Politics

Safe and Constructive

I’ve been writing this blog for almost 20 years now and while I’ve touched on politics from time to time, it’s not a strong point and I’ve found that while arguing about stuff on the internets can be productive at times, these days it just makes me angry. Social media doesn’t help. With all due respect to Twitter and Facebook, they’re awful platforms for these sorts of discussions. They’re optimized for “increased engagement” but that basically amounts to algorithms that seek to obliterate nuance and sow discord.

A couple of months ago, as the world went into various forms of lockdown to fight a pandemic, I thought maybe blogs could make a comeback. That’s somewhat naive, I guess, and it’s not like some blogs weren’t a cesspool, but they were at least easily isolated or avoided cesspools. Social Media only occasionally scratches that blogging itch, but it’s too easy to mix garbage into your feed (or to have an algorithm insert garbage into your feed despite explicitly rejecting to follow someone, etc…) It’s a signal vs noise problem, and the algorithms find that noise actually increases engagement, so it’s encouraged.

It reminds me of that scene in Private Parts where they’re going over Howard Stern’s ratings and they’re like “The average radio listener listens for eighteen minutes. The average Howard Stern fan listens for an hour and twenty minutes.” and they’re like “That’s amazing, but what about the people who hate him?” and the response is “Good point. The average Stern hater listens for two and a half hours a day.” People like to be angry I guess, and social media is built around that concept.

Mad

If there’s one recommendation I can make right now, it’s to at least be aware how this sort of thing works. I don’t think you need to avoid social media altogether (though it may be a good idea to take breaks from time to time!), so long as you are thinking critically about what you’re seeing. Anger is a natural and legitimate response to a lot of things in this world (what happened to George Floyd, for instance), but social media’s goal is to increase engagement by stoking that anger into something less focused and unproductive.

Look, anger can prompt action, but it can also end in counterproductive events or, strangely, apathy. I’m not very productive when I’m angry (or, I should say, that kind of angry), which benefits no one. We’re living through an unprecedented mixture of upheavals ranging from a pandemic to police officers committing murder to protests to antifa to looting to curfews and much more. No one reads this blog and to be honest, my “in the moment” analysis isn’t going to be very productive, but I’m reading and thinking and trying to find core issues and ways to support needed change (justice for George and I’m glad the police officer in question has been arrested and charged, but it goes far beyond that). I’m angry, but I’m trying to find ways to contribute that will actually help. As are most people! Another failing of social media is that it amplifies the most divisive voices even what the grand majority of people can all agree on a given issue.

For the record, some bullshit Executive Order isn’t going to “solve” social media. I’m critical of social media in this post, but it also contains value, and improvements to social media probably won’t come from government. The only way to “solve” social media is for its users to be more aware of what those platforms are and how they react to it. A lot of the best parts of the internet are also its worst parts, and it’s important to understand how that works.

All of which is to say: be safe and constructive out there, people. It might seem impossible, but we can get through this stronger than before. Change happens incrementally, and while it might seem like small victories aren’t enough, they can add up and build a base for larger change. But we have to want that. We’re trying to move mountains here, it won’t happen overnight. Being angry on social media isn’t going to get it done. Only a few people read this (or, for that matter, my social media accounts), but if you are reading this, I will repeat: stay safe and constructive.

Teddy Roosevelt versus anti-Semitism

In Theodore Roosevelt’s autobiography, he recalls a story from his time as Police Commissioner of NYC:

The many-sided ethnic character of the force now and then gives rise to, or affords opportunity for, queer happenings. Occasionally it enables one to meet emergencies in the best possible fashion. While I was Police Commissioner an anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Ahlwardt, came over to New York to preach a crusade against the Jews. Many of the New York Jews were much excited and asked me to prevent him from speaking and not to give him police protection. This, I told them, was impossible; and if possible would have been undesirable because it would have made him a martyr. The proper thing to do was to make him ridiculous. Accordingly I detailed for his protection a Jew sergeant and a score or two of Jew policemen. He made his harangue against the Jews under the active protection of some forty policemen, every one of them a Jew! It was the most effective possible answer; and incidentally it was an object-lesson to our people, whose greatest need it is to learn that there must be no division by class hatred, whether this hatred be that of creed against creed, nationality against nationality, section against section, or men of one social or industrial condition against men of another social and industrial condition. We must ever judge each individual on his own conduct and merits, and not on his membership in any class, whether that class be based on theological, social, or industrial considerations.

