JDN 2456250 EDT 19:06

I've noticed a common mistake of reasoning, technically an informal fallacy, which once I started looking for it turned up all over the place. I call it the quantitative fallacy.

Quantitative fallacy: The use of easily-quantifiable measures that do not accurately reflect the phenomenon in question, especially when this produces false or misleading conclusions.

Quantitative measures are very useful, don't get me wrong. But we must be careful to remind ourselves that not everything is easily quantifiable, and any simple quantitative measure is going to leave out important information. It's perfectly fine to make a simplified model, as long as you recognize it as a simplified model. The mistake lies in taking the conclusions of the model too seriously and applying them to the real world without first making sure that the conclusions still apply.

Here are a few examples of the fallacy in action:

1. We use national GDP to assess economic prosperity. Even adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, it still ignores some very important things, like inequality in distribution and economic activity that isn't paid for, like volunteer work and housework. And then there's the fact that more stuff doesn't necessarily mean a better society. But of course GDP is so much easier to measure!

2. We use grades and test scores to assess education. How would you really measure whether a student is a creative, critical thinker? How would you determine whether a student has the potential to make great discoveries as a researcher? That's so hard! How much easier it is to simply count up the correct answers to multiple-choice questions. Nevermind that multiple-choice by definition eliminates the most important classes of problems that people need to learn to solve. (Multiple choice reduces all NP problems to P problems, and eliminates any need to creatively generate possible solutions.)

3. We use IQ scores to assess intelligence. Human intelligence is one of the most complex phenomena in the universe; indeed, it is so complex that it is actually capable of understanding many features of the universe and even, most remarkably, itself. So the idea that it could be measured in a single number is pretty much risible on its face. Yes, some people are smarter than others, in various ways. And maybe we could average over them all and say that people have an overall "smartness", which we would call IQ. But this is necessarily going to be an oversimplification of their abilities. Someone with a higher IQ will not be better at everything than someone with a lower IQ, and not even necessarily better at traditionally intellectual tasks like chess or calculus. As for social skills, manual labor, athletic achievements--these have no connection to IQ at all, yet are vitally important, and require complex brain functioning that currently no robot is capable of matching.

In fact, the quantitative fallacy can prop up in more subtle ways. Consider the use of a company's market capitalization, profit, and debt-to-revenue ratio as an assessment of the company's value. At first this seems totally reasonable: Doesn't a company exist, after all, to make profits? But there are many other factors that can cause these values to fluctuate, factors which may not have anything to do with the real functioning of the company. There are also externalities, impacts the company has on the world which are not measured in their profits and stock price. A company is a very complex system, and ultimately it cannot be reduced to a single number or small set of numbers.

How do we deal with this fallacy? First, we need to recognize it. Then, we need to continually remind ourselves that while numbers are useful, the fact that something is a number doesn't automatically make it useful. A quantitative measure that doesn't measure what we want is no better than a qualitative measure that does--in fact, it can be considerably worse.

JDN 2456247 EDT 18:08.

I think I hate parallel parking more than most people, given that I'm terrible at it and I have dented cars doing it on a few occasions. But I don't know anyone who likes parallel parking, or prefers it to perpendicular or angled parking. So why do we have it?
Most people probably think it's because we can fit more parking on a given section of road that way. It turns out this is not the case. It seems that way because you're using both sides of the road; but you are using both sides of the road very inefficiently. Perpendicular parking is actually the most space-efficient, and angled parking's improved convenience outweighs the small loss in space efficiency it produces.

Why? Because you need less space on the side of your car when parked perpendicularly (or angled) that you do in front and behind in order to park parallel. A typical space is about twice as long as it is wide, so a street that has parallel parking on both sides could be converted to angled parking on one side without losing any spaces. Converted to perpendicular parking, it could actually gain a couple of spaces, but at the price of making parking quite difficult. Hence, on balance, angled parking makes the most sense.

This would reduce congestion in cities, because it is much faster for most people to park in an angled space than a parallel space, and hence the road will be blocked for less time by people moving in and out of parking spaces. The only significant downside I can see is the initial cost of implementing the new system, which could be minimized by making the change during normal maintenance and resurfacing of the road. Another minor problem is that it will only be possible to park while driving in one direction; but this no problem at all on one-way streets and not a very serious one on two-way streets.

