Philosophtly

On the "rape = power" meme

2011-10-22T15:27:00.000+01:00

I'm going to tackle a very sensitive subject here. It's one of society's greatest taboos, but it's also centred around an almost omnipresent and enduring misconception, most likely largely because it's such a taboo that's hard to discuss calmly and rationally.

Given this state of affairs, please consider first reading this before continuing, and - for anyone who's experienced rape or indecent assault - be aware that the following discussion may include triggers.

First, a caveat

There's an almost-omnipresent meme in society today, that rape is entirely or primarily about power. It's one of those incredibly hardy, robust memes that are simultaneously difficult to argue against without leaving yourself open to accusations of apologism, or excusing the inexcusable (see also: civil rights for captured terrorists, differentiating between child molesters and paedophiles, etc), which likely accounts in no small measure for its widespread success.

With that in mind, nothing in this post should be taken to excuse, diminish, apologise for or trivialise rape or rapists. Rape is a hideous, inexcusable phenomenon, and should rightly be viewed as such. However, that doesn't excuse inaccuracies or inconsistencies in its characterisation or people's beliefs, and pointing them out does not diminish its evil in any way. Moreover, with a more accurate understanding of the problem one can almost always fight it better.

In summary: one can still believe Hitler was a monster without having to believe he also had horns and a tail. Moreover, WWII would have gone significantly more poorly for the allies if we fell into this trap and allowed ourselves to believe the Nazis could be beaten with a Bibles, silver and holy water.

That said (and hopefully any offended sensibilities or jerking knees pre-emptively defused), on with the discussion...

Problems with the "rape=power" meme

The primary problem with the "rape = power" meme is that as far as I can tell it is completely and utterly unsupported.

That sounds incredible - at first - given its prevalence, but I've researched this quite heavily, and I am literally unable to come up with a single evidence-based source for the claim. Literally the closest I've been able to find for a source for this claim was a 1974 documentary about violence against women, wherein a group of prisoners who formed an organisation named "Men Against Rape" in Lorton Prison were interviewed regarding attitudes to rape^[1].

In this documentary the prisoners claimed (apparently without evidential support) that male-male rape in prisons was primarily a power relationship, and then baselessly hypothesised that the same might hold true for all rapes, outside of the kind of violent, criminal, uncivilised, exclusively-male, strongly hierarchical, macho culture that characterises prison life.

Aside from the highly speculative and unsupported basis of this claim, it's also worth knowing that of this group, only one of their number was even a convicted rapist.

Got that? We have a bunch of unqualified prisoners, only one of whom is even part of the group they're hypothesising about, suggesting that rape in their particular prison is primarily a power issue, and generalising from that not only to "all prisons", but to all rapes. Hmmm.

Moreover, despite the fact the claims were speculative, unsupported, advanced by completely unqualified individuals and of dubious applicability to life outside prison, they were picked up and quickly became society's default assumption as to the nature of rape. An assertion with which, moreover, even the makers of the documentary seem to have something of an issue.

In addition to a fundamental lack of supporting evidence, there are also several empirical factors that appear to counter-indicate the idea that rape is primarily or entirely a power relationship, and has nothing to do with "normal" sexual attraction:

To begin with - even controlling for extraneous factors like socialising patterns, socio-economic level and the like - rape victimisation is hugely more common amongst younger people than older^[2]. Were it simply a power relationship one would expect no significant difference between ages, or even (outside childhood, wherein child abuse is a related but distinct phenomenon) an increased likelihood with age, as ill-health, infirmity, mobility problems and/or dependency on others all increased, and the individual generally presented an easier, more tempting target.

There are also several scientific studies demonstrating that as access to pornography goes up, rape goes down. It's hard to imagine how rape can be primarily about power and not about satisfying sexual urges, when improving individuals' ability to satisfy sexual urges leads to a measurable reduction in rape (and, note, in no other type of violent crime).

In addition to this, there are plenty of documented instances of forced or otherwise coercive sex in the animal kingdom. I'm somewhat leery of evolutionary-psychology due to its inherent non-falsifiability, but when you have a behaviour - that's commonly asserted to be about a conscious lust for power - being demonstrated as a successful reproductive strategy even by non-conscious animals, I think we have to acknowledge that - distasteful though the activity may be - there's at least some chance that it's simply an evolved reproductive strategy (ie, an instinctive satisfaction of sexual/reproductive urges) rather than purely a psychosocial dominance issue or power-play.

Finally, the word "rape" covers a multitude of sins. Statutory rape is rape. Date-rape is rape. Even drunk mutually-consensual sex can be considered rape if one partner later decides they regret it^[3].

Violent, sober, non-consensual sex is a horrifying phenomenon, but in our society "rape" is not always necessarily the same thing as "violent, sober, non-consensual sex". In particular it seems... problematic to reasonably argue that an overly-insistent drunken hookup, a 17 year-old sleeping with a 15 year-old that they're in a long-term relationship with and a violent alleyway sexual assault at knifepoint are all committed by offenders with exactly the same psychological type, with exactly the same motivation.

Upon reflection, it's not so surprising that there's no hard evidence supporting this assertion - dealing, as it does, with intangible and subjective psychological motivations that you can't empirically test. The question is, then, given all the evidence against it and the paucity of evidence in favour of it, how did we as a society ever get so convinced of it?

So why is it so enduring?

From here on in I'm hypothesising rather than reporting documented history or scientific conclusions, but I suspect it's because such a view of rape demonises and de-humanises rapists, so it's more appealing to many members of both sexes.

To many "old fashioned" feminists or people strongly interested in women's issues it suggests by association that all men are at least potentially insatiable power-hungry oppressors with unnatural, destructive motivations, and it casts the penis as the weapon of the oppressor. Modern (third-wave) feminism has right moved away from this kind of misandrist rhetoric, but it was a lot more common in the past, and flattering this kind of world-view would certainly account for why the meme became so popular when it did, especially given feminism (as an institution) has been primarily responsible for pushing the issue of rape into the public eye (and rightly so).

Equally, to many men (even ones uninterested in women's issues) it allows us to characterise rapists as some violent, power-obsessed "other". We've all been horny and drunk or otherwise impaired, but we've never raped anyone. If plenty of rapists are just guys with normal sexual urges and a little less self-control than us it's deeply unnerving, as it suggests that - in the right situation - we could potentially do something like that. Casting rapists instead as power-mad abusers with no normal human motivations is therefore more comforting to us, as it's a rigid separation stopping "us" from ever becoming one of "them".

It's the same idiotic cartoon-o-vision mentality that says paedophiles (people with a sexual orientation who have no choice over how they feel) are all uncontrollable child molesters (people who choose to give into their urges and perform an action), or that terrorists like Osama bin Laden are all necessarily two-dimensional, moustache-twirling megalomaniacs who sacrifice their lives in attacking western countries simply because they hate every single individual in the country because of their "freedom"... rather than people who are legitimately angry about the effects of western countries' foreign policy on their regions and their families/friends, and who - lacking any conventional ability to effect change - instead out of desperation choose tactics which we find morally abhorrent.

In short, we overwhelmingly and unthinkingly believe this as a society not because it's empirically proven, or supported by evidence, or even particularly plausible. We apparently believe it purely and simply because it flatters our preconceptions and makes us feel better about ourselves... and that's no reason to believe anything.

So now we've cleared that up, while we continue condemning rapists and rape, can we finally put this tired, baseless, inaccurate, misleading, counter-productive meme to bed?

Footnotes

[1] Given the hot-button nature of the subject, lest anyone be inclined to jump to assumptions regarding a pro-rape or "mens-rights" agenda on the part of the linked blog article, bear in mind that it's written by a blogger dedicated to sex-positive feminism.

[2] This paper separated adult rape victims into seven age-bands (18 to 24 years, 25 to 29 years, 30 to 34 years, 35 to 44 years, 45 to 54 years, 55 to 59 years and 60 years and over). After controlling for all other factors, the analysis indicated that each successive band has only around a 70% of the risk of the previous band of experiencing rape. In other words, compared to an 18-24 year-old, a 45-54 year-old is only 24% as likely to be raped.

Similarly, this paper reports that outside of the ages 12-15 (which include child abuse - a related but distinct problem to adult rape), you are at most risk between the ages of 20-34 (0.9/100,000 people), then 16-19 (0.6), then 35-49, then 50-64, and last of all 65 or older. Aside from the (already-mentioned) child-abuse outlier, this clearly shows a correlation between the ages when people are commonly considered most attractive, and next to nothing about vulnerability or opportunity for dominance.

[3] There is , it must be acknowledged, also an egregious gender-imbalance in this particular case, but that's a whole other discussion, equally inflammatory and controversial in its own right.

We are living in the future: A rant

2011-03-18T23:00:00.012Z

Fairly frequently listening to people talk or post in online discussions, you run across an attitude you could sum up as

Come on! It's 2000-and-whatever and we don't even have flying cars/hoverboards/whatever yet!

In response, a rant. Profanity is for emphatic purposes only - I assure you the tone of this piece is "cheerfully outraged".

Seriously? Seriously? Are you fucking shitting me?

I'm carrying in my pocket a device smaller than my hand which can record audio, video and static images in high quality, and share them with anyone else in the world. It allows me to speak to people on the other side of the planet instantaneously, receives messages from space that prevent me ever getting lost, anywhere, and can reliably guide me to places I haven't even been before (even showing me a picture of the building, so I know what I'm looking for).

It provides wireless, practically-instantaneous access to the sum total of knowledge we have as a species (as well as all the LOLcats and boobies I could ever want to see), allows me to remotely control computers and devices around me, and can provide an "alternate reality" layer allowing me to peer into any one of hundreds of geographically-relevant virtual worlds that underlies the real one, so I can find businesses, read reviews or find invisible notes people have left attached to locations in the real world.

I can play games on it - in fact, I can emulate entire games systems from my youth at full speed, in software, on a device smaller than one of the controllers of the original console system.

And that's just my fucking phone, right now, today.

Leaving aside mobile computing, and the web, and computers that for $500 can read your fucking mind, looking forward you've got massive advances in genetics, the entire field of proteomics just opening up, private spaceflight (including affordable holidays in space reasonably projected within my lifetime), and that's not to mention practical holography, industrial and consumer nanotech and neuroprosthetics allowing you to extend or augment your own body, mind or consciousness in hitherto-unimagined ways.

Your problem is not that the exciting things still haven't arrived yet - it's that you're so neck fucking deep in exciting things that you've become jaded and stopped even noticing them. We live - to quote Paul Simon - in an age of miracles and wonders, but you're so used to them that they've stopped impressing you.

People like you bitch about the lack of flying cars, blind to the fact that we already have them, but most people are far too stupid, incompetent and distractable to drive safely in two dimensions, on the ground, where there's no risk of a collision causing even survivors to drop hundreds of metres out of the sky and pancake themselves on whatever's beneath them.

You complain about hover-boards, but miss the fact that we live in a society with unprecedented access to information and communication, where anyone can teach themselves practically anything to a high level for free on the internet, this increased access to information and unfettered, geographically-omnipresent, low-barrier-to-entry many:many communication means we're slap-bang in the middle of the biggest social revolution since the fucking printing press (possibly since language), and the public discourse is extending itself outwards and refining itself inwards as we gradually - and for the first time ever - begin to form a truly global consciousness and discourse. Cognition at the whole-species level, if you will.

And people like you bitch about the lack of a floating fucking plank? O_o

We are alive at the single most exciting time in the entire history of the world - not only is technology progressing faster than ever before in human history, but it's also taking less and less time before it's commoditised and even the relatively poor start to feel the benefits.

Put simply, we are living in the future.

How can you possibly be so bored of it already? ಠ_ಠ

Post-conventional wisdom

2011-03-04T20:47:00.008Z

I've long believed that one of the most important aspects of rationality is learning to be skeptical even of your own rationality. Just like unquestioning faith in a creator or social movement is naive and usually incorrect, so is unquestioning faith in yourself and your own memories.

Most of us instinctively think of ourselves as rational, logical people. We believe that our thinking processes, assumptions and even automatic reactions are justified, proportionate and correct.

This is, to put it bluntly, wrong.

Over the last few decades cognitive science has demonstrated repeatedly that our "natural" way of thinking is actually little more than a collection of useful evolved heuristics, not a rational, logically-defensible framework. They've even collected a huge array of known cognitive bugs. We're all guilty of most of these biases much of the time, and even those of us who know about them and try aggressively to avoid them still fall prey to them upon occasion, often without even realising.

