Chomsky on Foucault

“In Foucault’s 1971 televised debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argued against the possibility of any fixed human nature, as posited by Chomsky’s concept of innate human faculties. Chomsky argued that concepts of justice were rooted in human reason, whereas Foucault rejected the universal basis for a concept of justice. Following the debate, Chomsky was stricken with Foucault’s total rejection of the possibility of a universal morality, stating “He struck my as completely amoral, I’d never met anyone who was so totally amoral” … “I mean, I liked him personally, it’s just that I couldn’t make sense of him. It’s as if he was from a different species, or something”” (from the Wikipedia page on Foucault)

 

Morality is an evolved sense; different societies have evolved different moral structures. In this sense Chomsky and Foucault are each half-right.

The point, though, is less about what morality is, as about how humans think of morality in other humans; Foucalt is particularly distant from anything most people (especially most Americans) would recognize as moral.

Cats are Cuckoos

“Cats win at Evolution,” (from Cave People and Stuff,) is a great article about the evolution of cats from primate-predator to primate-parasite.

A quote:

“The domestic cat – aka Felis catus or Felis silvestris catus – is the same size as a human infant.  Its mew sounds very similar to the cry of a newborn human baby.  It has a round face with big eyes, like a human infant.  The domestic cat has gone down the same evolutionary route as the cuckoo, only much further.  Its entire life-cycle involves imitating baby humans and being coddled, fed and protected as though it were a human infant.”

Fabulous post. Go read it all.

EvolutionistX Manifesto

1. Evolution is real. Incentives are real. Math is real. Their laws are as iron-clad as gravity’s and enforced with the furor of the Old Testament god. Disobey, and you will be eliminated.

2. Whatever you incentivize, you will get. Whatever you don’t incentivize, you will not get. Create systems that people can cheat, and you create cheaters. If criminals have more children than non-criminals, then the future will be full of criminals. Create systems that reward trust and competence, and you will end up with a high trust, competent system.

3. Society is created by people, through the constant interaction of the basic traits of the people in it and the incentives of its systems.

4. Morality is basically an evolved mental/social toolkit to compel you to act in your genetic self-interest. Morality does not always function properly in evolutionary novel situations, can be hijacked, and does not function similarly or properly in everyone, but people are generally capable of using morality to good ends when dealing with people in their trust networks.

Therefore:

5. Whatever you think is wrong with the world, articulate it clearly, attempt to falsify your beliefs, and then look for practical, real-world solutions. This is called science, and it is one of our greatest tools.

6. Create high-trust networks with trustworthy people. A high trust system is one where you can be nice to people without fear of them defecting. (Call your grandma. Help a friend going through a rough time. Don’t gossip.) High trust is one of the key ingredients necessary for everything you consider nice in this world.

7. Do not do/allow/tolerate things/people that destroy trust networks. Do not trust the untrustworthy nor act untrustworthy to the trusting.

8. Reward competency. Society is completely dependent on competent people doing boring work, like making sure water purification plants work and food gets to the grocery store.

9. Rewarding other traits in place of competency destroys competency.

10. If you think competent people are being unjustly excluded, find better ways to determine competency–don’t just try to reward people from the excluded pools, as there is no guarantee that this will lead to hiring competent people. If you select leaders for some other trait (say, religiosity,) you’ll end up with incompetent leaders.

11. Act in reality. The internet is great for research, but kinda sucks for hugs. Donating $5 to competent charities will do more good than anything you can hashtag on Twitter. When you need a friend, nothing beats someone who will come over to your house and have a cup of tea.

12. Respond to life with Aristotelian moderation: If a lightbulb breaks, don’t ignore it and don’t weep over it. Just change the lightbulb. If someone wrongs you, don’t tell yourself you deserved it and don’t escalate into a screaming demon. Just defend yourself and be ready to listen to the other person if they have an explanation.

Guilt is a Thing inside of You

Guilt does not care whether you deserve to feel guilty or not. It does not care about right and wrong. Guilt is just an evolved mechanism to make you feel like shit if you threaten the stability of your own place in the social order. Guilt forces you to forget everything and grovel on your hands and knees until you are accepted back into your clan, not because your clan is good or right or just, but because outside the clan lies nothing–wilderness, lions, and death.