 JDN 2456246 EDT 11:15.

A British biotech company is working on a new condom which contains a drug that helps maintain erection. The idea is to make condoms more appealing, and thus make them used more often.

And as you probably know if you've ever used them, losing an erection as a result of putting on a condom is definitely a problem a lot of men have. There are several reasons for this: Condoms reduce stimulation, they take time out of sex (often at a particularly critical moment!), and they can be a source of anxiety, none of which bode well for erections.

So you'd think I'd be in favor of these right? But I'm really not comfortable with so... pharmaceutical a solution. I don't like the idea of giving men more drugs to enhance erection, we have plenty of those already (and too many men who abuse them).

What I would really like to see is a better kind of condom. Something that provides the same protection, but is more comfortable to wear, preferably quicker to put on, and doesn't reduce stimulation as much. It should feel more like skin--preferably foreskin specifically. It would also be good if it were hypoallergenic. Presently, the most common options for people with latex allergies are polyurethane, which is uncomfortable and breaks easily, and lambskin, which doesn't protect against HIV. There are also a couple of synthetic materials that are better, like polyisoprene and AT-10 resin; these are pretty good but also more expensive.

Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a materials chemist to say what exactly would be necessary to make such a substance, or if it could be done in any kind of economical way. If I knew how to make such a thing, I imagine I could become very rich by starting a company that makes them. So hey; anyone know any materials chemists who think this is feasible?

JDN 2456240 EDT 11:22.

This last election went pretty well, all things considered. I was disappointed to see that neither Jill Stein nor Gary Johnson made the 5% cutoff for public campaign financing; I wasn't too happy to see that the Republicans still control the House of Representatives; I was sad to see the Michigan proposals supporting collective bargaining and clean energy failed. But overall the news was good: Obama won, the Democrats kept the Senate, the really crazy right-wing candidates mostly failed, marijuana was legalized several places and gay marriage was upheld everywhere it was on the ballot.

Yet behind this good news lies many dark facts. Half of America is still ignorant and delusional.

People got really offended when Romney said that 47% of Americans are lazy moochers; and perhaps this was the right response, seeing as it's completely untrue, and the people he focused on--those who pay no federal income tax--often pay many other taxes and of course contribute to society in a variety of other ways. (One obvious example: Soldiers at war pay no federal income tax.)

Yet, there really is a 47% of Americans to be worried about, 46% anyway, maybe more depending on what you count: This is the 46% of Americans who believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. We should also include the 41% of Americans who think that the second coming of Jesus will happen in their lifetimes, and the 41% who believe in extrasensory perception (which is a contradiction in terms), 37% who believe in haunted houses, 32% who believe in ghosts, 21% who believe in witchcraft, and over 70% who believe in at least one paranormal phenomenon. Then there is the 77% who believe in angels.

This is nothing less than a crisis of human rationality. The Enlightenment hangs by a thread, a single carbon fiber holding it up from plummeting headlong into the abyss of a new Dark Age. Perhaps Europe would escape this time, but then again perhaps not, as the United States holds unprecedented worldwide military, economic, and diplomatic hegemony. As goes America, so goes the world.

To be fair, it may be that there have always been this many ignorant and delusional people in the world, and it's simply now that we are good at tabulating them. So in that sense the crisis is nothing new.

But there is something new, and that is the interconnectivity of the world today. Human beings now have the power to affect each other on an unprecedented scale. Each of us participates in a system that can affect billions of lives, from the tiny ripples of Twitter posts and sweatshop tennis shoes, to the larger waves of UN sanctions and drone strikes, and perhaps--we hope not--all the way to the catastrophic tsunamis of nuclear warfare. There has always been a village idiot; but now there's a real chance of that idiot getting access to ICBM launch codes.

So what do we do about it? How do we change so many minds, particularly minds that excel in closing themselves off to persuasion? We can make some progress by traditional means, writing books, funding science education. But this is not enough; we must find some bolder approach, something that will reach more people faster.

