Freedom is not confusing

March 1, 2014 Leave a comment

Somebody wrote, in the critical rationalism Facebook group, in the context of a discussion about Taking Children Seriously (TCS):

Boundary rules are liberating for children, there are few things more confusing than being left as a free agent.

Bullshit. If you’re free then you can just act on the ideas you understand and decline to act in other situations. So then you’re not confused about what to do. You either do stuff or learn more about what to do before acting.

What is confusing is being dumped in a situation where you are expected to act despite your lack of understanding. This is inevitable in coercive education because the people “educating” you don’t allow you to refuse to do stuff. So you will end up acting in situations where you are confused.

An illustration:

I had some slight experience with this when I worked for some eight years with autistic children and adults. We found behaviour modification techniques were appropriate for helping them gain a grip on their dangerous and confusing umwelts. Freedom has a dark side.

The autistic person behaves in some way other people dislike and they want to force them to learn to behave differently. This person may feel confused, but that’s because somebody is forcing him to do stuff he doesn’t want to do. The rational way to address this would be to tackle their moral disagreement explicitly instead of coming up with some pseudo-medical label for the undesired behaviour. But the people who so label him don’t see any possibility that he might be in the right. They cling, instead, to the idea that some behaviour is so obviously right that those who don’t enact it must be unable to think properly. This is not consistent with the critical open society attitude that sees all institutions and behaviour as conventions that we can reject if they turn out to be flawed, see Chapter 5 of OSE.

UPDATE: I want to explain more about my interpretation of the second passage I quoted. “Behaviour modification techniques” for dealing with children whose behaviour has been labelled autistic basically amount to rewarding children for behaviour you like and imposing “consequences” for behaviour you don’t like.

The consequences are not really consequences they are problems that fall into one of two categories. Either something the child does will have some unpleasant consequence that the adult knows about in advance but the adult doesn’t tell the child about it, or illustrate it or take any measures to prevent it. The adult should not be doing this. His role is to help the child to understand and solve problems not to impose them. Imposing a problem is deliberately making a situation worse not better and so it is irrational.

The rewards aren’t really any better. If the child likes doing something the adult should be helping him to find ways to do more of it, not restricting his ability to do it by imposing deliberate restrictions on such help.

Now, if the adult in question is not the child’s parent and he is aware that the child doesn’t want to participate in the activity he is organising then he shouldn’t be making the child participate. Whether he should do anything else is situation dependent, but the minimal standard of behaviour is not to get the child to do something the child doesn’t want to do. If an adult agrees to participate in behaviour modification then he is breaching this standard.

There is a further notable issue. “Behaviour modification” implicitly treats the child as a machine for producing approved behaviour rather than treating him as a person. The alternative to doing this is when a person does something you dislike is to offer him something you think he will prefer, be willing to explain why you dislike his behaviour and be willing to consider that you might be wrong.

Extreme behaviour is sometimes used as a reason for this kind of treatment. In all cases where a child does something extremely dangerous or bad I consider that you should look at their parents. Most parents want to control their children to an extent that no adult would ever tolerate unless they were in prison and probably not even then. Children can be punished for not washing when the parent tells him to, for having the wrong facial expression, the wrong tone of voice, for not eating food his dislikes, for sleeping or not sleeping at the wrong time, for not being interested in what a parent or teacher wants him to be interested in at a particular time (thought crime) and a whole load of other stuff. If some children act in strange ways when they are treated in this way we should be surprised that it doesn’t happen more often.

Filed under moral philosophy, political philosophy

More bad stuff about Sherlock

January 22, 2014 1 Comment

While I’m complaining about Sherlock I should point out some other flaws in the show. First, Sherlock is described as a sociopath and given various other psychiatric labels. All of those labels are insults and that’s all there is to them. He doesn’t like pointlessly hanging around with other people? This is good. You shouldn’t waste your time and the time of other people by hanging around with them if you aren’t getting any benefit from it. Describing such behaviour in pseudo-medical jargon is just a way of covering up moral disagreement rather than having an open, rational discussion about it.

Second complaint: the treatment of drugs. Sherlock acts angry when he doesn’t have access to cigarettes. He also seems to imagine that alcohol makes people feel good (Season 3, Episode 2). Both ideas are rubbish. Nicotine and alcohol can’t reprogram your brain and so can’t make you do anything or make you feel good. All the sensations they produce can be reinterpreted.

