Tag Archives: Society

Democracy

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I am going to do this one in a Q&A format, for questions of my choosing.

Does voting matter in the short term?

It depends on how you look at it. In general, the effect of a vote is inversely proportional to the size of the voting pool. A rational agent would weigh the potential impact of their vote against the cost of voting (getting up, walking/driving to the precincts, etc.) Most of the time, the costs probably outweigh the impact, and thus it’s not worth voting. Now, you might argue that democracy wouldn’t work if everybody did that, but it is fallacious to argue under the assumption that other people follow the same train of thought that we do: they do not, and it is fairly clear that humans in general are not rational agents. Furthermore, nobody argues this on a whim an hour before voting – if the estimated voter turnout is 50% a week before the election, it won’t fall to 10% overnight, and if it does, a rational agent will remember this and will try to take advantage of the low turnout on the next election. Basically, if you know that 80% of people in your county will vote, and that they will massively vote for candidate X, just stay home. Really. Don’t worry, most people won’t change their minds.

But wait! There might be another reason to vote, one that you did not think of:

Does voting matter in the long term?

Yes. Overall, it might matter more than it does in the short term, and it’s a pity people do not see this. In an election, you are focused on its results, and that’s understandable. But that does not mean you cannot look into how your vote might impact future elections. Because let’s face it – an election is not a matter of life or death, and by always looking at the immediate future, you merely ensure mediocrity for the next fifty years.

A vote is mind share. Even though a small upstart party has absolutely no chance of winning the current election, voting for it is not a complete waste, to the extent that it places it on the map. People have a limited attention span: the more major a party is, the more likely it is that people will look at it and consider voting for it. Most will only look at the parties that have a chance of winning, plus maybe one rising party. Some will also look at the one or two next-largest parties, that might be large enough to have some credibility. And then some will look at everything. But in all cases, there is a list of parties or candidate, ordered by how well they did in the last election, and their mind share is roughly proportional to that. By voting for a party, you help them rise in that list.

In other words, imagine that 6% of voters like party X. With strategic voting, it gets, say, 3% of the vote. If no strategic voting occurs at all, it gets 6%. Next election, instead of being 3%, the baseline will be 6%. A higher baseline means that more people will consider it and the party will become significant much faster than it would have otherwise. Indeed, with a 3% baseline, maybe 7% of the voter base will like the party next election. With a 6% baseline, it might be 10%, because more people will pay attention to it.

You see, if you want to change the world, that’s how you do it.

Does the participation rate matter?

No. What matters is that voters are an unbiased sample of the population, with reasonable standard errors. A higher participation rate can reduce variance on the result, but if the sample is biased, that’s not even a good thing. To illustrate, imagine a population where 50% of all people lean left and 50% of them lean right. Now, let’s imagine that for some reason left leaning people are slightly more likely to vote than right leaning people. Therefore, in an election, maybe 90% of lefties will vote, and 80% of righties will vote. The tally will be 53% left, 47% right, and the left will win. Over the course of many elections, the left will almost always win, because there is too little variance for the right to get in even once. Now, if you picture an election where only 5% of lefties vote and 5% of righties vote, the victories will be evenly shared between the two sides, which seems much fairer, despite a measly participation rate.

In fact, an election where, say, one to five percent of the population is chosen strictly at random and forced to vote, would probably be more reliable than the current system. It doesn’t really matter much how many people participate, as long as the result is unbiased.

Should the side with the most votes win?

Counter-intuitively, only most of the time. Current democracies only look at the short term, which induces a temporal imbalance: in a society where 55% of the population is on a side, and 45% is on the other, it seems bizarre that the first side would win all the time, rather than 55% of the time. While there is admittedly much more variance in such a process, picking each side with probability equal to its vote share would lead to more representative governance in general. It also eschews trying to come up with a better voting system: all voting systems work from the flawed premise that one should figure out each result with perfect accuracy, even though in fact such a system will not, on average, do better than a stochastic process (in fact, I would argue that no deterministic voting system has theoretical properties that are as good as a stochastic one when you take temporal bias into account).

The main problem here is that people wouldn’t understand such a system: it is natural for human beings to place very inflated importance in particular results, and to loathe variance. People will get angry losing a game because of luck, even though luck always averages out on the course of many games. Why? Because they want to win every single time they believe they deserve it. Obviously, nobody would want to lose a campaign for congress, senate or even presidency on a die roll. And yet, democracy would probably work better if we did that, if only because it would give minorities a louder voice and push us to try new things once in a while. A deterministic system is consistent, but that only means it is consistently mediocre.

Basically, as far as democracy goes, the accuracy of each individual result seems to be a sacred principle, even though there is no mathematical need to go beyond being unbiased. It is also questionable whether the strategy to always reward the front runner works out for us in the long term. Unfortunately, human nature is such that alternatives are unthinkable.