What it comes down to, broadly, is that you are not a reliable narrator, even of your own experiences, opinions and life-history. You are just as prone to biases, subconscious (and sometimes not-so subconscious) whitewashing and a whole suite of cognitive errors and biases as anyone else. Don't just gloss over that - let it sink in for a moment. Much of what you "remember" is invented detail. Many of the life-experiences that make up your sense of self and your identity are exaggerated, grossly biased or even wholly fallacious.

This is a revelation for some people, and for others (too attached to their mental image of themselves as perfect, incorruptible and in control of themselves) it's deeply troubling and offensive.

Really accepting this fact (rather than paying lip-service to it and then continuing to act as if it's not true) is deeply humbling and restrictive. You can't just get angry when you're feeling irritable, because you might not have the right. You can't automatically call others idiots and dismiss their opinions, because you might simply be missing their point. You can't even pride yourself unduly on achievements in the past, because much of what you remember is likely to be (even slightly) self-aggrandising or a distorted account.

This is obviously difficult for many to accept - it feels humbling, and restrictive to personal liberty. However, it probably feels restrictive for a five year-old child to be told not to run out into traffic and to instead learn the Highway Code.

Let there be no doubt; it is restrictive. It's also a part of growing up and taking responsibility for yourself.

There are distinct benefits, however. Aside from helping you become a more reasonable person (always a worthwhile goal), what it does do is give you the opportunity to learn to "step outside" yourself. When you always keep in mind the fact that you might be wrong, it helps you avoid being caught up in events, and allows you to rationally consider not only situations but also your own reactions to those situations in a more calm, considered, objective manner. Instead of merely reacting like a mindless emotional automaton, it allows you to analyse and probe your own emotions, and decide, consciously and rationally whether to pay heed to an emotional impulse or to disregard it as undesirable.

I honestly believe a real, conscious acceptance of one's own fallibility (even in areas we normally automatically assume we're infallible) - and (paradoxically) the opportunity for enhanced self-control that it presents - represents a distinct "level" of cognition (in terms of self-awareness, rationalism, "enlightenment" and the like) that many or even most people simply never advance to. Hell, I know I make a conscious effort to bear this in mind, and I frequently fall far short of the ideal. Nevertheless, I think the goal is a worthy one.

You can think of the two mind-frames as being exemplified by the following scenario:

If you wake up one morning and hear The Voice Of God, where do you go first? The church, or the psychiatric unit of your local hospital? Many (perhaps most) would instinctively believe in the veracity of their subjective experience and would believe God was talking to them personally. That this is an irrational conclusion is pretty easy to demonstrate, given the relative paucity of sanctified religious prophets compared to the enormous (and rising) incidence of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.

If on the other hand you'd immediately to to your doctor and ask for a psychiatric evaluation, congratulations - that's exactly the kind of skepticism I'm talking about.

Postscript; a name for this type of skepticism (the title of this post) was coined by a helpful redditor, by analogy to Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development. I would never presume to describe it so grandly myself, but I think the analogy is a good one.

An attempt at a simple, two-rule morality

2010-05-26T20:17:00.004+01:00

I've been thinking about morality recently. Plenty of people claim to offer moral systems, but as a modern, relatively enlightened individual most of them seem to include relatively arbitrary injunctions, and as a geek most of them seem both over-complicated and over-specified, and yet still riddled with unhandled edge-cases.

Take the Ten Commandments, for example:

I am the Lord your God
You shall have no other gods before me/You shall not make for yourself an idol
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
Honor your father and mother
You shall not murder
You shall not commit adultery
You shall not steal
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
You shall not covet your neighbour's wife/You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbour

As a modern weak atheist there seem to be some obvious errors or redundancies there:

The first two injunctions presuppose a belief in supernatural entity, so as someone who finds no rational reason to believe in a supernatural entity, these seem suspect or redundant. Firstly they could be better summarised as "Do not believe in any gods other than me". Secondly, unless God can himself demonstrate his moral authority (instead of, as most religions do, simply assuming it) they seem more concerned with promoting and propagating one religion than with laying down universal moral rules to live by.
The latter half of the Second Commandment seems to contradict the First Commandment and the first half of the Second. As a non-Christian, I would define an idol as an entity which is worshipped blindly and absolutely. This definitely includes the Christian God. Alternatively, one can take the assumed definition in context as "anything other than the Christian God"; but then (as above) it amounts to an empty re-iteration of the first commandment-and-a-half, which themselves rely on the undemonstrated assumption that the Christian God is an absolute moral authority.
The third again seems unnecessary - why should a system of morality define it as immoral to take the name of its creator in vain? A system of morality should stand up on its own to reasonable argument, and defining veneration of its creator as a moral requirement frankly sounds far too much like begging the question.
The fourth is simply redundant - why should a moral system concern itself with keeping a day of the week specifically marked out? Admittedly there may be some social benefits to setting aside a whole day of the week for adherents to remember and reflect upon their moral choices, but I don't see why such an injunction is morally good, rather than simply a good idea.
The fifth is again a good idea, but too over-simplified and prone to edge-cases. Sure honouring your parents is good for social stability, but what if your father is a deadbeat dad and your mother a shiftless crackhead? This commandment smacks entirely too much of the kind of unconditional, assumed authority that typifies the Ten Commandments, and is far too incomplete to serve as a good rule. Moreover, why should parents get special treatment? Why not simply honour anyone who is wiser, more intelligent or more experienced than you?
The sixth through ninth are pretty good, prohibiting murder, adultery, theft and lying. However, you have to be careful with definitions - for example, distinguishing between "murder" and "killing", which may include self-defence or defence of a third party). Moreover, I can't help wonder if these are overly specific, leaving out whole classes of immoral behaviour not explicitly prohibited. Take "dropping litter in public", for example - most of us would agree that it's a comparatively moral issue, and yet it's not covered by these four injunctions.
Leaving aside the implication that a wife is a possession to be owned, the tenth is again pretty good - I've always understood this as an injunction to try not to feel jealousy (because it's frequently a sterile, unproductive emotion), but rather to concentrate on bettering your own life and resist the temptation to waste it wishing you had someone else's.

Clearly, then, there's a lot of fat that could be cut, and a lot of edge-cases to handle.

Instead, I present my best stab at a moral system. It's only two injunctions:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, at the highest level of abstraction possible.
Always seek to minimise harm in the long run.

There are a couple of subtle but key points here.

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a pretty good moral system on its own, but the addition of "at the highest level of abstraction possible" removes edge-cases and makes it a lot more specific and defensible.

For example, it would now prohibit a masochist excusing undesired violence against others on the basis that he liked to receive violence himself. Rather, he is now constrained to consider their wishes when deciding whether it's acceptable to hurt others, rather than simply the shallow fact of his actions.

The second injunction is a somewhat Utilitarian attempt to minimise the total amount of harm in the world (where we define harm in the usual way, as "physical or mental damage").

This prohibits short-termism in decision-making (which often merely saves up problems or harm for later, possibly even increasing the total amount of harm).

It also allows for harm to be caused where necessary, but only where such harm is in the service of preventing greater harm - this would permit otherwise difficult moral choices, such as the hypothetical "killing a single child to prevent a nuclear weapon going off in a major city".

More trivially, it also permits things like "contradicting someone you believe is incorrect", but when considered in conjunction with the first, only if you're happy being contradicted or corrected by others in turn. It also effectively prohibits you from debating others' positions unless you're equally willing to give their arguments due consideration.

So that's it. The first injunction prohibits most non-victimless crimes, because we would all rather not be the victim of them, and the second permits harm to come to others, but only if we can reasonably assert that it will prevent greater harm elsewhere, or in the future.

With a little reasoning, as far as I can tell, every action or injunction we can reasonable justify as "moral" seems to be derived from these two principles.

Geeks can be hard to work with

2010-05-15T15:29:00.003+01:00

Geeks and especially programmers often have strong belief in "doing things right". People have remarked on this tendency, and given it a variety of negative characterisations: obsessive-compulsive, irrational, making a moral issue out of a pragmatic question.

As a geek and a programmer, I put my hands up to this stereotype - it doesn't affect us all, but enough of us (myself included) have some degree of it that I don't think it's inaccurate. However, I believe that far from being a drawback, it's arguably a vital component of a gifted developer.

I think this urge toward technical correctness comes from three main sources:

Obsessive-compulsiveness

Good programmers spend a lot of their time thinking in details - they have to, to be able to write reliable code. Programmers who gloss over or fudge details write buggy code with unhandled and unknown edge-cases.

Importantly, this code usually "sort-of" works most of the time (or at least, the obviously broken bits quickly get patched), and then occasionally fails spectacularly and catastrophically... at which point it's also usually blamed on the programmer who wrote it, rather than the manager who specified an over-complex requirement, or who provided an unreasonably small amount of resources (time, money, manpower) to achieve it.

Being a programmer is 50% artistic and 50% autistic, so it's hardly surprising that programmers can be a bit Aspergers-y about their code, especially when they're likely to carry the can for any catastrophic failures caused by it.

Artistic merit

Any programmer who isn't a journeyman or hack does the job because they like to create things, and as you get better mere creation isn't satisfying - instead you want to create things of beauty.

It's been noted before that (many or most good) programmers are makers - we need to feel that what we're creating reflects our abilities - something we'd be happy to put our name to - and we like delivering good, reliable, flexible, well-designed systems.

Banging out code or design you know is buggy, unreliable, inflexible or has unhandled edge-cases is simply not rewarding in the slightest. It's like hiring an artist to paint a wall blue, or hiring a sprinter to walk slowly to the shops for you.

To be fair, this is a very wishy-washy, non-business-oriented motivation, but I'd go so far as to say pretty much all the best programmers suffer from it - it seems to go with the territory, and not just from programmers, either - chefs are notoriously histrionic, artists are notoriously high-strung about their work and musicians are notoriously unstable or prone to mental illnesses. I don't think you can have excellence without pride in the work, and I don't think you can have pride in work without disillusionment and frustration when you're forced to churn out work you know is crap.

Pragmatism

I've been privately or professionally involved in software development for around 15 years. I've worked in a variety of companies, in a variety of languages and systems, and with a variety of different management styles.

Across all companies, management structures, languages, technologies and system there are only two things I'm utterly certain of:

Given the choice between a longer/more expensive design and a simpler, less flexible one, management will almost always say "design it to the current requirements, because we'll never need <hypothetical scenario X>, and it would be a waste of time to build a system which takes it into account".
From the date of hearing this, within six months to a year they will discover a pressing, immediate, unavoidable and business-critical need for scenario X... and if they don't react well to being told that this will now take longer to accommodate, they often react really badly to being gently informed this is the result of the decision they took several months previously, at which point you (or your predecessor) informed them that this would be the consequence if they ever encountered scenario X.

Personally I try very hard to avoid taking dogmatic positions on anything, but in the years I've spent programming (especially professionally, when you're most likely to have to compromise on the design or implementation to hit deadlines or budgets), I - literally, with no exaggeration - don't believe I've ever heard "we'll never need that" and then not had to implement it (whatever it was) within a few months of that date.

This only has to happen a few times (especially when you're responsible for cleaning up the mess) before you become firmly convinced that creating a system that's any less flexible than you can possibly manage is ultimately tantamount to just fucking yourself square in the ass.

There are reasons...

So yes - there are a number of reasons why programmers are obsessed with Doing The Right Thing, and why we tend to react with aesthetic revulsion to the idea of fudging designs, or hard-coding things for convenience.

Some of them are unfortunate but understood and accommodated in other disciplines - try commissioning an artist to produce art for your offices then ban him from using anything except potato-prints, or tell an architect (for deadline/budget reasons) to design you a building that they know damn well could fall down at any moment.

Others are actually vital aspects of being a programmer that you can't easily switch on and off - athletes have to be fit, programmers have to be anally-retentive and precise - and that you really wouldn't want to do without in your dev team.

Lastly, if you're a non-technical co-worker or manager, programmers often have a lot more experience working on software projects than you do, and have learned hard-won lessons you aren't even aware are available to learn... particularly lessons where they have to pick up the pieces from their own (or other people's) mistakes.

So yeah, geeks can be hard to work with. But then the guy who knows where the landmines are buried can be awfully prescriptive about where you put your feet as you navigate through a minefield, too. And unless you want your feet blown off, it's often worth listening to them.