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Sherlock, emotions and rationality

January 22, 2014 Leave a comment

Many people have a false model of how emotions work and in particular a false model of the relationship between emotions and rationality.

To see this model in action, you need only watch programs like Sherlock in which the hero is supposedly rational. The hero is said not to have any emotions except when he is doing something stupid. So when Sherlock wants a cigarette he acts like an idiot, not just in the sense of wanting to poison himself in a way that could shorten his life and end up with him dying of lung cancer, but also in the sense of him being angry with people who get in the way of him smoking. In Episode 2 of Season 3, Sherlock gives a terrible best man speech in which he claims that Watson saved his life in more than one way. In other words, if Watson was not his friend he would be miserable or something like that. And we are told that Sherlock isn’t good at dealing with emotions. So the model is that rationality and emotions are antithetical.

The way most people with emotions is that they have some particular interpretation of those emotions that they never bother to question. It doesn’t matter what the interpretation is because absolutely any such rule is bound to be completely broken and lead to disaster. And by disaster I don’t mean driving your car off a cliff, I mean chronically failing to solve problems. An emotion is just a kind of sensation, so any interpretation of that sensation that you don’t criticise is going to be wrong almost all the time. Imagine if you stopped moving every time you saw something red because you thought it was a red traffic light and you will have some impression of just how bone headed this idea really is. Actually I’m understating the problem. Imagine every time you saw a red light, you decided to chain yourself to the first person you saw when the red light was on. That’s basically what people do when they get married, as Godwin pointed out:

But the evil of marriage as it is practised in European countries lies deeper than this. The habit is, for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex to come together, to see each other for a few times and under circumstances full of delusion, and then to vow to each other eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are presented with the strongest imaginable temptation to become the dupes of falsehood. They are led to conceive it their wisest policy to shut their eyes upon realities, happy if by any perversion of intellect they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of their companion. The institution of marriage is a system of fraud; and men who carefully mislead their judgments in the daily affair of their life, must always have a crippled judgment in every other concern. We ought to dismiss our mistake as soon as it is detected; but we are taught to cherish it. We ought to be incessant in our search after virtue and worth; but we are taught to check our enquiry, and shut our eyes upon the most attractive and admirable objects.

Sherlock acts like an idiot when he deal with emotion because the writers don’t have any other model in mind for dealing with emotions other than turning off all their critical faculties and enacting a ritual that has nothing to do with rationality or reality.

There is a common saying that you can’t criticise an emotion. This is sort of true only because emotions are so lacking in any worthwhile content  that they aren’t worth criticising if you divorce them from the context in which you are having them. If you look at them in context you can often criticise the package deal of which they are a part: a set of emotions, preferences and ideas about how the world works or should work. For example, if you feel happy when you’re with somebody you might think you should have sex and get married and that sort of thing. The way you ought to think goes a bit more like this: “Why am I happy when I am with this person? She looks attractive, she smells nice and she cooks me nice food. To get the same services I can buy air freshener, porn and a cook book. I don’t need to get married or even have sex with this person.” Why don’t people do this? Part of the problem is other bad ideas, like the idea that dealing morally with other people requires mutual sacrifice, so you should sacrifice stuff by getting married and agreeing to do stuff your dislike with your spouse. But it’s kinda difficult to criticise that idea without first realising that your emotions are just sensations and that they should be treated as being part of a wider context.

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Justificationism vs ancap and rationality

January 6, 2014 3 Comments

The socialist anarchopac claims to have an argument against anarchocapitalism (ancap). I think this argument is flawed, but I doubt that many ancaps could reply to it properly.

Anarchopac states that according to ancap all property gained by coercion is illegitimate. So if a thief buys a phone with money stolen from many victims, they collectively own the phone. All government property has been created by taxation, which is theft according to ancap. the money used to fund that property is owned collectively by all of the people from whom it was stolen. Many corporations get government subsidy and that money too comes from taxation, so their property too is owned collectively.

There are a few problems with this argument. The first is that if a thief steals money from people, then he owes them money, not something they would not have chosen to buy. If we were to view taxation as theft, then what the government would owe people is the money it stole, not the goods or services they bought with the proceeds of that theft. The first is that if a thief steals money from people and buys a phone with it they may or may not own the phone, or the proceeds from its sale, or the money the thief stole from them depending on what the law awards them as compensation and what other claims are made on the thief’s assets. This is true even under ancap since the protection agency employed by an individual might only look for assets worth more than some lower bound or something like that. I can see no reason why such a policy would be illegal.