Who should win if the tally is very close?

Just flip a coin. You know how fickle voters are: when an election is very close, that basically means that the candidate who won today would have lost tomorrow, and the one who would have won tomorrow would have lost the day after that. I know that democracy is based on sacred principles, but in evaluating the merits of a system, you have to look at the results. As I have said, what underpins democracy is the understanding that its results are unbiased on average, not the understanding that they are exact. It’s important for morale to make sure that the ballots are counted properly, but don’t fool yourselves into thinking it really matters if they are. As long as there is no fraud (which would induce a bias towards electing corrupt people, and we definitely don’t want that to happen), it doesn’t matter at all. When an election is extremely close, in general, there is no evidence that either side will do better or worse than the other. Besides misguided rigid principles about how democracy should work, a coin flip would work just fine, perhaps even better, since a fraudulent candidates has an edge under the current system.

Morality

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Reflecting on morality is an important and enduring pastime within the ranks of humanity. Cultures, religions and interest groups go to great lengths to classify each and every action as being either good, evil, or morally neutral. A sizable field of philosophy, ethics, is devoted to figuring out, by any way imaginable, what should be done in any given situation, and what should not. A lot of things, such as happiness, power and wealth, hinge on what you do and what you don’t do, so it is not difficult to imagine how important it is to figure out by what rules a society should abide to run as smoothly as possible.

One thing I observe in discussions about morality or ethics, however, is that reason is never used to figure out the best thing to do, but rather to justify a predetermined idea, or to point out inconsistencies in the ideas of others. They are rarely constructive, more often aggressive. Morality is not a matter of reason or science, nor of faith; it is meme warfare.

Morality is not absolute

Regardless of what an absolute, “objective” morality might be, it does not tell us whether we care to follow it or not. Suppose for a moment that absolute morality comes from God (for a minute, we will assume he exists). Then anything he deems moral is, by definition, moral. Should he order us to kill all newborns, that would be moral, and we ought to oblige. Any argument to the effect that God would not consider these things moral boils down to placing restrictions on morality that are exterior to his being.

And so, any attempt to an objective moral system has to start from the moral intuitions we have. If a moral system clashes with our intuitions, we will almost certainly reject it. Indeed, the principal objections we find to moral frameworks are almost all of the same form: “imagine contrived situation X: the model says we should do Y, but doesn’t that seem wrong?” The theory’s defender can then either agree and then retool their theory, or disagree and maintain that the theory is correct and the intuition is wrong. But he can only do so by appealing to stronger intuitions: he can only justify that the poor man steals a loaf of bread by appealing that the harm to the baker is marginal and the benefit to the poor man and his family is great. He cannot simply assert that theft is good.

Now, if all of our intuitions were consistent (internally, and between each other), we could try to pool them together and figure out morality. Alas, they are not consistent. We all have basic intuitions about what situations are good and what situations are bad, and as to what actions are good and what actions are bad. Since good actions may lead to bad outcomes, and conversely, bad actions to good outcomes, there is a basic internal inconsistency that cannot really be resolved (see my previous post on utilitarianism). Furthermore, different people have different ideas about what good and bad outcomes are. They will disagree on whether white lies are moral or not, on whether security or privacy is more important, and so forth. Since these differences lie in intuition, and that intuition is the only basis on which morality can be founded, it is often impossible to find a satisfactory resolution.

Things can be moral because they are moral

Essentially any arbitrary proposition can become a moral imperative, and through the course of history, incompatible imperatives will arise in different societies. Imagine that an influential shaman decides, out of insanity, or on a whim, that wearing purple attracts demons and bad luck. People will believe him, and will transmit his teachings to their children, and so forth. Eventually, nobody will wear purple anymore, and if anybody was to commit that sin, onlookers would become panicked. Alas, if wearing purple scares people and makes them uncomfortable, then it is harming them – which incidentally justifies that nobody should wear that color. Wearing purple then becomes a threat to a stable society and an immoral action. That shaman would essentially have bootstrapped a completely useless moral rule onto society, which becomes difficult to remove because doing so would upset those who follow it. At this point, wearing purple is immoral because it is immoral.

Societies, cultures and religions all around the world have many such rules: some animals cannot be eaten, those that can must be killed in a precise way, prophets must not be drawn, women must cover their breasts, homosexuality is immoral, promiscuity is frowned upon, and so forth. Even though some of these beliefs might have had justifications in the past, a society without any of them would still work perfectly. Getting rid of them is difficult, however, because there is great inertia against it. The benefits that laxer rules would give to certain individuals are offset by breaking the masses’ “entitlement” to legacy rules (because change really does upset people). In practice, what this means is that changing society either requires a huge upset (like conquest) or a lot of time (generation renewal). But still, you have to wonder to what extent people have a right not to get offended. Say you really like to pick your nose – most people really don’t want to see that, but is it more reasonable for you to accommodate them, or for them to stop being offended so easily? In a sense, customs help give some uniformity to society, which comforts people, but a necessary side effect is the marginalization of the people who can’t really fit the mold.