Should we enlist the help of moderate religion? In some ways this seems like a good idea. Certainly religious moderates are more likely to believe in evolution and less likely to sign on to truly insane social policies. But is that enough? Or might it be that moderate religion is precisely the problem? Moderate religion has spent centuries training in apologetics for cherry-picking the parts of religion you like and leaving behind the parts you don't. It makes religion more intellectually respectable, and gives people an excuse to say things like "In God we trust" and "God bless America". In Bigfoot we trust! Unicorn bless America!

But then again, we don't want to alienate the moderates do we? There aren't enough hardcore rationalists to win a democratic vote in this country. We need their help, at least for the time being.

But maybe it would be better, actually, to focus on convincing those moderates to stop being religious altogether. Rather than trying to pander to them, making lame excuses like NOMA and agnosticism, maybe we should come right out and say it: You're not allowed to turn off your brain on Sundays. The world doesn't work one way in the physics lab and another way in the church. Either science is true, or religion is; you can't have both. Choose a lane.

I guess the fear is that if we present this ultimatum, they'll just go all the way to fundamentalism, and I can certainly see the risk here. But maybe there is a way of presenting it that would reduce this probability. Maybe we can talk about all the myriad ways in which science has proven itself and made their lives better, and then say: "And by the way, science says there is no God, no soul, no Heaven."

After all, we've been trying to accommodate moderates for a long time, and it doesn't seem to be working. It's time to try something bolder.

JDN 2456239 EDT 11:05.

We won the most important election: Barack Obama remains President of the United States.

The rest of the outcomes were... mixed. Here in Michigan, all the proposals failed, both the bad ones (1, 5, and 6) and the good ones (2, 3, and 4). The Senate remains Democrat-controlled, and the House remains Republican-controlled.

Gary Johnson received about 1% of the vote, and Jill Stein less than 0.5%. The two-party system remains quite fully intact.

Honestly, the best single explanation I can give for this result is status quo bias. America stood together, and with one voice, said: "Better the devil we know than the one we don't."

It could certainly be a lot worse: We dodged a lot of bullets (for the people of Iran, literal bullets) not electing Romney. The bad proposals were more bad than the good proposals were good. Now unencumbered by a re-election campaign, Obama may do more bold actions than he was willing to do before.

In all, I guess I'm happy with the election results. But I'm also vaguely disappointed; we could have made things better, and instead we decided to leave them pretty much where they were.

JDN 2456237 EDT 11:02.

Tomorrow is the US national election for the President, half of Congress, and many local candidates and proposals. It is difficult to overstate the importance of an election like this. They come around every few years, and we become jaded, we lose perspective.

If you are an American citizen eligible to vote in this election: You are one of the most powerful people in the world.

You hold the reins of the world's economic, diplomatic, and military superpower. The fate of the entire world rests upon your decisions. Who you vote for tomorrow will have a far-reaching impact on people all around the world, from food prices in Ghana to land mines in Pakistan. The people we place in power tomorrow will decide environmental policy that shapes the future of Earth's climate; they will set war policy that decides whether cities are bombed. They will decide how our justice system is run, who will be imprisoned and why. Millions of lives hang in the balance.

Do you think your vote doesn't count? It counts. Even if you don't live in a swing state (and it's appalling that we have such things as "swing states"), your vote still matters, particularly for local elections. In fact, you have a chance that we in swing states can't really afford: Vote for a third-party candidate for President. Help Jill Stein and Gary Johnson get the 5% they need to trigger public campaign financing for the next election. And think carefully about who you choose for Congress, because every one of those votes counts too.

Yes, your vote is tallied along with millions of others, and weighed against them. If everyone votes against you, you'll lose. That's democracy. If you made the decision by yourself, it would be called dictatorship. And of course, it wouldn't be you or I making that decision at all, would it? It'd be someone like Dick Cheney or David Koch (unless it was someone even worse, like Hu Jintao or Kim Jong Un).

This notion of "wasted votes" is fundamentally wrongheaded. The only wasted vote is one that isn't cast. (Or isn't counted, if the election is rigged or something like that.) All votes count. The election would not happen without them. And yes, because there are a lot of them and they all count equally, each one does not have a lot of power by itself. That's what democracy is all about: We share power. No one person has more power than any other person. But you still have power! Take away all the voters and you have taken away the nation.