The second problem is that it is not at all clear that taxation is theft. Most taxpayers still think that government is good and necessary and many are enthusiastic about it. They want the government to take their money. Is the government stealing from them? I don’t think so. The trouble is that you have to pay taxation to the government regardless of whether you support their policies. If you dislike the government’s policy on the environment you can’t refuse to pay for that particular policy. Rather, you get to vote for one party or another every four years or so, and occasionally it may happen that a government is toppled by a vote of no confidence or something like that between elections. The rest of the time you are free to say what you like (in the West) but the government can ignore or insult you and there is nothing you can do about it. Now, just so I’m not misunderstood, having the vote is better than not having it. It is sometimes possible to persuade enough people the government is doing something bad or stupid at an election. But I would prefer to change the way government works in the direction of allowing individuals to withdraw financial and practical support from the government piecemeal and on a much shorter timescale than every four years. I think that is the good substance of the ancap position. Taxation is bad financing, it is not theft.

Many ancaps might agree that government and corporate property is not legitimate. But seeing as everybody uses goods and services provided by the government I don’t think that it would be possible to disentangle what property is legitimate and what property is not legitimate. Some positions are morally worse than others to be sure. Campaigning for government support of X is worse than taking money from the government that happens to be available for doing X. If you think it would be better for X to be paid for by non-tax means but you take the money anyway I don’t see that as bad provided that you don’t compromise what you want or say that it’s good for X to be paid for by taxation. The money will be spent anyway so why not take it? The proviso may be difficult to meet, but if you’re willing to walk away if you can’t meet it, then that’s okay.

I think this is an instance of a much more general problem. People often say that some position is rational or not rational. (1) Sometimes what a person means by saying a position is irrational is that there are known criticisms of it and so people shouldn’t hold it. (2) But they also irrational to mean that an idea has been justified: shown to be true or probably true. (1) is possible, (2) is not. Justification is impossible because the conclusion of an argument is only true if its premises are true. So if you have to show something is true then you have to justify the premises, which requires another argument with more premises, which have to be justified and so you get an infinite regress. So justification is a bad standard. What you can do instead is to look for criticisms of your ideas: problems they fail to solve such as inconsistencies with other ideas, or with experimental data. You can then propose replacements for the criticised ideas and so make progress by solving problems. (See Realism and The Aim of Science by Karl Popper, especially Chapter I, Sections 1 and 2 and The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch for more details.) What you should do is look for problems and try to solve them, not justify ideas.

Looking for problems requires having the means to spot them and take action to change the way we do things. Liberal democracy has some means to do this, but ancaps have suggested means that may allow us to do better. So if people decide ancap is a good idea what they should they do about the current distribution of property? The best gloss I can come up with on legitimacy is the following: a particular action is legitimate if there are no unrefuted criticisms of it. There is no way to justify an action or idea about what action to take. If there is clear problem with some particular action and there is a way to fix it that has no surviving criticisms you should fix it. Otherwise you should just admit that you don’t know how thing would be if people hadn’t made the mistakes they have made in the past rather than trying to undo things when you don’t know how to do so without doing bad stuff.

For example, Apple has sued Samsung who allegedly copied their iPad designs or something like that, but the government has also pursued an antitrust case against Apple. What would have happened without those cases? I don’t know, nor does anybody else. Apple lost money from the antitrust action. But would people who bought a Samsung pad thing have bought an iPad? Did Apple actually lose money because of what Samsung allegedly did and if not weren’t they just shaking down Samsung? What would Apple have done with the money they had to spend on the antitrust case? How could you even go about finding out what opportunities Apple gained or lost or how to price them in either case? And let’s say Apple has come off worse. Whatever improvements they would have made the resources for making them have already been used and can’t be recaptured. The damage can’t be undone. Apple and Samsung should just be left alone to trade.

There may be some very clear cases where somebody has been screwed and it is possible to make restitution. If the government has seized some property (e.g. – eminent domain or civil asset forfeiture) and it hasn’t ruined the property in question, then it should return the property. Otherwise all we should do is sell off government property and let the market sort the rest out. I don’t think the government has much chance of getting the price of its assets right, so there’s not a lot of point in worrying about that.

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Joshua Greene Bad Scientist and Amoralist

December 25, 2013 Leave a comment

Joshua Greene is an associate professor of psychology at Harvard who works on what he calls moral cognition:

My lab studies moral judgment and decision-making, primarily using behavioral experiments and functional neuroimaging (fMRI). The goal of our research is to understand how moral judgments are shaped by automatic processes (such as emotional “gut reactions”) and controlled cognitive processes (such as reasoning and self-control).