Morality is always locally and temporally optimal

Society always considers that its current morality is close to optimal. It is torn between people who are nostalgic of traditional values and others that want to push society further along the path it’s following, but overall it is still relatively homogeneous. Despite all the apparent strife in occidental society between liberals and conservatives, almost nobody questions the right of women to vote, and almost nobody is indifferent to incest, even between consenting adults. Sure, there is debate about gay marriage, but most nonetheless accept that engaging in homosexual intercourse should not be criminal.

Each individual holds what they believe to be the optimal moral view (that is why they hold it, after all), usually acquired early in their lives, and becomes attached to it (hence the common phrase: “it was better in my time”, and attachment to “traditional values” that are in fact no older than the people defending them). In fifty years, society might accept incest, and today’s youth will balk at the utter destruction of moral values that would bring – in a hundred years, it will just be a given, and our times will attract derision. We are shaped by the moral principles we are exposed to, and due to this there is always a certain orthodoxy to them, even though many groups try to push them towards one end or the other. Due to this orthodoxy, there can be an illusion that morality is derived from rational principles: indeed, when virtually everyone shares a certain moral base, beliefs that are found to be inconsistent with that base are harder for rational people to hold.

Alas, that orthodoxy can drift, and the direction towards which society evolves is not necessarily predictable. A return to slavery would be perfectly possible, and even in a way that the people practicing it would find their own society much more evolved than ours. For instance, society could split into two groups according to IQ, the smart deciding everything for the dumb for their own good, with selective mating widening the intelligence gap between the two groups. The smart would see the dumb as an inferior species, like smarter chimps, only fit to do their bidding. This sounds like dystopia to us, but that society might call it “progress”, and how would you argue with them? Racism is comparatively easy to defeat rationally, since it’s obvious that race is a very unreliable indicator of intelligence, consciousness or moral character.

Another unexpected turn society might take would be to completely destroy the concept of privacy. Not divulging personal information would be frowned upon, much like we frown upon avaricious people now. Secrecy would be seen as a flaw, cameras would be placed absolutely everywhere, and that would be justified by how easily crime is thwarted by the measure. Sure, right now we would balk at all the possibilities for abuse, but if society became like that, without much abuse taking place, you wouldn’t actually have that argument anymore. What appears like dystopia to us could be utopia for people actually living there.

Morality is meme warfare

All this to say that morality is a complicated thing that can evolve in many ways, and several moral systems, including some we would describe as dystopias, are logically coherent enough to be immune to (logical) criticism. A moral system can only be challenged by shifting the relative importance of some of our intuitions, maybe adding some, removing others. That can only be done through shock: emotional shock that leads us to revisit a policy that had disastrous results, factual shock from new information that changes everything, or logical shock stemming from realizing that some of our basic intuitions clash (e.g. “female homosexuality is good, male homosexuality is bad” vs “the same standards should apply no matter the sex” requires either rejecting all homosexual behavior, or accepting all of it). I would not argue that either of the dystopias I have just described are good, but that’s because my moral intuitions are mainstream – if you or I were to argue against them to people living in them, we would probably hit a solid wall.

It would be interesting to argue against slavery in a past society where it was prevalent and widely accepted. I reckon we could be effective by bringing up facts that they are unaware of, but I think it is possible that we would also hit a wall. If the slave owner has literally no capacity for empathy with slaves, it would be difficult to make them develop any. One might also justify slavery by rejecting that people have a right to freedom or opportunity, and that being raised as a slave makes you a slave. Arguing with people from past societies might give us the frustrating feeling that we are trying to climb a soaped up pole: we try to get a grip on what we consider to be universally shared intuitions, only to find out they are actually recent constructions.

In the end, each and every one of us has intuitions about what is good and what is bad, and we all have a stake to convince others to think like us. That is why a statement such as “morality is subjective” is without consequence: the statement according to which “all moral systems are just as acceptable” cannot be concluded from it, because it is in itself a moral judgment. Morality being subjective does not stop anyone from claiming that everyone should behave just as they do. Much to the contrary, it is in one’s best interests for everybody else to have the same moral standards as they do. Religion does not claim to hold all the moral truths for nothing: undying confidence and a lack of nuance are the best strategy to get people to follow your lead. In that sense it is neither right nor wrong, it is merely efficient. Likewise, the future does not belong to those who are “right” or “wrong” about morality, because morality is not about truth anyway. It belongs to whoever can most effectively make their case through the use of emotional, logical or factual shocks on their fellow human beings.