Little White Lies and What They Mean

Back on my post about society lying, I mentioned a category of untruth that we might generally consider “little white lies”.

In our society, these lies are generally feel-good statements, like, “everyone is beautiful,” or “don’t care what others think–be yourself!” If you believe these things too literally, you’ll get in a lot of trouble, because reality doesn’t work that way. But if you try to point out that these are lies, you’ll meet a lot of resistance–people are very committed to their lies. Sometimes large chunks of their identities or interaction with the world rest on these sorts of lies.

So what’s up with that?

I mentioned in the previous post that I was over-simplifying, and I am. You see, I have only explored the situation so far from the POV of someone like me–someone who takes things literally and prefers factual analyses over emotional ones.

Most people aren’t like me.

Most people, (as far as I can tell,) do most of their functional thinking via their emotions, and use words not in precise ways to convey actual facts about the world, but wield them like the blobs of paint in an impressionist painting to convey the emotions they feel on a subject.

Confusing one approach for the other leads to great miscommunication. The facts-and-numbers person misunderstands the feelings-person, and starts rambling off about a bunch of irrelevant fact-things that the feelings-person either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about. The only thing that is clear to the feelings-person is that the facts-person is a humorless jerk who keeps saying their feelings are wrong. The only thing clear to the facts-person is that the feelings-person makes no damn sense because they keep saying stuff that is wrong.

Let’s use the Trolley Problem as an example. Suppose a trolley is about to kill a bunch of children who have accidentally wandered onto a railroad track, but you could save them by pushing another person in front of the trolley. You know the problem.

Present this problem to a feelings-person, and imagining trolleys killing children will make them unhappy and sad and the alternative of murdering someone will also make them unhappy and sad. The feelings-person concludes that you must be a terrible person because you asked them this question that made them feel so terrible. What kind of monstrous person goes around thinking about trolleys murdering children?

The facts-person, meanwhile, has gotten totally annoyed at the feelings-person for not answering the hypothetical and turning this nice, reasonable discussion of utilitarian calculi into a flame war about their totally irrelevant feelings.

So when dealing with feeling-people, the important thing to remember is to try to understand what they mean, rather than what they say. When a feelings-person says, “Be yourself!” what they actually mean is, “I think society should be generally more accepting of certain forms of quirky and essentially harmless variation, and people should be generally less concerned with what others think. I pledge not to be too judgmental of people who are a little different in ways that aren’t too weird or disruptive, and may myself be a little quirky.” This is a fine message; you just have to understand that this is what “be yourself!” actually means, and not mistake it for actually encouraging you to go to work naked (or whatever you would do if there were nothing stopping you.)

(Likewise, feeling-people, when dealing with facts-people, they aren’t trying to be kill-joys. They just require a lot of tolerance and clarity.)

It’s all or Nothin’

I posit that it is difficult for humans to adequately respond to things that they regard as merely somewhat problematic. Getting just about anything done requires a ton more work than sitting around doing nothing, so people who are motivated to change things are generally people who are convinced that things are really, really bad.

If you don’t think things are really, really bad, you’ll probably end up self-justifying that things are really good, so you don’t need to spend a bunch of time trying to change them, so you can comfortably hang out and relax.

If you do want to change things, you’ll probably have to spend a lot of time convincing yourself that things are truly dire in order to keep up the emotional energy necessary to get the work done.

Either way, you’re probably lying to yourself (or others), but I’m not sure if humans are really capable of saying, “this system is mostly good and mostly beneficial to the people in it, but it has really bad effects on a few people.”

Your opinions about a system are probably going to be particularly skewed one way or another if you have no direct or second-hand experience with that system, because you’re most likely hearing reports from people who care enough to put in the effort to talk about their systems.

Likewise, the people who care the most about political issues tend to have more extreme views; moderates tend not to be terribly vocal.

It makes an impassioned defense of moderatism kind of anomalous.