Certainly a better solution than, say, lighting fires in the streets and threatening violence against those who promulgate ideas we find heinous.

Link Dump: Election

I don’t think anyone wants to hear more about the election, but no one reads this blog anyway, so you’re safe. Or, er, no that doesn’t make sense, but nothing about this election made sense, so that’s fitting. Or something. I don’t write a lot about politics anymore, and I’m not generally interested in knee-jerk analysis, but that’s all we’ve got right now. My instinct is try and understand what happened in a broad sense, and everyone is so shell-shocked right now (even the “winners”, mostly) that they’re just reverting to their previously held biases. From what I can see, almost every explanation for the election played a role. I won’t go so far as to say that there were 118 million reasons why people voted the way they did, but to pin it all on one thin explanation is also pretty foolish. Statistics failed us pretty well in this election, so I want to know more about that, and about why things are the way they are. This is easy to say for me, and others are in much worse shape, but I’m trying not to let all the anger and fear or joy and elation influence me too much.

  • Election 2016: Exit Polls – Various demographics can be interesting, but the real goofy part is that literally all of the polling up until the election was dramatically wrong, yet we’re treating these exit polls like gospel. The polling was wrong, let’s base our diagnosis of the election on more polls! Intuitively, most of these aren’t that surprising, but that’s kinda the point. Intuitively, Donalt Trump had no real chance of winning either.
  • Voter Turnout Fell, Especially In States That Clinton Won – Turnout numbers, at least, are probably more reliable. It was a douche and turd election, few seemed to actually like who they were voting for, and that generally leads to lower turnout. Yes, I know that you think the choice was clear, but the majority of Americans seemed pretty apathetic about their choices. But here I am speculating based on polling again. Oof.
  • A Running List Of Reported Racist Incidents After Donald Trump’s Victory – This shit is unacceptable. I don’t think bigotry was the main driving force behind Trump’s victory (partly because I don’t think there is a single, main driving force, but rather dozens of smaller ones), but it’s impossible to ignore this wave of xenophobic bullshit. I have not personally seen anything like this and I’m hoping that it will quickly subside, but I’ve read too many stories like this since the election. If you can do something about it, please do.
  • Louisiana student ‘fabricated’ story of hijab attack, police say – Well, shit. I’m consistently baffled by stuff like this. There’s enough genuine bullshit going around, why do you have to support those that would dismiss it by fabricating an attack?
  • Bystanders yell anti-Trump taunts as man beaten after car crash – And hey, this ain’t great either. What the hell is going on.
  • Stumped by Trump’s success? Take a drive outside US cities – A lot of stuff from before the election suddenly seems more relevant these days:

    While Trump supporters here are overwhelmingly white, their support has little to do with race (yes, you’ll always find one or two who make race the issue), but has a lot to do with a perceived loss of power.

    Not power in the way that Washington or Wall Street boardrooms view power, but power in the sense that these people see a diminishing respect for them and their ways of life, their work ethic, their tendency to not be mobile. (Many live in the same eight square miles that their father’s father’s father lived in.)

    Thirty years ago, such people determined the country’s standards in entertainment, music, food, clothing, politics, personal values. Today, they are the people who are accused of creating every social injustice imaginable; when anything in society fails, they get blamed.

    The places where they live lack economic opportunities for the next generation; they know their children and grandchildren will never experience the comfortable situations they had growing up – surrounded by family who lived next door, able to find a great job without going to college, both common traits among many successful small-business owners in the state.

    This has been a pretty common thread that I’ve seen. Many have been dismissing this view or blaming it on something other than what it is. Of course, I’m doubting that Trump can actually provide what these voters think, but its hard to dismiss their complaints. It also illustrates the divide between city and rural, which is not really new. But where there used to be at least some semblance of balance in our culture between this geographic divide, it no longer feels that way. The divide is growing. I realize it might be silly to look at horror movies for insight here, but hey, I just spent a month and a half watching them, and one thing that often pops up is the city/country divide. Carol Clover wrote about this in a chapter concerning rape-revenge films like I Spit on Your Grave and Deliverance and delved in to a more general “Urbanoia”:

    The city/country split is by no means confined to the rape-revenge film – or even revenge films in general. An enormous proportion of horror takes as its starting point the visit or move of (sub)urban people to the country. … Going from city to country in horror film is in any case very much like going from village to deep, dark forest in tradional fairy tales. … One of the obvious things at stake in the city/country split of horror films, in short, is social class – the confrontation between the haves and have-nots, or even more directly, between exploiters and their victims.

