in an evolutionary sense, but even at the level of the rapist's psychology, rape has an awful lot to do with sex; most rapists think of themselves as "getting laid". Victims are selected for their attractiveness and perceived sexual availability. Pregnancy is a common outcome.

 

It may be uncomfortable to think about, that something as beautiful as sex could have such a horrific dark side, but it's the truth. We have to face that truth responsibly; we can't just deny it out of existence.

 

17. There's no excuse for violence against women.

 

In other words, violence against men is just fine? Men are vastly more likely to be the victims of assault and murder. They may not even be any less likely to be the victims of rape (see above)! Thousands of men suffer domestic violence. College men and women are statistically indistinguishable in their rates of violence victimization.

 

Why would we say this? Is it really to strong to think it's because of the trope that Men are the Expendable Gender?

 

I suppose "there's no excuse for violence" would be too strong: What about self-defense? Justified war? So we needed a slogan that distinguishes these cases, and "There's no excuse for inexcusable violence" is a tautology. Fair enough, how about this one: "There's no excuse for domestic violence."

JDN 2456310 EDT 20:13.

 

Frameshift was set Twenty Minutes into the Future when it was written in 1997, so by now it is actually set in the recent past. This is not as weird as it sounds, because actually most of the events in the story could actually have happened. If there were a little girl who was a cloned Neanderthal growing up in secret somewhere in California, we might not actually know that. Also, it's almost certainly possible. Honestly, it's the action scene at the end that culminates in a helicopter crash that would be least likely to happen (and that we'd definitely know if it had).

There are really only two parts of the novel that are SF: One is that one of the main characters is telepathic, which frankly didn't even need to be the case given how little impact it has on the narrative. The second is that the protagonist geneticist discovers something about introns that is not only untrue, but actually ludicrous in Darwinian terms (the discovery happens right at the end, and annoyed me to no end). Also, this ends up having something to do with the telepathy and a stupid notion of "Evolutionary Levels". It was unbearably disappointing to see that Robert Sawyer is someone who knew enough about DNA to know what introns and PCR and RFLP are, and then said something so incredibly stupid about evolution.

The basic story is a murder mystery, which centers around neo-Nazis and corrupt insurance executives, both of which assuredly exist. A key theme is the very real issue of how insurance companies may use DNA information. Overall, it might be a good story for introducing mystery fans to SF as a genre, since it's so light on the actual SF. But I wasn't impressed.