Utilitarianism

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Utilitarianism is the position according to which moral actions are actions that increase the value of a certain objective function. For instance, insofar that “maximizing total happiness” is our objective, any action leading to a world where happiness is higher than it is now is moral. Of course, that objective is not necessarily the one that should be used: perhaps we want to give weight to the preservation of our free will or of our humanity, so that sedating everyone does not become the best utilitarian policy. In any case, no literature really offers any particular mathematical framework allowing for the calculation of the objective function, much less of the expected effect that various actions would have on its value.

Utilitarianism typically considers our current moral imperatives (e.g. do not kill), laws and rights (e.g. right to live) as heuristics that usually lead to greater utility and are easy to understand by the masses. Here I will argue that utilitarianism is itself a heuristic. In the same way that moral imperatives serve to simplify the execution of ethical behavior by minimizing the amount of outcome projection we have to do, utilitarianism serves to simplify ethical discourse by minimizing the basic principles on which it is predicated.

There is no single best utilitarian objective function

In a sense, utilitarianism is predicated on the existence of some objective function that, given a world, yields some kind of number telling us about how good it is. The best action to take at any point is the one that increases the value of the function by the greatest amount. For instance, if the function is the number of people alive in the world, then making the most children possible is the best course of action, and murder is always wrong (and so is suicide, incidentally). Of course, that’s a stupid objective function, since maximizing our population would involve misery, and nobody likes misery.

The first problem with finding a good utilitarian objective function is that what we deem “good” is not invariant to the actions we take. In other words, we could engineer a society to perceive any given function as the most moral. To give an extreme example, take the simplest utilitarian function, which involves maximizing “happiness”. Most reject this as being too simple, because giving everybody “happy pills” is the best and easiest course of action to achieve that objective, and we are very uncomfortable with that idea. Nonetheless, it stands to reason that once everyone is made happy through these chemical means, everyone would be happy about their own society. We don’t want to move into such a society, but if we were there we wouldn’t want to move outside of it either. Even though we disapprove of “maximizing happiness” as a goal, pursuing it would have the side effect of making us approve of it. So in devising an utilitarian function, should we take into account our current preferences, or the preferences of the society it would lead us to adopt?

The second problem lies with a lack of uniformity in what people value. Most people value life, happiness, freedom of choice, and so forth, but they do so at different degrees. For instance, is freedom to choose between good and evil valuable? I would argue that it isn’t: I value the freedom of choosing my career or choosing my next meal, but I don’t value being able to kill someone. Most religious people (as well as some others, I imagine) would argue that this freedom is fundamental, if only because it is quite difficult to explain the existence of evil if God is benevolent and evil is unnecessary. Making humans incapable of killing or hurting each other would be an excellent thing to do for me, but if one values the freedom to choose to do good or evil, the loss of it might offset the gains of preventing crime. Since we all value a certain freedom of mind, we cannot do away with it in our objective function, but it appears that different people value different freedoms. How does one question valuing moral freedom without the same arguments applying to all freedoms? Assuming we could measure them, how are life, happiness and freedom weighed against each other?

Common wisdom would state that killing one person is not acceptable in order to guarantee the happiness of another. On the other hand, it seems that it would be fine if it guaranteed the happiness of a million. Where does the threshold lie? How can any hypothetical objective function satisfactorily provide exact answers in gray areas?

Our moral intuition is not symmetric

Imagine a world full of prosperous, happy people. Then imagine the exact same world, except with one additional island, a barren world where everybody suffers from famine and poverty. Which one has higher utility? If the former does, then nuking the island in the second would raise utility and would therefore be moral. If the latter does, then the former world could raise utility simply by building up “human farms” full of miserable people.

Consider the parts of the world that live in misery. We could help them get better. Or we could nuke them completely, so that there would be nobody miserable anymore. Our intuition is that the former is moral, but that the latter is immoral. The only way utilitarianism can match this intuition is by asserting that a miserable human has positive utility. Unfortunately, if a miserable human has positive utility, then creating miserable humans would technically raise utility, potentially at a lower cost than raising the quality of life of those that already exist.

In other words, if a miserable human has negative utility, then killing them off is moral; if they have positive utility, then multiplying them is moral. This is utilitarian symmetry: if world A has utility X and world B has utility Y, where X < Y, then it is moral to go from A to B, and immoral to go from B to A. But our intuition does not work like this: it seems immoral to create people who are doomed to be miserable, but if these people exist, it is immoral to kill them. Going from A to B is immoral, and going from B to A is also immoral.