The feeling you're about to get smarter

2010-04-29T21:22:00.002+01:00

As you might have noticed if you read this blog, I'm quite an aggressive rationalist - I'm big on introspection, and strive to be as rational, consistent and justified in my beliefs as possible. If someone demonstrates to me conclusively that I'm wrong I'll generally (at least: I'll try to) reverse my position on a dime.

Because I try not to invest identity in my opinions it's usually not too difficult to change a belief or position when new information or reasoning comes along. However, even I'll admit that despite my efforts in this area, It's Not Fun Being Wrong.

In particular, everyone hates that point in a discussion that most rational people experience occasionally, where you discover your argument has a gaping hole in it. You know the one - you get that sick, empty, vertiginous, see-sawing feeling where it feels like you've inched yourself out over a long drop because you trusted the plank you were standing on, only to notice now that it was apparently made of cardboard the whole time.

However, I've realised recently, that feeling is exciting and scary, but it should be savoured and sought-after, because it's the feeling you're about to get smarter.

It may feel unpleasant, but that doesn't mean it should be unpleasant - that's much more down to what we associate with the feeling than the feeling itself. For example, a muscular ache is rarely considered pleasant... and yet after a good workout we can even enjoy it. This is because - while the feeling is the same - when we've worked out hard out we often feel virtuous, and good about ourselves. Although our muscles ache, every time we notice it it's a reminder that we did something we think of as good, and that we're slightly fitter or healthier now (or can just eat an extra cream cake without feeling guilty) as a result.

Equally, it's usually unpleasant to have our insides jangled about, or to feel like we're falling, or to be out of control... and yet many people love roller-coasters. It's unpleasant to be frightened... but some people will watch horror movies for fun.

In every case, the important difference is that although the sensation might be unpleasant on its own, we recognise in each case that we're getting something greater out of it, that makes the uncomfortable sensation worth-while - health and fitness, or novelty, or entertainment and feeling more secure the rest of the time. Indeed, when we associate it strongly enough, you can find yourself searching out these unpleasant sensations, and relishing the discomfort because of what it signifies.

"Being wrong" is one such unpleasant sensation, but as pointed out above, it's actually the feeling that you've just become smarter. This is unambiguously a good thing... and yet we generally don't realise or acknowledge to ourselves that that's what's happening, so people often simply fixate on (or even actively, instinctively try to avoid) the unpleasant sensation.

What this means, then, is that as humans we very deeply, subconsciously, instinctively try to stop ourselves from becoming smarter, and we don't even realise we're doing it. Whatever we consciously tell ourselves, subconsciously we would rather feel good about ourselves and be wrong than be correct or rational in our opinions.

As you're reading this blog, I'll assume you're the kind of person who would rather be right (even if it's uncomfortable) than deluded but confident. This, then, is clearly a problem.

What to do about it?

The good news is that - because it's a subconscious association, it's malleable. You can change and modify (even, as we've seen, completely reverse) these associations with a little effort.

Try the following: next time you realise (or someone proves) you're wrong about something, stop and consciously acknowledge it to yourself. Try to hold and really feel that sensation of being wrong. Try to consciously acknowledge and analyse the emotions you're feeling - are you embarrassed? Ashamed? Annoyed? At the other person or yourself? Do you suddenly feel less sure of your place in the world, or your opinions on certain subjects? Can you feel that bruise on your ego?

Be brutally honest with yourself - if it helps, if you don't feel any of the above (or something similar), you're probably not human.

Now you're fully engaged, and aware of how you feel, try to modify it. Acknowledge that you're feeling bad, but remind yourself it's only because your ego is wounded. Realise that the only thing making you feel bad is egotism, but that even that is both instinctive (ie, uncontrollable and not your fault), and a normal part of being human.

Remind yourself that you want to be smart and right and rational about things, and remind yourself that what you're feeling is the feeling of getting smarter, that that's unambiguously good. Try to explicitly relate the uncomfortable sensation to the positive feelings you have about being smart, or correct, or rational in your beliefs. Nice, isn't it? So, like exercise, or taking care of paperwork, that feeling you initially shied away from or avoided is actually a good thing, even if it's briefly uncomfortable in the short term.

Once you're smarter or more right about a subject, you're generally smarter or more right about it for the rest of your life. Isn't that worth a brief, temporary, silly little sting?

Now you've got the hang of it, go out and try to find things you're wrong about. Read up on subjects that interest you. Challenge your beliefs and attitudes by seeking out dissenting opinions and viewpoints, and see if you can prove your existing opinions wrong. Treat it like an intellectual game of conkers - every time you're proven wrong you get a little bit smarter, and every time you win a debate you can reward yourself by being a little more confident in that opinion or line of reasoning.

Test your ideas by subjecting them to challenges, discard the ones which fail and adopt the ones which succeed. And remember - the whole time you're doing it, you're becoming smarter, more educated and more rational.

It's not a moral question, it's a simple impedance mismatch

2010-02-17T21:19:00.011Z

I was talking with my girlfriend about housework the other day, when I came to a realisation I think explains a lot of the common niggling disputes between men and women (especially men and women in relationships, or who cohabit).

I should probably emphasise first that what I'm discussing here are general trends I've noticed in the genders - when I refer to "men" or "women" I'm discussing these general trends, and nothing in this post necessarily applies to any specific individual or small group of them.

I should also emphasise that my girlfriend is a wonderful, caring, kind woman, and nothing about this specific issue should in any way reflect on her character. Despite our odd little disagreements she's challenging, intelligent and awesome, and I'd hate to imply otherwise.

Moral questions vs. impedance mismatches

Briefly then, my girlfriend always used to get annoyed that our two flatmates (both male) rarely did the washing up - she would get endlessly pissed off that they "were happy to use clean plates where they were available", but always "left it for her to do" when it came to actually washing them.

Now, I know from times when she's been away that they're perfectly happy to do the washing up, but - being slobby, single young guys - they'd rather let a whole load mount up over the course of three of fours days (washing up individual items if required during this time), then tackle the whole lot in one go a couple of times a week.

Basically, my girlfriend prefers a clean kitchen as often as possible (a "little-but-often" strategy to washing up), but because my flatmates aren't bothered by dirty washing next to the sink they prefer to minimise the frequency of washing up they have to do, even if it means doing more when they do do it (a just-in-time washing up strategy, combined with a "rarely-but-a-lot" strategy that occasionally clears the lot).

From my girlfriend's point of view washed plates were "clearly" objectively good and dirty washing up was "clearly" objectively bad, so they were selfishly taking advantage of her and using her as a washing up skivvy, and (as the apparently aggrieved party) she understandably got quite annoyed about this.

However, from my flatmates' point of view clean or dirty plates were both relatively neutral prospects, so by making an arbitrary judgement and then trying to pressure everyone else into doing what she wanted, my girlfriend appeared (being uncharitable) to be an obsessive-compulsive nutter who was constantly cleaning, then getting all annoyed and frustrated with them because they weren't as "unreasonably obsessive" about it as she was.

The key thing here is that neither party was right - rather than a moral or objective right/wrong issue it's a simple impedance mismatch between two different styles of housekeeping.

As long as you don't leave food on the plates to rot and you have enough crockery/cutlery to use there's nothing morally, scientifically or legally wrong with leaving the washing up for a couple of days, then doing it all in one go.

My girlfriend was choosing to tackle the washing up every evening because she "can't relax properly in a dirty house" then essentially blaming the flatmates for not being the same type of person as her.

My flatmates were leaving the washing up, because they're the kind of people who can only relax when they don't have an hour or so's washing up hanging over their heads to be done later in the evening. And as a result they were allowing my girlfriend to do more than her fair share.

To their credit they didn't tend to see it as a value judgement either, so (unsurprisingly given their less-than-fair workload) they didn't tend to judge my girlfriend for her irritation with them. They were more puzzled and confused as to how and why she thought she was entitled to the moral high-ground (especially when there was none to be had) than offended.

In many relationships this mechanism generalises to much/all of the housework, and appears to be a common cause of domestic friction in couples and families.

Another example - should the toilet seat be left up or down?

Another example is the perennial and endless inter-gender wrangling about whether the toilet seat should be left up or down. A lot of women I know see the toilet seat as the same sort of moral issue/value judgement, and request or require that the man put the seat down when he's finished peeing.

When asked why, the most common response is "it looks nicer down", but most men honestly don't care either way, so it looks pretty much the same to us. Moreover, we reason, if it looks nicer with the loo seat down then surely it looks nicest of all with the lid down as well... and yet very few women will make a point of doing that.

The first point suggests to us that it's just an arbitrary, amoral preference rather than a real moral issue, and the second makes it look like an arbitrary and irrational preference at that - regardless of the reasons claimed, women as a group seem to just disingenuously prefer the most convenient option for them, rather than the genuinely nicest-looking one which would put us both out equally.

This is the root of a common objection by men - "well, fair's fair," we think - "the most convenient option for us is to keep the lid up, so why don't you put it back up when you're done?" This is an (admittedly ham-fisted and ill-expressed) attempt to highlight that mere convenience is an inadequate rationale, because it cuts both ways and cancels itself out.

We're trying to explain that we see it as an equal, arbitrary choice with the other party unfairly imposing their choice upon us, rather than the irrational resistance and stubborn attempt to achieve victory that many women apparently see it as.

Since I first noticed this dynamic with the washing-up issue, I've come to realise that this mistaking of simple impedance mismatches for objective moral value-judgements is an incredibly common source of inter-gender friction.

So next time you find yourself in one of those clichéd wrangles, try considering this model, and see if you can isolate and explain the impedance mismatch to the other person instead of merely following the script and getting nowhere.

As I said, lest anyone jump to conclusions my girlfriend is a wonderful woman, but all relationships have these sorts of little niggles, especially when you begin cohabiting. Ever since I realised and explained this process, we've found it much easier to both accommodate the other's desires - she doesn't get so wound up about perceived "taking advantage" of her, and I (and my flatmates) don't mind pitching in and helping out more with the washing up, because we understand now why she was so insistent about doing it so regularly.

Coda - a plea for assistance

Finally, I'm acutely aware that the two examples above both involve the female partner jumping to make the moral judgement, and not the male. I certainly don't intend to imply this is typically (or even mostly) the case, but I've had a hard time so far coming up with examples of "men" as a group commonly doing it... though it's entirely possible that I'm fundamentally unqualified to do so, by reason of my maleness!

However, I really hesitate to lay the "blame" for these issues generally on the female half of the couple, so I'd be fascinated if any commenters could offer any examples from the female perspective - things that you (or "women generally") really don't care about, but which men tend to instinctively assume is some sort of objective or moral value-judgement.

If so, please do drop me a comment and let me know. ;-)

There are fewer conspiracies than theorists think, but you should still listen carefully to them

2010-01-17T23:17:00.021Z

Being online for the last 15 years, and having a strong (if sceptical) fascination with conspiracy theories I've run into quite a few over the years.

Many are clearly and obviously ridiculous on the face of them, while others somehow suddenly turn from "ridiculous paranoid fantasy" into "boring history" in the public consciousness - usually (and oddly) without ever passing through the stage of "important and shocking revelation" in-between.

Obviously these days (after years of the X Files and similar cultural touchstones) "conspiracy theory" is a loaded and negative label, and most people instinctively disregard anything described as such. However, I think this is somewhat unfair - there are more conspiracies out there than people typically realise, and they've often played a much larger role in shaping the world than most people give them credit for, even starting wars, bringing down presidents and contributing to the maiming or deaths of hundreds of innocent citizens.

In addition to the "obviously idiotic" and the "obvious-with-hindsight", I believe there is a class of conspiracy theories which - while incomplete and mis-attributed - still conceal a nugget of truth and worthwhile insight, as long as you disregard their more fanciful claims.

As an example, with the rise in filtering systems and various countries' attempts to filter the net, the meme is gaining strength that these are simply cynical excuses by authoritarian governments to restrict their citizens' freedom, and censor the public discourse.

These concerns are persuasive in that they recognise the problems with such systems - that once in place they only tend to ratchet tighter, and that people will accept any amount of change as long as it's introduced in small enough increments. However, systems like censorship (and by extension even really huge conspiracy theories like the idea of the so-called New World Order - an internationalist/globalist conspiracy to dissolve national boundaries and unite the world under one global government) wouldn't necessarily even require a conscious conspiracy.

These trends (if they exist) aren't some Machiavellian super-conspiracy implemented by a smoky room full of the rich and powerful - they're simply the emergent behaviour of lots and lots of different people, all following their own, parochial agendas, who find themselves (often quite unconsciously, or inadvertently) all pushing society in a similar direction.