    There is, of course, lots to unpack there, and as mentioned above, this can’t explain everything, but it does seem to be a base disagreement that is driving divisions in this country. People in the city/country divide are dismissing each other with ever more vigor, and that probably plays a small part in what’s going on here.

  • To the supporters of Donald Trump – Jason Kottke wrote a bit about this in July and tied it to Tyler Cowan’s description of Brexit:

    Many Americans share a frustration of the current political system and how it is wielded against us in our name by skilled political practitioners, but I do not believe the US is a country filled with small-minded, intolerant racists, despite the perplexing level of national support for a proudly dishonest and bigoted TV personality, whatever his keen political instincts. Trump is the one lever being given to those frustrated voters for sending a message to their politicians and many are choosing to use it despite many of the reasons listed in that letter. Sending that message is more important than its potential consequences.

    This goes to the “outsider” view of the election, another common theme. Again, I doubt Trump will actually be able to deliver on what these voters actually want, but their complaints are valid. Part of the Trump win? Sure, but not all of it, which also seems to be a common theme.

  • Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash – This is another example of someone using the election to harp on one of their hobby horses, but it’s not entirely wrong either.

    If you’re a leftist reading this, you probably think that’s stupid. You probably can’t understand why someone would get so bent out of shape about being told their words are hurtful. You probably think it’s not a big deal and these people need to get over themselves. Who’s the delicate snowflake now, huh? you’re probably thinking. I’m telling you: your failure to acknowledge this miscalculation and adjust your approach has delivered the country to Trump.

    There’s a related problem: the boy-who-cried-wolf situation. I was happy to see a few liberals, like Bill Maher, owning up to it. Maher admitted during a recent show that he was wrong to treat George Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain like they were apocalyptic threats to the nation: it robbed him of the ability to treat Trump more seriously. The left said McCain was a racist supported by racists, it said Romney was a racist supported by racists, but when an actually racist Republican came along—and racists cheered him – it had lost its ability to credibly make that accusation.

    This is akin to the political-correctness-run-amok problem: both are examples of the left’s horrible over-reach during the Obama years. The leftist drive to enforce a progressive social vision was relentless, and it happened too fast. I don’t say this because I’m opposed to that vision – like most members of the under-30 crowd, I have no problem with gender neutral pronouns – I say this because it inspired a backlash that gave us Trump.

    Once again, I don’t think this is the only reason the country went for Trump… but it played a role.

  • A friend posted this on Facebook, and it’s well said:

    I understand that there is anger and fear right now. But, I just got through 8 years of hearing from extremely conservative friends and family about how Obama is not their president. It did not make me want to lend credibility to anything they said regarding him after that. Like it or not, Trump will be your president. Claiming otherwise is the most divisive thing you could do right now. He does not have a mandate and by all means, let there be fierce opposition to every unconstitutional and harmful policy he proposes. The important thing is to keep this country a place where you can openly criticize your president, assemble to protest your president, read about your president in the free press and where a president can be impeached if necessary and most of all, where power continues to peacefully be transferred from one president to the next one.

    Again, well said.