A utilitarian might be tempted to say that it is immoral to kill miserable people because it will lower the happiness of those who care for them, but I don’t think that really holds water: people care most for those who are geographically close to them, so if you completely destroyed a large swath of land and stopped the media from saying anything about it, a very limited number of people would actually be affected, and the negative impact would not last very long, certainly less than a generation. I would argue that utilitarianism assigns greatest utility to bringing the whole world at the level of comfort enjoyed by the most advanced of its civilizations, but I would argue that it still assigns positive utility to outright killing off the parts that don’t. Indeed, it is difficult to argue that the absence of miserable people* is worse than their presence without admitting in the same breath that farming humans for food and organs would bring higher utility to the world. Since destruction is arguably much easier and much faster than construction, you can see what this leads to.

Utilitarianism is a nice theory which can refine our moral intuition very much and help make it more consistent, but as it fails to take into account the lack of symmetry of these intuitions, it must still be considered as an imperfect heuristic, regardless of the objective function that’s being used. The lack of symmetry I am talking about lies in the fact that it is both immoral to kill off someone who is living in misery and immoral to willingly give birth to someone into misery, even though in the former case we go from A to B, and in the latter we go from B to A. Utilitarianism’s mathematical formalism is insufficient to represent this, because if one transition is moral, the other ought to be automatically immoral (and vice versa).

* I know I am oversimplifying: not enjoying modern comfort does not make people “miserable”, and there is no particular part of the world where everybody is miserable either. My point still stands, though.

 

The consistency of thought

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I skipped a week :( But here goes:

At the most basic level, a concept is a mental description of a set of possible observations, most of which we learn by example: “this is a cat”, “this thing is blue, and so is this other thing”, and we quickly learn to extrapolate how to recognize a cat or the color blue in the very early stages of our lives. In order to cement and reinforce our understanding of things, we create new concepts and relate existing ones with negation, conjunction and disjunction. So for instance we will say that cats have pointy ears and whiskers, and through a highly interleaved web of relationships, we can avoid most mistakes and misunderstandings.

Because natural language does not really restrict how concepts can be related to other concepts, there are several known paradoxes involving it. For instance, “the smallest integer that cannot be expressed within ten words” is ill-defined, because the phrase itself contains exactly ten words – if it represented a number, that number would be expressed within ten words, which is contradictory. Resolving that paradox, in itself, is not particularly difficult. It is not particularly interesting either, because the example is contrived and the contradiction is easy to see. But what if the contradiction was harder to see, hidden behind several layers of indirection?

Beyond dictionaries, our understanding of language is founded on examples and a large number of “intuitions”, which are statements about things that “feel right”. Observe that the more abstract concepts get, the more indirectly they can obtain – you can easily observe a bison, but you can’t exactly observe “free will”. Second, the more abstract concepts get, the harder it is to actually verify that it is possible for them to obtain. “A married bachelor” is a rather plain contradiction, but “a program which can determine, for any program, whether that program halts or not” is a much more subtle one. If we had a name for it, we would have a name for something that can’t exist while naively thinking that perhaps it could.

From these insights, I must wonder, how in hell do we know whether the concepts we use every day are actually consistent?

The question I am asking is not innocuous and I believe it is far reaching. Take the concept of “reality”, for instance. As trivial as it might sound, that concept is a very high level one. How do we know that the concept of “reality” is self-consistent? I am perfectly aware of how much sense the concept of reality makes in our minds, so please bear with me. What I mean to say is that as a complex concept, reality is a sort of conjunction of concepts – “reality” is not just a word, it is an ecosystem. Our brains’ knowledge banks contain a large number of assumptions and intuitions that make use of the concept of reality and thereby restrict what can be real and what cannot be real. For instance, if I tell you that we live in the matrix, then you might contend that the table you are sitting at is not, in fact, “real”. But of all of these things, of all the statements that are related to the concept of reality and modulate its nature, which ones are the result of a structured, logical design? None! Reality is an intuition – there is no formal argument that says that reality is not real if we live in a computer simulation, it is merely a strong intuition. And if a strong intuition implicates “reality” and “simulation”, and that another strong intuition implicates “simulation” and “determinism”, and so forth, you end up with an unchecked cascade of links.

So if we take the concept of reality, list all of our strong intuitions and everything we take for granted about the world, and then crunch them all together to determine whether there exist conditions where anything at all is real, are we going to wind up with the embarrassing conclusion that reality is impossible? Should we care?

