The View from Hell

Enhanced Running

2012-01-26T10:50:00.000-08:00

This is the first part of a series of posts exploring the moral and practical importance of pleasure and happiness.

In this post, I would like to share the most pleasurable thing I know of that most people don't know about: distance running under the influence of cannabis.

Every time I run the trails and fire roads in Los Angeles (which is almost daily), I wonder: if there are four million people wandering around in the city down there, why am I the only one up here running?

Here's a really sad statistic: 86% of poor pre-schoolers in cities have not developed age-appropriate basic motor skills like running. This might even apply to you: a shocking percentage of moderns are simply not learning to run in childhood. This, despite the fact that we are a species with many adaptations specific to running, indicating that we are, in an important sense, born to run.

Clearly, running is a Civilization and Its Discontents issue: the patterns of modern life do not match the patterns in which we evolved. While our food has gotten sweeter and easier to get than our ancestral diet ("superstimulus food"), moving our bodies has come to be seen as eccentric and optional, or perhaps as a chore to be completed for moral reasons, not for pleasure.

The solution: superstimulus exercise, exercise that's so good you get addicted to it and have to force yourself to do less of it than you want to. My thesis is that running while high on weed is just this kind of superstimulus exercise.

While I understand that marijuana remains technically illegal in many states and other bullshit political entities like the United States of America, almost half of Americans report having used it illegally, and hundreds of thousands of people like me use it legally with a magical note from their doctor that makes it not recreational, but medical, because there is totally a difference between health and recreation. (Health is moral; fun is not.)

Running high on marijuana has been the single most important factor in making life bearable for me for the past three years. I find it shocking that this healthy pleasure is denied to millions of people who could benefit from it.

What It's Like to Run High

It makes you free. You can go anywhere, and it makes the city feel like your territory. Running while high is an excellent mode of exploration; as a runner, you occupy a well-understood role that is both socially approved and socially ignored. It's the perfect disguise to enable an introvert to move around the world in the sunshine. You can go almost anywhere, even blatantly trespassing, and no one says anything because they barely notice you except to think that they should really start running, too.

It's easy and effortless (especially as you become more experienced). It would take more effort to stop running or break the rhythm than it takes to keep running fluidly at the same pace.

You get to see deer and coyotes and foxes and owls and bunnies and dogs and lizards.

It's engaging, especially trail running - an ostension of fantasized Imperial speeder bikes maneuvering perfectly through the forest, avoiding all the trees efficiently and with perfect concentration.

It's insanely pleasurable, with every part of your body screaming (in chemicals) that this coordinated motion is exactly what you're supposed to be doing. (Which ties in with the recent discovery that endocannabinoids are probably what causes runner's high. It feels to me like weed jump-starts the process of experiencing exercise as pleasurable, which, even as a life-long athlete, I experienced as much less pleasurable before becoming a stoner.)

It's transcendent - it often feels like another being is controlling your body, like you can step away from yourself and "create a void," as Haruki Murakami puts it.

Running is not only pleasurable in the moment; it makes everything else in life more pleasurable, too. Running fills me with happy chemicals for hours after the run itself. It gives me an appetite and helps me sleep. It increases my sex drive and the intensity of orgasm. Marijuana does those things too, but those are the acute rather than sustained effects of the drug. Both pieces are necessary for the magic to occur.

When you are running, it is none of the government's business what chemicals are in your body, the way it is when you are driving a car or even riding a bicycle.

Running high is not just more pleasurable than running sober; it's more pleasurable than just sitting around being high, which is itself pretty fucking pleasurable.

Running high is so pleasurable and addictive that the main danger (in addition to commonsense dangers) is wanting to do it too much (see Appendix: Secondary Enhancements for more enhancements that are dangerous in this way). I experience beautiful grouch logic moments where I say to myself, "I'll be good and just sit on my ass and eat ice cream all day today, so tomorrow I can run as much as I want!"

The Meaning of Pleasure

Running high is the best thing ever. What is the importance of this?

Would it be morally important if there were a major, easily accessible, healthy source of pleasure that is denied to the majority of people through ignorance and politics?

If pleasure is not enough to give meaning to life, what is pleasure's moral value? Is there negative value when pleasure is denied? Is that negative value different for existing versus never-existing people? Is it different for those aware of the deprivation versus those unaware of it?

And what is it that gives a sense of meaning to life - a sense of wanting to go forward in your story and see what happens next?

Appendix: Secondary Enhancements

There are two other enhancements I use to push running into the "superstimulus exercise" category. One is paleo-happy, minimal "barefoot" running shoes; the other is an iPod Shuffle. These are not nearly as important as marijuana, but running in giant squishy "running shoes" doesn't feel as good and is associated with more injuries than running in flat shoes or barefoot.

That said, I would not be surprised if nonscientific reports of a "barefoot running injury epidemic" were true, i.e. that lots of people get injured while running barefoot nowadays. The most likely causes of the purported "barefoot running injury epidemic" are (a) a lot of people suddenly running barefoot, with predictable injuries (probably at a lower rate than with shod running); and also (b) the fact that barefoot running is so pleasurable that you want to do more of it than is healthy for your body.

No study has ever shown that cushioned running shoes reduce injuries. 79% of all runners are injured every year; we humans tend to attribute bad consequences to any salient deviant behavior we detect, hence the blame on barefoot shoes. Few ask: would these folks have been injured wearing cushioned shoes? What if they hadn't been running at all - what are the risks of no exercise? (I should add that I also don't stretch or warm up - I just roll out like a Tarahumara.)

The iPod Shuffle (or other tiny little clip-on MP3 player) accomplishes two goals: (a) music piped directly into your (perhaps marijuana-enhanced) brain, and (b) not having to schlep anything bigger than a house key. This is by far the most important piece of blood electronics that I own. While no iPod Shuffles have yet been found in burial sites of our pre-agricultural ancestors, I still put this in the "paleo enhancement" category. I don't know what it is about music and repetitive physical activity that is so great, but it feels important. My evidence for this is from D. E. Brown's list of human universals, which includes ten separate entries relating to music, including "music related in part to dance" and "music related in part to religious activity." Running to music allows one to synchronize one's motions to the music, an activity very similar to moving in sync with other people. From Pyongyang to Burbank, in military and civilian use, there seems to be something going on with people moving in sync. A new study suggests that moving in sync makes a group more willing to engage in (a laboratory equivalent of) coalitional violence. Whether for violent or other purposes, moving in sync may help a group cohere; humans love it and want to watch it and do it. Running with a partner is nice, but running with music may give our bodies the same burst of feeling like we're moving in sync.

So You're In A Simulation

2012-01-05T22:26:00.000-08:00

Looking at what we can see of our universe, there don't seem to be many folks like us around.

There don't seem to be many folks around at all.

Aware beings seem to arise only rarely, from what we can tell. That's Fact #1. Fact #2 is that we are, nonetheless, aware beings. (Hi!)

Should we assume things are as they seem - that our experiencing selves arose through rare natural processes? That we are among the few beings who will ever wake up and experience the universe?

Or should we wonder at the coincidence of our existence and our a priori unlikeliness? Should we suspect, perhaps, that we are not the special unicorns of the galaxy that we appear to be, but rather are ordinary in a way that is hidden to us? Because which is more likely: that we are among the 200 billion aware beings who will ever live in our universe, or that we are as grains of sand among the ten-to-the-fuckload beings who might exist in the simulations of some simulation-capable entity?

So you're in a simulation. What can you do if you don't want to play anymore?

From the existence of miserable folks since Jeremiah,^* we have some evidence as to our simulator overlords' value system: they don't give a fuck if we don't want to be here. Actively trying to get out of the simulation and hitting the "off" button over and over again does not seem to exempt us from participation. They do not seem to restrict themselves to creating only creatures that are glad to be alive. We know this about them; what else do we know? What could their purposes be for having us here, and what, if anything, would motivate them to let us stop existing?

Some folks seem to leave for good and we don't interact with them again - death seems final, in our universe. But what if that's not how it works in the big simulation? Given the information we have about our simulation and our overlords, is there any strategy to speak of for (a) getting out of the current simulation and (b) preventing oneself from being recreated in other simulations?

I imagine longevity enthusiasts would be interested in the flip side: is there anything they can do to ensure they get copied and re-used as widely as possible in everybody and their mother's simulation?

And if our universe is as it seems but simulation capabilities are in our own society's future, is my boyfriend correct in suggesting that I'm putting myself at risk of future involuntary simulation by being friends with quirky AI geeks?

* 20:14-18 "Cursed be the day on which I was born; let not the day on which my mother bore me be blessed. Cursed be the man. . . because he slew me not from the womb; so that my mother might have been my grave and her womb always great. Why did I come out of the womb to see labour and sorrow?" Quoted in Benatar, "Abortion: The 'Pro-Death' View," Chapter 5 of Better Never to have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence.

Antinatalism and Comfort

2011-12-27T10:24:00.000-08:00

Comfort is low-variance pleasure. It's pleasure and pain within narrow parameters. When someone is dying, their comfort is our priority, not their capacity for great pleasure; and the opiate medication we palliate them with serves this purpose.

The conservative ethos, broadly speaking, is generally one of preserving a state of comfort at the expense of the possibility for great pleasure or pain (since great pleasure, biologically speaking, tends to have a cost). Risk aversion in humans is a preference for comfort over possibility, and risk aversion is universal, at least among those not currently suffering a great deal.

Assuring the comfort of others is a very humane value.

Here is a problem, though: openness to experience is a highly attractive trait that correlates strongly with certain other highly attractive traits, such as intelligence and youth (and associated neotenic traits). If we are brave and open to experience, we wish to push out of our own comfort zones; think of people you know who choose comfort over adventure, and how you feel about them.

When making moral judgments, we of course wish to display our own highly attractive traits (or even front like we have attractive traits we do not really possess). What better way to signal our own adventurousness than to appear willing to impose it on others?

But is there an important difference between being willing to accept risk ourselves and being willing to impose it on others?

Defining comfort as I have as a state of low-variance pleasure, the ultimate comfort would be the never-born state - pleasure and pain tightly bounded at zero. Creating a person by definition means pulling him screaming out of a state of comfort (negative bliss, as Jim puts it) and pushing him into a state of great risk. Whatever the costs and benefits of this unasked-for adventure, I suspect our feelings about the morality of forcing risk on others function as a (costless, to us) way of signalling our own willingness to take risks.

Rape, Humor, Liberals, and the Sacred

2011-12-03T12:20:00.000-08:00

This is a response to a piece by blogger Bacchus of the awesome Eros Blog (NSFW) entitled On Not Speaking Up.

How Rape Humor Enriched My Life This Week

We have this friend, and everybody likes him. He's sweet beyond sweet, kind to everyone, and I think his main motivation in life is to meet, hug, and have long, intimate talks with everyone in the entire world. A few days ago my boyfriend and I were on our way to a party at this friend's house to play Magic: The Gathering,^[1] and we were talking about Posnerian rape licenses^[2] (like you do), and my boyfriend mentioned how sad it would be if our friend were a rape licensee - because he'd never find anyone who disliked him enough for sex to be non-consensual! He'd just wander the world sadly, "but he'd never go so far as to not be nice," my boyfriend added. Could this same information have been communicated as well by just saying "wow, isn't our friend super nice?"

So later that night, at our beloved friend's house, I was watching two guys play Magic, and it was a fairly even game until one of them played a "Grimoire of the Dead" card, which I am informed is a "mythic rare" card of unimaginable power. "Wow, I'm about to get reamed, aren't I?" his opponent said. Could this same social information, with all the good sportsmanship I think it conveys, be communicated as well by just saying "wow, I'm about to lose, huh?" In fact, when I was in the process of destroying^[3] my boyfriend with a hastily-constructed deck and a shaky understanding of the rule set, I noticed myself saying "I think I'm going to fuck you with THIS card" - the obvious hyperbole takes the edge off of competition that would otherwise be uncomfortable, somehow. This is what I am reminded of when Bacchus (NSFW) talks about online gaming boys using the phrase "rape your face" to describe combat victory. It has nothing to do with women and everything to do with navigating complicated group-belonging and status dynamics.

Do you know someone in a relationship of habit, with no particular intimacy or frisson? Our term for this - to distinguish it from the kind of satisfying, kinky, intimate relationship that is greatly preferred - is a "rapeless marriage." As in, "she was trapped in a rapeless marriage for ten years." Could the social information and pleasure of this phrase be conveyed as well another way?

I Promise I Am Not A Misogynist Monster Here

Notice that, in the above examples, no one was actually raped.

I am a girl. I have never been raped, but my close female relative (within two degrees of separation) was raped under circumstances making it unclear if she would survive. She was raped by a stranger, and when he was done she managed to convince him to abandon her alone in the desert rather than murder her outright.

Another woman in my life was drugged and gang-raped by boys she knew.

Are those of us who joke about rape somehow adding to the suffering of the real-life victims of rape?

As I have mentioned before, I grew up in Northern Idaho among rednecks, and I was horrified when some of my little redneck friends' redneck parents would say things to them like "You do your chores right now or I'll beat you bloody!" My little redneck friends were not disturbed by this in the least; it took me a while to realize that nobody was actually beaten bloody at any point. My own parents used the more genteel (but still terrifying) "unknown punishment" - the details were left intentionally vague, and I was probably in high school before it dawned on me that the threat was empty and the "unknown punishment" didn't really exist. Does the specificity of "I'll beat you bloody" make it genuinely objectionable in a way the "unknown punishment" is not, even though both parties understand that there will be no blood?

Liberal Sacredness

Jonathan Haidt has identified five primordial moral foundations upon which humans base our conceptions of good. These range from Harm/Care (caring about others, protecting them from harm) and Fairness (treating people justly and fairly) to Loyalty (to your in-group), Authority (respecting the established social hierarchy), and Purity (avoiding the pollution of sacred things).

From the Wik:

Haidt found that Americans who identified as liberals tend to value care and fairness considerably higher than loyalty, respect, and purity. Self-identified conservative Americans value all five values more equally, though at a lower level across the five than the liberal concern for care and fairness. Both groups gave care the highest over-all weighting, but conservatives valued fairness the lowest, whereas liberals valued purity the lowest. Similar results were found across the political spectrum in other countries.

Haidt identifies liberals as more oriented toward what I think of as REAL morality - treating others fairly and not hurting them. Conservatives seem more interested in what I think of as bogus morality - respecting authority, being true to your school and loyal to the Packers and America, and not queefing in the holy water.

But I think that this misstates things a great deal. My beloved Internet friend Rob Sica says that, as a liberal, he tries to expose himself to those with more conservative moral foundations - loyalty, purity, authority. I think that's laudable, but we as liberals are still human, and experience all the foundations to some degree - we just need to know where to look.

In my own heart, I noticed a strong (physical) sacredness reaction to the beating of Robert Hass at Occupy Berkeley. Thinking of the jackboot bruising Hass' precious ribs made me understand how a Christian could get riled up thinking about the jackboots whipping Jesus. It's hard not to fantasize about violence under such circumstances. It's intense, physical, not subject to rational correction. Yes, Robert Hass is just a man, and lots of other real people's ribs suffered equal or worse abuse. But they don't make me want to punch a police officer in the face; without the sacredness induction, I feel almost as bad for the pathetic pigs as I do for the protesters.

PC is our way of doing sacredness. But we need to recognize this and stop doing it - because sacredness is bullshit.

Framing Sacredness as Harm/Care

Arguing in favor of calling out those who use rape humor, Bacchus refers to a feminist treatment of the rape humor issue that argues that rape humor is wrong because rapists think rape is normal, and rape humor enforces this belief.

The writer of that piece cites (unsourced) the fact that rapists think rape is normal. "In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again," she says. Let's accept this as true for now. What this doesn't prove is that thinking rape is normal is what causes them to rape. It doesn't prove - can't prove, because it's not true - that an increase in rape jokes leads to an increase in rape.

What we see happening here is a move from a genuine harm/care foundation - don't rape people, don't hurt people, don't put people in camps and kill them - to a sacredness foundation - the idea that somehow just talking about the taboo subject will make the tabooed subject occur. Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary!