  • I could keep going on here, but if there’s one thing I’m trying to keep in mind, it’s that there’s no easy explanation for an election result, especially this election. Everyone who is writing about it seems to think they’ve identified that one, key component… and it just happens to conform perfectly to their worldview. Voter turnout, bigotry, third party voters, politically correct wolf-crying, city/country divide, immigration, bathrooms?, single-issue voters, capitalism/socialism, Russian influence (fucking Russia?), the list goes on and on and on. No one of these things put us where we are, but we can’t really dismiss any of them out of hand either.
  • One other thing I’ve noticed in the past few years, on both sides of the divide, is a lack of respect for free speech. I feel like it’s been constantly dismissed in the past few years in favor of [insert preferred ideology here]. Again, this goes both ways. Trump has repeatedly threatened free speech because he’s such a crybaby. Many on the left decry speech they disagree with too (you could argue that the politically correct stuff feeds into that). But now we’re really going to need free speech. This country has safeguards to protect against wannabe authoritarians, and free speech is one of them. We need to be vigilant about stuff like that. One of the reasons I’m always cautious about executive power and the expansion of federal power is that you never know who’s going to wield it next. You may have been comfortable with Bush or Obama wielding certain powers, but now Trump has them. Are you still comfortable?
  • Some bite sized nuggets from twitter:

Alright, that’s enough of that. I’m still trying to understand and none of the above is meant to dismiss or harangue anyone with unwanted advice. The only advice I have comes from Bill and Ted: Be excellent to each other. We now return you to your regularly scheduled SF/Movies programming.

Vigilantes

I recently finished watching both seasons of Dexter. The series has a fascinating premise: the titular hero, Dexter Morgan, is a forensic analyst (he’s a “blood spatter expert”) for the Miami police by day, but a serial killer by night. He operates by a “code,” only murdering other murderers (usually ones who’ve beaten the system). The most interesting thing about Dexter’s code is the implication that he does not follow the code out of some sort of dedication to morality or justice. He knows what he does is evil, but he follows his code because it’s the most constructive way to channel his aggression. Of course, the code is not perfect, and a big part of the series is how the code shapes him and how he, in turn, shapes it. To be honest, watching the series is a little odd and disturbing when you realize that you’re essentially rooting for a serial killer (an affable and charming one, to be sure, but that’s part of why it’s disturbing). I started to think about this a bit, and several other examples of similar characters came to mind. There’s a lot more to the series, but I don’t want to ruin it with a spoiler-laden discussion here. Instead, I want to talk about vigilantes.

Despite the lack of concern for justice (or perhaps because of that), Dexter is essentially a vigilante… someone who takes the law into his own hands. There is, of course, a long history of vigilantism, in both real life and art. Indeed, many classic instances happened long before the word vigilante was coined – for example, Robin Hood. He stole from the rich to give to the poor, and was immortalized as a folk hero whose tales are still told to this day. I think there is a certain cultural fascination with vigilantes, especially vigilantes in art.

Take superheroes, most of whom are technically vigilantes. Sure, many stand for all that is good in the world and often cite truth and justice as motivation, but the evolution of comic books shows something interesting. I haven’t read a whole lot of comic books (especially of the superhero kind), but the impression I get is that when the craze started in the 1930s, it was all about heroics and people serving the common good. There was also a darker edge to some of them, and that edge has grown as time progressed. Batman is probably the most relevant to this discussion, as he shares a complicated relationship with the police and a certain above-the-law attitude towards solving crimes. Interestingly, the Batman of the 1930s was probably a darker, more violent superhero than he was in the 1940s, when one editor issued a decree that the character could no longer kill or use a gun. As such, the postwar Batman became more of an upstanding citizen, and the stories took on a lighter tone (definitely an understandable direction, considering what the world had been through). I’m sure I’m butchering the Batman chronology here, but the next sigificant touchstone for Batman came in 1986, with the publication of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Written and drawn by Frank Miller, the series reintroduced Batman as a dark, brooding character with complex psychological issues. A huge success, this series ushered in a new era of “grim and gritty” superheros that still holds today.

In general, our superheroes have become much more conflicted. Many (like Batman) tackle the vigilante aspect head on, and if you look at something like Watchmen (or The Incredibles, if you want a lighter version), you can see a shift in the way such stories are told. I’m sure there are literally hundreds of other examples in the comic book world, but I want to shift gears for a moment and examine another cultural icon that Dexter reminded me of: Dirty Harry.

Inspector Harry Callahan is an incredibly popular character, but apparently not with critics:

Critics have rarely cracked the whip harder than on the Dirty Harry film series, which follows the exploits of a trigger-happy San Francisco cop named Harry Callahan and his junior partners, usually not long for this world. On its release in 1971, Dirty Harry was trounced as ‘fascist medievalism’ by the potentate of the haut monde critic set, Pauline Kael, as well as aspiring Kaels like young Roger Ebert. Especially irksome to the criterati was a key moment in the film when Inspector Callahan, on the trail of an elusive serial sniper, is reprimanded by his superiors for not taking into account the suspect’s Miranda rights. Callahan replies, through clenched teeth, “Well, I’m all broken up about that man’s rights.” Take that, Miranda.