So in other words, he’s not studying moral philosophy, right?

Rationalist philosophers such as Plato and Kant conceived of mature moral judgment as a rational enterprise, as a matter of appreciating abstract reasons that in themselves provide direction and motivation. In contrast to these philosophers, “sentimentalist” philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith argued that emotions are the primary basis for moral judgment. I believe that emotion and reason both play critical roles in moral judgment and that their respective influences have been widely misunderstood.

Emotion and reason both play a “critical” role? If they are important that implies that there is some standard by which they are important? What’s the standard? He doesn’t say. I think this is because he doesn’t realise that he has raised this issue. Greene isn’t interested in moral philosophy. That is, he isn’t interested in how to make decisions and improve how he makes decisions. It seems likely from the article that he doesn’t think there is such a thing as an objectively better or worse way to make a decision: he is an amoralist. Greene continues:

More specifically, I have proposed a “dual-process” theory of moral judgment according to which characteristically deontological moral judgments (judgments associated with concerns for “rights” and “duties”) are driven by automatic emotional responses, while characteristically utilitarian or consequentialist moral judgments (judgments aimed at promoting the “greater good”) are driven by more controlled cognitive processes. 

Both deontolology and utilitarianism are bad ways to think about moral philosophy. I hold neither of them. So I don’t fit into the little boxes he uses uncritically. Deontology holds that there are rules you have to obey to be moral, utilitarianism that acting morally consists of calculating the greatest good according to some standard. Neither of them accounts for the growth of knowledge. Any rule you could come up with may turn out to be flawed or irrelevant in the light of some new explanation or problem, so deontology is not worth much since it doesn’t explain how to make such decisions. Utilitarianism has the same problem since you have to assume some standard to make it work and so if the standard is unclear or flawed then utilitarianism won’t help you make that decision. For example, does the rule or standard thou shalt not kill apply to turning off a life support machine for a brain dead patient? Or can you do the utility calculation for that problem if you don’t understand whether the patient still counts as alive?

 If I’m right, the tension between deontological and consequentialist moral philosophies reflects an underlying tension between dissociable systems in the brain. Many of my experiments employ moral dilemmas, adapted from the philosophical literature, that are designed to exploit this tension and reveal its psychological and neural underpinnings.

The “dilemmas” Greene discusses tell us nothing about anything except the sort of mess you can get into when you fail to refute bad philosophy:

My main line of experimental research began as an attempt to understand the “Trolley Problem,”…

 First, we have the switch dilemma:  A runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks toward five people who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. You can save these five people by diverting the trolley onto a different set of tracks, one that has only one person on it, but if you do this that person will be killed. Is it morally permissible to turn the trolley and thus prevent five deaths at the cost of one?   Most people say “Yes.”

Then we have the footbridge dilemma:  Once again, the trolley is headed for five people. You are standing next to a large man on a footbridge spanning the tracks. The only way to save the five people is to push this man off the footbridge and into the path of the trolley.  Is that morally permissible?  Most people say “No.”

These two cases create a puzzle for moral philosophers:  What makes it okay to sacrifice one person to save five others in the switch case but not in the footbridge case?  There is also a psychological puzzle here:  How does everyone know (or “know”) that it’s okay to turn the trolley but not okay to push the man off the footbridge?

The appropriate answer to both problems is to say that the question is ill-posed. In a real situation there would be many relevant details that would help solve the problem or you would just lack the knowledge to make a good decision. If you know enough to stop the trolley you should do that. And if you don’t have an idea about how to stop it, the appropriate thing to do would be to wait and see instead of doing something that might cause trouble for people who have more knowledge who are trying to fix the problem. And the idea of throwing somebody off a bridge into the trolley’s path is silly. That person might have better ideas about how to solve the problem than you do so if you want to do something you should work together rather than have a fight that ends with one or both of you being run over. So if you actually think about the trolley problem as you would a real problem in your life you wouldn’t be tempted to say stupid stuff like “I would flick a switch that controls something I don’t understand.” Saying you would flick the switch would be like saying that if you’re on a plane and somebody has chest pain you should cut open his chest to do open heart surgery despite the fact that you know nothing about hearts or surgery and you don’t know the cause of the pain.