The Chinese have a proverb: No raindrop feels responsible for the flood.

Tomorrow, you are a raindrop. You are the flood.

JDN 2456234 EDT 11:09.

I've noticed a general problem among rationalists, something quite irrational that people often do in the name of rationality. It is common to behaviorists, logical positivists, emotivists, agnostics, even frequentists.

This is the tendency to declare things meaningless. When faced with a phenomenon that is currently not understood, there are really three possible responses, which Less Wrong cleverly describes thus: "Explain, Worship, Ignore?" The default human response is actually Worship, even though this is the one that makes the least sense by far. Ignore does sometimes make sense; as a practical matter we can't be expected to explain everything about everything all at once. But the true rationalist tries always to select Explain. This is the hardest path, but ultimately the most rewarding.

Yet, too often we choose Ignore. Instead of admitting that there is something we don't understand, we assert that there is nothing to be understood, that the phenomenon itself is meaningless.

I can think of no better example of this than behaviorism: "I don't see how consciousness can be explained scientifically, therefore consciousness does not exist." Well done, guys. Well done. Just deny the entire phenomenon in question, that solves everything.

Logical positivists also loved to do this sort of thing: "I don't understand morality, so morality doesn't exist. Universal quantifiers can't be made certain by experience, therefore they are meaningless."

Emotivism is a similar process: "I only understand a narrow concept of facts, therefore the UN Declaration of Human Rights actually contains no propositional content and it's really just a series of emotional outburst noises, 'yay' and 'boo'."

Agnosticism and frequentism are the mildest forms of this general effect.

The agnostic rightly says "I'm not sure what you mean by this word, 'God'"; but then they stop there, refusing to go the next step and say, as atheists do, "But if you mean the magic man in the sky in those books... that's obviously not real."

The frequentist correctly notes that subjective probabilities (like beliefs) are more complex than objective probabilities (like die rolls), but simply gives up there, where Bayesians boldly charge forth and do our best to understand subjective probabilities anyway.

And to be fair, even the positivists and the emotivists have some kernel of validity to them: Statements about the world should be subject to verification or falsification, or else they become detached from reality. Morality does have a deep connection to emotions; the mistake is only thinking that emotions and reason have nothing to do with each other, that a proposition can never cause an emotion. (To see why this is wrong, consider propositions like "Your mother is dead" and "You have just won one million dollars.")

But really what bothers me is that these kinds of philosophy declare things meaningless. Not false, not pointless, not stupid; those are all fair game--but meaningless. Yet it is actually extremely rare for people to use words in ways that are genuinely without content--which is what the word meaningless ought to entail. Even "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" can be assigned a certain degree of meaning.

When people talk about religion, they say some really stupid, inane, absurd, even nonsensical things; but they are not meaninglessthings. "Jesus was the Son of God" is a nonsensical statement, but it is not a meaninglessone. It has content; it's just content that doesn't make any sense.

If you want a meaningless statement, here's one: "Blarg gurgen flurgeen!"

If it doesn't look like that, it's probably not meaningless. If you want to say it's stupid, false, or even nonsensical, go ahead; but be very reluctant to say meaningless.

JDN 2456233 EDT 14:09.

A couple weeks ago a friend of mine said something that really annoyed me. I tried to argue with him, but he wouldn't listen.

No, it wasn't about politics (though he does have far-right libertarian politics, so it's not a bad guess). It was about reductionism. What he said was this:
"Someday we will reduce psychology and economics to neuroscience, and there will be no need for psychologists or economists."

First of all, keep in mind I'm a behavioral economist, so this is like saying "Your life's work is completely worthless"; that's bound to make anyone upset. But occasionally it's true; I mean, come on, postmodernist literary theory?

But more importantly, in this case it's just not true. There is no plausible universe in which psychology and economics will be so reduced to neuroscience that we don't need psychologists or economists anymore.

Does this mean that there is a mysterious "ontological emergence" within psychology, that our minds are somehow "irreducible"? That certainly sounds pretty bizarre, and I think it's what my friend thought I was saying.