Returning to net censorship, what happens is that one short-sighted government puts a filtering system in place to filter out "unambiguously evil" content like child pornography, and then later on that mechanism is inherited by later governments, who have their own ideas about what's considered ban-worthy.

Successive governments only encroach on freedom a tiny bit from the previous government, but every time someone complains you get people shouting down dissenters on the grounds "it's only a trivial change, so why are you getting so bent out of shape about it?", or the ever-popular "Yeah, but X is evil - how can you not want X filtered out?" (where X is "terrorism", "hate speech", "child pornography" or the current bête noire.

The other important part of this process is that it's a ratchet effect. Almost no government - short of massive upheaval like a revolution or regime-change - is going to ease off on the filtering, because firstly there's no political capital in doing so, and secondly it would make them look soft on terrorism/paedophilia/whatever the current reason is.

So you have a mechanism where controls ratchet ever-tighter, it's practically impossible to ever loosen them short of a major social upheaval, each step is such a tiny one that people can't emotionally appreciate the importance of resisting it, and anyone who does resist is easily dismissed as reacting disproportionately, or being actively in favour of terrorists, or paedophilia, or whatever the excuse du jour is for "just tightening restrictions a little bit, just this once".

Importantly, and this can't be said enough, this doesn't even require a Machiavellian conspiracy or a particularly authoritarian government behind it - it can happen simply by lots of honest but short-sighted people of good conscience just doing what they think is for the greatest good... but if allowed to run unchecked (and as previously indicated, it's hard to check it without looking like a lunatic or conspiracy theorist) it still ends up in a more restrictive, less free, more authoritarian state in the end.

Project this trend far enough ahead (a few decades is usually enough, although sometimes as little as one will do) and you can quite easily get from an open, successful democratic society to an authoritarian police-state with no large or jarring social upheavals required.

This is exactly why it's so vitally important to never, ever grant any additional powers to any government unless they're absolutely unarguably necessary, and even then grant them for a limited span of time, and never, ever renew them unless there's a proven requirement to do so (ie, never renew because it's the default position to keep the law on the books, as was arguably the case with the PATRIOT Act renewal in 2005/2006).

Plenty of people instinctively recognise themes and trends like these, but a common cognitive illusion called an overactive sense of external agency (PDF warning) causes them to mistake simple but counter-intuitive emergent behaviour for a conscious, intentional conspiracy. This makes them easy to dismiss as paranoid or crazy, and makes it easy for others to dismiss both them and any legitimate trend they've identified (an example of the Association Fallacy, also known as damning by association).

Clearly I'm not suggesting that all (or even most) conspiracy theories are realistic, accurate or plausible. However, if you run across one it's always worth making an effort to separate out the What and the How from the Who and the Why, and seeing if the processes and effects it describes have any validity on their own.

If someone tells you that a concerted cabal of international bankers and financiers are attempting to bring together and integrate the disparate economies of the world, dissolving national sovereignty and bring the world to heel under one world government made up of shape-changing lizards, you can safely laugh at the lizards.

However, shorn of its intentional (and sensationalist) nature, there is a distinct trend towards economic and political integration in international politics, the advent of the internet and international trade deals have inadvertently acted to make national boundaries progressively more porous, and increasing geopolitical integration necessarily reduces national sovereignty somewhat.

When you put it like that it's boring and mundane, but wild-eyed, crazy-haired conspiracy theorists have been pointing out the What of it since the 70s or 80s, and - vaccinated against listening by their kook-like presentation and the cultural stereotype of the "crazy conspiracy theorist" - most of us still aren't even consciously aware it's going on.

I find that extremely interesting, although I ascribe to it no particular group, agenda or intent.

Say it with me: dumb ideas are dumb

2009-12-30T04:18:00.015Z

There is a prevalent and dangerous meme rife in society today, and though some people may find the following offensive, judgemental or unfashionable, I believe it needs to be said. Your forbearance is therefore appreciated while I do so. ;-)

First, some axioms. These should be unarguable:

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
Not everyone's opinions is as valid, useful or has as much merit as everyone else's in every single situation.
Nobody is entitled to their own facts.
You have freedom of speech, thought and association. You do not have freedom from criticism, freedom from offence or freedom from correction.

The problem happened where the first axiom (a healthy recognition that other people have different opinions) turned into the second and subsequent beliefs; that everyone's opinion is equally valid, and that contradicting someone in error is impolite, arrogant or somehow infringing on their freedoms.

One look in some Lit Crit classrooms will show you what happens when you aren't allowed to contradict or dispute someone else's opinions, and one look in a politicised fundamentalist church will show you what happens when you believe you're allowed your own facts, instead of just your own opinions.

And while people might enjoy studying Lit Crit or subscribe to fundamentalist religions, if they've got any sense they'll notice that people acting in either of these two roles have rarely done anything tangible to better the overall lot of their fellow man... unlike all those rude, elitist, judgemental, snobby scientists, engineers, geeks and other educated types (who instinctively recognise that ideas vary in quality and efficacy, and have therefore been quietly and industriously changing the world for the better for the last few hundred years).

The Western world (ably lead, as ever, by America) is learning the hard way what happens when you confuse recognition of existence of everyone's opinions with equality or worth of everyone's opinions. Moreover, while we mouth thought-terminating clichés like "everyone deserves an equal say", we routinely disregard them in practice. Who seriously consults their toddler in the back seat on how to get home when lost in the car? Who leaves their neurosurgeon's office and seeks a second opinion from their local garage mechanic?

It's ok to judge and disregard things which demonstrably have no merit. We commonly all agree that "all people" deserve some sort of minimum baseline freedoms, protection, treatment and standard of living. And yet we still deny some of those benefits to those people who we have judged and found undeserving of them or actively dangerous (imprisoned criminals, for example).

We try to pretend that all ideas are equal, but it's not true - some ideas are brilliant, explanatory and useful, but some are stupid, dangerous or self-destructive. And refusing to judge them and pretending those ideas are harmless, valid or beneficial has much the same effect on society in the long term as refusing to judge dangerous people would have on society - internal chaos and developmental stagnation.

We don't have to ban stupid ideas or opinions, like we don't have to kill criminals. Instead we isolate criminals using jails so they can't damage society any more.

We can do the same with ideas, simply by agreeing they're dumb.

Refusing to publicly label a dumb idea "dumb" for fear of offending someone is - long term - as bad for our culture and society as refusing to lock away criminals "because their families might be upset".

Although it's unpopular to point out, sometimes people and ideas need to be judged for the good of society, even if it does end up upsetting or offending some people.

For the last decade or two - beginning around the advent of political correctness, though I suspect that was a symptom rather than a cause - we've done the intellectual equivalent of systematically dismantling the judicial system and all the courts and prisons in society. Now - in the same way if we dismantled all the prisons we'd be overrun with criminals - we're overrun with stupid ideas, unqualified but strongly-expressed opinions and people who act as if they can choose their own facts.

The only way you can help redress this situation is by not being afraid to offend people - if someone says something stupid, call them on it. Politely but firmly correct when people make erroneous claims. Question badly-thought-out ideas, and don't let people get away with hand-waving or reasoning based on obvious flaws or known logical fallacies. Yes they'll get annoyed, and yes they'll choose to take offence, but we don't free criminals because they or their families are "offended" at their having to stay in prison. They are there - largely - because they deserved and invited it, and because the world is better with them there. Likewise, dumb ideas deserve and invite correction, and the world would be a better place for everybody if more people judged and criticised them when we came across them.

Sometimes uncomfortable things do need to happen to people, and certainly if they invite them. There's no advancement without the possibility of failure, and removing the opportunity for failure removes the opportunity to develop. If no-one ever tells you you're wrong, how will you ever learn?

But most important of all, while judging people is unfashionable, can be dangerous and should largely be left to trained professionals, don't ever be afraid to judge ideas.

Internet memes are not without purpose

2009-12-30T03:31:00.009Z

Internet Memes get a lot of stick - they're usually considered mildly amusing at best, and sterile, content-free, mindless, bovine group-think at worst. However, both these assessments are incomplete - they fall into the trap of judging memes as "good" or "bad", instead of asking "why they are" at all.

Memes aren't just jokes - they're the way we form bonds and generate shared context in distributed virtual communities, just like "living near" and "saying hello every day" were the ways we formed context and social bonds in physical, centralised communities like villages, and "chatting around the water-cooler" and "bitching about the boss" are ways we form social bonds and shared context at work.

Part of the problem in society is that as we centralise in huge cities with too many people we don't know we lose the feeling of belonging to a distinct community, which is why city life can be so isolating for some, and others fulfil the need elsewhere (churches, sports teams, hobby/interest clubs, etc).

The only difference between this and the kind of people who make up the core of communities like reddit, Fark or 4chan is that instead of physically going somewhere to interact with other community-members, we're geographically separated and typically a lot more diverse in terms of outlook, age, race, physical appearance and interests.

This means that - for a community to form - we require shared context and some way of differentiating between people "in the community" and those out of it. This is where memes, references and in-jokes come it... and it's also why we have terms like "redditor" or "digger", instead of "people who read reddit" or "people who read Digg".

You can even compare different kinds of communities, and memes seem overwhelmingly to arise where other, more traditional forms of shared-context-building are unavailable or inapplicable:

At one extreme, memes rarely arise in traditional physical communities - it's pretty rare where a village - say - gives birth to catchphrases or memes, because the community already has plenty of shared context from living in the same region, sharing the same culture and language, sharing largely the same core beliefs and seeing each other regularly.
TV shows pioneered the way, where catchphrases and quotes (though typically only a few per show) could be used to find and bond with like-minded individuals when we encountered them, even though we didn't necessarily live near them, or see them regularly.
Moving online, sites like Facebook are still largely clustered around groups of people who have some real-world relationship, and though people occasionally make use of imported memes from other communities for the purpose of humour, for this reason these sites still rarely give birth to new memes.
More frequently, memes arise from forums (fora?) or social news sites like Slashdot, reddit and Digg. These are sites with a strictly limited ability to share context - their communities are culturally, socially and intellectually extraordinarily diverse, and stories are posted (and disappear beneath later submissions) so fast that there's no guarantee that any two individuals will have seen the same news or read the same content from one day to the next. Practically all that these sites offer in the way of shared-context-building is the ability to recognise the usernames of other users when they post, which - with the sheer number of users - is a wildly inadequate method to generate strong social bonds.
Most clearly of all, 4chan is a website which is prolific in the generation of new memes - indeed, many memes which users of other sites assume originated there in fact originated on 4chan. 4chan is also unusual in that it does not enforce uniqueness of username, but instead assigns a deeply unmemorable number as the only guarantee that a given "Bob Smith" is the same as a "Bob Smith" whose comments you remember reading previously. In fact, 4chan even allows completely anonymous posting, and in 4chan's most famous meme-originating boards (/b/ and others) the overwhelming majority of posters post anonymously. This means that users are literally bereft of any way to reliably recognise each other or establish a sense of community, and they're simultaneously the most prolific creators of internet memes.

You can see from this trend that memes are a distinct method of community-building, almost unknown in human history, which has largely evolved in the last few decades in response to the increasing isolation of modern life, with its lack of traditional ways to build shared context or easily encounter familiar individuals.

When you get right down to it we're social monkeys, who are usually happiest in a tribe of one kind or another. Due to lifestyle and technology how we form and maintain those tribes is changing, even in the last a few years, and if we can resist the temptation to dismissively complain about this emergent behaviour it can teach us a lot - both about ourselves and about the new kinds of communities we are forming.

Your Kids Aren't Lazy; They're Just Smarter Than You

2009-11-20T01:06:00.001Z

There's a recurring theme in the media, and in conversations with members of older generations, and it goes something like this:

"Kids these days have no concentration span. They're always Twittering or texting or instant messaging, and they're always playing these loud, flashy computer games instead of settling down to listen to the radio or read a good book. Computer games and the internet are ruining our kids minds! Won't someone think of the children?"

Oddly enough, these criticisms are often associated with complaints that "kids will spend all hours of the day on the bloody internet or playing these damned games, instead of going outside and climbing trees or riding their bikes", although nobody seems to see the inherent contradiction there.

In a nutshell it's this: surely if these kids really had poor attention spans they'd get bored of the game in short order and move onto something else? And if they lacked the ability for delayed gratification how would they manage to spend hours unlocking every achievement in Soul Calibur or grinding for loot on World of Warcraft?