A good example of this effect is religion. If you’ve ever listened to American atheists talk about religion, you’ve probably gotten the impression that, as far as they’re concerned, religion is super duper evil.

By contrast, if you’ve ever talked to a religious person, you know they tend to think religion is totally awesome.

About 80% of Americans claim to be religious (though in typical me-fashion, I suspect some of them are lying because how could so many people possibly be religious?) We’ll call that 75%, because some people are just going along with the crowd. Since religion is voluntary and most religious people seem to like their religions, we’ll conclude that religion is more or less a positive in 75% of people’s lives.

Only about 40% of people actually attend religious services weekly–we’ll call these our devoted, hard-core believers. These people tend to really love their religion, though even non-attenders can get some sort of comfort out of their beliefs.

It’s difficult to determine exactly what % of Americans believe in particular forms of Christianity, but about 30% profess to be some form of “Evangelical”; Fundamentalists are a much smaller but often overlapping %, probably somewhere between 10 and 25%.

So let’s just stick with “about 75% like their religion, and about 40% have some beliefs that may be really problematic for other people” (after all, it’s not Unitarians and Neo-Pagans people are complaining about.)

For what % of people is religion really problematic? LGBT folks have it hard due to some popular religious beliefs–we can estimate them at 5%, according to the Wikipedia.

People who need or want abortions are another big category. Estimates vary, but let’s go with 1/3 of women being interested in abortion at some point in their lives, with I think 12% citing health reasons. 33 is a pretty big %, but since abortion is currently basically legal, religion is currently more of a potential problem than a real problem for most of these women.

A third category is non-Christians who face discrimination in various aspects of life, and kids/teens who have to put up with super-controlling parents. I have no idea what the stats are on them, but the logic of encounters suggests that the 30% or so of non-Christians are going to have trouble with the 40% or so of problematic-belief-Christians, mediated by non-Christians being concentrated in certain parts of the country, so lets go with 15% of people having significant issues at some point, though these are unlikely to be life-long issues (and some % of these people overlap with the previous two groups.)

So, let’s say 70% like religion; 40% have problematic beliefs; 20% suffer some sort of discrimination in their lives, and about 5% suffer significantly.

In short, most of the time, religion is actually a really positive thing for the vast majority of people, and a really bad thing for a small % of people.

But most people who have an interest in religion don’t say, “Religion is basically good but occasionally bad.” Most people say, either, “Religion is totally awesome,” or “Religion totally sucks.” And that has a lot to do with whether you and your friends are primarily people for whom it is good or bad. The moderate position gets lost.

Are Useless things actually Useful?

One of the things I found striking in the previous article (the one on evangelicals) was the claim that people involved in anti-abortion groups don’t see their activities as political, and claim that most of what they do is religious, like praying about abortion or Bible-reading. That reminded me rather strongly of the depiction of abolitionists in a book (historical fiction) I just read. Most of what abolitionists did probably amounted to little more than talking, praying, singing, and Bible-studying about the evils of slavery. Useless? Or consciousness-raising? Does it require a large army of people who say they agree with you to inspire a small % of people to actually get stuff done? Or does stuff get done by people just gradually changing what they believe, even without anyone doing big, “effective” things?

I recently encountered a petition to Honor the Children of Pakistan (Note: this was written immediately after the massacre of a hundred Pakistani children by the Taliban.)

On its face, the petition seems utterly useless (and possibly slightly insulting to Pakistan.) Signing a petition about how children deserve educations does nothing about the security situation in Pakistan. It’s not like the problem here is that Pakistan just hasn’t bothered to build schools, or cranky parents won’t let their girls go to school, or the kids are too busy sewing soccer balls to go to class, or any other practical impediment to which we can imagine fairly easy solutions, like Americans donating money to build schools or laws that fine parents for not sending their kids to school. The problem is that there’s a war going on, and one side is massacring the other side’s children. And I can’t think of any easy solutions to that, other than building a wall around the Taliban and shooting anyone who comes over, which may not be feasible.

(Given the circumstances, I wouldn’t blame Pakistani parents if they all started homeschoolong.)

Anyway, me signing a petition or not is clearly useless–but in the long run, can it actually be useful?