But it's not. Psychology and economics will be in some sense "reduced" to neuroscience; I would actually say they will be unified with neuroscience. The gaps between them will close and they will all become part of a broader universal theory. And no, there's nothing that's mysteriously "irreducible". Everything that happens in an economy is made up of people making decisions, and everything in the human mind is made up of neurons and chemical interactions. In that sense, I am a reductionist.

The problem is, my friend wasn't just talking about that kind of reductionism. He was talking about a much stronger sense, one in which the reduction renders the higher level completely irrelevant. Once we understand neurons, we don't need to worry about minds! Once we understand minds, we don't need to worry about economic systems!

To see why this doesn't work, consider the most successful reduction in the history of science, the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics. We have now fully explained everything there is to be explained about heat and temperature and entropy in terms of the energy and interactions of quantum particles. Reductionism successful.

But at the same time, if you want to know how hot something is, you don't try to measure all 10^23 quantum particles bouncing around in it. You simply don't have to, and couldn't if you wanted to. And when engineers make stress-strain curves based on the temperature of a material, they don't try to account for the wavefunction of every particle in the substance--again, they don't have to, and couldn't if they wanted to.

Imagine someone saying, "Someday we will reduce computer science to electrical engineering, so there will be no need for software programmers." Would that make sense to you? Would that seem like a very logical, scientific thing to say?

I hope not, because we have reduced computer science to electrical engineering--in fact, computer science was basically built up from electrical engineering, so there really was no reduction to be done. And yet, we still need software programmers; in fact, it's a very challenging, rewarding, and lucrative career, one of the few that weathered the 2008-2012 depression virtually intact.

Why? Because computers are complicated, and they are made up of billions of tiny pieces interacting in very complex ways. You can't possibly keep track of every 1 or 0 on the entire CPU. Indeed, to do so would require an enormously larger CPU, and then you wouldn't be able to keep track of that, and so on ad infinitum. (The size requirements grow combinatorically, so for a processor with a billion components, there are 2^(10^9) or about 10^(3*10^8) interactions to track.) You need to understand high-level laws like "classes" and "loops" and "functions" in order to make any sense of what's going on inside a computer (and even then, it's hard).

Now consider a human brain. At least right now, a human brain is about 1000 times more complex than even the most advanced computer. Eventually that may not be true--probably sooner than most people think; that's only 10 more doublings, or 15 years by Moore's Law--but still, it's true right now. And since a computer is already so complex we could never understand it in terms of its constituent parts, the human brain is even worse. We can't even understand the human brain at the high level of modules and functions, though we are beginning to--and that's what cognitive science is all about.

Now consider the world economy, which contains billions of people--and hence, billions of human brains. We may never make a computer as complex as the world economy--Moore's Law has got to run up against physical limits eventually. Sure, if you do the exponents, it seems like we'll be there in 50 years; but this is like arguing that because your credit card interest rate is 24%, in 50 years your $1000 balance will become $47 million. You'll pay it off or be bankrupt long before that, and likewise we're already running up against some pretty fundamental limits of computing power. Quantum computers will help, understanding the structure of the brain will help; but a trillion times more powerful than we currently have? I think that's pretty unlikely.

And that would just be enough to simulate the world economy (basically, make a copy of it). That would be about as useful as... having the world economy in front of you. The only advantage I can see is the ability to tweak variables for experiments in ways that don't actually affect people's lives. This could certainly be useful. But basically, it's a black box that you poke until it does what you want.

To actually understand the world economy at this level of detail, you'd need to be able to process the 2^(10^15*10^9) combinations (10^15 synapses per person, 10^9 people). This would require a computer able to process on the order of 10^(10^23) calculations, and feel free to give it a million years to work, you haven't reduced that number in any noticeable way. 10^(10^23) per second and 10^(10^23) per million years are basically the same processing speed; there are only 3*10^13 seconds in a million years, so it's the difference between 10^(10^23) and 10^(10^23 - 3*10^13). Even if Moore's Law somehow miraculously transcended the laws of time and space to have components smaller than a Planck length processing at faster than a Planck time, it would still take about 10^24 years to make a computer that fast. There are in fact enough years left before all the black holes evaporate... we think. Yay?