Blogger Bacchus^[4] takes on "Jew humor" as his personal crusade in his online game, even though he candidly admits he doesn't currently have any Jewish friends. I personally hardly have any non-Jewish friends, but I can't say I agree that enforcing a taboo on antisemitism's "sacredness" will actually do anything good for individual Jewish folks, or even Jewish people in the aggregate. In fact (and I'm about to give you a real citation, coincidentally via aforementioned Rob Sica, and not just say "studies show over and over again"), making a token gesture may actually make us less likely to act when it's important. In her paper "Vicarious moral licensing: The influence of others' past moral actions on moral behavior," Maryam Kouchaki reports on five related studies that all demonstrate that being told you're not racist, or taking actions that convince you you're not racist, actually make you act more racist. For instance,

In Study 1b, when given information on group members' prior nondiscriminatory behavior (selecting a Hispanic applicant in a prior task), participants subsequently gave more discriminatory ratings to the Hispanic applicant for a position stereotypically suited for majority members (Whites). In Study 2, moral self-concept mediated the effect of others' prior nonprejudiced actions on a participant's subsequent prejudiced behavior such that others' past nonprejudiced actions enhanced the participant's moral self-concept, and this inflated moral self-concept subsequently drove the participant's prejudiced ratings of a Hispanic applicant.

So not only does preserving a zone of sacredness around rape and Judaism NOT prevent harm to actual women and Jews, it may actually make us feel fine about harming or allowing harm to come to these groups. (See also Dorothy Thompson's brilliant essay "Who Goes Nazi?" from 1941.)

Snuggletown Has Boundaries

One of the liberal values I find most questionable is that every environment (or even most environments) should be welcoming and inclusive to everyone. (Related: Five Geek Social Fallacies.) Social belonging is something we all need, but I question whether social belonging can be achieved at all without exclusion.

In college, I got used to seeing, appended to event announcements, "please honor this as a woman-only space." That't pretty vomitrocious, but no one had a problem with it. Why not? Perhaps because we recognize that special, fragile women need to be "honored" (sacredized) as the special, fragile creatures we obviously are, without dirty boys contaminating our space with their cooties. No one has a problem with this kind of exclusion; women need a place to talk about mascara and tampons and stuff, without boys intruding.

But what about 14-year-old gamer boys? Don't they need to define for themselves their own space?

American children in the past had much more unsupervised time away from grown-ups. They created their own social orders and spoke their own language, with little interference from adults.

Now that adults are expected to supervise every moment of children's lives, we expect them to develop a kind of egalitarian, welcoming social order that we cannot even develop for ourselves. And in trying to prevent pretend harm, we may be doing real harm.

1. Not joking, as you will see.

2. A long time ago Richard Posner wrote a lot of things about "efficient rape," including a thought experiment in which some individuals who rape might not be merely avoiding a market in sex, but might actually prefer rape to consensual sex - so much so that their pleasure in raping people outweighs the suffering of the victim. Such individuals could be allowed to purchase rape licenses from the government to maximize everyone's utility. Many people, in hearing about this, feel the same kind of sacredness violation that they feel upon hearing rape humor.

3. Is "destroying" preferable to "ass-raping" here? Is there a good reason why murder humor is acceptable where rape humor is not?

4. Who for the record I would totally smoke a bowl with

The Practical Effect of an Epistemic Peer

2011-11-25T10:54:00.000-08:00

Recently I was attempting to estimate the probability that we are living in a simulation. Watching my brain's natural attempt to estimate the probability of this eerie abstraction, I saw that it seemed to do two things: (a) poll my mental models of people I thought of as smart who had considered the question; and (b) discount that percentage by the high percentage of smart people I know who haven't considered the question (though this second is really about my confidence in my assignment of probability, rather than the probability itself - the hash I see my brian performing is to adjust the probability toward the status quo in response to a drop in confidence of a strange assertion).

I have no idea if my introspective experience^† is in any way univesal, but it does seem that polling one's epistemic peers is an excellent means for estimating probabilities. This is basically like looking things up on Wikipedia, which is also a highly rational action, but polling one's own personally vetted epistemic peers removes some of the uncertainty.

Noticing how I use my mental models of my epistemic peers in thinking about things caused me to notice how startling the effect of a single epistemic peer can be on my confidence in widely accepted beliefs. When I get to know someone and find that I have no choice but to grant that his brain works at least as well as mine, I have no choice but that any strange belief he holds alters my confidence in the commonly held belief.

One way that we protect important beliefs is to by definition exclude those holding opposing beliefs as epistemic peers. If we refuse to admit them into polite society, they can't harm the stable, practical ways of thinking that we have developed.

What this suggests to me is, to get your strange belief accepted by a wider audience, it's much more effective to establish yourself as an epistemic peer of a wide, influential group than it is to develop "convincing" arguments for your strange belief. The existence of an epistemic peer who holds a contrary belief is more devastating than any argument.

What this also suggests is that if we are really interested in the truth, we will surround ourselves with epistemic peers who hold beliefs as different from ours as possible, and try to figure out why similar brains have come to hold such different beliefs. We will counteract our social belief-protection systems.

I am anxious to test this - if anyone knows any 150+ IQ evolution deniers, please send them my way! (Basically I think this is how Chip Smith lives his life.)

† As usual, I would like to thank marijuana for its important contributions to this post.

Blind to the Downside

2011-11-19T09:15:00.001-08:00

One theory of rational suicide (see The Mathematics of Misery and What Kind of Evidence for Effective Suicidality?") posits that a significant proportion of people - much greater than the proportion of people who actually commit suicide - act as if their lives are not valuable to them. They engage in "actuarially unfair" gambles in which the downside is not adequately compensated by the expected benefit.

One interpretation of those accepting actuarially unfair gambles with significant risks is that they ignore the downside because they secretly plan to commit suicide (limiting the harmful effects of the downside) if the gamble doesn't pay off. This would indicate that they assign low value to continuing to live, which contradicts the popular notion that everyone is very glad to be alive and wants to live as long as possible.

This model applies not only to serious gambles with significant downsides as well as significant, potentially permanent upsides (suicide gambles, like joining a street gang or going to law school), but also applies on a smaller scale to measures that temporarily reduce the pain experienced by the actor, though with potential future costs (palliation, like smoking cigarettes or playing World of Warcraft). Palliative remedies may have significant present and future costs, but at least they are generally effective at alleviating pain temporarily.

However, looking around at the transactions taking place in the world economy, one cannot help but notice the market share of bullshit. Huge numbers of consumers prove willing to spend money on products and services that measurably don't do what they promise to do. These products and services may or may not be particularly harmful, but they all have monetary cost, and they all have a very low likelihood of solving the problem they purport to solve. The market in expensive placebos is massive.

Here are exemplary lists of both Palliation phenomena and Expensive Placebo phenomena, so that the reader will have a better idea of what I'm talking about:

Palliation	Expensive Placebo
Budweiser Chelada	weight loss potion
heroin	face de-wrinkling potion
World of Warcraft	breast augmentation potion
cigarettes	penis growth and erection potion
the McRib	multi-level marketing wealth potion
7th Heaven	psychic services
lactation porn	Jesus
video poker	nice Russian women looking for a good husband who need your credit card number

In both cases, consumers seem blind to the downside. In the Palliation case, there is a significant downside, but it's made up for by the reliable temporary relief from pain. In the Expensive Placebo case, the downside is limited to the cost of the product or service, but the upside is measurably nil.

The line between Palliation and Expensive Placebo may be fuzzy; for instance, a lonely person may get real social pleasure from interacting with a psychic consultant (and effective scammers, like all salesmen, tend to be pleasant people). And alcohol advertisement often includes implicit promises of social belonging, which if interpreted literally would make it more of an Expensive Placebo Belonging Serum than a genuine palliation tool. But the distinguishing characteristic is that in the case of what I call Expensive Placebo, the benefit that is bargained for is wholly imaginary, whereas with Palliation, the essence of the promised benefit is, in fact, provided.

Since the value of Expensive Placebos arises from pure fiction, ordinary measures of quality are not available; if acknowledged and utilized, real measures of quality would destroy the entire market. From this, we can distinguish Expensive Placebos from Palliation in terms of the effect of price.

The price of an Expensive Placebo is a measure of social proof it carries - a more expensive placebo gets you better fantasies. A $2 penis enlargement pill probably doesn't work, but one that costs $2000 is a much more effective fantasy projection device. Price has to take on more epistemic weight in the evaluation of Expensive Placebos, because no other indicia of reliability are relevant. This is so because every indication of reliability, except price, would show the value to be zero. In order to maintain the fantasy, we must look at price instead of real quality indicators. To the degree that an intervention is Palliation, consumers would seek out the most palliation for the cost - these are ordinary goods where price is negatively correlated with demand. But to the degree that an intervention is an Expensive Placebo, price should behave much more weirdly, perhaps even correlating positively with demand, as with Veblen goods. It's not just that the consumer of an Expensive Placebo makes himself blind to the downside of the purchase. The downside becomes the upside. (I describe a similar phenomenon here, in which parents report getting more meaning and joy from child-rearing activities, and plan to spend more time with their children over a coming weekend, when they are reminded of the downside, but not the upside, of having kids.)

There are some things that people will pay for even an imaginary chance at having. Youth, love, sex, wealth, and status are so deeply and painfully desired that people are willing to suspend their disbelief for the privilege of imagining that they might get them. The need for social belonging trumps all other needs, and even trumps our own rationality. Being old, fat, poor, or impotent means being in social pain. Just as the desperate, terminally ill cancer patient often turns to expensive placebos for an imaginary chance at more life, desperate, terminally alive sad people turn to expensive placebos for a chance to imagine a decent life.

Grouch Logic

2011-11-18T09:15:00.001-08:00

Scene: Sesame Street. Oscar the Grouch and his girlfriend Grundgetta are watching Baby Bear try to teach his little sister, Curly Bear, to draw.

Oscar and Grundgetta, as grouches, are annoyed to see Baby Bear and Curly Bear playing peacefully. They attempt to sow discord, getting very excited when Curly Bear fails to grasp the basics of drawing and throws crayons and paper around. The Grouches hope that Baby Bear will flip out, but instead, to the grouches' extreme irritation, Baby Bear sings a fucking song about sharing.

By the end of the day, none of the grouches' trolling has been effective. Baby Bear and Curly Bear learned lessons about sharing, and nobody had a fight. The grouches announce that they feel rotten.

But wait! Grouches LOVE feeling rotten! So they're HAPPY!

I relate this important episode from literature not to demonstrate any point, but merely to illustrate a concept I use frequently: Grouch Logic. Grouch Logic refers to arguments that seem comically nonsensical, not because of flaws in reasoning as such, but because highly unusual preferences and values drive the logic - often preferences in direct opposition to the "common sense" preferences ostensibly shared by the entire reference group.

Philanthropic antinatalists like me are a special group of grouches who start from an eccentric assignment of value ("it's a great harm to be born"). This alone is enough to make most of our conclusions sound comical, no matter how sound our reasoning.

Obviousness Doesn't Solve the Problem

2011-11-17T14:03:00.001-08:00

Science is the history of the mismatch between the obvious and the truth. The more we study science - and the more we study our meat brains, and the greater meat brain social network our meat brains comprise - the less epistemic weight we must attach to obviousness. For obviousness is a primary perceptive experience - not subject to methods of reason or even introspective analysis.

Warren Quinn (Morality and Action, p. 125 et seq.) has argued, in favor of moral realism, that in experience and even in the natural sciences, a great deal of the information we are most certain about arises from primary perception, impossible to ground in reason (or anything but more primary perceptive turtles). If we are warranted in believing that there is a chair beneath our butt based on nothing more than primary perception, then we are equally warranted in having initial moral beliefs grounded on nothing but the feeling of wrongness.

We can do nothing but proceed from our primary perceptions, trusting them until given reason to doubt them. But we must realize that the obvious is merely a starting point. What is obvious to humans has not been demonstrated to reliably correlate with facts about the universe. Obviousness may inform the problem and even set priors, but it does not solve it.

Special Monkeys or Failed Monkeys?

2011-11-15T11:20:00.001-08:00

The thing that disappoints me the most about my own nerdy subculture is a specific form of self-blindness (hypocrisy).

We "special monkeys" get a lot of our sense of status from our abstract cognitive capacities. These very capacities, of course, may also be seen as major social deficits. As David Foster Wallace famously put it:

...the other children's punishment of the SNOOTlet [Wallace's term for a "precocious" speaker of Standard Written English] is not arbitrary at all. There are important things at stake. Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. They're learning about Discourse Communities. Kids learn this stuff not in English or Social Studies but on the playground and at lunch and on the bus. When his peers are giving the SNOOTlet monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there's serious learning going on ... for everyone except the little SNOOT, who in fact is being punished for precisely his failure to learn. What neither he nor his teacher realizes is that the SNOOTlet is deficient in Language Arts. He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for "peer rapport," which is just a fancy Elementary-Ed term for being accepted by the most important Group in the little kid's life. [Bolded emphasis mine. References omitted.]

As nerds, we must realize that we are, at some level, failed human beings - according to the values and standards of the vast majority of humankind.

At our best, our special-monkey cognitive capacities let us see our own species from a more abstract, impersonal perspective than is generally possible for the regular monkeys. Even if this doesn't help us design better systems for monkey living, at least it helps us to have more compassion for the other monkeys (and ourselves).

At our worst, we attempt to flip it around and define our own freakish, mutant nonsocial cognitive capacity as REALLY AND TRULY HUMAN, making the rest of the monkeys out to be less than human. By so defining them, we create a comforting myth of struggle and can justify (and even happily take part in causing) the suffering of the regular monkeys. This is often true even for those of us who define ACTUAL monkeys (and chickens and cows and octopuses and salamanders) as worthy of moral consideration, in the sense that their suffering is bad.

If we special monkeys are to advance the values that our unusual cognitive capacities help us perceive - impersonal values, often opposed to regular human values as revealed by human behavior - then we must get better at seeing our own monkey nature. Specifically, we must learn that the struggle between the special monkeys and the regular monkeys is a dangerous (though evolutionarily beneficial) monkey illusion. And we must become aware that those in the regular monkey "out group," while they may not score as high as us on special monkey tests, are no less worthy of moral consideration than ourselves - in the sense that their suffering matters.

To Say Status is Zero-Sum is Optimistic

2011-11-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

I have previously argued that status, as a positional good, is by its nature a zero sum game; any gains in status by one participant are matched by losses on the part of other participants.

When we look at the real-world effects of status choices, though, it seems that the view of status as a zero-sum game (where losses of losers are balanced by gains of winners) is a very generous interpretation.

Losses of status, or having low status, seems to make people very miserable. Robin Hanson quotes the authors of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage on the harmful effects of status threats in maintaining poverty:

Conflicts over money do not usually erupt simply because the man cannot find a job or because he doesn’t earn as much as someone with better skills or education. Money usually becomes an issue because he seems unwilling to keep at a job for any length of time, usually because of issues related to respect. Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.

Clearly, a loss in status causes serious enough social pain that the affected person is willing to risk his job and family to avoid or repair it. But don't gains in status make the winners much happier, rendering status contests at least Kaldor-Hicks efficient?

Not so, suggests a study on the welfare effects of commuting (Stress That Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox). From the abstract:

People spend a lot of time commuting and often find it a burden. According to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals’ utility is equalized. However, in a direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium, we find that people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective well-being. Additional empirical analyses do not find institutional explanations of the empirical results that commuters systematically incur losses.

Unfortunately, the status gains a person may derive from commuting to work (high-status job, high-status suburban house, etc.) are not made up for by greater happiness; people with longer commutes are consistently less happy than people with shorter commutes. This is true even where people longer commute time is associated with higher income.

We are used to seeing sad low-status people, but what's missing is the ecstatic high-status people. It seems that the best we can achieve is somewhat stable mediocre life satisfaction, but the worst we can achieve is very bad indeed.

Modeled Behavior on Population Ethics

2011-10-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

Karl Smith and Adam Ozimek of Modeled Behavior bring to light some interesting questions and arguments on population ethics. Karl Smith, from The Morality of Creating People:

In the past we could be resigned to the fact that our biology was going to drive us to do this no matter what. However, we are facing an era where we may be able to create sentient life synthetically. Either through artificial intelligence or by growing individuals en masse outside the womb.
The excuse – my biological clock made me do it – will no longer cut it and we may be talking about trillions of lives here. If we get this wrong it will be the greatest moral crime ever committed.

Adam Ozimek, pulling a partial Bryan Caplan in Some non-answers on population ethics:

In this model of the world there is only resources, and they are directly consumed. Imagine, for instance, if your two people with two living children have a third child whose inventions increase the efficiency of solar power by 1%, or increases grain yields, or leads to a new low cost recycling technique. This person coming into existence has clearly increased the amount of output than can be created with the resources on earth. The way Population Matters has formulated the problem of scarcity only makes sense if… well, if you’re determined for some reason to try and argue that more population is a really bad thing.