I've been thinking for a while that much of the perceived "reduction in attention span" is merely kids getting bored with an activity that has inadequate input bandwidth to satisfy them.

For example, my grandparents could sit and listen to the radio with their eyes shut for hours on end, but the pathetically slow drip... drip... drip of information through the radio would rapidly drive me to distraction. Even my parents have trouble doing this - they usually listen to the radio while also doing other things, like household chores or driving.

Likewise, my parents can sit and watch TV for hours on end, but even this eventually bores me - being forced into passively watching and waiting for programmes to get to the point or adverts to finish leaves my brain with too much spare capacity - I either start to over-analyse the content of the show and get annoyed by the perceived agenda, or I start to get fidgety and end up picking up a book or going and doing something more engaging.

Conversely I can browse the web, program or play computer games for hours on end, and observation of most younger people will bear out that this is the norm, rather than the exception. The problem here is clearly not attention-span, or I'd rapidly get bored of surfing or gaming just as I get bored of the radio or TV.

The problem here is that with radio and TV the rate information comes to me is slower, and is determined by an external source - the broadcaster.

Conversely, when I'm playing a game or surfing the web the information-flow is limited only by my ability to absorb it. Result: my attention is fully engaged, I don't get fidgety or bored, and I'm happy indefinitely.

Books are another telling case: personally I love reading, and most "short attention span" kids I know who have a good reading-speed can still sit and read books (surely the least instantly-gratifying and most boring-looking of all media) indefinitely. Their reading-speed matches or exceeds their information-absorption rate, so they're happy.

On the other hand, even "normal" kids I know who have a slow reading-speed get bored and restless after only minutes of reading - even though their information-absorption rate is low, it's still higher than their reading-speed can provide, so they get bored.

I've noticed this in my grandparents, parents and myself, and I'm just past 30. I'd be frankly gob-smacked if this didn't apply to kids who'd only grown up in a world of globally-networked computers, millions of channels, the web at their fingertips and ever-increasing amounts of data to sift through.

It also raises questions about the sudden and questionable upsurge in diagnoses of low-grade ADHD and related disorders in young people over the last few years. Although in the more serious cases these are undoubtedly very real disorders, it's entirely possible that at the lower end much of what the older generation (and psycho-pharmaceuticals industry) perceive as pathological behaviour is simply plain old frustrated boredom in minds adapted to faster and better information-processing than they're capable of.

In summary, I suspect this phenomenon has little to do with "short attention spans", and everything to do with old media (still largely aimed at the older generations) appearing frustratingly slow and boring to ever-more-agile minds raised in our ever-more-information-rich society.

If this is true, this phenomenon could actually be a good thing - our brains are getting faster and better at information-processing, so things which seemed fun to our slower, less-capable ancestors now seem un-stimulating, or no better than momentary diversions.

However, generations who found crocheting or games of "tag" or charades the most amazingly fun experience in their lives now have to watch kids try their cherished childhood hobbies before discarding them as boring, trivial or simplistic.

It's therefore understandable that they find it a lot more comforting to automatically decide there's something wrong with kids today (a refrain that echoes down through the generations)... rather than realise that their own brains are by comparison so poor at information-processing that activities that were stimulating to them as children are just too simple for kids these days.

So piracy is killing the music and movie industries?

2009-07-29T20:08:00.008+01:00

The MPAA and RIAA (and their various non-USA equivalents) are famous for claiming that piracy (tapes, DVDs, digital downloads, etc) are "killing the [music/movie] industry".

Apart from the fact that these industry bodies (with a strong vested interest) have been claiming this ever since the introduction of 8-track tapes in the 1960s (and yet still the MPAA/RIAA lurch onward, living hand-to-mouth in their luxury penthouses, and somehow barely scraping by with continuing exponential growth ever since they first started making these claims), there's another problem with their claim:

The very day our culture stops producing popular music, television, news reports, novels, movies or art I will agree that "something needs to be done", about the expectation of free access, and would support instituting some sort of internet-wide micropayments system.

In fact, scratch "stops producing", and replace it with "noticeably slows production of". In fact, screw it all; scratch even that and instead substitute "stops continually increasing production of popular music, television, news reports, novels, movies or art".

Until then, commentary like this is simply worrying the sky will fall because you don't have the wit or imagination to develop new business models not based around repressive monopolies and artificial scarcity.

We had music as a species for long before we had trade bodies like the MPAA and RIAA around, and we'll have music long afterwards, too. The only difference is that in those times there wasn't an enormous, fat, unnecessary middle-man sat square between the artist and the audience, raking in cash hand over fist from both sides.^[1]

If newspapers start to die because they can't afford to give away their on-line content for free then they'll stop doing it, people's expectations will change, and they'll start paying for subscriptions.

Although I hate to sound like a (big-L) Libertarian, the market will sort this one out just fine if left to its own devices.

Claims that "music/movies" or "news" will die are really worries about the deaths of "the RIAA/MPAA" or "some news organs unable to adapt to the changing conditions".

Obviously, however, the thought that bloated dinosaurs who refuse to adapt to the technological advancement of our species might go extinct doesn't really bother people.

Hansom cab drivers were pretty pissed off at the idea of the motor-car, but they didn't form industry bodies and try to ban cars or trains. And now - a hundred or more years a later - aren't we really fucking glad they didn't?

Footnotes

[1] And although we didn't have movies for anything like as long, ever-cheaper video recording equipment, the increasing popularity of sites like Youtube and the ability of even basic modern desktop computers to create high-quality special effects shows that even high-quality movies aren't out of reach of the talented amateur.

Cognitive dissonance

2009-07-29T19:42:00.007+01:00

A reddit discussion came up recently, in relation to a recently-surfaced suppressed World Health Organisation report on global cocaine use, which concluded that the western "War on Drugs" is overblown, and that automatically criminalising all prohibited-drug users^[1] was counter-productive and unsupported by scientific evidence.

A comment was posted asking why - in the face of evidence, and after a conclusions by the experts tasked to investigate this very topic - governments and supporters would not only disregard the conclusions and evidence, but actively seek to suppress the report and the evidence it contains.

The answer is simple, and generalises to many different opinions and topics. Largely, it's because they're making decisions subconsciously and emotively, instead of consciously and/or rationally.

People holding these positions claim to be pro-prohibition because it "saves lives" (and that may well be how they initially started believing in it, or how they justify the belief to themselves and others), but when you believe something strongly enough for long enough it ends up becoming part of your identity. Then, if you're confronted by evidence your long-cherished belief is in fact wrong, you have one of two choices:

Reject the belief, and accept that - by some measure - you've wasted your life and been an idiot for however long you've held the opinion (possibly as much as your whole life up to that point!), or
Reject the evidence, and continue believing you're right.

Believing you're right is comfortable and safe, but believing you're wrong (and moreover, have been for years) is uncomfortable and scary. It's like having the rug yanked out from under you - first you have to find a defensible new position that you can take, and then you have to revisit every single opinion you hold that depended on the "wrong" one, and see if any of those also need changing in light of the new information.

This process takes effort, and may involve discarding many other ideas that you hold dear. This is - needless to say - highly unnerving and uncomfortable for most people.

Although it's irrational to the point of complete intellectual bankruptcy, when faced with this choice many people will simply (and irrationally) ignore the evidence to the contrary. They might go quiet and try to change the subject, they might bluster and try to shout you down, or they might declare that the contrary evidence or reasoning "offends them", and demand you stop out of politeness.

All of these things are simply tactics to get the inconvenient evidence to go away - believing something you know at some level to be false is normally easy when you don't think about it, but gets increasingly difficult and uncomfortable the closer the dichotomy rises to your conscious mind.

By offering counter-indicative evidence you force the cognitive dissonance closer to their conscious mind, so they become increasingly irritable and uncomfortable. However, the rationalisation process is almost entirely subconscious, so they often don't realise why they're getting worked up - all they know is that you're the cause of it, so they tend to become frustrated and irritated with you.

This is also why you can't easily persuade people out of irrational ideas, and why it's hard to have a good conversation about politics, religion or the like which doesn't end in offence or shouting.

The key problem(s) in the irrational person's psyche isn't saving face, it's one or more of:

Laziness - the person doesn't want to have to undergo the effort of re-evaluating all their beliefs, so they just don't.
Egocentricity - the person doesn't want to admit to themselves how wrong (or stupid, or duped) they were.
Excessive attachment to their present identity - the person is too attached to their present identity (for reasons of comfort, personal gain, etc) to allow themselves to accept that part of it might need changing.
Centrality of the opinion to who they are - the threatened belief is so central to the core of the person's identity and beliefs that re-evaluating it might leave them a largely different person (effectively, the current version of them might "die" in the process).

This approach explains many, many things that otherwise seem inexplicable - why it's so hard for people to leave religions, why it's so hard to convert people to another political party, why people continue to back politicians who violate the very tenets they espouse and why people will stick to comfort beliefs even in the face of absolute proof to the contrary.

The only way to cure someone of this kind of egotistical, emotive self-deception is to bring the cognitive dissonance to the surface, and show them how irrational it is.

Nevertheless, they'll fight you every step of the way, and if you force the issue they just end up seeing you as the enemy and disregarding what you show them.

It's a knotty problem, because you can't "cure" someone of identity-related emotive irrationality unless they want to be cured... but there are literally billions of people with these kind of incorrect or irrational opinions, and they're materially retarding the progress and development of the entire human race.

Footnotes

[1] Of course, legal-drug use - like caffeine, alcohol or tobacco - is usually considered perfectly ok, and ingesting any of these three is a right that would cause rioting in the streets if a government tried to ban it.

On homosexuality as a choice

2009-07-29T19:24:00.007+01:00

Many people - usually religious, right-wing "family values" types - claim that "homosexuality is a choice", and that one piece of legislation or another will "encourage kids to be gay".

This is the bit I don't get - even as a straight guy raised in a pretty liberal household, I've never once looked at the idea of hot gay buttsecks and thought "y'know, I think that's the sex for me!".

I'm straight and non-homophobic, but even offering tax-breaks and free ice-cream to gays wouldn't tempt me to indulge in hot man-loving.

I literally can't comprehend of someone examining their own feelings and deciding homosexuality was a choice, unless they're naturally inclined that way themselves and in viciously deep denial about it^[1] ("it's got to be a choice, so I can choose not to be gay!").

So when they say that X or Y will encourage homosexuality, what they actually mean is that it will encourage people who are naturally that way inclined to not live their lives miserable, unhappy and in denial, never knowing the companionship they crave and at constant war with their own essential nature, until they become bitter and twisted by their own unrelenting self-loathing.

It therefore appears that the correct response to "Homosexuality is a choice" is "Well maybe in your case, ducky".

Footnotes

[1] This is a truly fascinating study, and I thoroughly recommend reading it. A full version of the paper in (PDF format) is available here

Your opinion is worthless

2009-07-29T18:55:00.017+01:00

This is a slightly self-indulgent post, relating to website and forum discussions, rather than a generally-applicable epiphanette. Nevertheless, I think it's an important point, and one which far too few people understand...

I find when browsing internet discussion forums, when someone with a controversial or non-mainstream opinions posts and gets voted down I frequently run across run across comments similar to the following:

I find I get downmodded a lot because I'm a person willing to speak my mind. That makes a lot of the insecure people here (of which there are many!) uncomfortable, and to try and counter that they downmod my posts.

Straight to it: although sometimes the commenter has a point (people get very attached to their ideas, and can react irrationally when they're threatened), general attitudes like this always make me uncomfortable, because they smack of self-delusion and comfort-beliefs.

Everyone has some element of this in their thinking, but it's rarely justified. As an experiment, consider the following:

Aside from your own clearly-biased personal opinion of your posts, what evidence do you have that your thoughts or beliefs are generally:

Insightful
Interesting
Well-expressed, or
Correct?

Secondly, how many people - even really stupid, boring people - do you think get up in the morning, look in the mirror and think "shit man, I'm a really windy, boring, unoriginal fucker", and then spend a lot of time expressing their opinions to others?

Most people think what they have to say is insightful, interesting, adequately-expressed and correct, or they wouldn't bother posting it.

Now, this idea is correct in that some people vote down anything which contradicts the prevailing wisdom, but people also vote down things which are wrong, stupid, ridiculous or badly-expressed.

Conversely, I know from repeated personal experience that in many communities a well-written, well-argued, non-whingey post which counters the prevailing wisdom frequently still gets a high score, sometimes because of its contrary position.