Fortunately, we don't need to do that. It's completely pointless to try to understand the world economy in terms of individual neurons. That's ridiculous. Even at the level of individual people seems pretty silly. We can model much better by looking for high level principles--like supply and demand, information asymmetry, externalities, and so on. These simplifications allow us to make computationally tractable models, which can then be applied usefully (albeit not perfectly) to the real world.

Sometimes I do think our models are too simple. We try to solve exactly instead of using the computational power we already have. Most equilibrium models literally have 2 firms, 2 goods, and 2 consumers; this can be solved exactly, but come on! At least do 10 firms, 100 goods, 1000 consumers. You're missing out on a lot of important interactions if you only look at 2 of each. And yes, 2^1000 is still too big to deal with, but make some more simplifications and you can probably get it down to 2^30, which is only about 10 billion calculations, well within what a modern computer can achieve. That means that instead of just simulating the system we can actually take it apart to some extent, look at the pieces, understand how it all fits together. At least potentially.

Are economies made of people? Of course. Are minds made of neurons? Yes. But it's not only stupid and pointless, but outright impossible in most cases to study a complex system at the level of its constituent parts. And to say that a system "just is" those parts is also pretty silly; the parts by themselves would not be the system, you have to actually put them together, in, you know, a system. A pile of steel girders is not a bridge.

Anyone who thinks this sort of thing, that reductionism means economics will be replaced by neuroscience, clearly doesn't understand complexity. They are not really doing reductionism, they are doing what Daniel Dennett calls greedy reductionism. They're not trying to understand the system in terms of its parts; they're trying to replace the system with its parts. It's like having a pile of steel girders and shouting, "look at my beautiful bridge!" A system is made of parts and interactions; and yes, you need the parts to have the interactions. You can't take away all the parts and still have a system, that makes no sense. But the parts by themselves aren't the system either, and nor can you simply add them up in any straightforward way. It's not linear like that; you're not just adding up. It's more like multiplying, and as I've just shown, multiplying can make very big numbers very fast.

JDN 2456232 EDT 11:16.

How out are you? How much do you reveal about yourself, particularly the parts that are less than fully socially acceptable?

This is something the LGBT community has been familiar with for decades (maybe centuries, really), and the atheist community is now picking up on as well. But in fact I think it's much more generally applicable. There's a book called Covering which I've been meaning to read for awhile that (from what I hear) makes a similar argument.

I thought of it today because it's something that same-sex couples have to negotiate in various contexts; my boyfriend is visiting one of my classes today, and I have some other friends in the class and I needed know if I could introduce him as my boyfriend or if he'd be more comfortable just being "my friend". (We decided on "boyfriend," which I am happy about, but also a little nervous about.)

Obviously if you have a queer sexual orientation or a trans gender identity, you know all about being out. But even if you don't, there are plenty of other things to be out (or not) about.

Do you have political opinions that aren't mainstream, or that deviate from one of the two party lines?

Do you believe in a minority religion, like Mormonism or Islam?

Do you have a complex racial ancestry, so that you have ancestors who wouldn't be read as the same race you are?

Are you poor but you try to fit in with the middle class? Do you have poor relatives?

Are your interests in film or music not mainstream, or not "hip"? Do you enjoy works that other people think are "uncool"?

Do you suffer from mental illness?

Do you have any chronic diseases or disabilities that aren't obvious?

Do you associate with people outside your usual clique? Are you a nerd who hangs out with jocks, a jock whose friends are emo?

Do you not use drugs, but associate with people who do, or vice-versa?

Do you have any minority sexual preferences, like polyamory, furry or BDSM?

Are you unemployed, or facing other financial hardship like foreclosure?

Do you have any unusual hobbies, particularly any that people might disapprove of?

Some of these are obviously more important than others, but we all have things we hide from each other. I've always felt that radical honesty goes too far--there is such a thing as tact, thank you very much--but they do have a point: We hide so many things about ourselves, and this hiding has two effects:

1. It prevents us from achieving intimacy with others. The "you" they know is not quite the same as the you you really are. This creates barriers between people, and makes it harder to form healthy relationships with others.