My comment to Ozimek is a rehash of my questions for Bryan Caplan:

Both you and Bryan Caplan seem willing to trade off very uncertain, speculative, indirect effects (inventions, etc.) of population against the direct, quite certain physical effects. Why do speculative positive effects matter more than definite negative effects? Or do you think the negative effects are somehow themselves speculative? Is the reality of scarcity of important stuff really in question?
Also, your connection between having the third child and inventions seems to imply causation from population to nice inventions (which Caplan also assumes). What evidence supports the theory that population drives innovation in a significant, reliable way? It seems the global distribution of both innovation and population would call that relationship into doubt...Just looking at the distribution of patents or Nobel prizes, it seems there are dozens of variables that correlate better with these than population. Are you talking U.S. only, or is this also supposed to apply to Brazil and China and Kenya and India and Israel equally?

Further Thoughts on Pimps & Trolls

2011-10-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

All human systems, like biological systems, are complex ecosystems, intricate webs of cooperation and competition - of predation, symbiosis, parasitism, and the like. In both cases, novelty - whether due to the admixture of individuals from separately evolving, isolated populations, or due to the mutative creation of new types - can have devastating effects on a stable ecosystem, though it also can have hugely beneficial effects for the innovator.

Liberals and conservatives differ in that the hubris of conservatives (in failing to value environmental protection over economic development) is in imagining we can safely manipulate the biological kind of ecosystem, while the hubris of liberals is in imagining we can safely manipulate the human kind of ecosystem.

Exposing Children to Risk: Why Do We Ignore Genetic Risk?

2011-10-13T09:04:00.000-07:00

Reader Chuck G. proposes a thought experiment to examine our thinking on exposing children to different kinds of risk:

I was thinking about the moral problem of breeding couples with heritable diseases, specifically bipolar disorder (since I have it), and I came upon a nice little analogy that is pretty damning to those who think it's ever OK for two genetically-impaired parents to have a kid:
First of all (this isn't very well-researched, just Wiki, but it's a start), bipolar disorder has a 0.4% lifetime suicide rate among all patients, and a full third of them attempt suicide at some point. Those numbers compare well with the mortality rate and general seriousness of West Nile Virus. For those who don't know, West Nile Virus has to be handled in level 3 biosafety labs, right along with a bunch of shit the Pentagon tried to turn into biological weapons. You Do Not Want West Nile Virus.
So let's think of a couple where there is a decent chance of passing on bipolar disorder to their child. They have it, everyone comes to the baby shower, and they wish them well and give them lots of nice presents. It's a joyous occasion, and the parents may even be praised for their decision to reproduce. People might know about the parents' heritable genetic problem, but surely they would smile and nod anyway.
Now think of a genetic supercouple with no possibility of passing on a hereditary illness to their offspring. They go to the hospital, the child is delivered, and just as it comes out of the mother, the father sprays it in the face with a spray bottle full of West Nile Virus. Wanna know what happens?
Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Oh, and also, you're going to be on the news for months, you will never live down your infamy, and you are never going to see your kid again, ever, regardless of whether or not it manifests symptoms.
I just don't see how willingly conceiving a child with a known risk of severe lifetime disease differs from willingly conceiving a child with no risk of severe disease, then willingly exposing it to such a risk later. You're deliberately gambling with someone's life in a way that goes far above and beyond the usual case for philanthropic antinatalism. I think this shows just how far toxic cheeriness infects our society. It warps all our perceptions and allows us to get away with assault/manslaughter/criminal negligence, as long as *our* genes do the hurting and not genes from some mosquito virus.

Intuitively, it does seem that we treat the risks inherent in the creation of a child differently from the risks we expose a child to after he has been created. This is true even though different prospective parents expose their children to different levels of genetic and early developmental risk.

The explanations I find most compelling for the double standard here are, first, an ill-thought-out, pluralistic/liberal distrust of eugenics, and, second, the very abstractness of the harm, compared to, say, kicking a baby like a ball or microwaving her.

And, of course, there's the idea that any existence is better than none, so that any risk necessarily engendered by bringing someone into existence is acceptable, whereas creating new risk after the fact is morally questionable.

What other reasons might there be for treating genetic and early developmental harm/risk differently from the harm/risk created later in a child's life? Is it so obvious that any existence is better than none? This seems like a dubious proposition upon which to base such a a serious action as childbearing.

Eugenics

On the Nazi/eugenics issue, I think it is highly relevant that many observant Ashkenazim participate in voluntary screening for Tay-Sachs disease. This, despite speculation that heterozygosity confers greater intelligence. As a culture, observant Ashkenazim have decided that the suffering of children born with Tay-Sachs is more important than concerns about "eugenics," and certainly more important than a speculated slight increase in intelligence for carriers.

The Suicide Prevention Industry Advocates Search Engine Manipulation to Hide Information About Suicide

2011-10-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

A study entitled "Hyperlinked Suicide : Assessing the Prominence and Accessibility of Suicide Websites" (led by a professor hilariously named Sunny Collings) found that, shockingly, search engines get people what they're looking for. When suicidal people search for methods, they find information (albeit poor) about methods - they don't find bullshit. The authors think this is a problem. They say "significant improvements need to be made," which they use as a euphemistic call for creepy search engine censorship:

“One of the big problems with the internet is that pro-suicide sites are often the first thing people see when they search about methods,” says Professor Collings. “In contrast support sites were only 9.3% of total hits, but never featured as the number one search result.”
The study suggests more effort should be made to make support sites more accessible through search engine optimization. Professor Collings says it is totally unsatisfactory to have pro-suicide sites occupying the first 10 search results, rather than information and advice to help prevent suicidal behavior in New Zealand. [Emphasis mine.]

I am pretty scandalized by the fact that they openly call for search engine manipulation - perhaps for companies like Google to get rid of the crowd-sourced model with regard to suicide searches and make anti-suicide sites more "accessible" - you know, the way the Nazis made anti-Jewish propaganda more accessible. It's hard to imagine. But then, traditional media have often gone along with calls to censor suicide stories.

Suicide is sad. But there are things worse than suicide. One of them is miserable, suicidal people being trapped in their bodies with no exit available.

But since "everybody knows" that suicide is bad and needs to be forcibly prevented, study authors can still get away with Orwellian bullshit like this.

Thanks to Rob Sica for pointing me to this!

Access to Information about Childbearing

2011-10-08T12:43:00.000-07:00

What messages do women get about the positives and negatives of childbearing? How do these differ from reality? How do these differ from the messages people get about other activities?

From ChildfreeFeminist:

...women need to be aware of why the media is pressuring women so strongly to give birth. They want your money, and you will gladly spend it because they make you feel your progeny is worth an $800 stroller and all the other items that come with it. And maybe he is, but motherhood will never be like the happy family in the Pampers commercials or like Katie Holmes and Suri.
There is the nasty green ca-ca , the snot, the no sleepign–and that’s just Day One. . Pregnancy is not all “amazing and life changing and awesome” like they all confess from Jessica Alba to Gisele Bundchen. Have you seen a pregnant woman’s feet? They look like air balloons shaped like…feet. And the GAS! And-and…oh, all the horror. I mean maybe if you can afford a personal masseuse and organic wildberry smoothies. Then possibly this baby stuff is for you. The rest of us have to go back to reality.

For a regular dose of pregnancy reality, I am very grateful to Shape of a Mother, a blog that posts real pictures of postpartum women's bodies, together with (often poignant) stories about their lives. While the tone of that website is breeding-positive and the audience is the Oprah crowd, information is information and this is information that women considering getting pregnant need to be aware of. The physical toll of pregnancy is often much worse than that of methamphetamine abuse, but we never see billboard-sized images of postpartum bellies on the freeway!

In the name of awareness, I must suppress my aesthetic reaction and agree with the advice of Shape of a Mother readers who encourage postpartum women to wear bikinis.

Marginalized Social Roles

2011-10-08T11:08:00.000-07:00

The Idiocracy Effect is Okay

2011-10-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

Ever since the time of Darwin, science has been gradually revealing (to those with their eyes open) that we were created as part of a giant game of passing information into the future.

Ever since thousands of years before Darwin, the most creative human beings have been engaged in information games other than the biological one, including the game of passing information into the future. They have done this through creating and participating in institutions, writing literature, and inventing maths. (They have also done this through writing radio jingles, copying and sending chain letters, and breeding pigeons.)

When the game of making human babies did not have a good opt-out (i.e., prior to around 1970 C.E.), participation in the wider information games was largely instrumental for better playing the breeding game. But with good ways to opt out of breeding new humans, the original game - the game of breeding to pass some of one's genetic information into the future - is coming to be recognized as a small, rather pathetic subset of the total space of information games.

Only the least creative and least intelligent will continue to play the original game, with its massive costs and limited returns. Those who can't think of any more interesting information game to play will be the parents of future biological humans.

But lamenting this is like lamenting brain drain from print newspapers to electronic media: missing the point, because that's no longer where the interesting information is being created and passed around.

The Problem of Pimps

2011-09-30T11:49:00.000-07:00

The prostitutes worked for a pimp now. He was splendid and cruel. He was a god to them. He took their free will away from them, which was perfectly all right. They didn't want it anyway. It was as though they had surrendered themselves to Jesus, for instance, so they could live unselfishly and trustingly - except that they had surrendered to a pimp instead.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

...in 2005 Dallas Police officials realized that arrests of teen prostitutes is ineffective [sic].... Because girls will not testify against pimps, arrests stopped teen prostitution temporarily and did not lead to the prosecution of pimps. After their first, second, third and even the fourth arrests and releases from jail, teen prostitutes headed straight back to their pimps.
--Letot Girls Center, "The Problem"

There's so much desensitization that has happened, so much normalization of exploitation that has happened, so much internalization of trauma that has happened. Some of them would any day go back to their pimps or procurer than rather be with us.
--Sunita Krishnan, founder of NGO that rescues girls from the sex trade

The problem of pimps is a problem of people. The problem is not merely that a few sociopaths exploit others for their own gain; the problem is that human beings come with built-in exploits, honed by evolution and primed by life experiences, that allow them to be exploited by sociopaths (who constitute at least 3% of the general population).

Pimping and domestic violence are strange sorts of crime - strange, in that the victims of the crimes frequently identify with, support, and eventually return to relationships with the perpetrators of the crimes. Part of each crime - the essential features that enables the crime to occur - is that the perpetrator manages to satisfy a huge part of the social belonging need of the victim.

Advocates for girls exploited by pimps often focus on drugs as a need both created by and filled by pimps, neglecting the extremely important social belonging aspect. Trafficked girls are disproportionately girls with shitty family lives - neglected and abused by their parents. They are, in a real sense, starving - for affection, structure, attention, belonging, even status. Pimps are able to exploit these needs, making themselves into superstimuli of a sort - appearing to fill these needs even better than more appropriate figures that might better fulfill trafficked girls' needs.

I have been meaning to write on this issue for a while, and fully intended to start the essay with this sentence: "The problem of pimps is a problem of women." However, while sex trafficking vastly disproportionately affects girls and women, the phenomenon of sociopaths making themselves into superstimuli and exploiting inbuilt belonging and status needs of others affects men as victims as well. A beautiful example of this process is presented in Episode 447 of the radio show This American Life, entitled "The Incredible Case of the P.I. Moms." (Spoilers below, but the show is fascinating either way. See also "The Setup," the journalist's account of the story that led to the drama and inspired the show.)

The alleged sociopath in question is Chris Butler, who ran a private investigation firm that was supposed to be the subject of a reality television show on Lifetime. It appears that Butler faked several of the cases that his P.I. moms investigated, but as those frauds unraveled, he was also busted for selling drugs. But not just any drugs - drugs seized by the Contra Costa Police Department. He had an inside man in the department, Norm Wielsch, who, along with many other people involved with Butler, points to the charisma of Butler as a major contributing factor to the illegal schemes:

Norm Wielsch: Whoever has talked to Chris knows that he has the gift of gab. He could talk you into buying anything. I mean, I'm not blaming him, but he had his way of you know, kind of coercing a little bit more, you know, where if I would say, 'Hey, that's a stupid idea,' all of a sudden the golden tongue would come out, and then all of a sudden I'd be driving home thinking, that's not a bad idea, you know? ...

He always insisted on buying lunch, and pull out his credit card; he would bring some of the girls there [presumably girls from the illegal brothels he ran], and he would make sure they were dressed all pretty and stuff...there was a little theater to it. And then he would come in his black Mercedes, which, you know, and you're impressed, you're sitting there going 'wow,' you know?

Joshuah Bearman: Even now, in his lawyer's conference room, you can hear in Norm's voice that he still feels it a little bit, that Chris had some kind of hold on him, as he did on so many other people. It's obvious when you see Chris in action.

Whether we believe Wielsch and the other adult participants in this particular case or not, the charismatic, "superstimulus"-type person is an inherently believable archetype. In the excerpt above, Butler even uses the same flashy methods on his male accomplice that pimps use to attract and retain women to exploit.

The most important aspect that makes people slaves is not bad, mean slave owners. It is our inherent, inborn needs that makes us slaves - that make us willing to go back to an abusive boyfriend or a pimp even when we have other options. The problem of stuperstimulus is not the superstimulus. It is the need that the superstimulus exploits.

See also the Overcoming Bias thread "Moneyball Slavery" and comments, relating to the phenomenon of slavery in different contexts (such as baseball players).

If You Love Life So Much Why Don't You Marry It?

2011-09-28T12:56:00.001-07:00

The central claim of antinatalists like me is that being born is not a good thing - specifically, that it's better not to be born than to be born.

Lots of folks have the same immediate reaction to first encountering this: "so why dontcha just kill yourself?"

I wish to illustrate here how this response is a non sequitur - specifically, almost identical to a response of "so why don't you marry it?" in response to me telling my friend how much I love Christopher Brosius perfume.

In the "Why don't you marry it?" case, the respondent is implying that the assertion of the speaker is not genuine unless the speaker is willing to give the most extreme possible evidence of his conviction.

Note first that this is a personal attack (ad hominem, as the kids call it these days) rather than a response to the argument.The respondent is not analyzing anything to do with the argument, but rather is questioning the sincerity of this speaker's protestation.

Second, he demands the most extreme evidence imaginable - marriage as evidence of love.

Similarly, when someone hears I think it was a bad thing for me to have been born, and then asks me why I don't kill myself, he's (a) failing to respond to any argument I have made, instead choosing to challenge my sincerity, and (b) demanding the most extreme imaginable sort of evidence for the claim.

This is a non sequitur because it is possible that it is a bad thing to be born, but that once born, it is worse to commit suicide than to remain alive for one's lifespan (worse for others one cares about, or even for oneself). I have heard at least one antinatalist assert that it's wrong to create new people precisely because death is so awful and scary to think about; we would not have this fear, would not experience this irrational negative affect, if we had not been born.

Also, similarly to the "Why don't you marry it?" example, it is not legally possible (to my consternation) for me to marry a bottle of perfume. Indeed, there are many barriers, legal, practical, and even moral, to committing suicide. It's like asking a starving person in Somalia, "if you're so hungry, why don't you drive to Wendy's and get a cheeseburger?"

One last note: lots of people get married for immigration purposes. Lots of people kill themselves who nonetheless think it was a good thing that they were born and got to see all those puppies and sunsets. The evidence demanded is not even necessarily evidence of the proposition asserted!

The Trolling Relationship

2011-09-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

Trolling is not morally good or bad; it is a relationship between a person and an institution. Or, we did it all for the glory of lulz.

On Meatspace Trolling

Upon being summoned for federal jury duty, my immediate reaction was not irritation, but amusement. Jury duty is an opportunity to play a game: the Peremptory Challenge Challenge! When one reports for jury duty, it is of course with the goal of having a "peremptory challenge" used to exclude one from the jury - that is, inducing an attorney to use one of his "get rid of this juror free" cards, as Thi achieved in part by dropping an e-bomb^[1] when asked to explain what he did for a living. Getting knocked off "for cause" is easy, and will result from being too heavy-handed in one's approach, so obviously the result of a challenge for cause is ignominy. Being placed on a jury is a form of losing, but then one faces the Jury Nullification Challenge (particularly on a drug jury). The path of glory is clearly to be excused on a peremptory challenge if at all.

"So basically, you're trolling the District Court," is how my boyfriend puts it.

Yes! Yes, I am! But this is only one facet, one instance, of a greater social phenomenon that relates individuals to institutions (broadly defined): the relationship of trolling.