I should say that critics often give the film (at least, the first one) generally good overall marks, praising its “suspense craftsmanship” or calling it “a very good example of the cops-and-killers genre.” But I’m fascinated by all the talk of fascism. Despite working within the system, Dirty Harry indeed does take the law into his own hands, and in doing so he ignores many of our treasured Constitutional freedoms. And yet we all cheer him on, just as we cheer Batman and Dexter.

Why are these characters so popular? Why do we cheer such characters on even when we know what they’re doing is ultimately wrong? I think it comes down to desire. We all desire justice. We want to see wrongs being made right, yet every day we can turn on the TV and watch non-stop failures of our system, whether it be rampant crime or a criminal going free or any other number of indignities. Now, I’m not an expert, but I don’t think our society today is much worse off than it was, say, a hundred years ago (In fact, I think we’re significantly better off, but that’s another discussion). The big difference is that information is disseminated more widely and quickly, and dramatic failures of the system are attention grabbing, so that’s what we get. What’s more, these stories tend to focus on the most dramatic, most obscene examples. It’s natural for people to feel helpless in the face of such news, and I think that’s why everyone tends to embrace vigilante stories (note that people don’t generally embrace actual real-life vigilantes – that’s important, and we’ll get to that later). Such stories serve many purposes. They allow us to cope with life’s tragedies, internalize them and in some way comfort us, but as a deeper message, they also emphasize that the world is not perfect, and that we’ll probably never solve the problem of crime. In some ways, they act as a critique of our system, pointing out it’s imperfections and thereby making sure we don’t become complacent in the ever-changing fight against crime.

Of course, there is a danger to this way of thinking, which is why critics like Pauline Kael get all huffy when they watch something like Dirty Harry. We don’t want to live in a police state, and to be honest, a real cop who acted like Dirty Harry would probably be an awful cop. Films like that deal in extremes because they’re trying to make a point, and it’s easy to misinterpret such films. I doubt people would really accept a cop like Dirty Harry. Sure, some folks might applaud his handling of the Scorpio case that the film documents (audiences certainly did!), but police officers don’t handle a single case in the course of their career, and most cases aren’t that black and white either. Dirty Harry would probably be fired out here in the real world. Ultimately, while we revel in such entertainment, we don’t actually want real life to imitate art in this case. However, that doesn’t mean we enjoy hearing about a vicious drug dealer going free because the rules of evidence were not followed to the letter. I think deep down, people understand that concepts like the rules of evidence are important, but they can also be extremely frustrating. This is why we have conflicting emotions when we watch the last scene in Dirty Harry, in which he takes off his police badge and throws it into the river.

I think this is a large part of why vigilante stories have evolved. Comic book heroes like Batman have become more conflicted, and newer comic books often deal with the repercussions of vigilatism. The Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force, was apparently made as a direct answer to the critics of Dirty Harry who thought that film was openly advocating law-sanctioned vigilantism. In Magnum Force, the villains are vigilante cops. Then you have modern day vigilantes like Dexter, which pumps audiences full of conflicting emotions. I like this guy, but he’s a serial killer. He’s stopping other killers, but he’s doing so in such a disturbing way.

Are vigilante stories fascist fantasies? Perhaps, but fantasies aren’t real. They’re used to illustrate something, and in the case of vigilante fantasies, they illustrate a desire for justice. The existence of a show like Dexter will repulse some people and that’s certainly an understandable reaction. In fact, I think that’s exactly what the show’s creators want to do. They’re walking the line between satisfying the desire for justice while continually noting that Dexter is not a good person. Ironically, what would repulse me more would be the complete absence of stories like Dexter, because the only way such a thing could happen would be if everyone thought our society was perfect. Perhaps someday concepts like justice and crime will be irrelevant, but that day ain’t coming soon, and until it does, we’ll need such stories, if only to remind us that we don’t live in a perfect world.