2. It builds a sense of shame. The parts of yourself that you never share with others, you come to feel are somehow inferior, unworthy. The disapproval you fear becomes transferred into yourself, so that you begin to disapprove of yourself as well.

I certainly disagree with radical honesty in that I think there are times and places to say things, and a church service is not a good place to start spouting off about your sexual fetishes. Also, for some of the above (and especially LGBT status) there are serious risks associated with being out--losing a job, being harassed, even facing physical violence. If that's really what you're worried about, obviously your safety is paramount.

But for me at least, I find that this is really not the case. I hardly ever face any actual discrimination, I have to deal with a minimal amount of harassment (none since high school, really), and I have never been subject to actual violence. No, I'm worried about far lesser things: Awkwardness, embarrassment. And these do count for something; no one enjoys being humiliated. But I think we'd all be better off if we were a little less worried about being embarrassed and a little more concerned with expressing ourselves authentically.

In fact, in the long run, a lot of that harassment and violence will become unsustainable once the bigots realize that they are literally surrounded by people who don't neatly fit into the boxes of mainstream conservative middle-class straight White Christian (etc.). Hardly anyone actually fits into every "majority" category, making the notion of "majority" a somewhat odd one. (It's a majority in each category usually, but the vision we have of a "typical" American corresponds to a tiny fraction of actual Americans.) Even most of the people that bigots thought were on their side--and were on their side, in the sense that apathy is a good friend of injustice--turn out to be oppressed in their own way.

My exercise for the reader: Come out to one person today. Tell them something they didn't know about you, something you feel a little nervous or embarrassed about revealing. Trust them; make yourself vulnerable.

I think you'll be glad you did.

JDN 2456230 EDT 20:06.

As you no doubt know already, the East Coast is being battered by one of the worst hurricanes in recorded history. We in the Midwest are experiencing only the faint edges of the storm system, and we're at record levels of wind and rain. People are losing power. The New York Stock Exchange is closed. Cities are flooding. People are most likely dying, especially those who refused to evacuate the worst areas.

How do we respond to this? The standard response is to "pray for the victims", or in slightly more secular form "keep them in our thoughts". This, of course, does absolutely nothing.

In fact, there isn't a whole lot we can do, at least right this minute. We are helpless before the awesome power of nature. But once the hurricane clears, there is much we will be able to do. We should already be planning for it.

1. Support relief. Best way to do this: Pay money. Don't go there yourself, you are probably not skilled enough to be useful. Pay money to the people who have the necessary skills, training, and equipment to most efficiently help people. Organizations like the Red Cross are a good place to start.

2. Elect representatives who believe in disaster relief and investing in infrastructure. Not to put too fine a point on it, but... this means voting for Obama. Mitt Romney said we spend too much money on disaster relief. He didn't support the stimulus program that has rebuilt much of our failing infrastructure. He won't support the urban renewal and poverty relief programs that we're going to need in the aftermath of the damage. A compassionate conservative he certainly is not. (Actually that describes Obama pretty well.)

3. Fight global warming. This hurricane didn't happen on its own. These record heat waves aren't a coincidence. We are destabilizing the Earth's climate. We need to cut carbon emissions, yesterday. We will probably need to extract carbon from the atmosphere or perform geoengineering. Here's one where Obama doesn't do enough. Investing in wind and solar is a start. But we need more, a lot more. We need to cut down oil and coal consumption. We need to invest in fission power. We need to fund fusion research. We need to fight for international cooperation on all these issues. And yes, actually, literally fighting--as in war--might become necessary. Millions of lives are on the line. Scientists estimate that 100 million people will die by 2030 as a result of global warming. ONE HUNDRED MILLION. You need to make it clear to everyone you know, not to mention all your elected representatives, that this is the number one most important issue in the world today. Not debt, not the economy. Not religion, not guns. Not abortion, not gay marriage. Global warming.Millions of lives are already at stake. If the ecosystem collapses, nothing else matters; we're all dead, game over. If you don't understand that, you are part of the problem. And if you have any beyond a sliver of doubt that global warming is real and important, you are a big part of the problem.

If you actually care about saving lives, you will do these things. You won't just "keep them in your thoughts". You won't just talk about how terrible the hurricane is. You will use your money and your votes to make a difference.