As this example illustrates, the phenomenon of trolling is not limited to participating in a conversation in a manner inimical to the purposes of the other conversation participants. The troll is not trolling the conversation: he is trolling the institution of the conversation, made up of implicit rules and purposes.

Andy Kaufman

The public life of Andy Kaufman is illustrative as a bridge between the concept of meatspace trolling and of internet trolling. Kaufman performed in such a manner that he satirized and questioned (rather than naively participating in) certain social institutions defined by implicit rules (and by doing so, helped bring some of those rules to visibility - the project of phenomenology). Frequently, his performances had the effect of causing strong negative affect in some audiences, but that was not the ultimate purpose of his art.

The troll engages participants in a pre-existing institution, but does not observe the rules of that institution. A troll is not a person, and trolling is not an absolute; "troll" is a social role a person may play from time to time toward certain institutions, and "trolling" is a manner of relating to an institution.

Highly effective meatspace trolls include the scatological buffoonery of Mozart, the Sokal hoax, the trial of the Chicago Seven, Issa's famous haiku composed for a poetry contest, the funeral protests by the Westboro Baptist Church, and the Yes Men's impersonation of a Dow Chemical spokesperson taking responsibility for the Bhopal Disaster of 1984 (but see below for a discussion of why the latter two are poor specimens of trolling). Social roles such as "class clown" and "court jester" can be seen as trolling positions. Nasrudin, Bugs Bunny, Jesus, Gandhi, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Richard Feynman are all associated with the phenomenon I call meatspace trolling. As should be clear from my examples, trolling is a morally ambiguous phenomenon.

Evo Bio and Game Theory: Trolling and Fairness

One of the most consistent results from watching actual humans play the "ultimatum game" - in which one experimental subject is asked to divide a sum of money between himself and a second subject, and the second subject can then take it (both subjects get to keep their share) or leave it (neither subject gets his share) - is that people reject "unfair" offers (offers of less than, especially considerably less than, 50% of the pot), even though this is costly to themselves. This may not be rational in the sense of maximizing payoff in the moment, but ecologically speaking, such "spite" may be a very good strategy for a social organism.

Just as the second subject rejects an "unfair" offer out of spite, the troll rejects the "offer" of naive participation in the target institution. It is possible that trolling is the broader phenomenon of which ultimatum-game-type "spite" is one aspect. However, what the ultimatum game ignores, and what is important to understand in order to grasp the wide importance of the phenomenon of trolling, is that (a) trolling is generally conducted with an audience; and (b) this audience may provide benefits to the troll (attention, a social context in which to belong, etc.) that may more than make up for the benefits foregone by refusing to participate in a naive manner out of "spite." That is, "spite" in meatspace may not be as damaging to self-interest as laboratory ultimatum games make it seem - after all, social capital may be the most important kind of capital, both in the EEA and in our world.

In other words, what we often conceive of as "spite" - punishing others at one's own expense - might actually be part of a larger phenomenon of meta-competition, of undermining institutions and the implicit rules that make up institutions not necessarily at personal expense, but often with the effect of increasing one's status in the view of one's audience.

Countersignalling and Meta-Competition

Trolling is a special form of countersignalling - refusing to "play the game" and naively signal within the implicit rules of the institution, and instead flaunting the signalling conventions of the institution. Those of very high ability or status

sometimes avoid the signals that should separate them from lower types, while intermediate types often appear the most anxious to send the “right” signals. The nouveau riche ﬂaunt their wealth, but the old rich scorn such gauche displays. Minor ofﬁcials prove their status with petty displays of authority, while the truly powerful show their strength through gestures of magnanimity. People of average education show off the studied regularity of their script, but the well educated often scribble illegibly. Mediocre students answer a teacher’s easy questions, but the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial points. Acquaintances show their good intentions by politely ignoring one’s ﬂaws, while close friends show intimacy by teasingly highlighting them. People of moderate ability seek formal credentials to impress employers and society, but the talented often downplay their credentials even if they have bothered to obtain them. A person of average reputation defensively refutes accusations against his character, while a highly respected person ﬁnds it demeaning to dignify accusations with a response. [Feltovich et al., "Too cool for school? Signalling and countersignalling". Internal hyperlink mine; thanks Rob Sica for the source.]

Trolling is a subset of countersignalling. Not only outside characteristics such as wealth and social status, but also the acts of trolling themselves, may be perceived by one's audience as evidence of high value - of, for example, the capability to perceive institutions abstractly, or the courage to flaunt the conventions of powerful institutions.

To be successful, trolls must be high-status folks in some sense - possessing high-status characteristics (though these need not be visible to the majority of his audience - only to his relevant audience, which may be a small subset of his total audience). But we could speak of a narrow "status window" to define trolls: why would a high-status individual undermine an institution that accords him high status? Perhaps the troll mind is a different kind of mind, one that is bored by naively playing status games within an institution. Somehow, the rewards the institution accords to the individual must not be "worth" the effort and boredom of playing by the rules to get those rewards. In addition to being a means to get attention and social status, trolling is the infinite fun.

Trolling is more than just a competitive tactic.

Troll = Trickster?

The phenomenon of trolling, broadly conceived, has several salient characteristics:

An orientation toward fun (lulz) rather than making a point; absurdity over sincerity^[2]
Distrust of cherished institutions
Engaging with participants of institutions, but not on the institution's terms
Cognitive capacity to conceive of value distribution outside of pre-existing value-distributing institutions (see 6.)
Game orientation (everything is a game)
Display of emotion by target is a form of "winning" (on the flip side, target "loses" by displaying emotion) (see 3.)^[3]
Outcome is unpredictable; the troll orientation is chaotic neutral
Trolling is a social phenomenon, distinct from the hermit - the troll seeks out institutions to interact with
Social fearlessness
Trolling is conducted for amusement, not for explicit, material personal gain^[4]

At this point, one must connect the phenomenon of meatspace trolling to the widespread "trickster hero" theme in literature and art. Nasrudin and Bugs Bunny, for example, are trickster heroes; they are also trolls. Why should a society value trolling? Why should trolling have such amusement and status value? Why should we preserve the pattern of trolling in our literature, and take so much joy in it, even though most of us do not engage in trolling behavior?

Chuang-tzu is a troll; he says:

Making a point to show that a point is not a point is not as good as making a nonpoint to show that a point is not a point.

Indeed, the winning move is often not to play, as with the Giant's Drink; but perhaps more importantly, the best explanation is often not a naive explanation within the existing framework, but a view of the situation from a more abstract level.

The fact that trolling can be an effective strategy for individuals allows societies a mechanism for questioning its institutions and seeing them from a more abstract point of view. Institutions can outlive (or outgrow) their usefulness and effectiveness as value distributors; but in the face of entrenched, self-perpetuating institutions that do more harm than good, what is society's defense?

It is the troll.

Easier to Criticize than to Build Anew

An important criticism of trolling behavior, as I have outlined it, is that it is directed toward delegitimizing institutions, "tearing them down" in a way, without concern for substituting new institutions in their stead. If we accept this, we may adopt a more negative view of trolling than the one I have proposed above. There are a few responses to this criticism.

First, there are plenty of institution-building processes operating in human groups - what Vernon L. Smith refers to as "constructivist" processes, creating new institutions that will be tested in the real world to see if actual humans can use and sustain them. Trolling, from this perspective, must be viewed as part of the natural "ecological" testing of such institutions - perhaps a crucial function.

Second, there is the Ultimate Troll - the null hypothesis on human institutions (and, indeed, human flourishing). We come into the world with institutions already in existence - many of them created not solely by conscious human agency, but through the natural processes of our social brains. Such institutions are not justified a priori - we have not consented to them, certainly, and they may be terrible institutions that we would not consent to, given the opportunity to choose. The biggest excuse these institutions have is that they have been shown (in Smith's "ecological" sense) to work, at least in the sense of sustaining themselves through human generations. Is that enough? If an institution "works," does that justify its existence? That is the central question of the Ultimate Troll. The question is sharpened by the fact that our lives have become so much more complex than our environments of evolutionary adaptedness that they may in fact be too complex for ecological or constructivist processes to accommodate satisfactorily.

1. Epistemology

2. This is why the Westboro Baptist Church and the Yes Men are poor sorts of trolls; they wish to show the absurdity of a particular institution in order to support the meaning and sense of other institutions. Pure trolling is purely absurd, clean of all sincerity. This is why Andy Kaufman is the troll hero of our time. (Contra Camus, absurdity is the absence of sense and meaning.)

3. Items 1, 4, and 6 relate to the idea of play - the ability to conceive of events as not having their usual meaning. This is similar to when dogs "bow" on their elbows as an invitation to play, allowing the usual dog status rules are not applicable, and that what happens in the play session does not have the meaning it would have in the mundane world.

4. Patent trolls are not really trolls in the sense I am using the word.

Today in Giant Loads of Crap

2011-09-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

Suicidal signs merit immediate intervention

....Some of the early warning signs are changes in sleep patterns, isolation from friends and family, sudden outbursts of anger, talking about being a burden to others or about a desire to die, and an increase in the use of alcohol and drugs.

Risk factors for teenagers include a recent breakup with a girlfriend or boyfriend, being a victim of bullying and sexual orientation issues.

If a friend or family member exhibits any of these signs, the first step to getting them help is confronting the issue directly.

“One of the things that people think is a bad thing to do, but is the absolute most important thing to do, is ask the person if they are thinking about suicide,” Stevens said. “People are afraid to do that because they think it will cause someone to commit suicide. But it won't. It is the No. 1 thing a therapist will ask when they first see a (suicidal) client. So don't be afraid to ask.”

Once a person admits to wanting to commit suicide, Stevens said, it is imperative not to leave the person alone at any time and to contact a behavioral health center for assistance.

Let's imagine actually following this extremely dubious advice (to respond immediately, coercively if necessary, to extremely dubious signs of suicidality).

Studies on prevalence of suicidal ideation in the general population frequently find rates as high as 20%. Imagine if every guy who suffered sleep disturbances or made out with a dude or got drunk more than usual got asked if he ever thought about suicide. Imagine if one in five people were dragged into a "behavioral health center" for "assistance."

The bullshit recommendations promulgated by the media on suicide do more harm than good. Survivors are taught that they could have prevented any suicide, making suicide more of a tragedy than it needs to be. People are subjected to dehumanizing, humiliating treatment at the hands of medical professionals. And, knowing that he is likely to be dragged into a "behavioral health center" if he voices his suicidal thoughts, a suicidal person is left even more isolated than is necessary, unable to talk about suicide reasonably with his friends.

Don't rat out your suicidal friends. Just talk to them.

How Babies Destroy Your Fuckability: Male Update

2011-09-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

Childbearing clearly negatively affects women's attractiveness. But what about men? Their material resources are negatively affected by childbearing, but what about physical attractiveness and outright sexual success?

A study on men in the Philippines recently demonstrated that being a "partnered father" substantially and significantly decreases testosterone levels - that same testosterone that significantly predicts whether a man will become a "partnered father" in the first place!

That same chemical that "predicts mating success" also is tanked by "successful" mating. As the authors put it,

these findings show that [testosterone] and reproductive strategy have bidirectional relationships in human males, with high [testosterone] predicting subsequent mating success but then declining rapidly after men become fathers.

How to solve this problem? Keep the sexual success (and the testosterone), but don't have the babies.

Have fun!

The Depressed Person's Special Duty Not To Breed

2011-09-12T15:26:00.000-07:00

The heritable component of depression is large. Depending on the nature of the study, the heritability of depression is estimated at anywhere from 29% (for men, in a Swedish twin study) to 75% (in a British twin study). Heritability of bipolar affective disorder is even greater (85% in another British twin study). All told, a child with a parent who has depression has double or triple the risk of an average child of developing major depressive disorder.

Imagine the suffering that could be prevented if all of us with severe depression - especially of the endogenous type particularly likely to be heritable - avoided reproducing. It is not the case that every person who has suffered depression wishes she hadn't been born. But it need not be a 1:1 correlation to imply a duty to avoid reproducing.

A woman in her 40s who conceives a child with her own egg is rightly considered to be irresponsible, because of the risk of mental retardation to her child. But that risk (one in a hundred at maternal age 40) is nothing compared to the risk of severe depression in the child of a severely depressed person.

Many of us who are explicitly not glad to be here have parents who suffered from depression, diagnosed or not. Thirty-three years ago, when my own mother made the awful decision to have a child, the heritability of depression was not well understood.

But now it is undeniable.

If you have been depressed, the chances that your child will experience depression are high, especially if your depression is severe. Reproduction by a depressed person is at best irresponsible, at worst cruel. (This is true even though depressed and bipolar people make all the art.)

Please don't make more of us! Thanks!

Science says new parents have a higher risk of developing depression; perky blonde disagrees.

Revealed Belief

2011-09-06T15:52:00.001-07:00

Prior to Judith Jarvis Thomson, the big philosophical issue regarding abortion was the issue of when a zygote/blastocyst/fetus/baby achieves personhood - the moment at which a being acquires recognizable interests - as opposed to the related, perhaps more important issues of how strong those interests might be compared to other interests, or whether those interests include a right to continued existence. (For a concise treatment of the major philosophical arguments on abortion since 1973 or so, see Chapter 5 of Benatar's Better Never To Have Been, entitled "Abortion: The 'Pro-Death' View.")

Modern Catholics and evangelical protestants have largely taken the position that personhood accrues to a zygote as soon as fertilization occurs. However, it is clear from their other positions and behaviors that this belief is only for the purpose of making the anti-abortion argument, and does not reflect a true belief in the personhood of a zygote/blastocyst in the relevant sense.

For example, reviewing the policies supported by anti-abortion religious groups, one is struck with how little they accord with the stated position that a zygote/blastocyst is a person, and the destruction of a zygote a murder; what the supported policies all appear consistent with is a desire to punish women who have sex. In the "moral foundations" thinking of Jonathan Haidt, we might say that concerns for authority and for purity are masquerading as concern for fairness or for harm/care.

In addition to punishing women who have sex, anti-abortion religious people also want to force everyone to submit to the will of their God - concern for authority and in-group loyalty again masquerading as concern for fairness and harm/care.

Imagine for a second that a zygote really is a person, whatever that means to you.

Now realize that up to a quarter of all recognized pregnancies, and HALF of all fertilized zygotes (some sources say up to 70%), are spontaneously miscarried.

That's a lot of death. If you take a zygote to be a person, half of all children are dying before they ever take a breath.

But "No pro-life group has called for the foundation of a National Institute for the Prevention of Miscarriage," notes a commenter in the above-linked thread.

Of course, intentional harm is both more deserving of blame than unintentional harm and more preventable than unintentional harm. But the assignment of, apparently, ZERO value to the accidental deaths of billions of zygotes (after all, God willed it) while claiming that the intentional killing of these zygotes is MURDER is hardly consistent.

In sum:

Religious people do not believe that zygotes or blastocysts are persons.

Religious people want to punish women for having sex.

Religious people want to force everyone to submit to their God.

The Double Violation of the Unacceptable Life

2011-09-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

While there is disagreement as to what constitutes an unacceptable life - a life not worth getting - there can be no doubt that many people with unacceptable lives currently exist. And, Utopian post-human fantasies aside, at least some unacceptable lives are a guaranteed result of the continuation of our species.

Forms of utilitarianism such as prioritarianism push us to be most concerned with the welfare of the least well off within the relevant population. But I argue that it is the very special group at the bottom, those with unacceptable lives, who are especially entitled to our highest consideration.

Those with unacceptable lives suffer a double violation. First, they are violated by being brought into existence. Their lives are worse than having no life at all, so being born makes them worse off.

Second, they suffer a new and continuing violation by being prevented from improving their circumstances in particular ways. Just as their birth is required to enable those with unacceptable lives to exist (because each birth risks the creation of unacceptable lives), their exploitation is also required for those very acceptable lives to remain acceptable.

For instance, if those with unacceptable lives were not coerced into acting in the interests of those with acceptable lives, the most miserable could either end their lives or increase their welfare toward acceptability. However, by doing so, they would likely depress the welfare of those around them with acceptable lives.

The (philanthropic) antinatalist objection to breeding is not limited, in practical application, to the decision to create a being. It also implies that those who are born with unacceptable lives, having been once violated, are entitled to special consideration once they come into existence - the "social contract" justifications for coercive policies are not applicable to them.

So these people with unacceptable lives have a strong moral claim to be allowed to commit suicide, to use mind-altering chemicals or technology, to "shirk" the "responsibilities" that the majority would benefit from imposing upon them, perhaps even to join a criminal gang. There is much less justification for coercing them into acting in accord with the best interests of the majority, because there can be no reciprocation.