If we codify the knowledge contained in a dictionary, and crunch everything to its utmost logical conclusion, until every definition stands on its own, how many of them would end up with the mention that “whoops, there is actually no way this concept can obtain”? The first concept that pops to mind everytime I think about this is free will. Conventional wisdom says that if the world is deterministic, and that all of one’s actions are ultimately the result of natural processes, then there is no free will. Conventional wisdom also says that if your choices are determined by coin flips occurring inside your head, thereby making your choices random, then there is no free will either. So free will is neither deterministic, nor random, nor a combination of both. The thing is, this leaves literally no possibilities. The intuitive definition of free will is not consistent and there is absolutely no way it can obtain (which is why I believe that the whole debate around it is sterile – the intuitive concept is impossible and the possible concepts are unintuitive, so there really isn’t much to salvage). The main reason why this fiasco does not totally discredit free will in the minds of people is that the human brain is extremely eager at either seeing possibilities that are not there or not seeing possibilities that are there, depending on what is convenient. Proofs that there is no third option have little effectiveness when you believe you “see” that third option.

There is a strong and devastating principle in logic, which is the principle of explosion: from a contradiction, anything can be proven, and thus a single contradiction can run a belief system into the ground. Alas, you do not necessarily know that contradictions exist in your belief system, and if they are distant enough, you might never know about them. You might instead find extremely sound answers to your problems, staying at a safe distance from total collapse, but nonetheless using incompatible premises. Given the organic growth of human thought and the ultimately informal basis of most concepts in philosophy (despite the best efforts of philosophers), it is almost impossible that even half of philosophy is about consistent concepts.

What to do about it?

In a sense, there is something terrifying in the idea that our brains are almost certainly broken. All this certainty we have about so many things, the obviousness of ages old principles, there is something surreal about the possibility that some of them might be contradictory. My strong intuition is that this is not just a possibility, but a fact, though I have not done the tedious work of trying to figure out where the broken links are (I prefer to start with tackling the contradictions in my own thoughts). All this being said, I do not think that the situation is hopeless – there is nothing wrong with science, not least because it works so well, and inconsistency does not have to be catastrophic.

The principle of explosion is problematic enough that logical systems have been designed which do not admit it. These systems are called *paraconsistent*. In classical logic (and in intuitionistic logic for that matter), (A ∧ ¬A) → B for all A and all B. A paraconsistent logic is any logic where this is not true. Such a logic is therefore robust, to some extent, to contradictory statements, since their ill effects will be localized, rather than contaminating the whole belief system. Since humans can easily hold contradictory beliefs, it seems logical to think that the human brain is paraconsistent, although I am not quite sure how it does it. I believe that it is probably an error to use classical logic in arguments involving natural concepts and intuitions, and that restricting such arguments to much tighter inferences would improve the quality of discourse. I cannot say, unfortunately, that I have anything in particular to offer.

For those who are willing to try, there are also ways to reduce one’s own mental biases in order to make less assumptions. It is my belief that if you cannot see how something *could* be true (or false), and yet cannot prove that it cannot, you should try harder. Note that I am talking of mere possibility, not of probability: I am simply stating that if you cannot *imagine* something (whether that be God, a causeless universe, the idea that there is no space outside of the universe’s bounds), you should either figure out why you cannot imagine it, try harder, or both.

Polarization

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I believe that there is one major problem with the current state of journalism, blogging, commenting and debate, one that rots discourse to its core. The issue is that of polarization.

I have many opinions of my own, and I feel that I can adequately justify most of them. On controversial topics, I hold such positions as atheism, the right to abortion, marriage equality, evolution, anthropogenic global warming, and so forth. I can hold my ground against people who have the same level of knowledge as I do, and I can adjust my opinion if new facts come to light. Furthermore, while it would be politically correct to say that I do, there are many opinions that I do not respect, because I find them hopelessly inane and ill-informed. Intelligent design, for example. I don’t feel the need to keep my mind open to all the kinds of nonsense that floats around.

What makes me uncomfortable is certainly not the fact that people have strong opinions. What bothers me is that the whole system is bent in such a way that there is a downwards spiral towards heavy and indiscriminate polarization, rather than towards a fact-centric ecosystem. That spiral is such that I find almost as many imbeciles camping on the same “side” of any debate as I find on the other side (of course, the other side will always have more idiots, because I’m always right, for some definition of “always”, anyway).

I constantly see atheists giving counter-arguments to theistic arguments that are just as flawed as what they purport to discredit (e.g. fine tuning is an awful argument for God, but hand waving is not a proper counter – probability does matters to model selection). Other atheists are so hell-bent on their flaming crusade against religion that they end up using rhetoric that is disturbingly similar to that of their opponents (if humanity is better off without religion, it will not be by much – the real problem are strong ideologies and religions only account for a subset of them).