Rhetorical Strategy

Every so often, I see someone who is genuinely concerned with reaching the unreachable. Whether it be scientists who argue about how to frame their arguments, alpha-geek programmers who try to figure out how to reach typical, average programmers, or critics who try to open a dialogue with feminists. Debates tend to polarize, and when it comes to politics or religion, assumptions of bad faith on both sides tend to derail discussions pretty quickly.

How do you reach the unreachable? Naturally, the topic is much larger than a single blog entry, but I did run accross an interesting post by Jon Udell that outlines Charles Darwin’s rhetorical strategy in the book, On the Origin of Species (which popularized the theory of evolution).

Darwin, says Slatkin, was like a salesman who finds lots of little ways to get you to say yes before you’re asked to utter the big yes. In this case, Darwin invited people to affirm things they already knew, about a topic much more familiar in their era than in ours: domestic species. Did people observe variation in domestic species? Yes. And as Darwin piles on the examples, the reader says, yes, yes, OK, I get it, of course I see that some pigeons have longer tail feathers. Did people observe inheritance? Yes. And again, as he piles on the examples, the reader says yes, yes, OK, I get it, everyone knows that that the offspring of longer-tail-feather pigeons have longer tail feathers.

By the time Darwin gets around to asking you to say the big yes, it’s a done deal. You’ve already affirmed every one of the key pillars of the argument. And you’ve done so in terms of principles that you already believe, and fully understand from your own experience.

It only took a couple of years for Darwin to formulate the idea of evolution by natural selection. It took thirty years to frame that idea in a way that would convince other scientists and the general public. Both the idea, and the rhetorical strategy that successfully communicated it, were great innovations.

I think Udell simplifies the inception and development of the idea of evolution, but I think the point generally holds. Darwin’s ideas didn’t come into mainstream prominence until he published his book, decades after he had begun his work. Obviously, Darwin’s strategy isn’t applicable in every situation, but it is an interesting place to start (I suppose we should keep in mind that evolution is still controversial amongst the mainstream)…

Lots of Stuff

A little short on time this week, so here’s a bunch of links:

  • Glenn Reynolds has two excellent posts: A 9/11 Retrospective and a roundup of lessons learned from Katrina.
  • NASA and the Dream, and How To Get Back To The Moon: An excellent essay about the history of the Space Program and where we should be going from here.
  • The Old Negro Space Program: On the lighter side of things, this is a hilarious parody of a Ken Burns style documentary… (via Polytropos)
  • The gods are a) Angry, b) Happy, c) Indifferent, d) Bummed about the lousy weather.
  • Why Most Published Research Findings Are False: As The Economist summarizes:

    THEODORE STURGEON, an American science-fiction writer, once observed that “95% of everything is crap”. John Ioannidis, a Greek epidemiologist, would not go that far. His benchmark is 50%. But that figure, he thinks, is a fair estimate of the proportion of scientific papers that eventually turn out to be wrong.

    If Sturgeon’s law is relatively accurate, that would mean that Science is doing pretty good… It seems that a lot of people these days have pretty inflated expectations when it comes to a lot of things, and science is definitely one of them. Witness the “CSI Effect”:

    Prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges call it “the CSI effect,” after the crime-scene shows that are among the hottest attractions on television. The shows —CSI and CSI: Miami, in particular — feature high-tech labs and glib and gorgeous techies. By shining a glamorous light on a gory profession, the programs also have helped to draw more students into forensic studies.

    But the programs also foster what analysts say is the mistaken notion that criminal science is fast and infallible and always gets its man. That’s affecting the way lawyers prepare their cases, as well as the expectations that police and the public place on real crime labs. Real crime-scene investigators say that because of the programs, people often have unrealistic ideas of what criminal science can deliver.

    It’s a problem similar to the unglamorous march of technology; the achievements of science are great, but they are also abstracted enough that people begin to lose sight of some of the issues – and science works because of those issues, not in spite of them (which is the point). [thanks to Patton from the Ministry of Minor Perfidy for the original links. Bruce Schneier also mentioned the CSI effect on his blog a while back…]

  • Hogwarts Security: A little while ago, I examined some of the security measures in the latest Harry Potter book, using Bruce Schneier’s 5 step analysis process. Schneier himself is now looking at the issue:

    …can you really render a powerful wizard helpless simply by taking away his wand? And is taking away a powerful wizard’s wand simply as easy as doing something to him at the same time he is doing something else?