What Changes People's Minds?

2011-08-25T10:29:00.000-07:00

Most of my friends and lovers are pronatalists, so I know that kind, smart people often hold beliefs that contradict mine. I still have hopes of converting them and others (as they have hopes of converting me, no doubt).

How do we go about changing people's minds? How do real human minds get changed?

Information doesn't seem to do it - being exposed to information contradicting your point of view, if anything, seems to cement your original position, rather than change it. This is a well-documented social phenomenon; you know those cults that predict the end of the world? What happens when the end doesn't come? A few members leave the cult, but generally, those who remain are even more committed to the cult!

So how do we change minds? Is it inextricably connected to status? Self-interest? Social belonging? Are there any methods that reliably work to change core beliefs?

What Kind of Evidence for Effective Suicidality?

2011-08-23T15:10:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote a post called "The Mathematics of Misery," which explored Becker and Posner's idea of effective suicidality. In brief, it may be that miserable people value their lives so little that they rationally accept gambles that happy people would never accept, because they plan to commit suicide if the gamble does not pay off. The authors connect their model to many stories we are familiar with, and find greater explanatory power in their model than in others. The model is particularly appealing to me, because it accords well with my introspective experience as a bona fide, not-breathing-for-a-while-there suicide attempter.

But there are alternative explanations for such Hail-Mary, seemingly irrational choices (not the least of which is actual irrationality). How might we begin to test such a theory?

One obvious choice would be to study the connection between "losing" at a prospective suicide-gamble activity and actual suicides. If unsuccessful participants in the activity do commit suicide at a high rate, the theory is supported - so long as we assume that some higher-than-baseline percentage of the effectively suicidal "follow through" on their suicide plans. (A plan need not be followed for it to be a cognitive reality upon which decisions are based.)

How about investigating whether the strong correlates of suicide are also strong correlates of the candidate "gamble" behaviors?

"Effectively suicidal" behavior may have a different etiology than actual suicide attempts, but there are many reasons to believe that if effective suicidality exists, it is another aspect of the suicide drive, and that they share a common cause. In addition to failed social belonging and burdensomeness, the strongest predictor of suicide in Thomas Joiner's model is competence: the ability to carry out the act of suicide. Competence, as Joiner outlines in his book, is learned; "provocative" preparatory behaviors systematically precede suicides, as if one must train oneself to do it, bit by bit. (This is one function of intentionally cutting one's skin.)

Given that people must achieve competence over time in order to successfully commit suicide, we would expect a continuum of provocative, suicide-preparatory behaviors - and both from introspection and from examples in the Becker-Posner paper, many dangerous gambles are also suicide-preparing.

Let's say we could agree on some strong correlates of suicide, specifically things that seem to cause suicide that also would be expected to cause people to become effectively suicidal (that would make circumstances unacceptable to them, as JasonSL puts it), hence to take a bad gamble/engage in provocative/preparatory behaviors. Let's say I have five or ten candidate behaviors for effective suicidality, and some of them really strongly correlated with the things that suicide really strongly correlates with. Would that be evidence of anything?

Any other suggestions for (a) how to support or knock down effective suicidality (revealed unacceptability) and (b) candidate behaviors?

Lives of Creatures

2011-08-23T10:11:00.000-07:00

On that planet, the dominant intelligent species initially took three forms. Females were of one type, males of two: a massive, ape-like type almost twice the size of a female, and a smaller type comparable in mass to a female.

The large males attempted to maintain harems of females, both for sex and to provide them the food they required to maintain their large body masses. (The large males' ability to feed themselves without female assistance was constrained by the need to engage in violent competition over resources with other large males.) A successful large male could often be heard boasting and strategizing with his lieutenants at the campfire late into the night.

The small males were similar in appearance to females, so much so that they could not be distinguished from females at a moderate distance, save for the almost comically oversized male sex organs they possessed. They did not attempt to monopolize harems, but seemed motivated only to maintain proximity to females at all times, and to have sex with them whenever possible. Their smaller size of course facilitated eye contact during face-to-face intercourse, while their sex organs exhibited several adaptations that facilitated female sexual pleasure. The large males regarded the smaller males as a parasitic nuisance.

Upon the rapid democratization of the tribes following first contact, a faction of the large males was able to establish female suffrage, in hopes of besting a rival faction of large males with the females' help. To the great surprise of both factions, the large males soon found themselves legally classified as a parasitic offshoot of the species, and sentenced to technological incapacitation.

But this is not a cruel story. All the large males left alive were given virtual reality worlds with harems of NPCs, and they all lived happily ever after.

Disciplease and Funish

2011-08-10T10:22:00.000-07:00

Smilansky concludes, not that hard determinism is an inaccurate description of the world, but that it is impossible to live justly within a hard deterministic world. Which is the same kind of "null hypothesis" on human welfare as that of antinatalism.

Saul Smilansky, in his paper "Hard Determinism and Punishment: A Practical Reductio," argues that hard determinism fails as a practical moral philosophy, in that it is inherently self-defeating. His core example is the punishment of criminals. Since the hard determinist rejects the notion of morally relevant free will, he rejects the notion that a person can deserve to suffer for his actions (which he could not, in terms of physics, control). While incarceration may be necessary for the purpose of incapacitation (that is, keeping criminals away from the rest of society where they will do harm), it is not justified on grounds of retribution - because, in a hard deterministic world, no one freely chooses anything, so prisoners do not deserve their suffering.

Smilansky proposes that a hard determinist is committed to what he calls "funishment" - resort hotel prisons that accomplish the dual purpose of incapacitating criminals (protecting society) and keeping them entertained (compensating criminals for the injustice necessarily imposed upon them by society, for society's benefit).

The problem with funishment is that it's fun. It ceases to have any effect by way of deterrence. (Here we see three theories of criminal justice interacting in a fascinating way.) Lots of people would want to go to the resort hotel funishment prisons ("fun-zone," Smilansky calls them) and may even commit crimes to get there - removing most of the negative incentive for committing crimes, and in fact creating a positive incentive. The end result of the funishment program is, says Smilansky, "Many people who would otherwise not have become involved in crime, nor even suffer detention, would be caught up in that very life. In the meantime, the rest of us would be living in the worst possible world: suffering unprecedented crime waves while paying unimaginable sums for the upkeep of offenders in opulent institutions of funishment."

Smilansky gives this argument as a reductio of hard determinism as a practical moral philosophy. I think the context of antinatalism makes this an overstatement on Smilansky's part. The upshot of Smilansky's argument is not that hard determinism is not true in the metaphysical sense, but that committing ourselves to its reality ends in moral horror, the "worst possible world." My view is that Smilansky's argument is not a reductio of hard determinism, but of the idea that there could ever be a decently just human society. There is, in essence, a right of each person to be free from unjust suffering - but in fact, unjust suffering is guaranteed simply by being born. See a problem here?

One who recognizes determinism cannot insist on desert. But could a person who accepts hard determinism morally choose to reproduce? By doing so, he imposes suffering on a person who does not deserve it, and will not deserve any of the suffering he receives. Creating a being that will necessarily suffer unjustly seems to me indistinguishable from making a being suffer unjustly. Isn't it immoral to bring beings into an unjust world?

What of fun and pleasure, then? To what extent do we "deserve" those? Can we morally give benefits to people who do not suffer any deprivation without them when other, suffering people need those benefits?

I think that desert is incoherent (and birth wrong) primarily because the most important thing ever to happen to a person, that which determines that he will suffer gravely, is without question outside his free will: his birth. The undeserved suffering imposed on a person simply by being born is likely to overwhelm any suffering justly imposed on him for his actions, even if we were to buy into a morally relevant free will.

But without free will, of course, desert goes out the window. All suffering, none guilty, as Dostoevsky put it. Hard determinism helps us realize the horror show we are in, so that we may end it. THAT, and only that, is the practical consequence. There is no reductio; there is only support for the null hypothesis.

Most self-described compatibilists that I know ground their beliefs in the experience of choices: we feel ourselves to have free choices, and it seems impossible to live as if we didn't. But even granting this, the suffering of the "guilty" is nowhere near justified. A demon could build a machine that we might find ourselves in that would give us the experience of free choice within a virtual reality world. But our suffering as a result of our fake-but-perceived choices would be justified not at all.

Inequality in Slums

2011-08-03T07:59:00.000-07:00

We live in the Repugnant Conclusion. We just don't know it yet.

From Planet of Slums, by Mike Davis (2006):

As a rule of thumb, both the popular and scholarly literatures on informal housing tend to romanticize squatters while ignoring renters. As World Bank researchers recently acknowledged, "remarkably little research has been done on low-income rental markets." Landlordism is in fact a fundamental and divisive social relation in slum life worldwide. It is the principal way in which urban poor people can monetize their equity (formal or informal), but often in an exploitative relationship to even poorer people.... To be sure, most of the urban poor in West Africa have always rented from landlords, as have a majority of residents in Dhaka and some other Asian cities (in Bangkok two-thirds of "squatters" actually rent the land they build their shacks upon). Renting has also become far more common than usually recognized in the peripheries of Latin America, Middle Eastern, and South African cities. In Cairo, for example, the more advantaged poor buy pirated land from farmers, while the less advantaged squat on municipal land; the poorest of the poor, however, rent from the squatters. Likewise, as urban geographer Alan Gilbert observed of Latin America in 1993, the "vast majority of new rental housing is located in the consolidated self-help periphery rather than in the centre of the city."

Mexico City is an important case in point. Despite a Model Law of the colonias proletarias which sought to ban absentee ownership, "poaching," and speculation in low-income housing, the Lopez Portillo government (1976-82) allowed slum-dwellers to sell their property at market rates. One result of this reform has been the middle-class gentrification of some formerly poor colonias in good locations; another has been the proliferation of petty landlordism. As sociologist Susan Eckstein discovered in her 1987 return to the colonia that she had first studied fifteen years earlier, some 25 to 50 percent of the original squatters had built small, 2-to-15-family vecindades which they then rented to poorer newcomers. "There is, in essence," she wrote, "a two-tiered housing market, reflecting socioeconomic differences among colonos." She also found "a 'downward' socioeconomic leveling of the population since I was last there.... The poor tenant stratum has increased in size." Although some older residents had thrived as landlords, the newer renters had far less hope of socioeconomic mobility than the earlier generation, and the colonia as a whole was no longer a "slum of hope."

Renters, indeed, are usually the most invisible and powerless of slum-dwellers. In the face of redevelopment and eviction, they are typically ineligible for compensation or resettlement. Unlike tenement-dwellers in early-twentieth-century Berlin or New York, moreover, who shared a closeknit solidarity vis-à-vis their slumlords, today's slum renters typically lack the power to organize tenants' organizations or mount rent strikes. As two leading housing researchers explain: "Tenants are scattered throughout irregular settlements with a wide range of informal rental arrangements, and they are often unable to organize as a pressure group to protect themselves."

Large peripheral slums, especially in Africa, are usually complex quiltworks of kin networks, tenure systems, and tenant relationships. Diana Lee-Smith, one of the founders of Nairobi's Mazingira Institute, has closely studied Korogocho, a huge slum on the eastern edge of the city. Korogocho includes seven villages offering a menu of different housing and rental types. The most wretched village, Grogan, consists of one-room cardboard shacks and is largely populated by female-headed households evicted from an older shantytown near the city center. Barracks-like Githaa, on the other hand, "is an entirely speculative village, built by entrepreneurs for rent," despite the fact that the land is publicly owned. Nearby Dandora is a sites-and-services scheme where half the owners are now absentee landlords. Lee-Smith emphasizes that petty landlordship and subletting are major wealth strategies of the poor, and that homeowners quickly become exploiters of even more impoverished people. Despite the persistent heroic image of the squatter as self-builder and owner-occupier, the reality in Korogocho and other Nairobi slums is the irresistible increase in tenancy and petty exploitation. [Citations omitted. All bolded emphasis mine.]

This excerpt illustrates a little-recognized phenomenon of the slums: wretchedly poor people making tiny, incremental moves away from the most severe poverty by exploiting even more wretchedly poor people as renters. (One fact that this passage does not emphasize is that politicians and thugs are as likely to exploit the extremely poor as are other poor people - people who sleep on the sidewalks have to pay neighborhood gangs for the privilege.)

The inequality that gets magnified is, to some degree, one of time - those who arrived earlier exploit those who arrive later. But other forms of natural or preexisting inequality are also magnified, such as differences in social connections, business savvy, and willingness to exploit others.

A slum is a pattern, a physical instantiation of a phenomenon that occurs at different levels of development. In rich countries and poor countries, slums are what happens when people are so poor that they fall out of the legally available housing system and must resort to "illegal" housing. The immense tent city slums of Los Angeles' Skid Row are similar in form to the cardboard shantytowns of Nairobi, despite vast differences in wealth between the two cities.

Most of the population growth in the Global South is happening in slums - in some cases up to 90% of population growth.

The slums are an emergency. Their scale is almost unimaginable, and they have exploded in the past few decades.

Plenty of people are born into slums. Plenty of them are smart. But this application of population magic does not seem to be having the effect Bryan Caplan hopes for when he assures us that "when population goes up, everyone gets extra choices."

As of 2006, only about 6% of the urban population of the United States lived in slums. But over a third of China's urban population, over half of India's, and a shocking 99.4% of Ethiopia's, are slum dwellers.

Both the absolute population of the slums and the percentage of the world population that lives in slums are growing. Fast.

"If such a trend continues unabated," warns planning expert Gautam Chatterjee, "we will have only slums and no cities."

I guess it's a good thing that poor people still smile.

Team Thinking and the Zone of Bad Information

2011-07-27T09:12:00.000-07:00

Anarchists talk as if there is something fundamentally worthwhile in human life. They employ terms like 'virtue', 'goodness', 'potential' and so on. Anarchism is based on the premise that if it weren't for pesky and interfering governments, human life would be substantially better, if not indeed unrecognisably so, from the current picture. It's based on a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature that has very little evidential support.
-Karl, in a comment on his post

This insight extends to almost every belief structure there is, because almost every belief structure is fundamentally (and shamefully) optimistic. Feminists and men's rights people seem to think life would be grand if it weren't for pesky, interfering patriarchy/gynocracy. [Group A] thinks life would be grand if it weren't for pesky, interfering [Group B] fucking up the program, and vice versa.

I think of this as "team thinking" - the idea that (a) we are on teams (what Vonnegut calls granfalloons), and that (b) our team should win against the other teams, which (c) totally exist, and (d) then life would be great.

This "team thinking" is a huge part of the reason that we get bad information and cannot think clearly. This is because of the practice of civility, which is a form of bullshit.

Civility means that we avoid saying things that cause our conversation partners to experience negative affect. Unbiased information about oneself is particularly difficult to get, because negative information about oneself is likely to cause one to feel bad, and is hence "impolite" to discuss. Team thinking extends this zone of bad information to information about all kinds of spurious groups we happen to belong to, not just the individual - gender teams, race teams, political teams, geographic location teams, socioeconomic teams, religious teams.

In-groups (the existence of, and bias toward, which are on the list of human universals) represent an important part of self-deception, in that it allows us to imagine that others deserve suffering.

Population Is Magic

2011-07-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

Does a future of glorious prosperity await us if we forget about the direct, measurable harms of overpopulation and instead focus on the indirect, unpredictable benefits that might come from denser populations?

The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrolled way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us and it is the poor people of the world who will suffer most.
—David Attenborough

Over the observed range, people and good outcomes go hand in hand—and there’s no sign of anything else on the horizon.
—Bryan Caplan

You may have seen the satellite images of rainforest loss. You may have heard that we are in the middle of an anthropogenic extinction event. Perhaps you have become aware that a billion people are hungry and a sixth of the world lives in slums. Perhaps you have noticed that the costs of fuel and food continue to rise dramatically, trends that have historically been followed by large-scale misery and mass human die-offs.

Bryan Caplan sees a clear solution to all these troubling problems: more babies.

Characterizing population worries like those of David Attenborough, above, as "fretting," Caplan surprisingly argues that increasing population has always gone along with greater human well-being, and that there is every reason to suspect that a larger population will result in higher levels of human welfare in the future.

With a totally straight face.

Lest you suspect I am mischaracterizing Caplan's argument for dramatic effect, here are some direct quotations:

People have been fretting about the “population problem” for at least fifty years. But over those five decades, the perceived problem has practically reversed.