X will be more like Y if X just acts more like Y

Due to some basically random and kinda funny only to me things that the modern internet does to people’s information networks, I stumbled across this article:

Why white evangelicals rule the midterms

I can’t speak for the factual accuracy of the article, or whether you’d find its aims desirable. But I found it amusing that it basically boils down to recommending that if Liberals want the same outcomes as conservatives, they should act more like conservatives.

If liberals act like conservatives, then do they become conservatives? (Questions of acting and being, I suppose.)

It is tempting to see religion as an organizing principle within people’s lives, but the causality may go the other way–people who are prone to organized community life tend to join/form religious organizations.

As for the article’s general recommendation that liberals build more community from the ground up–well, I like community, or at least the idea of it. But I also think there are some strong impediments to liberals actually building community. Liberals are more likely to be young people, who simply haven’t lived in one place long enough to form communities. Liberals are more likely to be folks from small, diasporic ethnic groups, who don’t have a big group of people to join with. They are more likely to come from communities where factors like crime and poverty have large negative effects on people’s ability to have nice public spaces where they can hang out. Etc.

Beyond their ethnic enclaves, the far left seems to be having trouble with effective organization. Someone has said that trying to get liberals to do anything is like herding cats; much mention is also made of the circular liberal firing squad, and of course the metaphor of everyone jockying for position on a doomed, sinking ship.

Still, despite it all, communities that care about each other and provide basic social support and friendship for their members, without falling prey to some of the violent excesses of certain communities I could mention, seem like a good thing.

Bertlemann’s Socks

I always wear mismatched socks in honor of Bertlemann’s Socks.

Also, laziness.

Memes and Transmission Pathways

From, Why Cultural Evolution Is Real (And What It Is)

(Because watching other people say that thing you were saying and be like ‘omg I was saying that’ and then they give it their own twist and you are like ‘oh yes I see where this is going and it gets back to the morality model’ and then the joy at how much fun it is.)

(Guys guys we are talking about memes, okay. And the big question brought up by the part I quoted is, of course, What are the long-term effects of changing transmission pathways?)

Quote:
“How Transmission Pathways Matter

In my outline, I mentioned that the transmission pathway – vertical or horizontal – matters a great deal for the content and friendliness of transmitted cultural items.

In biology, there is already support for this model. Parasitic entities like bacteria that are limited to vertical transmission – transmission from parent to child only – quickly evolve into benign symbiosis with the host, because their own fitness is dependent on the fitness of the host entity. But parasitic entities that may accomplish horizontal transmission are not so constrained, and may be much more virulent, extracting high fitness costs from the host. (See, e.g., An empirical study of the evolution of virulence under both horizontal and vertical transmission, by Stewart, Logsdon, and Kelley, 2005, for experimental evidence involving corn and a corn pathogen.)

As indicated in an earlier section, ancient cultural data is very tree-like, indicating that the role of horizontal transmission has been minimal. However, the memetic technologies of modernity – from book printing to the internet – increased the role of horizontal transmission. I have previously written that the modern limited fertility pattern was likely transmitted horizontally, through Western-style education and status competition by limiting fertility (in The history of fertility transitions and the new memeplex, Sarah Perry, 2014). The transmission of this new “memeplex” was only sustainable by horizontal transmission; while it increases the individual well-being of “infected carriers,” it certainly decreases their evolutionary fitness. …”

Okay, right. So your meme-mitochondria will most likely protect you from dying, but don’t much give a shit if you end up killing people who are not-you or at least don’t share your genes. And meme-viruses will try to get you to not kill society at large (which is busy propagating them,) but don’t particularly care if they kill you.

Reflections:

1. Will modern mass-media destroy itself by accidentally destroying the people that use it? Can mass-media be a stable, long-term part of the human cultural/technological toolkit?

2. Does modern mass-media create an actually different moral meme-environment from the vast majority of the human past? Is this good/bad/neutral?

3. Will we evolve to be adapted to this meme-environment, say, by people who believe that Western Education is Sin kidnapping girls, selling them as brides, and then massively out-breeding people who “Lean In”?