Instead of taking this line Greene talks all sorts of elaborate piffle about brain systems for deontology and utilitarianism. Those systems don’t exist. Some people who think badly about moral philosophy might think along those lines and their brains might light up in some particular way when they do so, but so what? Greene is trying to do science without thinking about the relevant explanations. He took some canned dilemma from incompetent philosophers and treats what they say about it as gospel. What if somebody thinks or suspects that the trolley dilemma is a load of old tosh but doesn’t say so and Greene puts that person in an MRI? Won’t that pollute his results?

Greene brings up another problem:

Consider the crying baby dilemma:  It’s war time, and you are hiding in a basement with several other people. The enemy soldiers are outside. Your baby starts to cry loudly, and if nothing is done the soldiers will find you and kill you, your baby, and everyone else in the basement. The only way to prevent this from happening is to cover your baby’s mouth, but if you do this the baby will smother to death.  Is it morally permissible to do this?

So the only choices are to let the baby cry or kill him? Really? If somebody tries to shut up his baby under such circumstances and accidentally smothers him do I think he should be held legally liable? I don’t know, it depends on some of the details of the context.

Greene’s work is bad science and bad philosophy. This junk reflects poorly on Harvard, who hired Greene and on Penguin who are publishing a book he wrote.

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Tanya on selfishness and altruism

December 14, 2013 1 Comment

Tanya has a blog post about selfishness and altruism, which is almost entirely wrong. We can see the see the beginning of the problem right at the start of the post:

In ethics we talk of the difference between ‘selfishness’ and ‘altruism’, and although it is frequently acknowledged that these terms are very elusive, we are to a great extent dependent on them for moral discussion.

On the surface of it, a straightforward reading of the dictionary has the case set out plainly.

self·ish adjective \ˈsel-fish\: having or showing concern only for yourself and not for the needs or feelings of other people”

al·tru·ism noun \ˈal-trü-ˌi-zəm\ : feelings and behaviour that show a desire to help other people and a lack of selfishness

An interesting thing to note here, which Tanya doesn’t note, is that these definitions are part of a more general idea about how the world and morality work. That idea is wrong in a way that was pointed out by Ayn Rand, as I shall discuss below. Tanya continues:

However, there’s a sense in which these definitions can only be read plainly if we were discussing, say, animal subjects–subjects which have a clearly defined ‘self’ to which they can clearly be concerned with benefiting or not within a given activity. Animals have this as they are strictly programmed by evolution. They have a ‘self’ (using the term loosely) amounting to a biological entity looking to survive and replicate, as a biological entity. This sets out clear boundaries in which activities such as eating when hungry or finding shelter are self-preserving, while activities such as grooming another or helping another eat when they are hungry are other-orientated.

This is all wrong. Animals enact a program in their genes. They can’t create new explanatory knowledge. As a result of this they can’t create knowledge about their place in the world, what they are doing and why and whether it could be improved. An animal doesn’t have a self anymore than does a cute computer game character. One way we can tell this is that people have made attempts to teach animals language and have failed to teach them anything beyond the simplest rudiments. For some examples see Kanzi: The Ape on the Brink of a Human Mind by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Are Dolphins Really Smart? by Justin Gregg, neither of whom necessarily agree with my interpretation of what they wrote. See also The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 16, especially around p. 407.

Tanya then writes about humans:

Humans are a different kind of creature, we are programmed by evolution only in a weak sense, and we are in a much stricter sense programmed by values. We have selves that are mental, which exist in self-selected ideas, and as such are malleable. We can learn, we can develop preferences, and we can change our minds. What is at one point unselfish can become selfish merely by shifts in our ideas. And therefore, there’s a sense in which we can never become less selfish in the pursuit of altruism. If a person is motivated by ‘wanting to win the football match’ this notion may entail ‘wanting to motivate the team’, ‘wanting to play your best’, or ‘wanting to give the crowd a good time.’ Each action can be interpreted fairly as both selfish and altruistic. Although each can be seen in a sense as generous, they are not idly or purposelessly giving, they serve some desire of the self. This veil of selfishness to our actions continues to apply to most human intentions, even charity.