During the last two centuries, both population and prosperity exploded. Maybe the world just enjoyed incredibly good luck, but it makes you wonder: Could rising population be a cause of rising prosperity?

When population goes up, everyone gets extra choices. [Emphasis in original.]

And the only mention of environmental problems at all in the entire essay:

After two centuries of rising population and rising prosperity, attempts to blame low living standards on overpopulation have worn thin. The most popular anti-population arguments now come from environmentalists. But their case is surprisingly weak. We’re not “running out” of food, fuel, or minerals. Despite occasional price spikes, real commodity prices have fallen about 1% per year for over a century. Air and water quality in the First World have been improving for decades despite rising population. Genuine problems remain, but limiting population to counter environmental problems is using a sword to kill a mosquito. Pollution taxes and congestion prices are far cheaper and more humane remedies. [Citations omitted.]

Caplan argues, essentially, that (a) ideas come from human brains; (b) ideas drive prosperity; (c) more brains mean more ideas. He maintains that there is no downside to growing population; somehow, all those new brains will come up with ideas that will solve all of our present problems, and all future problems as well.

At its core, Caplan's argument is that we should ignore direct, certain harms and costs of rising population (environmental destruction, water shortages, overpopulation-driven conflicts like the Rwandan genocide) and focus on the indirect, uncertain potential future benefits of increasing population - all those ideas future brains might come up with.

Optimism is not nice (or "humane") when it allows for the mental elision of real human suffering. More importantly, it is not warranted when the harms are direct and certain and the benefits are indirect and uncertain.

"Imagine deleting half the names in your music collection—or half the visionaries in the computer industry," says Caplan. "Think how much poorer the world would be." He includes a sentimental quotation from fellow breeding advocate Julian Simon, who says:

There came to me the memory of reading a eulogy delivered by a Jewish chaplain over the dead on the battlefield at Iwo Jima, saying something like, “How many who would have been a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein have we buried here?” And then I thought, Have I gone crazy? What business do I have trying to help arrange it that fewer human beings will be born, each one of whom might be a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein—or simply a joy to his or her family and community, and a person who will enjoy life?

The idea that we should breed lots more people because there might be a Mozart or an Einstein among them has two major problems. One is that the sheer number of brains is not the sole determinant of the creation of valuable ideas - else the slums of São Paulo would be outperforming Cambridge, Massachusetts, in new idea creation. (And these other determinants of the creation of valuable ideas, tied as they often are to real-world, material resources, may very well be negatively affected by increased population.) Another is that at the outset, the creation of a new Josef Fritzl is at least as likely as the creation of a new Einstein. (Indeed, many people who have committed horrific crimes fit the definition of the type of person Caplan says we should make more of - people whose lifetime tax payments exceed their lifetime consumption of government services. Even Jeffrey Dahmer, killed so quickly after his incarceration, might have met these criteria.)

Caplan is correct that each new person is a potential cooperation partner for every existing person. But he ignores the fact that each new person is also a new competitor. Caplan makes much of the fact that "much" government spending is "non-rival" - that is, it doesn't increase with population size. But how much of human welfare is truly "non-rival"? It is an undeniable fact that humans compete for resources that are genuinely scarce, such as water and land. This could be solved, in Caplan's magical view, by new ideas.

Caplan thinks reducing population to reduce harms like scarcity and environmental destruction is "like using a sword to kill a mosquito." In my view, breeding lots of new people in hopes that they come up with solutions to the problems caused by overpopulation is akin to snorting cocaine in hopes that it helps you figure out a way to overcome your cocaine addiction.

Or, perhaps more poignantly, it's like open-pit-mining the fuck out of Montana in hopes that microorganisms in the digestive tracts of endangered snow geese that die horribly in the polluted open pits will prove capable of cleaning up the damage.

Imagining Upheaval: The Often Adversarial Relationship of Solicitude and Respect

2011-07-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

Imagine the upheaval that would result from adoption of blanket language requiring total equality. Would male citizens be justified in insisting that women share with them the burdens of compulsory military service? What would become of traditional family relationships? What about alimony? Who would have the obligation of supporting whom? Would fathers rank equally with mothers in the right of custody to children? What would become of the crimes of rape and statutory rape? Would the Mann Act be invalidated? Would the many State and local provisions regulating working conditions and hours of employment for women be struck down?

You know the biological differences between the sexes. In many States we have laws favorable to women. Are you going to strike those laws down? This is the entering wedge, an amendment of this sort. The list of foreseeable consequences, I will say to the committee, is unlimited.

—Comments by Emanuel Celler (D-NY), the Representative who introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into the House of Representatives, opposing an amendment to forbid discrimination based on sex, 110 Cong. Rec. 2,577-2,584 (1964).

You want to treat [group] as full persons? But don't you care about them?

See also: slaves, native inhabitants, mental patients, poor people, children.

You Were Raped By Your Parents

2011-07-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Accidental Rape: Another Fable, from estnihil.

Incentives from the Group Crowd Out Joy

2011-07-04T02:21:00.000-07:00

The "overjustification effect" is the cognitive process whereby getting a reward for doing something makes people do it less.

In experiments demonstrating the overjustification effect (such as the classic felt-tip marker study), the rewards were never (that I know of) things the subjects found or discovered themselves, but were presented by the researchers. I emphasize: the rewards were perceived by subjects to come from people.

The process of overjustification is often explained by the idea that a reward acts to shift salience from the inherent enjoyability of the activity to the external-reward-generating aspect of the activity. In short, with the introduction of an incentive, fun becomes work.

Why should this be? Why should the shift to "reward" thinking make the activity less fun?

There is a perfectly rational reason: because the reward is a signal given by interested others, who are one's competitors.

When one receives a promise of an incentive for some behavior, one might rationally ask the promissor, "what's in it for you?" Of course, words can lie, but costly incentives cannot. By providing a valuable incentive (or the reliable promise of one) to someone, the promissor assures the recipient in very credible language that the action of the recipient is valuable to the promissor, and in fact he is willing to pay for it. The recipient should rationally slow down and think about whether, instead of wasting his time doing the activity for free, he should be getting compensated for it - and, relatedly, whether this activity has a cost to him that he hadn't perceived.

One way for this abstract strategy to be implemented would be to cause the actor to feel less joy in an activity another indicated a willingness to pay to promote.

This strategy also applies to disincentives. From a group's perspective, why waste resources prohibiting an activity unless individuals have some reason to engage in the activity? A group prohibition is a reliable signal to individuals that there is some individual benefit - an advantage over the group - to be gained from violating the prohibition. One way to instantiate this strategy would be to build into your creatures curiosity about forbidden things and a little thrill from rule-violation.

The overjustification effect is our rational, built-in stubbornness. We recognize that incentives are signals, and immediately adapt to best take advantage of those signals. Joy is the casualty. The thrill of illicitness is the consolation.

Meaning in Space: Mars as Distraction

2011-06-29T09:48:00.001-07:00

From io9, an excerpt from Robert Zubrin's book The Case For Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must:

There are real and vital reasons why we should venture to Mars. It is the key to unlocking the secret of life in the universe. It is the challenge to adventure that will inspire millions of young people to enter science and engineering, and whose acceptance will reaffirm the nature of our society as a nation of pioneers. It is the door to an open future, a new frontier on a new world, a planet that can be settled, the beginning of humanity's career as a spacefaring species, with no limits to its resources or aspirations, as it continues to push outward into the infinite universe beyond.
[...]
The only meaningful counterargument against launching a humans [sic] to Mars initiative is the assertion that we cannot do it.

Is that really the only counterargument?

I will treat Zubrin's reasons here individually.

1. [A mission to Mars] is the key to unlocking the secret of life in the universe.

Why do we want to know the secret of life? Mostly, because we want to know our own origins. Why do we want to know our origins? I submit that it is because we suspect they will give us a clue to our purpose.

However, study of life origins to date have not given us any clue as to what our purpose might be. If anything, it has shown us that we have no purpose.

I would find it aesthetically beautiful to know how life emerged, how common it is, whether there are different chemical possibilities for life than ours. But my experience of aesthetic beauty does not make up for the very real suffering of others, and it is criminally negligent for me to use aesthetic beauty to distract myself from their very real suffering. Anaesthetic beauty, that.

2. It is the challenge to adventure that will inspire millions of young people to enter science and engineering

As with the moon race, this is probably true. But to what purpose? Is attracting more young people into science and engineering a good thing? The life of a scientist or engineer is frequently dull and unrewarding, not at all that promised by the grand adventure of a Mars mission. I could not comfortably usher teenagers into the kind of life lived by my friends who are actual aerospace engineers.

3. ...and whose acceptance will reaffirm the nature of our society as a nation of pioneers.

I thought we all agreed, after Vonnegut, that "pioneer" was a swear now, like "conquistador" and "rapist." Even if there's no one out there to be, um, "pioneered," geographical expansion is the most boring, primitive sort of exploration.

Also, Zubrin's appeal to in-group loyalty ("nation") must fall flat for anyone with a more global sense of empathy.

4. It is the door to an open future, a new frontier on a new world

In other words, a Mars mission will let us think about nice science-fiction fantasies, instead of the depressing reality of hunger and cancer and environmental destruction.

As to the emotional connotations of "pioneer" and "frontier," see my post on Political Metonymy.

5. ...a planet that can be settled, the beginning of humanity's career as a spacefaring species, with no limits to its resources or aspirations, as it continues to push outward into the infinite universe beyond.

Getting more resources and more space does not solve any of the interesting problems. We want geographical expansion for monkey reasons, not person reasons. Like longevity (see: The ____ Must Go On), expansion in physical space is one of those primitive goals that need not infect our thinking any longer, as we now know it cannot lead us to what we really care about.

Distraction is what we mean by finding meaning in our search for meaning, the canard of Camus.

The only reason to go to Mars is that we are lonely and bored. But if there is anything to be learned from the whole of human history, it is that nothing relieves loneliness or boredom. Adventure can, at best, distract us from it for a while, while we pass on our loneliness and boredom down into the future, and all around the galaxy.

College as Suicide Gamble

2011-06-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

On the subject of the dubious value of a college degree, Richard Posner writes:

...the more interesting question is whether Krugman is right to be pessimistic about the future returns to a college education. The market disagrees. If the market agreed with him, college enrollments would be plummeting because college is expensive, not only in tuition but also in opportunity costs—the income forgone by being in school. College enrollments continue to increase relative to population, and, more important from a market perspective, more and more high-school students express a desire to go to college, even though if Krugman is right their college education will not produce lifetime earnings increments sufficient to offset the cost of tuition and the cost of their forgone earnings during their college years. [Emphasis mine.]

Posner admits that the market could be wrong:

A high school student, and his parents, are hardly in a good position to predict the structure of the labor market in ten or twenty years. Most people base most of their expectations for the future on simple extrapolation from the recent past. Often that’s the best one can do in the presence of profound uncertainty.

Poor information and uncertainty may be part of it, but I think the Becker-Posner model of effective suicidality (truncated utility function) could apply here. It is not necessarily that young people predict that a college degree is a good investment; it is that life without a college degree, for many middle-class people, would be an unimaginable humiliation, on the level of social death. We bet on education to establish social belonging, and we are not sensitive to the serious bad consequences entailed by failure, because not taking the risk leaves us in a position worse than death. It's simply unthinkable.

In fact, the increasing prevalence of college education itself makes college ever more "required" for one's social belonging and self-respect. In effect, it raises I_d (reduces utility for a given income) across the population (even for people whose utility functions are not truncated, which leads to misery at higher levels of income). Society as a whole is on a hedonic treadmill.

When I was a freshman at MIT, Noam Chomsky told a small group of us that college was where society was storing us to hide the fact that there wasn't enough meaningful work to go around.

The Mathematics of Misery: What Human Behavior Teaches Us About the Value of Life

2011-06-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

I request feedback on this. Please criticize and distribute.

The probability of your coming into existence was bogglingly small.

The ejaculation that led to your conception contained hundreds of millions of unique spermatozoa. You are the one in half a billion that made it to fertilization. And it was that particular ejaculation that resulted in conception – as opposed to the thousands of ejaculations your father experienced before and after your conception. Your parents met (literally or figuratively, if you’re the product of a sperm donor) and conceived you, instead of conceiving with other potential mates, or not conceiving at all. And this startling history applies to your parents as well – your grandparents – your great-grandparents – and on back to the Australopithecines and beyond – each one the winning sperm of hundreds of millions, the result of a particular ejaculation, a particular union, that could have not happened as easily as your nonexistent brothers and sisters failed to happen.

Are you lucky to be alive?

Most people seem to experience a mixture of terror and delight when contemplating their own unlikeliness in this way – terror at the prospect of never having come into existence, and delight in one’s specialness, one’s victory over the other potential beings. One might even feel pity for those who never got to exist.
The conventional wisdom is that we are all very lucky to be alive – that life is a benefit, a precious gift that has been given to us. This is an important belief. It is a belief that is necessary to justify creating a child – if the child is benefited by being born, then procreation, at least toward him, is morally innocent. Perhaps it is even morally required!

Of course, life isn’t so great for everyone. The world is so bad, in fact, that its badness is the most conclusive argument against the existence of a loving, all-powerful deity. But when antinatalists point out the serious harms that come to all living beings, such as hunger, loneliness, jealousy, pain, illness, fear, and death, we are often told that we are giving an incomplete picture of reality. Reproduction advocates, realizing that the moral innocence of reproduction rests on life having a positive value, advise us to look on the bright side. We are frequently invited to consider the good things about life, the sunsets and puppies and children’s smiles that allegedly blot out the bad and give life its high net positive value. And that’s the folks who are willing to engage the question at all: too often, the question of the value of life is not addressed because it is supposedly just so obvious that life is worth getting. (This is the position taken by Thomas Nagel and Bryan Caplan, among others.)

So is life a precious gift, or is it a costly burden? Are we impossibly lucky to be alive – or impossibly unlucky?

Let’s not argue the point. We can do better: we can measure.

Truncated Utility Functions and the Value of Life

“Utility” is an economic concept similar to happiness, but broader. It is the ultimate emotional evaluation of whether things are good or bad. The concept of utility does not rest on a purely hedonistic model of life; economics recognizes that utility may be gotten from a variety of transactions and experiences, springing from motives self-interested, altruistic, and everything in between.

Broadly speaking, utility is a function of “income” – again, very broadly defined. Income in this sense need not be monetary income in dollars, as from a job or investments, but may include items that are not even available directly on any market, such as affection from other humans and self-respect. I will address below the question of what real human utility functions are actually a function of. (I reserve the right to switch willy-nilly and with no warning between speaking of utility functions that are functions of monetary income and those that are functions of other things, depending upon context to clarify which I mean.)

As Gary Becker and Richard Posner note in the unpublished paper that is one of the primary subjects of this essay (“Suicide: An Economic Approach”), in studying how utility responds to changes in income, economists have primarily focused on middle-class individuals – people who own houses, earn money from investments, and buy fire, health, and automobile insurance. This has led to the conclusions of economics occasionally not being true observations of general human nature, as they often purport to be, but rather observations of middle-class human nature.

One of these suspect observations is that utility functions are concave. This is a typical representation of a concave utility function:

What this means is that a person gets a lot of utility from the first dollar he gets – even the first thousand or ten thousand dollars – but he doesn’t get nearly as much utility from the 40,000th dollar, and even less from the millionth dollar. (Modern American utility functions of income apparently top out at around $75,000 per year.) What this means is that, dollar for dollar, gains are less valuable to the average suburbanite than losses are painful. He would rather pay $1000 a year in car insurance (say) than take a one-in-ten chance at a $10,000 loss during that year in an accident. This phenomenon – that makes the insurance industry viable and makes utility functions concave – is called risk aversion.

Many people behave in ways that are not consistent with risk aversion. They make “bad” bets – bets where the expected payoff (probability of success times magnitude of win) is less than the cost of the bet. They take risks seemingly without regard for possible bad consequences. They appear focused on the present and immediate future, at the expense of the far future (they are “extreme future discounters”). Miserable people and poor people are particularly likely to fit these criteria.

Why are middle-class folks risk averse, but not miserable folks or poor folks?

Bryan Caplan and Scott Beaulier, in their paper “Behavioral Economics and Perverse Effects of the Welfare State,” present a possible solution: irrationality and akrasia. The bad choices made by poor people are a result of their inability to forecast the future effects of their actions, combined with laziness. Welfare and other social programs, rather than making the poor better off, paradoxically make them worse off (say Caplan and Beaulier) because their irrational, akratic minds cannot handle the extra choices. (Note: this is my characterization of Beaulier and Caplan's conclusion; they use euphemistic terms at all times.)