I know when I post all I have to go on is my own opinion of my posts, which (as we've established) is almost laughably unreliable. Instead, the votes my posts get serve as a useful barometer of how much my opinion of a well-written, well-argued post compares with the general opinion.

It's terribly flattering to think of oneself as a persecuted martyr, but it also usually requires a lot of egotism and a willing blindness to statistics.

To quote the great Carl Sagan:

They laughed at Galileo... but they also laughed at Bozo the clown.

Given a poster's personal opinion is biased to the point it's worthless, and given there are many more clowns in the world than misunderstood geniuses, on what basis do people claim to be downmodded for the content of their opinions, rather than for their worth, or the reliability of the arguments they use to support them?

Claiming you're being downvoted simply because your opinions run counter to the prevailing wisdom, rather than simply because you're self-important or wrong requires you to not only assume you're vastly more intelligent or educated than the average person, but also that most people voting you down are doing so because of a deficiency in their psychology, rather than your own.

When all the objective evidence you have is that a lot of other people disagree with you, it's terribly tempting to believe you're a misunderstood intellectual martyr like Galileo.

The trouble with this, of course, is that while paradigm-shifting geniuses like Galileo only come along a few times a generation, we're knee-deep in idiots, and the tide is rising.

There are literally thousands of times more idiots than geniuses, so claiming you must be a genius on the basis you were voted down doesn't mean you're a genius - it means not only are you overwhelmingly likely to be a self-important idiot, but you're also bad at maths.

Act appropriately.

The myth of idiot-proofing

2009-06-18T23:19:00.001+01:00

Idiot-proofing is a myth. Attempting to simplify an over-complex task is good, but be careful how you do it - beyond a certain point you aren't idiot-proofing, just idiot-enabling.

Three classes of tool

Tools (like programming languages, IDEs, applications and even physical tools) can be grouped into three loose categories: idiot-prohibiting, idiot-proof and the merely idiot-enabling.

Idiot-prohibiting tools are those which are effectively impossible to do anything useful with unless you've at least taken some steps towards learning the subject - tools like assembly language, or C, or Emacs. Jumping straight into assembly without any idea what you're doing and typing code to see what happens will never, ever generate you a useful program.

Perhaps "prohibiting" is too strong a word - rather than prohibiting idiots these tools may only discourage naive users. These idiot-discouraging tools are those with which it's possible to get some results, but which leave you in no doubt as to your level of ability - tools like perl, or the W3C XHTML validator. Sure you might be able to open a blank .html or .pl file and write a few lines of likely-looking pseudocode, but if you want to have your HTML validate (or your Perl code actually do anything useful and expected), you're soon going to be confronted with a screen-full of errors, and you're going to have to stop, study and get to grips with the details of the system. You're going to have to spend time learning how to use the tool, and along the way you'll practice the skills you need to get good at what you're doing.

The myth of idiot-proofing

Garbage in, garbage out is an axiom of computing. It's generally impossible to design a system such that it's completely impossible for someone sufficiently incompetent to screw it up - as the old saw goes: "make something idiot-proof and they'll invent a better idiot".

A natural fall-out consequence of this is that making anything completely idiot-proof is effectively impossible - any tool will always be somewhere on the "prohibiting->discouraging->enabling" scale.

Furthermore, even if your tool merely makes it harder for "idiots" to screw things up, at the same time that very feature will attract more idiots to use it.

Shaper's Law of Idiot-Proofing:

Lowering the bar to prevent people falling over it increases the average ineptitude of the people trying to cross it.

Or, more simply:

Making a task easier means (on average) the people performing it will be less competent to undertake it.

Obviously I don't have hard statistics to back this up (though there could be an interesting project for a Psychology graduate...), but it often seems the proportion of people failing at the task will stay roughly constant - all you're really doing is increasing the absolute number of people who just scrape over the bar... and who then go on to produce nasty, inefficient, buggy - or just plain broken - solutions.

Fixing the wrong problem

The trouble with trying to make some things "idiot-proof" is that you're solving the wrong problem.

For example, when people are first learning programming they typically spend a lot of their time concentrating on the syntax of the language - when you need to use parentheses, remembering when and when not to end lines with semi-colons, etc. These are all problems for the non-programmer, but they aren't the important ones.

The major difficulty in most programming tasks is understanding the problem in enough detail to solve it^[1]. Simplifying using the tools doesn't help you understand the problem better - all it does is allow people who would ordinarily never have attempted to solve a problem to try it.

Someone who's already a skilled developer won't benefit much from the simplicity, but many unskilled or ignorant people will be tempted by the extra simplicity to try and do things that are (realistically) completely beyond their abilities. By simplifying the wrong thing you permit more people to "succeed", but you don't increase the quality of the average solution (if anything, you drastically decrease it).

By analogy, spell-checkers improved the look of finished prose, but they didn't make anyone a better author. All they did was make it easier to look professional, and harder to tell the difference between someone who knew what they were talking about and a kook.

Postel's Law

The main difficulty of programming is the fact that - by default - most people simply don't think in enough detail to successfully solve a programming problem.

Humans are intelligent, flexible and empathic, and we share many assumptions with each other. We operate on a version of Postel's Law:

"Be conservative in what you emit, liberal in what you accept"

The trouble begins because precision requires effort, and Postel's Law means we're likely to be understood even if we don't try hard to express ourselves precisely. Most people communicate primarily with other humans, so to save time and effort we express ourselves in broad generalities - we don't need to specify every idea to ten decimal places, because the listener shares many of our assumptions and understands the "obvious" caveats. Moreover, such excessive precision is often boring to the listener - when I say "open the window" I don't have to specify "with your hand, using the handle, without damaging it and in such a way that we can close it again later" because the detail is assumed.

Sapir-Whorf - not a character on Star Trek

The problem arises that because we communicate in generalities, we also tend to think in generalities - precision requires effort and unnecessary effort is unpleasant, so we habitually tend to think in the most vague way we can get away with. When I ask you to close the window I'm not imagining you sliding your chair back, getting up, navigating your way between the bean-bag and the coffee table, walking over to the window, reaching out with your hand and closing the window - my mental process goes more like "window open -> ask you -> window closed".

To be clear: there's nothing inherently wrong with thinking or communicating in generalities - it simplifies and speeds our thought processes. Problems only arise when you try to communicate with something which doesn't have that shared library of context and assumptions - something like a computer. Suddenly, when that safety-net of shared experience is removed - and our communication is parsed exclusively on its own merits - we find that a lifetime of dealing in vague generalities has diminished our ability to deal with specifics.

For example, consider probably the simplest programming-style problem you'll ever encounter:

You want to make a fence twenty metres long. You have ten wooden boards, each two metres long, and you're going to the hardware shop - how many fence-posts do you need?

No programmer worth his salt should get this wrong, but most normal people will have to stop and think carefully before answering^[2]. In fact this type of error is so common to human thinking that it even has its own name - the fencepost (or off-by-one) error.

Solve the right problem

Any task involves overcoming obstacles.

Obstacles which are incidental to the task ("publishing my writing">"learning HTML") are safe to ameliorate. These obstacles are mere by-products of immature or inadequate technology, unrelated to the actual task. You can remove these without affecting the nature of the task at hand.

Obstacles which are an intrinsic part of the task are risky or even counter-productive to remove. Removing these obstacles doesn't make the task any less difficult, but it removes the experience of difficulty.

Counter-intuitively, these obstacles can actually be a good thing - when you don't know enough to judge directly, the difficulties you experience in solving a problem serve as a useful first-order approximation of your ability at the task^[3].

Despite years of trying, making programming languages look more like English hasn't helped people become better programmers^[4].

This is because learning the syntax of a programming language isn't an important part of learning to program. Issues like task-decomposition, system architecture and correct control flow are massively more important (and difficult) than remembering "if x then y" is expressed as "if(x) { y; }".

Making the syntax more familiar makes it easier to remember and reduces compile-time errors - making the task seem easier to a naive user - but it does nothing to tackle the real difficulties of programming - inadequately-understood problems or imprecisely-specified solutions.

The trouble is that the "worth" of a program is in the power and flexibility of its design, the functionality it offers and (inversely) the number of bugs it has, not in how many compiler errors it generates the first time it's compiled.

However, to a naive beginner beauty and solidity of design are effectively invisible, whereas compiler-errors are obvious and easy to count. To a beginner a program that's poorly designed but compiles first time will seem "better" than a beautifully-designed program with a couple of trivial syntax errors.

Thus to the beginner a language with a familiar syntax appears to make the entire tasks easier - not because it is easier, but because they can't accurately assess the true difficulty of the task. Moreover, by simplifying the syntax we've also taken away the one indicator of difficulty they will understand.

If a user's experiencing frustration because their fire-alarm keeps going off the solution is for the user to learn to put out the fire, not for the manufacturer to make quieter fire alarms.

This false appearance of simplicity begets over-confidence, directly working against the scepticism with the current solution which is an essential part of the improvement process^[5].

Giving a short person a stepladder is a good thing. Giving a toddler powertools isn't.

Footnotes

[1] This is why talented programmers will so often use exploratory programming (or, more formally, RAD) in preference to designing the entire system first on paper - because although you might have some idea how to tackle a problem, you often don't really understand it fully until you've already tried to solve it. This is also why many developers prefer to work in dynamic scripting languages like Perl or Python rather than more static languages like C or Java - scripting languages are inherently more flexible, allowing you to change how a piece of code works more easily. This means your code can evolve and mutate as you begin to understand more about the problem, instead of limiting your options and locking you into what you now know is the wrong (or at least sub-optimal) approach.

[2] Obviously, the answer's not "ten".

[3] When I'm learning a new language I know I'm not very good at it, because I have to keep stopping to look up language syntax or the meanings of various idioms. As I improve I know I'm improving, because I spend less time wrestling with the syntax and more time wrestling with the design and task-decomposition. Eventually I don't even notice the syntax any more - all I see is blonde, brunette, readhead... ;-)

[4] Regardless of your feelings about the languages themselves, it's a truism that for years many of the most skilled hackers have preferred to code in languages like Lisp or Perl (or these days, Python or Ruby), which look little or nothing like English. Conversely, it's a rare developer who would disagree that some of the worst code they've seen was written in VB, BASIC or PHP. Hmm.

[5] From Being Popular by Paul Graham, part 10 - Redesign:

To write good software you must simultaneously keep two opposing ideas in your head. You need the young hacker's naive faith in his abilities, and at the same time the veteran's scepticism... The trick is to realize that there's no real contradiction here... You have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but sceptical about the value of whatever solution you've got so far. People who do good work often think that whatever they're working on is no good. Others see what they've done and are full of wonder, but the creator is full of worry. This pattern is no coincidence: it is the worry that made the work good.

Stereotypes are useful tools

2009-06-18T22:48:00.000+01:00

Humans generalise. It's what we do.

If you chose to handle every single experience as an isolated event, you'd never go anywhere or do anything for constantly investigating options, exactly like how you'd never get out of your house if you had to check every room was empty before leaving - by the time you've checked the last one, someone could have entered the house and got into the first one again, so you have to start back at the beginning and check them all over again.

Stereotyping is a very useful, essential mechanism for bypassing all of that - when we meet a new situation, we compare it to situations we've experienced before, and this gives us a guide as to what this one is likely to be like. For example, "this room was empty and I closed the door. People don't generally break into second-story rooms in any given five-minute period, so it's safe to assume it's still empty and leave the house".

The problem comes when people assume that stereotypes are facts - stereotypes/generalisations only give good indications of probabilities, and as long as you're always aware of the possibility that this situation is an edge-case where the "general rule" doesn't apply, there's no harm in it.

In our touchy-feely, inclusive, non-discriminatory society it's become deeply un-trendy to stereotype or generalise. People feel that because stereotypes have been over-used, or used to excuse discrimination or bigotry, there must be something inherently wrong with stereotyping. This is itself stereotyping, and - in this case - it's wrong.

What people really disapprove of are:

Unfair generalisations (although since stereotypes come from repeated observations, there are a lot less of them than you think)
People mistaking statistical guidelines for hard facts.

However, as ever as a culture we err on the side of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and conclude that because some people have tried to use stereotypes to justify bad actions in the past, there's something inherently wrong with the whole idea of stereotypes. That's not the case.