What about people? Ideas can’t flow as easily from one person to another as they can within a single person’s mind. In particular, you can only judge or act on ideas in your own mind, not on those in the mind of another person. If you want to judge another person’s ideas you have to learn them first. Furthermore, since you have different knowledge than they do you have different opportunities and can make use of different stuff. Some people might be good at drawing, others at programming, others at physics and so on. So it makes sense to say that you are different from other people and that those differences often imply that you can benefit from different deals. So it makes sense to say that a human being can act in his own interest, which can be different from that of another person, but it doesn’t make sense to say this about an animal. Tanya continues:

The lines between altruism and selfishness are blurred by our existence through the mental in which ‘us’ and ‘the outside world’ can be intimately intertwined by values. In the extreme, selfishness can manifest itself in form of dying for a cause or a loved one.

This is very confused. What people commonly call selfishness involves lumping together two very different ideas, as pointed out by Ayn Rand. Idea 1 (good): thinking about what is in your self-interest and trying to enact it. Idea 2 (bad): being willing to do absolutely anything that seems to benefit you according to some ideas you happen to hold at the moment. Lumping those two things together is what Ayn Rand called a package deal.

The same set of common ideas lumps together two very different ideas under the heading altruism: another package deal. Idea 1 (good): you sometimes help people when it benefits you too. Idea 2 (bad): you have an obligation to help people even if, by doing so, you are cutting your own throat. Indeed, cutting your own throat is good and if you’re not doing it then you suck and other people should cut your throat for you.

One way that bad ideas survive: people accept them uncritically by using common words without stopping to question the ideas behind them. When Rand says that she uses the term selfishness for the reason that makes some people afraid to use it, the positive way of interpreting this is that she is bringing these bad ideas out in the open so that we can kill them. Rand replaced those ideas by saying that rational people don’t have conflicts of interest. So you can act in your own interest without screwing over other people.

The bad ideas in the definitions Tanya gave have leaked into her discussion of morality. Tanya claims you can sacrifice yourself for a cause or a loved one and that this is selfish. This is misleading. Let’s suppose you go off to fight in the British army in World War II. If you’re rational your objective is not to die. Rather, you are taking a risk of dying because the consequences of losing the war are worse the the risk of death that you’re taking on. If you get conquered by Nazi Germany it’s virtually impossible to act in your rational self-interest without being murdered. By contrast, if you’re fighting in the Soviet army and you take the risk required to steal food from kulaks, then you’re just an idiot – you are literally throwing away your life for nothing, for less than nothing. By living the idea that productive people can be thrown under the bus, you will reduce production. And you have made it more difficult for any productive person to cooperate with you, which will make it more difficult for you to improve. And in any case if the authorities decide you should be murdered, then how can you say no given the ideas you hold? What argument can you give that you should not be killed for the good of others? The British soldier may be acting in his rational self interest, the Soviet soldier is not.

Under an Objectivist perceptive, this renders talk of altruism redundant, with altruism standing out only in instances in which coercive pressures precede generosity. But it is not evident that, if this be so, by the same token talk of ‘selfishness’ shouldn’t becomes obsolete. If we find ourselves in a situation where one can say ‘I changed my mind drastically from being selfish to being selfish’, the term is hardly descriptive.

This is not a very accurate depiction of Rand’s position. Rand doesn’t consider talk of altruism redundant: she thought it was a good idea to criticise the bad content associated with it. Tanya’s misunderstanding illustrates a weakness of discussing issues in terms of the definitions of words rather in terms of explanations, as criticised by Popper: see The Open Society and its Enemies, Volume 2, Chapter 11, Section II. Rand may be partly to blame for this problem in the interpretation of her work since she sometimes laid stress on definitions. Tanya has taken this bad habit and run with it.

But then it sounds like Tanya is about to turn the corner and get something right:

But of course, all of this misses the point. Practically speaking when people speak of ‘selfishness’ being good or bad, or ‘altruism’ being good or bad, they’re really being used as umbrella terms for some handy rules of thumb to help guide us in selecting and reviewing our values.

Tanya then goes on to give examples of what she considers good and bad ideas under each term. Each term is sometimes used to invoke good moral ideas and sometimes used to invoke bad moral ideas. This often leads to lack of clarity about moral issues when people don’t discuss the ideas. The right thing to do if some issue is unclear is to clarify it by discussing the ideas, not terminology. Tanya then writes:

To decide between values we require much more sophisticated ideas to guide us.

Presumably it would be a good idea to start discussing the ideas she lists under her definitions, but she doesn’t. By contrast, there are some philosophers who don’t stop just when things are getting interesting. Ayn Rand wrote two novels and several non-fiction books, which have a lot of good and substantive and sophisticated moral content. Karl Popper also had good moral ideas, like the idea that you should take ideas seriously and discuss them instead of discussing terminology. See also some of the posts on the blog you’re reading right now, like this one, and Elliot Temple’s blog. Sadly, people often ignore such content.