Gary Becker and Richard Posner have a different solution: miserable and poor people don’t “properly” consider the future, because their lives are so painful that they are effectively suicidal. Poor people look around and rationally weigh the costs and benefits of different courses of action, but choose to gamble on long shots precisely because their current situations are not worth living in. They would just as soon die as remain in their current situations, and so gamble what little they have on the hope of a meaningful life.

Don’t just think gangs and lotteries and crime and crack. Think about people pursuing acting or singing careers, or going to law school or business school, or marrying in haste, or even, perhaps, having children. Such people bet everything – including their futures – on winning a particular gamble, even if it’s not a fair gamble and the likelihood of payoff doesn’t make up for the losses necessarily incurred pursuing the gamble.

The utility function pictured above has a lot of space beneath it and above the x axis, even at the origin. This reflects a judgment that even at zero income, a person takes great value from being alive.

This may or may not fit the facts.

The actual points at which actual human utility functions intersect the x axis may be far to the right of the y axis, as with this utility function for a person who only begins to get positive utility at income I_d. For all incomes below I_d, the person experiences negative utility – that is, he suffers.

This utility function is a model for the phenomenon that many people (myself included) do not seem to derive much utility at all from incomes (broadly conceived) much greater than zero.

Many people are so miserable that they do not want to enter the future at all. Their whole future projected life is worthless to them. In technical terms, their utility over all future time intervals, appropriately discounted, is less than zero. Also, their current utility (present circumstance) is zero or negative (otherwise they'd stick around a bit longer to pick up extra utility).

Suicide is one option for such people. But there are two other options, according to Becker & Posner (terminology is mine):

Take what you have and “bet” it on a chance at something that would make life worth living. If it fails, you can always kill yourself. (Gamble)
Since there is an element of uncertainty to the future, take what you have and use it to make the present livable so you can postpone suicide. Something to make life worth living might be just around the corner. If not, you can always kill yourself. (Palliate & Wait)

The utility function above for inefficient utility producers (like myself), where the utility function dips below the x axis, means that the person modeled must fear losing income below this point, because having income below I_d means he will suffer.

But a would-be suicide need not suffer. He has an ace up his sleeve: all suffering is the same as death to him, for he can use death to escape any suffering. His utility function is effectively truncated. It looks like this:

Instead of dipping below the x axis, his utility function continues along the x axis all the way to the y axis (and beyond, if you allow for negative income). Now there is a portion of the utility function that is convex – the signature of risk preference, the opposite of risk aversion described above.

Any income below the critical level I_d is worth nothing to the effectively suicidal person. This means that it will not make sense for him to expend any effort in securing income below this level. Like a depressed person who has lost the sense of the value of things, he is not motivated to get up in the morning, to work hard, to be responsible, if all it means is income below I_d. It's the same as death to him.

How can we tell who is effectively suicidal? Nonsuicidal people still often rationally accept gambles, even gambles with a risk of death. The main way to tell the difference between effectively suicidal people (with a truncated utility function, as above) and nonsuicidal people is that suicidal people are insensitive to the potential for great losses, and are only motivated by the possibility of a big win; effectively suicidal people accept actuarially unfair gambles which do not properly compensate them for risk of loss (including risk of death). Nonsuicidal people demand to be compensated for risks of loss, including risk of death.

To the extent that people display risk preference and extreme future discounting of losses but not large gains – to the extent that they are willing to accept unfair gambles with a high probability of loss (Gamble) or improve their short-term well-being at potentially great cost to their future selves (Palliate & Wait) – the hypothesis of effective suicidality must be considered. Only by considering and rejecting this hypothesis, based on data and/or reasons, could we meaningfully attribute these features to departures from the rational actor model, as Beaulier and Caplan do prematurely.

Beaulier and Caplan essentially argue against “welfare floors” because by cushioning the bad consequences of a gamble, they make antisocial gambles more attractive. But they ignore that there is a built-in welfare floor in any human society, welfare state or not: suicide.

It is inconsistent to maintain that, on the one hand, a welfare floor is undesirable because negative utilities are necessary as motivators for action, and on the other hand, that utility is rarely negative and hence procreation is morally innocent.

This model does not, however, predict mass suicides at any point, and the fact that suicide remains rare does not mean that many people do not have effectively suicidal, truncated utility functions. All this theory claims is that people act as if they don’t value their lives. Unsuccessful gambles may or may not be followed up with actual suicide; the costs of suicide are often greater than a pre-suicidal person realized when contemplating life paths, and are artificially elevated by the de facto suicide prohibition. Also, cheap palliation is widely available, allowing many would-be suicides (such as myself) to postpone this costly decision.

Policy Implications

The most important policy implication of the “mathematics of misery” I have outlined here – of the fact that many people appear to attach zero value to their lives – is that procreation becomes much more of a suspect enterprise. If people’s behavior reveals that they do not highly value their lives, then it is not “obvious,” as Bryan Caplan would have us believe, that human beings are benefitted by being brought into existence. A life that produces zero utility in the immediate present, and zero or negative utility for the foreseeable future, is hardly the kind of precious gift that would justify procreation, yet from this model it is likely that a substantial portion of the population of the world lives just this kind of life.

Someone whose utility function is negative for all time intervals would have been better off not having been born. Many people are in this situation through no fault of their own. A second policy implication for recognizing this is a move toward greater compassion in providing “palliative care” to people whose present utility and expected future utility are negative and whose only incentive to remain alive is uncertainty. As a society, we are willing to allow “palliative care” for terminally ill persons, but our middle-class model of risk aversion and the value of life prevents us from recognizing the need for palliative care in “healthy” people as well.

Third, there are implications for harm reduction, regardless of one’s position about the value of life. Viewing utility functions (and hence human motivation) in this light, we can see that a suffering person chooses from available gambles and palliation methods. Outlawing a particular type of gamble or palliation method will likely divert demand to other types of gambles or palliation, and hence will not reduce overall levels of harm unless substitution happens to be toward less harmful activities. Recognition of this “demand for risk” should guide policy decisions regarding dangerous activities.

What Real Human Utility Functions Are Functions Of

The utility function does appear to be a function of income – within a country, wealthier people are less miserable. But it is also a function of one’s past incomes – receiving a higher income increases utility in the short run, but in the long run, it sets a new baseline for utility (this is the hedonic treadmill). Utility is also a function of the incomes of near others (that is, a function of within-group status), which is why more direct income-utility correlation is found within-country than between countries.

However, as I have written previously, more than anything, a human utility function is a function of social belonging. That's the ultimate point not only of income, but of intelligence, beauty, and many other material and non-material goods: they may be traded for social belonging. The ability to provide others with what they want is the opposite of burdensomeness, a pillar factor of suicide risk in Thomas Joiner’s model (the other pillars are social belonging as such, and competence in carrying out the act of suicide). We want income because we want to be able to get the attention of others. We want a safe social place, primarily – and, of course, we want a better social place than the one we currently occupy.

The primary good, for humans, is group belonging. There is only so far up or down you can go in a social group, only so much room for status manipulation – otherwise you have to find a whole new social group. Within a group or class, we’d like to go up, but we’d HATE to go down. Each person sees a huge drop-off in utility when considering the loss of his present group belonging, no matter whether his present group is high or low in status relative to greater society. This has very little to do with absolute material welfare.

This is why the guy choosing television and phones over food is making the right choice. Group belonging really is more important than short-term well-being. He is even displaying risk aversion, as is the poor black parent who gives her child a name that strongly signals group belonging at the expense of belonging in other groups or classes.

It’s extremely difficult to join a whole new social group. Everyone faces a utility drop-off, a chasm, at the prospect of losing social belonging – a process sometimes described as social death. People behave as if losing one’s social group and status is worse than death. This is strong evidence that social death really is worse than death.

Poor Baby or Rich Baby: Which Is Worse?

Data about crime, drug use, and other forms of risk preference and palliation seem to indicate that poor people are more likely than rich people to display the kind of truncated, effectively suicidal utility function I have been discussing. This could support the claim that it is more wrong for a poor person to have a child than for a rich person.

However, when we realize that social belonging trumps everything, we see that what really determines the value of life is the opportunity to be party of a social group. Middle class people have different relevant social groups from poor people, and the very wealthy have different social groups altogether. A child born into one of these groups must establish a place for himself; if few places are available, downward mobility (social death) is indicated. Therefore a person born into a very wealthy social group that has few opportunities for belonging may be in a worse position than a person born into poverty but with many opportunities for belonging.

As Becker & Posner note, the nature of the "Gamble" you can buy depends on your present income; higher present incomes buy better gambles, with a higher probability of success. Therefore, wealthier people may succeed in their suicide gambles more often than poor people, so their gambles are more socially invisible than those of the poor - but they are still making them.

However, the social belonging hypothesis that I have been advancing here (that social belonging is the primary determinant of utility) implies that the income at which life becomes worth living, I_d, varies with one's existing social situation, hence with initial income. Wealthy effectively-suicidal people start out with more initial income - they have more to gamble with - but they have a higher mark to reach for their gambles to be successful. It is not clear which effect predominates.

See also:

Love, Sex, Babies, and Neural Correlates

2011-06-25T21:12:00.000-07:00

A possible solution to the mystery of why postpartum disfigurement has persisted as a trait detrimental to sexual desirability, despite correlating with fertility, is this: once human pair bonding has occurred, visual assessment of attractiveness of one's partner (or other members of a partner's sex) ceases to be an important motivator.

What would really nail this theory home, for me, is if fMRI studies demonstrated some kind of reduction in processing the physical sexual attractiveness of one's partner and others during the postpartum, pair-bonded state.

Analogously, analysis of what we polys term "New Relationship Energy," which mortals call "being in love," indicates that this phenomenon is associated with deactivation of neural areas associated with critical social judgment of others. Once the "decision" to be in love has been made (by your body, not by "you"), the brain ceases evaluation of the love object in social terms. (See, e.g., Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, "The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love." NeuroImage 21 (2004) 1155–1166.)

This is what Héloïse d’Argenteuil is making concrete in what is still the most righteous expression of romantic love I have yet encountered, from her first letter:

God is my witness that if Augustus, emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me for ever it would be sweeter and more honorable to me to be, not his empress, but your whore.

Its elevation above the self-interested social congress of the world is at the heart of the righteousness of romantic love.

I refer to this only by analogy. NRE is not at all the same phenomenon as the postpartum pair-bonded state that I have in mind. The early stage of love, as we polys remind ourselves with our terminology, lasts no longer than a year, maybe two, if you're lucky. (See, e.g., Enzo Emanuele et al, "Raised plasma nerve growth factor levels associated with early-stage romantic love." Psychoneuroendocrinology Vol. 31 Issue 3 (2006) 288-294.) The state of mind that must support monogamous love and continued investment despite postpartum disfigurement occurs after, and lasts much longer.

I don't imagine a woman who has gestated a baby would be eager to see the brain scan of her lover while he looks at her naked body. Nonetheless, it's hard to deny that this is important information for people considering whether to have a baby.

Why Aren't Postpartum Bodies Sexually Desirable?

2011-06-23T09:02:00.001-07:00

We are machines designed to reproduce ourselves - prayers inscribed on dollar bills. Some of the adaptations that help us reproduce ourselves are those that help us choose appropriate mates that will maximize our chances of passing on our genes.

Some characteristics that promote one's sexual attractiveness, such as novel eye color, are not associated with fertility. But many of the characteristics that define physical attractiveness in females - waist-hip ratio, youth, and facial symmetry - are strongly associated with fertility and health.

What I find surprising, on these facts, is this: postpartum bodies are actively unattractive, yet having an obviously postpartum body seems to be a very powerful signal of fertility. Sagging skin on belly, breasts, and buttocks, combined with prominent stretch marks, are major attractiveness hits. Why should this be? Why aren't big, saggy postpartum bellies covered in stretch marks the epitome of sexiness - since they are strong indicators that a woman has successfully carried something to term?

A few possibilities I see:

Socially-imposed monogamy prevented postpartum women from having to compete with nulliparous women with their flat little stomachs and firm, smooth, symmetrical breasts.

Postpartum disfigurement was not as severe in the EEA as it is under current dietary and lifestyle conditions.

Disfigurement from previous pregnancies prevents women from competing reproductively with their own offspring, maximizing inclusive fitness (along the lines of the "grandmother hypothesis").

Even considering the possibility that they are evidence of past successful pregnancies, big saggy bellies are still, on average, indicators of low reproductive fitness (and men who evolved to prefer them would ultimately lose out).

It's just an accident that we didn't evolve either genes to reduce unattractive consequences of pregnancy or to find those changes attractive, despite an easy fitness gain to be had for those females who evolved the ability to retain their fuckability after pregnancy, or for those males who evolved to find postpartum bodies sexy as hell.

I find (1) very suspicious, given the extremely limited nature of monogamy in actual humans, past and present. Is there reason to think it was not ever so?

I find (2), (3), and (4) much more plausible. Other explanations or evidence?

Added: My friend who has a bunch of children suggests that postpartum disfigurement is fairly temporary (probably more so in the EEA), coinciding with the period of infertility during breastfeeding. So how do breastfeeding mothers with postpartum bodies retain investment from the male consort during this period of infertility? Monogamous pair bonding must be extremely strong!

Added II: compoverde suggests that in certain situations, such as (perhaps) when the love bond has been established, changes in looks just aren't that big of a motivating factor for the relationship.

The Suicide Prohibition as Regressive Tax

2011-06-22T15:30:00.000-07:00

According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 80% of Americans think suicide is wrong.

Dear Americans: why is suicide wrong? Presumably, the nature of the "wrongness" of suicide, whatever it is, justifies the de facto suicide prohibition.

I suspect that a large part of that 80% would identify a religious reason for the moral wrongness of suicide (not that I think folks have much introspective access to their true motivations). However, only 51% think abortion is morally wrong, and 23% think divorce is morally wrong, despite strong religious condemnation of both practices.

Even more than religious convictions, I suspect that the perception of suicide as wrong is, at heart, about the suffering of people "left behind" when we kill ourselves. The suffering of those left behind is especially salient. But even if suicide does major harm to those left behind, to our mothers and sisters and best friends and teachers and lovers, this does not justify a suicide prohibition. A prohibition enacted for such a purpose is identical, economically, to a regressive tax.

Regressive taxation is when poor people pay a higher share of their income in taxes than rich people do. It characterizes our current economic system in the United States, but it is generally regarded as undesirable to take from the poor and give to the rich.

A person who genuinely wishes to commit suicide has, by her own measure (the only one that counts), negative expected future utility. She expects to suffer in the future more than any future benefits are worth. The suicide prohibition prevents her from improving her position (from negative expected utility to zero expected utility). It does so for the benefit of those who do not wish to commit suicide - those with positive expected future utility.

The suicide prohibition, when justified on the basis of harm to others, punishes the least well off for the benefit of those much more well off.

It takes choices from the poor to give pleasure to the rich - without consent and without compensating the poor in any way.

Another word for that is exploitation.

Waiting for Happiness

2011-06-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

On Fucked-ness

Human welfare is not merely a function of income (broadly defined as you like), but also of one's past income, and of the incomes of others.

The hedonic treadmill and status competition are important characteristics that enable organisms to successfully compete. They also ensure that we will never be able to actually achieve the happiness we imagine. Being satisfied with what you have, in terms of income and social position, is a biological suicide proposition.

We may not be willing to step into the Experience Machine. But we must not fool ourselves into thinking that this is because there are real things in the world (intellectual or otherwise) that we value more than pleasure. It is because many of us lack introspective access to the fact that all we value is pleasure. We imagine there is a difference between real experience and pretend experience, between made-up stories and the "real" story of our lives we tell ourselves. To satisfy our need for a sense of meaningful existence, we must paradoxically imagine realness. Unfortunately, "realness" is often measured in terms of one's effect upon the experiences of others, or upon the material substrates of that experience, inside and outside human bodies. Experience, however, remains all there really is.

We are evolution's nightmare machines. And there are billions of us, imposing our nightmares on each other and on the rest of the natural world, in the service of imagined future happiness that will never come.

Luckily for our genes, and at great cost to ourselves, we have evolved self-deceptive biases so that we fail to realize this and don't kill ourselves.

The (Limited, Obsolete) Function of Cultural Conservatism

2011-06-21T08:14:00.000-07:00

Unconscious Design

When was the hand axe invented?

Answer: it wasn't.