It is even worse for other subjects. Climate change draws so much passion that some people see no problem in claiming that we will all die within the next decade. Animal rights are a noble thing and it is shameful that so many animals are still treated in a scandalous fashion. However, valuing animals over human beings is a clear case of misplaced priorities. I am well on board with the fact that capitalism can be fucked up sometimes and that there are things the free market simply cannot do, but don’t tell me it hasn’t done great things for us (also: rich people are not all assholes). Copyright and patents are completely broken, but IP anarchy is not a solution. I have seen feminist rants that border on hysteria, but is it really necessary to dismiss them with mockery and an overt display of machism?

The vicious circle

The issue is not as much the fact that people are ignorant as the fact that it is too easy for them to keep being ignorant. Numerous blogs, communities and news organizations are slanted in a particular direction and link to each other in a tight circlejerk. It is quite possible to navigate a cross-section of the Internet that never deviates from a certain point of view – by not being properly exposed to criticism and dissention, people have too little information to see for themselves the potential flaws of the arguments they see. Since they see a dozen sites repeat the same information, they come to trust it. While the opposing side will be presented, it will be presented as a caricature, a strawman that is much easier to demolish. Furthermore, while they will come across passionate opinion pieces countering the opposing side, they will not come across that other side’s own counters.

The most perverse effect of all is that holding a certain opinion tends to shift our perception of “unbiased” towards that opinion. Therefore, anybody living in the parallel universe which promotes a certain side will inevitably tend to see unbiased sources as being biased the other way. The consequence is a lack of trust that pushes them to camp on their own position. Furthermore, if one side starts isolating itself, its discourse will become more polarized and less reasonable, which means it will get louder and drown out the reasonable points it might otherwise be making in a rational and civilized forum. This in turn will push the other side to do the same thing. The end result is that both sides end up saying unreasonable things. These unreasonable things get inflated exposure, because they are easy to ridicule, and this discourages transfers from a side to another. A truly unbiased picture becomes difficult to obtain, and few people will even bother, because it is easier and more comfortable for them to consolidate their own bias.

How could this be fixed?

Polarization is not a new issue, and it is fairly difficult to counter. Humans are social animals, and save for a small percentage of them, they are not very rational. They will easily indulge in ideological extremes, for two reasons: first, because it gives them firm foundations on which they can act without spending energy thinking, second, because blind allegiance to a shared goal mobilizes them towards action. Humans need strong emotions as a catalyst, regardless of whether they are actually warranted (I like speaking of humans as if I wasn’t one myself).

Granted, some societies are more balanced than some others – I am thankful to live in Canada rather than Pakistan, where insulting the Prophet might land me a death sentence. The existence and tolerance of divergent points of view is reassuring, since neither can readily crush the other. Nevertheless, I would like to have safeguards, guarantees against crowd manipulation for ill purposes. I do not want irrational or anti-scientific stances to prevail through careful control of the information flow, and I am rather sure that this control is happening now (possibly unwittingly).

The Internet could be a formidable tool in balancing the public discourse. I believe that fact checking could be crowd-sourced (despite its faults, Wikipedia is a very decent start – a lot better than I would have expected), and that web annotations highlighting errors and misleading statements should be shown by default by major browsers. Similarly, I believe that counters to an opinion piece, regardless of where that piece is located, should be ranked and shown on that piece as an annotation. The goal would be to provide an escape to readers from the sanitized environment they currently get. It is important for them to trust the system, so it should be clear what they are getting: fact checking, and an indexing of the best counters.

There is one other thing which I believe would help: I would like to see a site dedicated to pitting both sides of a debate against each other. The way that I envision it would work would be by letting the community of people subscribing to each side choose the very best arguments for their position, and link specific points to specific counter-points. Essentially, what I would like to see would be a list of the best arguments for the existence of God (as chosen by theists) and a list of of the best arguments against it (as chosen by atheists), and ditto for all other debates one can imagine. For each argument in the list, there would be a list of the best counters of that argument by the other side. In order to avoid sterile back-and-forth, I would cut the chain at a depth of one: arguments, counter-arguments, but no counter-counter-arguments. Instead, arguments should be updated in order to address their counters from the get-go.

If a system like this already exists, I would like to know. If it does not, would there be any interest in starting one?

Perfection

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Considering that I set up WordPress over two months ago, it seems that making this first post took me quite a while. Upon pondering why I procrastinated this long on a relatively simple task, I realized that it was because I wanted it to be perfect.

Perfect in the way of style, because good prose goes a long way into making the reader understand, respect and remember what he or she is reading.

Perfect in the way of significance, because the topic of a first post, as the first choice of a series, holds greater importance to the writer than those that succeed to it – as if every plunge one takes was a mirror into their own soul.

And perfect in the way of being a fixed point of my thoughts, something I will never have to recant because it stems from flawless reasoning.