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Pusey and all that jazz

December 7, 2013 3 Comments

In this post I’m going to present some philosophical dialogues to help explain what’s wrong with some current debates about quantum mechanics.

Philosophical Dialogue 1: The Right Argument

Scene: the living room of John’s house, where John is sitting at his computer. Jane enters.

Jane: This house does not exist.

John looks around, he seems appropriately puzzled.

John: Why do you say that?

Jane: I admit that the idea that this house exists can be used to do calculations of things like air currents, but it doesn’t actually exist, it’s just a rule for computing temperature and air currents.

John: That’s dumb. All you’re doing is taking the idea that the house does exist relabelling part of it as not existing. What you’re saying just makes the explanation of the air currents and temperature more complicated and less clear.

Jane: Oh, this metaphysical fantasy that the house actually exists is just complete hogwash, it’s not the sort of thing with which I, as a practical person, can possibly be expected to believe.

John: Your incredulity is not an argument. Kindly go away you silly person.

Philosophical Dialogue 2: The Wrong Argument

Scene: the living room of John’s house, where John is sitting at his computer. Jane enters.

Jane: This house does not exist.

John looks around, he seems appropriately puzzled.

John: Why do you say that?

Jane: I admit that the idea that this house exists can be used to do calculations of things like air currents, but it doesn’t actually exist, it’s just a rule for computing temperature and air currents.

John: But when I do experiments I find that the house does exist.

Jane: No you don’t. You just find that the air currents and temperature can be predicted with the house formulae, which are just tools for calculation.

John: Oh yeah. Well, I’ll prove it by coming up with a great experiment to test your idea. An experiment that will trash your idea forever.

Jane: So what?

Commentary

The statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics is the idea that quantum mechanics is just a set of formulae for calculating probability. The appropriate response to this is to say something similar to what John said in the first dialogue. A few years ago, Pusey et al proposed an experiment that they claimed would test the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is analogous to what John said in the second dialogue. Pusey et al are wrong, not because the statistical interpretation is right but because they give it too much credit. The statistical interpretation is complete garbage and cannot be tested by any conceivable experiment because it says nothing about anything. The statistical interpretation may or may not lead people into making some mistakes when doing calculations, but it is mistaken about physics and epistemology.

Physics is about what exists in reality. It is not about formulae for calculating stuff. The formulae are useful for testing ideas about what exists in reality and they may also have technological applications. But in both applications it is important to keep your eye on the underlying physical reality so you understand what you’re doing with the formulae. If you don’t keep your eyes on the prize you will end up making epistemological and technological mistakes.

To understand better what quantum mechanics says about reality read the structure of the multiverse, The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

Filed under epistemology, everett, multiverse, physics, quantum mechanics

Pensions

December 7, 2013 Leave a comment

George Osborne has decided to increase the state pension age. Unfortunately he hasn’t increased it to infinity yet. Anyway, somebody I know on Facebook said this was bad. He stated that since old people wouldn’t retire there would be no jobs for young people. Also, he claimed we won’t be getting pensions until we’re dead. My reply to is below.

I think this is probably one of the more sensible things Osborne had done, although I am not a fan of the conservatives for various reasons. Your arguments against it don’t make sense.

First, it makes no sense to say that school leavers won’t be able to get jobs because there is not a fixed amount of stuff to do. We are never going to run out of problems that need solving, i.e. – ways in which our lives are less satisfactory than they could be. So to have work to do, what you have to do is pick one of those problems and pick a way to solve it that people will voluntarily support with their time, money and resources.

Second, the world does not owe you money. If you want to spend thirty odd years lounging about at the end of your life, then save for it. I can see no reason why future taxpayers should pay you to do nothing. Are they your slaves?

Third, I’m am a bit puzzled by why you would want your leisure time to be dependent on bureaucrats who have little or nothing to lose from shafting you.

Fourth, average lifespan has been increasing and unless the growth of medical knowledge stops, it will continue to increase, which means the proportion of the population over some fixed retirement age will increase. Even leaving aside the moral bankruptcy of expecting other people to pay for your leisure time, that will at some point lead to financial bankruptcy. Keeping the pension age fixed is a bad idea. It would be more sensible to try to change the world so that people can earn their keep by doing stuff they like doing, by changing the way jobs work or by changing attitudes people have to work or both.