    I always assumed that the dewanding issue only really affected the students because they hadn’t learned how to go wandless, but now t hat he mentions it…

That’s all for now.

Dear Britain

I’d been at a loss for what to say about Thursday’s terrorist attacks in London until I saw this somehow appropriately obscure historical reference from Mindles H. Dreck of Asymmetrical Information:

“Whither thou goest I will go, and whither thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Even to the end.”

For details on the attack, check out this comprehensive Wikipedia entry (an impressive example of self-organization in action). Also, the British Red Cross has set up a relief fund for victims of the bombings and is accepting donations.

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Sharks, Deer, and Risk

Here’s a question: Which animal poses the greater risk to the average person, a deer or a shark?

Most people’s initial reaction (mine included) to that question is to answer that the shark is the more dangerous animal. Statistically speaking, the average American is much more likely to be killed by deer (due to collisions with vehicles) than by a shark attack. Truly accurate statistics for deer collisions don’t exist, but estimates place the number of accidents in the hundreds of thousands. Millions of dollars worth of damage are caused by deer accidents, as are thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths, every year.

Shark attacks, on the other hand, are much less frequent. Each year, approximately 50 to 100 shark attacks are reported. “World-wide, over the past decade, there have been an average of 8 shark attack fatalities per year.”

It seems clear that deer actually pose a greater risk to the average person than sharks. So why do people think the reverse is true? There are a number of reasons, among them the fact that deer don’t intentionally cause death and destruction (not that we know of anyway) and they are also usually harmed or killed in the process, while sharks directly attack their victims in a seemingly malicious manner (though I don’t believe sharks to be malicious either).

I’ve been reading Bruce Schneier’s book, Beyond Fear, recently. It’s excellent, and at one point he draws a distinction between what security professionals refer to as “threats” and “risks.”

A threat is a potential way an attacker can attack a system. Car burglary, car theft, and carjacking are all threats … When security professionals talk abour risk, they take into consideration both the likelihood of the threat and the seriousness of a successful attack. In the U.S., car theft is a more serious risk than carjacking because it is much more likely to occur.

Everyone makes risk assessments every day, but most everyone also has different tolerances for risk. It’s essentially a subjective decision, and it turns out that most of us rely on imperfect heuristics and inductive reasoning when it comes to these sorts of decisions (because it’s not like we have the statistics handy). Most of the time, these heuristics serve us well (and it’s a good thing too), but what this really ends up meaning is that when people make a risk assessment, they’re basing their decision on a perceived risk, not the actual risk.

Schneier includes a few interesting theories about why people’s perceptions get skewed, including this:

Modern mass media, specifically movies and TV news, has degraded our sense of natural risk. We learn about risks, or we think we are learning, not by directly experiencing the world around us and by seeing what happens to others, but increasingly by getting our view of things through the distorted lens of the media. Our experience is distilled for us, and it’s a skewed sample that plays havoc with our perceptions. Kids try stunts they’ve seen performed by professional stuntmen on TV, never recognizing the precautions the pros take. The five o’clock news doesn’t truly reflect the world we live in — only a very few small and special parts of it.

Slices of life with immediate visual impact get magnified; those with no visual component, or that can’t be immediately and viscerally comprehended, get downplayed. Rarities and anomalies, like terrorism, are endlessly discussed and debated, while common risks like heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes, and suicide are minimized.

When I first considered the Deer/Shark dilemma, my immediate thoughts turned to film. This may be a reflection on how much movies play a part in my life, but I suspect some others would also immediately think of Bambi, with it’s cuddly cute and innocent deer, and Jaws, with it’s maniacal great white shark. Indeed, Fritz Schranck once wrote about these “rats with antlers” (as some folks refer to deer) and how “Disney’s ability to make certain animals look just too cute to kill” has deterred many people from hunting and eating deer. When you look at the deer collision statistics, what you see is that what Disney has really done is to endanger us all!