Unfortunately, this never happens. As soon as you spend time thinking about and writing on an idea, its flaws always start to glitter faintly under the light of critical thinking. The iron clad certainty of the first enlightenment fades away and your brain gives in to the doubts: is this really a good idea? Should things really be done this way? If this hypothetical objection was raised, would it not invalidate part of your reasoning? And so, the card castle crumbles, what was crystal clear before is left muddled, baseless and amended, thoughts are rethought and your quest for perfection is thwarted, your Graal yanked out of your hands by an invisible thread. And then, ashamed, you withdraw what you have until you can be certain that it is right. I’ve felt this often enough in my ideas, writings and in my works that I figured I’d talk about it. I would say that this post is mostly for myself, but perhaps others can benefit from it as well.

Perfection (or the lack thereof) is something that is often much more clearly felt than defined. The best example is the concept of God, who religions say is a perfect entity under all measurements that you would care to make: omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and so on. By the aforementioned definition, there is no flaw that you could find about God. Now, if you were to look at the situation seriously, you would realize that several properties routinely attributed to God are inconsistent with each other, yet people routinely ignore this. Their feelings are unambiguous: the picture they paint of their deity cannot “feel right” if it is not glorified beyond all logic. They choose their gut feeling over consistency. The perfectionist (or the idealist) is the same – their work cannot “feel right” if it does not correspond to the mental image they have of what it should be. Because of this, they chase this image endlessly, neglecting to take into account anything else. Worse yet, they might never realize that their ideal is not self consistent and thus that nothing will ever satisfy it, effectively making it so that nothing they do will ever feel right.

Indeed, can there ever be anything perfect, even in theory? There is no perfect argument because there are no perfect premises, only a set of propositions a majority or a minority of people might or might not agree upon depending on whether it suits them or not. There is no perfect system of law because the essentials of what we want it to do are ever changing and often oppose irreconcilable world views. There are no systems of perfect ethics or morality for similar reasons. Closer to my line of work, there is no perfectly extensible software because it is impossible to predict everything users will want to do with it. There is no perfect syntax for a programming language because of the inherent subjectivity of aesthetics (Lisp syntax is either perfect or aberrant). Each and everyone of us has a slightly different conception and appreciation of everything that can be conceived. We even model each word in our own unique ways – what do you see in your head when I say the word cat? What do you see when I say the word God? Liberty? Intuition? I doubt our brains model these concepts in exactly the same ways, meaning that no abstraction is absolute and that any form of communication is inherently approximate.

No objective ideal of perfection can be found in a web of subjective appreciation, diverging interests and semantic approximation. This is to say that in seeking perfection, one usually pursues a personal chimera, an ideal which certainly means a lot to him but will never attain unanimity. While that is not a bad thing in itself – certainly, one can get a lot of satisfaction from getting a perfect score in a video game – it can easily lead to either failure or bitter disappointment (usually both).

The worth of an idea, an essay, a piece of software or of a solution to a problem should not be measured against some arbitrary ideal of what they should be. It should be measured pragmatically, against their expected benefit, may it be individual or societal. There are a lot of projects that I procrastinate on because I am still searching for the perfect way to implement them – designs that I would deem perfectly efficient, perfectly extensible, perfectly readable, and so on. However, this requires me to re-evaluate and rethink my projects everytime, because each insight, when examined carefully, fails to account for some property I would really like to have. It might also happen that two features are trivial to implement only insofar that they do not occur simultaneously, even though they are interesting in themselves. Worse yet, I might want to write a project using a programming language I want to make, hence delaying it unnecessarily by setting an arbitrary prerequisite which might never actually get done.

There are a few things to realize here. A great part of the worth of something is its availability: waiting two years to release a program in order to make it better or code prerequisites that may not actually be required in practice removes two years of availability. This availability is time where the program may still be improved while earning revenue and/or helping and inspiring other people. While it is daunting (for me, anyway) to release work that you are not perfectly happy with, or discouraging to let go before it matches your vision, it stands to reason that the pragmatic worth of imperfect work is made greater when it is published. It also stands to reason that committing to imperfect works rather than abandoning them makes it possible for the novel ideas they contain to propagate, earn revenue, help people, gather interest and constructive criticism from a greater number of people, all of which is likely to make them evolve much faster.

The world evolves in a very incremental fashion. Nothing in it is perfect. In fact, a lot of it is terrible if not unbelievably bad. Obviously, mediocrity is not a desirable objective, but the current state of the world does give some perspective, namely that it is in fact very easy to improve it. That’s why the most important thing is to impact it to the best of our capability, raise the bar slowly but steadily, spread our ideas around, whether they are good or bad, as long as we believe they can, for a few seconds, help the world leap ahead before fading away.