The incompetent leading the credulous - your mildly disconcerting thought for the day

2009-05-01T23:05:00.018+01:00

It's well-known to psychologists, public speakers, politicians and con-men^[1] that in general the more confident an individual appears, the more persuasive they are to other people. This effect holds regardless of the veracity or provability of their assertions. In other words, confidently and assertively talking horseshit will make you more persuasive than simply talking horseshit on its own, regardless of the fact it's horseshit.

In other news, the Dunning-Kruger effect demonstrates that - in general - the more incompetent or ignorant someone is of a subject, the more they will over-estimate their own expertise or understanding of it. Equally, the more experienced and competent a person becomes in a subject, the more they will begin to underestimate their true level of knowledge or expertise, downplaying their understanding and qualifying their statements. In effect, when trying to assess one's own level of ability in a subject increased expertise is inversely proportional to confidence in your expertise.

The net effect of this is that - again, in general - ignorant or incompetent people are subconsciously predisposed to be more confident in their opinions, and all people are subconsciously predisposed to find confident people persuasive.

In a nutshell, all things being equal, people are instinctively predisposed to find ignorant or incompetent people disproportionately persuasive and trustworthy compared to more competent, more experienced experts.

Distressingly it appears that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is not king. Instead, in the kingdom of the blind the true king is the one blind guy who's sufficiently incompetent or delusional that he honestly believes he can still see.

This has been your mildly disconcerting thought for the day.

Footnotes

[1] The author acknowledges that there may be some overlap in these categories.

Rules for system designing #1: If a system can be gamed, it will

2009-03-16T23:02:00.012Z

I first encountered this rule in web development, but once spotted I discovered it holds true in many, many diverse areas of life.

When designing a system of rules or procedures (a computer program, laws, a business's internal policies and procedures, etc) it's always tempting to ignore or avoid edge-cases - they seem so obscure or unlikely it's tempting to decide they don't matter, and not to bother resolving or fixing any ambiguities or loopholes.

People think about systems of rules the way they think about other people - you don't have to be too precise, because it'll be clear what the intent of your words is.

However, once set up systems are administrated according to the rules which define them - while "the original designer's intent" is nebulous and open to interpretation, the letter of the law is usually quite specific, even if the eventual result of them is quite different from what the original architects intended. Nobody ever got fired for following the letter of the law, even if by doing so they did great violence to its spirit.

This can be seen in all walks of life - if you're a naive programmer developing a web application it can seem tempting to ignore security holes or undefined edge-cases. "Who will ever spot that?" you think to yourself, "nobody will bother poking around in odd corners of my application, or try firing odd url parameters into my server. I'm much better off adding Whizzy New Feature #436 to my application than tidying up some dusty old corner of the code".

This sounds perfectly reasonable to most people, but any experienced web developers will be shaking their heads about now - first off, when you write code for websites your code is exposed to the entire internet, and there's always someone out there who'll start poking it with a stick, just to see what it does.

Even worse, there are also whole swathes of entirely automated systems like web spiders, spam-bots and automated vulnerability scanners that will systematically follow every link and try every combination of URL parameters it can imagine, simply to see what will happen.

The key point to take away here is that - almost invariably - your audience will turn out to be a lot larger and more diverse than you imagine, and what might seem obscure, boring or unimportant to you might not seem the same way to all of them... and neglecting to handle these edge-cases can lead to the entire system becoming compromised.

Likewise, laws suffer from this problem - they're typically crafted using vague language, and - like any non-trivial system - typically contain numerous unspotted edge-cases and loopholes. Moreover, the equivalent of issuing a patch to an existing law once it has been passed is about as complicated, fraught and long-winded as passing the law in the first place, making it difficult, time-consuming and expensive to correct errors once a law has been passed.

Like programs, relying on obscurity to paper over these loopholes is a mug's game - when laws apply to the number of people in an entire country you're pretty much guaranteed that eventually someone will either deliberately target or just stumble upon an unhandled edge-case. When this happens the system can be gamed, and the laws fail to perform their required function.

When this happens, the results may be anything from a single individual getting away with a parking ticket to your entire society taking a turn for the worse.

Remember: if a system can be gamed, it will, so take care to eliminate all possible edge-cases, and practice defence in depth so when an unknown compromise or loop-hole is inevitably eventually discovered, the amount of the system which is affected and can then be compromised is limited.

This advice applies equally whether you're a developer writing computer code, a politician crafting new laws or a manager adjusting business processes in a company. If it's a system of rules, this design axiom applies.

Lifecycle of a meme

2009-01-09T21:58:00.007Z

A recent discussion on reddit prompted me to sketch out the stages of an internet meme's lifecycle.

Lest there be any confusion, I'm talking here about internet memes - LOLcats, Soviet Russia jokes and the like, not about memes in the more general sense of the word.

As far as I can see, all memes go through this lifecycle:

Meme is born. Almost nobody understands it, and it's barely funny even when you do.
Meme gets adopted by a specific social group. Meme now serves as a shibboleth indicating membership of the group, and encourages feelings of belonging and "insidership" whenever it's encountered. At this stage, the meme is usually either utterly baffling or hilarious, depending on whether or not you're an insider in that social group.
Meme becomes mainstream - everyone is using it at every opportunity, and - its use as a shibboleth negated - it gradually gets stale from overuse. Meme is hilarious to newcomers, but increasingly sterile and boring to older users.
Meme effectively dies - people using it are generally downmodded or castigated for trying for "easy" posts. Importantly, it can still be funny even at this stage if it's used particularly well... however, 99% of the uses at this point are people trying to cash in on easy karma - the kind of people who tell the same jokes for years without realising that the 17th time you hear it, it's no longer funny.
Meme is effectively dead, but may experience rare and infrequent resurrection in particularly deserving cases. Generally these uses get applauded, because nobody wants to risk approbation for posting stale memes unless they're really sure this is a perfect opportunity for it - one that's literally too good to miss.

Importantly, by stage 5 the meme starts once again to be funny, because it's once again serving as a shibboleth... though this time instead of showing how advanced and up-to-date the poster is, it instead serves to indicate his membership in the "old guard" of whatever social group it's posted to - "I've been around here so long I remember when this was funny", it quietly indicates to other old-timers and well-educated newbies alike.

Engines of reason

2009-01-01T19:36:00.015Z

Initially we as acted as individuals - what we understood of reality was what we experienced and determined for ourselves. There was no understanding or appreciation of the world outside our direct experience.

Later we developed language, and what we understood of reality was formed from our own perceptions and conclusions, influenced by the perceptions and conclusions of our family and social group (family, clan, village, etc).

Next we developed the printing press, and mass-media. These allowed centralised governments and organisations to accumulate and weigh information and experiences and broadcast them to the populace. We still held our own council on personal or local matters, but since we rarely (if ever) knew anyone who had experienced such events outside our local region, we largely received all our knowledge and understanding of the outside world from centralised authority - governments, news media organisations, etc.

Finally, with the advent of the web we're enabling anyone to publish their personal experiences, in a way that anyone else in the world can then receive. No longer do we simply not have access to information, nor do we receive distilled, refined, potentially biased information from one or a few sources. Now we're capable in theory of hearing every point of view from every participant in an event, untainted by anything but their personal, arbitrary biases.

We are still receiving information on a global scale, but for the first time it's potentially all primary evidence, untainted and unfiltered by a single agenda or point of view.

The trouble with this is that brains, personalities, cultures and institutions long-accustomed to received wisdom now have to compare, contrast, weigh and discern the trustworthiness of multiple conflicting points of view for themselves. For the first time since our pre-linguistic ancestors you - and only you - are primarily responsible for determining truth from falsehood, and for the first time in history you have to do so on a global scale, involving events of which you have no direct experience.

To be clear: this is hard. Many people instinctively reject the terrifying uncertainty and extra effort, instead abdicating their personal responsibility and fleeing to any source of comforting certainty they can find. This explains why even in these supposedly scientific and rational times people still subscribe to superstitions or religions, or simplistic, fundamentalist philosophies, or blindly consume and believe opinionated but provably-biased sources like political leaders, charismatic thinkers or biased news organisations.

So it's a double-edged sword - for the first time in history we have access to primary evidence about events in the world, rather than receiving conclusions from a central source along with only what secondary or tertiary evidence supports them. However, in doing so the one thing we've noticed is that the channels we've relied-upon up till now are biased, agenda-laden and incomplete.

Obviously in an ideal world everyone could be relied-upon to train their bullshit-filters and research and determine the truth for themselves. However, given the newness of the current situation we can't rely upon this any time soon. Likewise, given both the sheer volume of information and humanity's propensity for laziness and satisficing, we'll likely never be able to rely on the majority of people doing this for every single issue they hold an opinion on.

So what's a species to do? We've turned on the firehose of knowledge, and it's shown that the traditional channels of received wisdom are unreliable, but many people find it impractically hard to drink from it.

There are three choices here:

We could allow the majority of people to reject their responsibilities and abdicate their reasoning processes to others of unknown reliability... though this is the kind of thing that leads to fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism and cultural and scientific stagnation.
Alternatively, we could encourage people to distrust authority and try to decide for themselves... though even if we win, if the effort of self-determination is too great we risk merely leaving people floundering in a morass of equally-likely-looking alternatives (I believe this is a primary cause of baseless, unproven but trendy philosophies like excessive cultural relativism - if you're lost in a sea of indistinguishable alternatives, it's flattering and tempting to believe there is no difference in their correctness).
Lastly, we can make an effort to formalise and simplify the process of determining reliability and truth - striving to create democratic, transparent mechanisms where objective truth is determined and rewarded, and falsehood or erroneous information is discarded... lowering the bar to individual decision-making, but avoiding unilateral assumption of authority by a single (or small group of) agendas.

Stupid as it may seem, I believe this is the ultimate destination towards which sites like reddit or Wikipedia are slowly converging - people post evidence, assertions or facts, those facts are discussed, weighed and put in context, and (so the theory goes) accuracy and factual truth is ascertained by exposing the process to a large enough consensus.

It doesn't always work - many of these early attempts suffer from a poor mechanism, or attract a community who vote based on their prejudices rather than rational argument, or end up balkanised in one or more isolated areas of parochial groupthink.

However, the first heavier-than-air aircraft didn't work too well either, and here we are a few decades later flying around the planet faster than the sun. As a species we're still only a few years into what may be a decades- or centuries-long process - one which could change the very foundations of (and mechanism by which we determine) what we understand as factual reality.

People love to rag on social news sites, discussion forums and sites like Wikipedia for what amounts to failing to have already achieved perfection. I prefer to salute them for what they are - hesitant, often blind, stumbling baby-steps towards solving a problem many people don't yet even realise exists.

The web is not a sheet of paper

2008-12-05T21:52:00.008Z

Print-turned-web designers:

Learn the medium you're working in. A five minute video of even the best print advert makes for a lousy TV advert. Likewise, techniques and habits refined by years of print design are often sub-optimal or flatly counter-productive when applied to the web.
For the love of god, give up on pixel-perfect positioning and learn to appreciate flow layout. Sure, it makes design harder... but if you think designing flow layouts is hard, think about the poor schmuck developers who have to implement the damn things. And if you think flow layouts are ugly, let's see how good your precious pixel-perfect design works when I do something freakishly unusual like resize my browser window.
Print pages are Things To Look At. Web sites are Things To Use. Prioritising aesthetics over usability or functionality is like putting a car steering wheel in the middle of the dashboard. Sure it looks nicer, but it makes the whole product useless. Incidentally, I swear if I get one more design through with a "button" image specified but no "pressed button" image (or "link" style but no "active/hover/visited link" style) I will personally bite off your head and defecate into your body-cavity. You have been warned.
Conventions are not boring - conventions are your friend. Putting light-switches near doors is a convention. Sure, putting them square in the middle of the ceiling is innovative, but then so is cheesegrating your knees (hey - do you know anyone who's done it?). Innovative means "nobody else is doing it". Accept the possibility that nobody else is doing it because it's a fucking stupid idea.
I don't want to "explore the interface". I want to get in, do my shit and get out again. If you think forcing users to explore the interface is such a good idea, try ripping the labels off all the cans of food in your cupboard. A couple of meals of cat-food, chilli and peaches should demonstrate exactly how "fun" this is for your users.

PANT, pant, pant... pant... ahem.

Originally via reddit.

Fear, Instincts and the Patented Lightning Test

2008-12-05T14:24:00.008Z

Our mass-media (meme-propagation system) has increased in efficiency tens or hundreds of times faster than our context-supplying instincts.

We evolved in loose groups of 150-250 individuals. If you heard about someone getting eaten by a tiger then, chances are you should watch out because he was likely only a few hundred metres over that way, so the danger to you was very real.