Given the above, one might be tempted to pursue some form of censorship to keep the media from degrading our ability to determine risk. However, I would argue that this is wrong. Freedom of speech is ultimately a security measure, and if we’re to consider abridging that freedom, we must also seriously consider the risks of that action. We might be able to slightly improve our risk decisionmaking with censorship, but at what cost?

Schneier himself recently wrote about this subject on his blog. In response to an article which argues that suicide bombings in Iraq shouldn’t be reported (because it scares people and it serves the terrorists’ ends). It turns out, there are a lot of reasons why the media’s focus on horrific events in Iraq cause problems, but almost any way you slice it, it’s still wrong to censor the news:

It’s wrong because the danger of not reporting terrorist attacks is greater than the risk of continuing to report them. Freedom of the press is a security measure. The only tool we have to keep government honest is public disclosure. Once we start hiding pieces of reality from the public — either through legal censorship or self-imposed “restraint” — we end up with a government that acts based on secrets. We end up with some sort of system that decides what the public should or should not know.

Like all of security, this comes down to a basic tradeoff. As I’m fond of saying, human beings don’t so much solve problems as they do trade one set of problems for another (in the hopes that the new problems are preferable the old). Risk can be difficult to determine, and the media’s sensationalism doesn’t help, but censorship isn’t a realistic solution to that problem because it introduces problems of its own (and those new problems are worse than the one we’re trying to solve in the first place). Plus, both Jaws and Bambi really are great movies!

Voters and Lurkers

Debating online, whether it be through message boards or blogs or any other method, can be rewarding, but it can also be quite frustrating. When most people think of a debate, they think of a group arguing an opponent, and one of the two factions “winning” the argument. It’s a process of expression in which different people with different points of view will express their opinions, and are criticised by one another.

I’ve often found that specific threads tend to boil down to a point where the argument is going back and forth between two sole debaters (with very few interruptions from others). Inevitably, the debate gets to the point where both sides’ assumptions (or axioms) have been exposed, and neither side is willing to agree with the other. To the debaters, this can be intensely frustrating. As such, anyone who has spent a significant amount of time debating others online can usually see that they’re probably never going to convince their opponents. So who wins the argument?

The debaters can’t decide who wins – they obviously think their argument is better than their opponents (or, at the very least, are unwilling to admit it) and so everyone thinks that they “won.” But the debaters themselves don’t “win” an argument, it’s the people witnessing the debate that are the real winners. They decide which arguments are persuasive and which are not.

This is what the First Amendment of the US Constitution is based on, and it is a fundamental part of our democracy. In a vigorous marketplace of ideas, the majority of voters will discern the truth and vote accordingly.

Unfortunately, there never seems to be any sort of closure when debating online, because the audience is primarily comprised of lurkers, most of whom don’t say anything (plus, there are no votes), and so it seems like nothing is accomplished. However, I assure you that is not the case. Perhaps not for all lurkers, but for a lot of them, they are reading the posts with a critical eye and coming out of the debate convinced one way or the other. They are the “voters” in an online debate. They are the ones who determine who won the debate. In a scenario where only 10-15 people are reading a given thread, this might not seem like much (and it’s not), but if enough of these threads occur, then you really can see results…

I’m reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s essay “An apology for printers,” in which Franklin defended those who printed allegedly offensive opinion pieces. His thought was that very little would be printed if publishers only produced things that were not offensive to anybody.

Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Public; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.

Are Libertarians Pragmatic?

Russ Nelson recently argued that there is no such thing as a “left-libertarian.” In so doing, he points to a larger issue:

I think there’s a larger issue here. “Liberal” used to mean the philosophy which is called in the US “libertarian”, and which is still called “liberal” in some other countries. Since this philosophy generally promotes happiness and distributes power, people who seek power object to it. Since the philosophy is hard to understand and is counter-intuitive, it only takes a little bit of effort to undermine it.

[Emphasis mine] Is a philosophy that is easy to undermine and difficult to understand in the first place a realistic philosophy? Well, self-organizing systems such as this often display emergent properties that are more than the simple sum of their parts. So the people contributing to the system don’t necessarily need to understand the system in order for the system to work. However, it is the “easy to undermine” part that causes the major problem…

I find libertarian ideas and concepts interesting and useful, but I can never seem to get rid of the nagging pragmatic objections to it, such as the one outlined above.