Filed under moral philosophy, political philosophy

David Nutt and drugs

December 7, 2013 Leave a comment

In 2009, Professor David Nutt was sacked from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs after claiming that ecstasy and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol. The government couldn’t have thought much of Nutt if they sacked him. Some people seem to think he is the best thing since sliced bread. He has written a paper on drugs that explains his position. I think the war on drugs is a moral catastrophe in terms of the persecution of drug users and those who sell to them. It is also intellectually bankrupt, and David Nutt has swallowed many of its worst ideas hook, line and sinker. If he ends up making any improvements to drug policy, it will be a matter of pure luck.

Nutt claims that experts can decide how drugs ought to be classified in a “rational” and “scientific” manner by looking at their effects. He divides these effects into three categories. Physical effects: if you drink too much alcohol your liver is damaged, heroin can lead to respiratory arrest and so on. Dependence: some drugs produce withdrawal symptoms and so it can be difficult to stop taking them. Social effects: drugs can break up families and cost the taxpayer money for healthcare of people who are ill as a result of taking drugs. The idea is that you can look at medical evidence and statistics and stuff like that and use them to decide government policy.

However, all of the categories above raise moral issues and he doesn’t address any of those issues. For example, taking heroin, say, may make it more likely that you will die and many people will think this is bad. But some people might want to die and so might value heroin specifically because it will kill them. At present, it is basically illegal to commit suicide. If you’re caught trying to do it you will be locked up. Thomas Szasz argued that this is one of the roots of drug prohibition: the government wants to make it difficult for a person to kill himself. The government is at least more or less explicit about this. Does Nutt favour the persecution of people who want to commit suicide or not? I can’t tell from the paper.

What about dependence? Many people seem to like dependence. Most people prefer to be dependent on a person rather than a chemical. Many people commit suicide after the end of a personal relationship such as a marriage. This is well-known and yet many people choose to get married: many people value being dependent on another person over their life. Now, admittedly this dependence involves a person and not a drug, but is there any relevant difference? I’m not saying there is no relevant difference, just that Nutt hasn’t bothered to address the issue. Should we ban marriage as well as heroin or alcohol or whatever? I think both marriage and heroin are bad ideas. However, the people involved in both marriage and taking heroin want to do those things and the people involved could walk away if they thought they had a better option. I don’t know how to provide people with better options and none of the people involved want anything better so I can’t see that it makes sense to force them to do something else.

What about the social effects? It costs the taxpayer money to look after people who have destroyed their health with drugs. But there is a problem. Most people seem to think that healthcare should be provided for by taxation, not by voluntary subscription. The reason given for this policy is that people who are ill shouldn’t have to pay for healthcare. So if this is a cost that people want to pay, why is anybody bitching about the cost of medical treatment for drug users? After all, the whole reason for the policy is to prevent ill people from having to consider the cost of treatment. There is a deep issue here. The problem goes like this: healthcare is a complex technological and personal service. It’s not like saying that you have a right not to punched in the face because it is easy to refrain from punching people in the face: it requires effort to punch somebody in the face. Curing diseases requires thought and deliberate action. If you deem that people have a right to healthcare, then there is no way to draw a principled line to demarcate what care they can’t have. Are you going to say that some people don’t deserve healthcare because they made a self-destructive choice to take drugs? But then why not say that you can deny this ‘right’ to everybody who makes the self destructive choice not to save or get insurance to cover medical expenses? If you admit one you’ve undermined the rationale for the other.

I can’t see any sign in the paper that Nutt differs from the government on any substantive moral issue. As such, any improvements he make will be tinkering around the edges. More substantial changes in how people think about this issue are needed. First, we should openly admit that this is a moral issue. Taking drugs is behaviour, not disease. Disliking that behaviour for whatever reason, is a moral position about how people ought to behave, not a medical position. Second, people should become much more reluctant to drag the use of force into disputes. If somebody isn’t using violence or fraud against you but you don’t like what they’re doing, then leave. Third, if a drug user fails to hold down a job or whatever that’s his problem and the government should not be using tax money, which is not contributed voluntarily, to support their bad habits, as it does now. And of course this policy should apply to anybody else who fails. It’s very difficult for people to learn competence if they are not allowed to fail.

Filed under moral philosophy, political philosophy

Against Conspiracy Theories

November 22, 2013 Leave a comment

I have made a YouTube video about why conspiracy theories suck.

Filed under Uncategorized

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