Then we started to hear about things that happened to someone at the other end of the country, and suddenly it seemed like there were murderers and rapists and nutjobs everywhere, because barely a day went past when we didn't hear of someone getting killed in an inventive or gruesome way.

Now we've got the web, and e-mail, and satellite TV, and blogs, and we hear about it if a mouse farts in Buttfuck, Antarctica. And now it's not even safe to let your kids walk to school for fear of them getting molested, you can't get on an aeroplane for fear it'll be bombed out of the sky, and you can't visit the toilet in your own house without getting abducted and beheaded by terrorists.

The only way to tackle this is by recognising what's going on and overruling your instincts. They served you well ten thousands years ago when you lived in a tree and had to avoid tigers, but now we're living in condos and keep small tigers in the house as pets.

Try my patented Lightning Test: Look up the statistics of whatever the latest mania/terror/panic is about, and only worry about it if it's more likely than… oh… say… getting hit by lightning.

Try terrorism - look up the number of deaths from terrorism each year, then look up the number of people who get hit by lightning.

Now if someone's advocating taking away civil rights because of terrorism, or locking up our children because of paedophiles, you can apply the simple test: Are they also advocating the compulsory wearing of earthed metal hats and rubber gumboots?

If not, then their little pet crusade is clearly disproportionate and can be safely ignored.

This has been a Public Service Announcement from the Lets All Get A Fucking Grip Society. Have a nice day.

Intellectual comparisons involving wood

2008-11-27T02:16:00.009Z

True story: in UK schools they used to run an extra-credit annual maths test called the Maths Challenge (or something equally imaginative)^[1].

The test was a series of 20 maths problems - "a snail climbs up from the bottom of a 10 ft well, moving up five inches every day and slipping back three inches every night. How many days does it take him to escape from the well?" being typical.

You started off with 20 points, scored +5 points for a correct answer, -1 points for a wrong answer and 0 for a question you didn't attempt (so your final score was in the range 0-120).

Pretty much all the kids worked out immediately that this meant you could answer 4 questions you weren't sure of for every question you were, and you'd still end up with at least a few additional points... all except my friend Dan.

Dan ploughed ahead, attempting nearly every question on the paper. When he got his mark back he'd only scored around 15-17. He wasn't too bothered, however, until we realised that he'd scored worse than the 20 points he'd have got if he hadn't answered a single question.

In other words, if the chair he was sat on had taken the test, it would have scored higher than he did.

This is the true story of how my mate Dan was once proven to be dumber than furniture.

(originally posted on reddit)

Footnotes:

[1] Awesomely, apparently they still do. Oh, and I got the scoring slightly wrong from memory, but the principle remains the same.

"Offended" is a choice you make

2008-11-16T17:48:00.025Z

We'll start with an epiphanette^[1] vouchsafed to me by an insightful friend:

Offence can never be given, only taken.

In other words, before you can offend me, I have to allow you to do so.

It's understandable that many people don't realise this - given a strong emotional reaction to a subject, I may instantly feel offended by something someone said. I make no conscious decision, and the only action I perceive is the original statement - it looks like simple cause and effect.

However, the important word is perceive - sure, it looks to me as if my offence was a direct effect of the statement, but that's not actually true.

Offend me. No, really - go on...

Call my mother names. Impugn my political affiliation. Assert things about my sexuality. Go on - post comments or e-mail me, if you like. All of these things can be reliably guaranteed to cause offence to people, but I promise I won't get offended by any of them. How can this be?

It's because I've simply chosen not to take offence at them. This much is obvious, but wait - if a statement is or is not "offensive", how can I choose whether or not to be offended? If "being offended" is a direct consequence of the statement, how can I opt out, and merely decide not to be?

The point here is that being offended is a choice. It might be the default choice - one I usually take automatically, or without even being consciously aware of it - but if I can choose not to be offended, surely that proves the opposite choice (being offended) is also a choice?

If offence can only ever be taken, then the "offensiveness" is your reaction to a statement, not a property of the statement itself. Moreover, it's not even a reaction the speaker can necessarily predict ahead of time - I make a statement, and then you decide whether you're offended by it.

Always remember this fact - every time you are offended, it's because you have chosen to feel that way. The nasty feeling you have is a direct consequence of your choice, not of the statement which motivated it.

The case of deliberate provocation

Obviously, some statements are made with the deliberate intent to offend you. It's understandable (though not admirable) that in these situations it's hard to overrule that emotional reaction - when someone tries to insult you, it's hard not to be offended.

To see why this is a problem, let's reason by analogy:

When babies are born, they have no bowel control - if their bowel is full, they'll shit. As far as the baby's concerned it's an automatic process.

However, as we grow and develop we learn that although excreting is an automatic process, we can learn to make it a conscious choice. Even if (through some biological problem) we can't do this, we at least recognise it's a fault within ourselves and strive to ameliorate it (for example, with diapers, medication, colostomy bags, and the like).

What seems like an automatic process we have no control over can - with recognition and effort - be mastered and controlled. And the more we practice it, the less difficult it becomes, until our chosen option becomes the automatic one (seriously - when was the last time you took a conscious choice not to shit yourself?).

Likewise, although "being offended" feels for many people as if it's something beyond their control, this is an illusion caused by their own lack of self-control. It's effectively emotional incontinence.

Given this, how fair is it to demand others change their actions based on a flaw within ourselves? It seems to me rather like demanding that everyone else carry around a potty at all times, just in case I want to take a shit.

Applying this reasoning to incontinence makes the reaction seem ludicrous - obviously my lack of self-control is my problem to deal with. Anyone who insisted everyone else has to scramble to solve their own problem while they themselves did nothing would be considered enormously selfish, demanding and immature.

So why when the issue is an emotional lack of control do so many people insist others change their behaviour, instead of asking what it says about them?

Can we as a society stop thinking of "offendedness" as a blameless condition, and start thinking of it as a lack of self-control? Can we stop advocating banning "offensive" things, and instead strive to fix the flaws within ourselves that mean they bother us so much?

Please - if you've remotely enjoyed this post at all, I want you to promise me something. Next time you read or hear something really offensive - something that really makes your blood boil - do me a favour.

Instead of shouting back or demanding something be banned, I want you to sit back, count to ten, and ask yourself

Am I shitting myself in public?

And if you are, and you decide to do it anyway, and then blame it on someone else, what does that say about you?

Footnotes

[1] Epiphanette: like an epiphany, but less-so. An interesting little thought that explains something fairly profound, but isn't really world-shaking enough to qualify as a full-blown epiphany. And no, sadly, it isn't a real word. ;-)

On The Decentralisation of News Media

2008-09-19T23:48:00.003+01:00

What you hear informs your world-view.

When everyone consumed the same (mass-)media, everyone had a fairly consistent (if sometimes wrong) world-view. It wasn't always correct, but at least everyone was on the same page and talking the same language.

Now aggregators, social news sites and predictive "you might also like" functionality has made it ever-easier to only see things you agree with, and to never even be aware of events and attitudes you don't.

This gradually, subconsciously leads you to believe that "everyone" thinks the way you do (so anyone who disagrees is obviously a kook and can be ignored), and to confuse "commonly-held beliefs in your particular subculture" with "proven, empirical facts" (or if you prefer, just "commonly-held beliefs for the entire population" ;-).

(I believe that this on its own is a major cause for the worsening "culture war" in the US, as well as the rise of tacky smear-based campaigning and staggering bitchiness of modern politics.)

This situation was always a possibility (witness the people who only ever watch Fox News, for example), but at least by deliberately limiting themselves to only one source it was obvious (often even to themselves) these people were closed-minded and willingly ignorant.

They might only watch one channel and forswear all other viewpoints, but the majority of people knew what they were doing and why it was dumb... at some level even them.

Now, with the advent of the internet and the massive decentralisation of news, discussion and rhetoric, hundreds of blogs and publishing outfits have sprung up for each mindset, niche political leaning, sexual preference, subculture... you name it.

This means that it's entirely possible to only read tens or hundreds of different sources... and yet still only really hear what you want to hear.

And yet, because you're reading so many different, unconnected sources the agenda they're pushing looks even more reasonable and widely-believed than when it could be easily written off by others as the agenda of just one channel, or just one new-corporation owner.

So although in this brave new world of millions of dissenting and conflicting voices the truth can be found more easily than in the monolithic, old world of Big Media... it's also made the truth harder to spot when you do find it, and it's made the bullshit look a lot more widely-supported and convincing than ever before.

I'm still not sure what to do about this state of affairs - I'm working on a few ideas which might help in the long run, but it's a serious problem that in the short term leads to social paralysis and all the he-said-she-said unconstructive, name-calling bitchiness of the politics of the last few years.

What's wrong with TV?

2008-04-16T20:37:00.031+01:00

Why do people who watch TV typically watch so much of it, and why do people who stop watching TV do so? And why do people who don't watch TV often instinctively have such a poor opinion of it? After all, they usually used to watch it too, didn't they?

For the purpose of explaining my theory, I'm going to start with the conclusion I reached and work back from there there:

People dislike TV because it's an inherently sensationalist, emotive and passive medium. It positively discourages critical thought and subtly but definitely encourages a receptive, passive, uncritical mindset.

Constrained input frequency

Television drip-feeds you information without any activity on your part - indeed, you're better off not moving or doing anything else, as any activity on your part will only distract from the medium. Unlike reading (where you can read as fast as you feel comfortable), the speed of information-flow is limited by the television. This encourages a passive, receptive mindset, as there's literally nothing you can do to affect the incoming information flow without degrading it (e.g., by fast-forwarding).

Water, water everywhere...

The (often largely irrelevant) moving visual image also means that though there's a lot of information to take in at any one time, precious little of this is useful data.

Compare the amount of time and raw information in the written sentence

"The man walked twenty metres down the road."

compared with a video imparting exactly the same thing. Also compare the amount of useful, important data in the written sentence versus the sheer volume of unimportant information you have to assimilate from a video to get the same amount of data^[1].

Nevertheless, with TV you still have to sift through all this unimportant information to select out the important parts, and this extra cognitive workload impairs and discourages any other thoughts you may be having. Additionally, having to handle such a comparatively large amount of input in real-time at least reduces the amount of attention you have to consider, analyse and critically evaluate what you're receiving.

Compared to other media

Reading, in contrast, is like accessing pre-filtered meaning - very little written text doesn't relate data essential to the communication, and text which does break this rule quickly becomes dull, windy and boring. Text is low-bandwidth (lower even than radio) and isn't inherently interesting to look at, so since the form won't hold your interest the content is required to be more interesting. Written text typically has a higher ratio of data-to-information - analogous to the idea of the signal:noise ratio in electronics.

Likewise, while radio has many of the same faults as TV (no random access, constrained input frequency) its lower bandwidth (audio compared to video) also communicates meaning much more efficiently than television - again, it has a higher data:information ratio.

Poor at communicating meaning

TV therefore communicates surprisingly inefficiently, in terms of the amount of raw information you have to sift through to extract meaning. This means that while it typically requires a large amount of attention to parse out the incoming information, it imparts relatively little actual data or knowledge... and what data it does impart is drip-fed to you at a rate much slower than you could typically assimilate it if it were presented in a more condensed or refined form.

Finally, its imposed (and slow) rhythm, high-bandwidth but data-poor input and a complete lack of interactivity (indeed, a disincentive to any activity at all) means no matter what you're watching, the medium itself acts to cultivate a more passive, receptive and uncritical mindset than you would otherwise experience.

Don't get me wrong - obviously there are plenty of situations where information could only sensibly be transmitted in a video medium (sports events, any communication where movement and visual change over time are important aspects, etc), and in any one particular instance these effects are typically very small^[2]. However, when you compare the very nature of the medium of TV to other media (books, the web... arguably even computer games) it's hard not to come to the conclusion that it's the least interactive, least efficient and most unchallenging of all the mainstream media we typically use.

Footnotes

[1] Finally, if any extra detail is required or desired by the receiver (What man? How old was he? Was he wearing a hat? What colour?), compare the amount of mental exercise required be the receiver to imagine all these things compared to merely observing them.

[2] But the rather more worrying question is: are they cumulative? If one gets used to regularly existing in a passive, receptive, uncritical mindset does that make it easier (and more common) to to experience it in future? Obviously I'm not trying to claim TV turns people into mooing idiots or anything so excessive... nevertheless, at the very least it raises interesting questions...