Post-conventional wisdom

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.

On the "rape = power" meme

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 (read the last post on that page).

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.

An attempt at a simple, two-rule morality

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:

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You shall have no other gods before me/You shall not make for yourself an idol
3. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
5. Honor your father and mother
6. You shall not murder
7. You shall not commit adultery
8. You shall not steal
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
10. 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:

1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, at the highest level of abstraction possible.
2. 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

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:

1. 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".
2. 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

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

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

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.