Although the hand axe appeared in the Lower Paleolithic, it would be presuming too much to say that it was invented. The same could be said for most of the innovations that have characterized human culture for thousands of years: music, language, baby talk, death rituals, mealtimes, proper names, rhythm, fire, and gossip did not originate from the creativity of any individual. Like the biological adaptation of morning sickness, human cultural adaptations arose gradually, necessarily in coevolution with our genetics.

It worked this way - slowly - because that's what works, in the long run. The shock of a genuine innovation would very likely be more than a fragile early human system could bear. We are all aware that most genetic mutations are either neutral or harmful; the fraction of genetic innovations that are beneficial is vanishingly small. Organisms have developed the conservative process of DNA repair to protect against these likely-harmful shocks to the system. Organisms arise naturally, without conscious invention, and processes exist to prevent innovations (mutations) from harming functioning organisms. In human culture, from the perspective of the individual, things are just done a certain way, and conservative cultural processes exist to prevent cultural innovation from harming a functioning group. The only time a limited cultural change may be welcome is when the existing system ceases to function; otherwise, innovation is (mostly correctly) regarded as dangerous.

Christopher Alexander, in his Notes on the Synthesis of Form, refers to the process by which simple societies slowly change as unconscious design. The extreme conservatism of simple, pre-industrial societies protects their functioning systems (from social organization to food production to shelter-building) from the danger of innovation.

The Burden of Complexity

Unconscious design and protective conservatism work well - until the burden of complexity overwhelms these simple mechanisms. Unconscious design processes (like biological evolution) cannot keep up with change beyond a certain level of complexity. (That's why massive extinctions frequently follow major environmental change.)

Alexander asks us to visualize, as a stand-in for a given human system,^[1] a ten-by-ten (say) panel of light-emitting diodes, connected to one another in various ways. When a diode is "on," this symbolizes a bad fit - analogous to discomfort, pain, human misery, poor functioning, etc. When a light is "off," this symbolizes good fit (the absence of a problem). We want all the lights to be off - then we will have solved the design problem.

The probability of finding a solution to the problem is related to the density of interconnection between the diodes (the complexity of the system).

In real-life systems, changing one thing can change a lot of other things, too. Increasing the capacity of a teakettle may also increase its weight and cost, for instance. This is the essentially conservative message of all those fairy stories about making wishes.

Analogously, diodes in Christopher Alexander's imaginary diode box may be connected to each other such that turning one diode on or off turns one or more other diodes on or off. If only a few diodes are connected to each other, we have a pretty good shot at solving the problem just by dumb luck - turn off lights at random and see what happens, and very likely a solution will emerge.

However, when the diodes become sufficiently entangled, it becomes impossible to blindly tinker our way to a solution. If every diode is connected to every other diode, for instance, achieving a solution in this way is impossible.

Systems with dense, complex interaction of sub-parts may, from time to time, "hit on" a solution that functions for a while. But this is not stable. Any change in the environment that destroys this lucky "fit" will not be able to be remedied by a simple change in the system, because any change to one part will affect other parts, likely inflicting damage.

The more complex (interconnected) the system, the more incapable it is of successfully responding to environmental change.

Simple systems are stable, even given environmental change. Complex systems aren't stable in a changing environment. Beyond a given level of complexity, conservatism is a losing strategy.

Toward Conscious Design: Big Independent Parts

"Keep things as they are if they work, tinker and hope if they break" does not work to fix big, complex problems arising from a change in environment. We must instead approach big, complex design problems consciously.

Alexander's mathematical approach to complex design problems is to analyze the interconnections between the parts of the problem (the diodes, above), with the goal of identifying big independent parts. If we can identify a part of a design problem that doesn't interact much with the other parts of the problem, we can solve that, and then move on to the next piece.

One major problem with this method is that our language does not necessarily correspond to the "big independent parts" that are so important to identify if we are to have any hope of solving big design problems. It is highly unlikely that a word happens to correspond to a big independent part of the design problem - especially since societies complex enough to require conscious design are much, much newer than language.

How Conservatism Ensures Misfit

There are two ways in which cultural conservatism ensures a bad fit between design and environment. First, conservatism functions in simple societies to preserve a good fit; in order for a conservative process to be useful, good fit must already be present. The knowledge of this causes culturally conservative humans to insist that there is, in fact, a good fit when in reality, the fit is very bad indeed. Second, conservatism obviously functions to prevent the implementation of innovative solutions to problems. In these ways, conservatism perversely functions to preserve a bad fit.

I do not mean here to draw a line between modern political conservatives and modern political liberals, except perhaps connotatively. To varying degrees, we all have tendencies toward conservatism as part of our cultural and genetic legacy. This is expressed generally in the status quo bias and its near relatives (or perhaps subspecies), the endowment affect (loss aversion), risk aversion, and shame from norm violations.

We do not have a choice as to whether we feel the status quo bias; it is a part of who we are. We can, however, decide whether to instantiate it.

Jonathan Haidt and others have found that modern political liberals and modern political conservatives rely on different "moral foundations" in doing ethics. Conservatives rely more on what Haidt terms "authority/respect," "purity/sanctity," and "ingroup/loyalty" than do liberals; liberals rely more on "harm/care" and "fairness/reciprocity." Both respect for authority and preservation of purity or sacredness are essentially conservative functions in the sense outlined above: they function to blindly preserve the status quo, with no analysis of the goodness of the status quo.

The design problem for large, densely interconnected human systems has no chance of solution if the previously adaptive human tendency to conservatism is allowed to control the design process. Our tendency to conservatism is, rather, a part of the design problem that must be solved.

1. Alexander's example throughout the book is the design of a teakettle, although by the end he's designing simple villages. However, his model is of extremely broad applicability - software designers are at least as gay for Alexander's thinking and methods as are urban design nerds like me. The person who gave me my copy works on the search algorithm at Google.

A Functional Definition of Pain

2011-06-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

The other day I was passed a dollar bill in commerce. The dollar bill had a prayer in Spanish written on it. It was ostensibly a prayer to St. Jude (San Judas Tadeo), but assured me that if I inscribed the prayer on ten more dollar bills, a lot of money would come my way.

I was delighted by this - a chain letter whose information floats on the empty spaces of currency!

If you have not seen it, one of the Intellectual Wonders of the Internet is Daniel W. VanArsdale's paper "Chain Letter Evolution" (and the associated archive of paper chain letters), which establishes paper chain letters as evolving organisms whose information specifies their prospects for reproduction the way our genes specify our own. Copying chain letters by hand introduces the possibility for error, hence for variation - as with sexual reproduction and mutation in organisms.

Information that causes its environment to preserve and reproduce that information, survives and spreads.

Information on chain letters survives by motivating human beings to preserve and reproduce it.

Information in DNA survives by motivating organisms to preserve and reproduce themselves.

Pain, at its most functional and basic, is an attempt by genetic information to establish a relationship between a circumstance and an action. Pain from fire and pain from loneliness are both ways that information exploits us without regard for our well-being: genes that cause organisms to run from fire, or (in social organisms) seek social belonging, get propagated. Never mind the unlucky soul with third-degree burns covering his body in the ICU.

Viewed in this way, it is easier to see the relationship between pleasure and pain. Pain motivates an organism by causing it to do something different than what it's doing; pleasure motivates an organism by causing it to do more of what it's doing. Pain is something like negative feedback; pleasure is positive feedback. Given the need for moderation in the life cycle of a complex organism in a complex environment, and the inherent limitations of positive feedback, we might expect a priori for pain to dominate.

From "Chain Letter Evolution":

We have described the descent and variation of chain letters, and their differential replication depending on copied features present in the text. These processes assure that chain letters "evolve" - that is, they accumulate inheritable features that increase or sustain propagation. It is this evolution that ultimately explains "how chain letters work," and why they worked even as public attitudes and beliefs changed over generations. This success is even more remarkable considering the universal condemnation of chain letters from both secular and religious authorities, and the lack of any real service they provide to their hosts apart from dealing with the false hopes and empty threats that chain letters themselves created. [Emphasis mine.]

Why do we persist in propagating information that does us no good?

Why do we persist in propagating our own genomes when that information does us no good?

The Meaning of Life: Sommerset Maugham and the Persian Rug

2011-06-15T12:21:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read Of Human Bondage, you should - this is the money shot out of context.

"Have you ever been to the Cluny, the museum? There you will see Persian carpets of the most exquisite hue and of a pattern the beautiful intricacy of which delights and amazes the eye. In them you will see the mystery and the sensual beauty of the East, the roses of Hafiz and the wine-cup of Omar; but presently you will see more. You were asking just now what was the meaning of life. Go and look at those Persian carpets, and one of these days the answer will come to you."

"You are cryptic," said Philip.

"I am drunk," answered Cronshaw.

[Years pass.]

Thinking of Cronshaw, Philip remembered the Persian rug which he had given him, telling him that it offered an answer to his question upon the meaning of life; and suddenly the answer occurred to him: he chuckled: now that he had it, it was like one of the puzzles which you worry over till you are shown the solution and then cannot imagine how it could ever have escaped you. The answer was obvious. Life had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment. Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed, and he had no time to read even that; and then the sage gave him the history of man in a single line; it was this: he was born, he suffered, and he died. There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness. Thoughts came tumbling over one another in Philip's eager fancy, and he took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined to leap and sing. He had not been so happy for months.

"Oh, life," he cried in his heart, "Oh life, where is thy sting?"

For the same uprush of fancy which had shown him with all the force of mathematical demonstration that life had no meaning, brought with it another idea; and that was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if one was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might a man look at his life, that it made a pattern. There was as little need to do this as there was use. It was merely something he did for his own pleasure. Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful; and though it might be no more than an illusion that he had the power of selection, though it might be no more than a fantastic legerdemain in which appearances were interwoven with moonbeams, that did not matter: it seemed, and so to him it was. In the vast warp of life (a river arising from no spring and flowing endlessly to no sea), with the background to his fancies that there was no meaning and that nothing was important, a man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various strands that worked out the pattern. There was one pattern, the most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but there were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not enter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be discovered a more troubling grace. Some lives, and Hayward's was among them, the blind indifference of chance cut off while the design was still imperfect; and then the solace was comfortable that it did not matter; other lives, such as Cronshaw's, offered a pattern which was difficult to follow, the point of view had to be shifted and old standards had to be altered before one could understand that such a life was its own justification. Philip thought that in throwing over the desire for happiness he was casting aside the last of his illusions. His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realised that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design. He seemed for an instant to stand above the accidents of his existence, and he felt that they could not affect him again as they had done before. Whatever happened to him now would be one more motive to add to the complexity of the pattern, and when the end approached he would rejoice in its completion. It would be a work of art, and it would be none the less beautiful because he alone knew of its existence, and with his death it would at once cease to be.

[Philip leaves the art world, goes to medical school, thinks his low-born girlfriend is pregnant, decides to sacrifice his life and marry her, then she finds out she's not pregnant after all]

An extraordinary sensation filled him. He had felt certain that Sally's suspicion was well-founded; it had never occurred to him for an instant that there was a possibility of error. All his plans were suddenly overthrown, and the existence, so elaborately pictured, was no more than a dream which would never be realised. He was free once more. Free! He need give up none of his projects, and life still was in his hands for him to do what he liked with. He felt no exhilaration, but only dismay. His heart sank. The future stretched out before him in desolate emptiness. It was as though he had sailed for many years over a great waste of waters, with peril and privation, and at last had come upon a fair haven, but as he was about to enter, some contrary wind had arisen and drove him out again into the open sea; and because he had let his mind dwell on these soft meads and pleasant woods of the land, the vast deserts of the ocean filled him with anguish. He could not confront again the loneliness and the tempest. Sally looked at him with her clear eyes.

"Aren't you glad?" she asked again. "I thought you'd be as pleased as
Punch."

He met her gaze haggardly. "I'm not sure," he muttered.

"You are funny. Most men would."

He realised that he had deceived himself; it was no self-sacrifice that had driven him to think of marrying, but the desire for a wife and a home and love; and now that it all seemed to slip through his fingers he was seized with despair. He wanted all that more than anything in the world. What did he care for Spain and its cities, Cordova, Toledo, Leon; what to him were the pagodas of Burmah and the lagoons of South Sea Islands? America was here and now. It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. He put all that aside now with a gesture of impatience. He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slipped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

[Bolded emphasis mine.]

I did not realize for many years that Of Human Bondage is a tragedy.

Labia v. Foreskin

2011-06-14T11:24:00.000-07:00

vs.

18 U.S.C. §116 - Female Genital Mutilation

(a) Except as provided in subsection (b), whoever knowingly circumcises, excises, or infibulates the whole or any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person who has not attained the age of 18 years shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
(b) A surgical operation is not a violation of this section if the operation is -: (1) necessary to the health of the person on whom it is performed, and is performed by a person licensed in the place of its performance as a medical practitioner; or; (2) performed on a person in labor or who has just given birth and is performed for medical purposes connected with that labor or birth by a person licensed in the place it is performed as a medical practitioner, midwife, or person in training to become such a practitioner or midwife.
(c) In applying subsection (b)(1), no account shall be taken of the effect on the person on whom the operation is to be performed of any belief on the part of that person, or any other person, that the operation is required as a matter of custom or ritual.

Mutilating the genitals of an infant girl is absolutely prohibited, a felony punishable by five years in prison, with no religious exception whatsoever.

Mutilating the genitals of an infant boy is more common than tonsillectomy.

This is despite the fact that many adult women voluntarily choose elective surgery to have their genitals mutilated, while virtually no adult men do.

Really, what the fuck is going on here?

Hume on Suicide

2011-06-14T10:36:00.000-07:00

It's not a violation of a duty to God:

It is impious, says the old Roman superstition, to divert rivers from their course, or invade the prerogatives of nature. It is impious says the French superstition, to inoculate for the smallpox, or usurp the business of providence by voluntarily producing distemper and maladies. It is impious, says the modern European superstition, to put a period to our own life and thereby rebel against our Creator; and why not impious, say I, to build houses, cultivate the ground, or sail upon the ocean? In all these actions we employ our powers of mind and body, to produce some innovation in the course of nature; and in none of them do we any more. They are all of them, therefore, equally innocent or equally criminal. [Citations omitted; bolded emphasis mine; italics in original.]

Nor to one's neighbors or society:

A man who retires from life does no harm to society: he only ceases to do good, which, if it is an injury, is of the lowest kind. All our obligations to do good to society seem to imply something reciprocal. I receive the benefits of society, and therefore ought to promote its interests; but when I withdraw myself altogether from society, can I be bound any longer? But allowing that our obligations to do good were perpetual, they have certainly some bounds. I am not obliged to do a small good to society at the expense of a great harm to myself. Why then should I prolong a miserable existence because of some frivolous advantage which the public may perhaps receive from me? [Bolded emphasis mine.]

Nor even to oneself:

That suicide may often be consistent with interest and with our duty to ourselves, no one can question, who allows that age, sickness, or misfortune, may render life a burden, and make it worse even than annihilation. I believe that no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping. For such is our natural horror of death that small motives will never be able to reconcile us to it; and though perhaps the situation of a man’s health or fortune did not seem to require this remedy, we may at least be assured that any one who, without apparent reason, has had recourse to it, was cursed with such an incurable depravity or gloominess of temper as must poison all enjoyment, and render him equally miserable as if he had been loaded with the most grievous misfortunes. [Bolded emphasis mine.]

David Hume, "Of Suicide," c. 1755

Your Possible Future Selves and Their Rights to You Putting Down the Banana Cream Pie

2011-06-12T21:02:00.000-07:00

Or, Holy Christ, I founded the goddamn Society for the Protection of Possible Future People

Whose well-being may we ethically sacrifice?

James at Diabasis makes a dangerous, strange, powerful connection regarding the rights of possible future selves.

A while ago, I argued that Adam Ozimek of Modeled Behavior was wrong to consider suicide "murder of a future self" in light of the successive-selves model favored by neuroscience. A future self, I argued, is only a possible future person, with no right to come into existence any more than the 1,526,287th sperm you ejaculated this morning has a right to come into existence together with your sister's ovum.

But all this time, I and others have been arguing in favor of a particular right for possible people: the right not to come into existence.

Connecting the two, James notes that this does seem like evidence of a duty to protect possible future selves from existence by committing suicide at the earliest possible date. (Indeed, I feel annoyance at all my past selves when I suffer.)

If your possible future self has a right for you to put down the fucking banana cream pie and take a walk, for chrissakes (a right, that is, to a certain quality of life) how can it not also have a right to not come into being at all?

Is there a good reason for treating possible future selves distinctly from possible future others? Indeed, I feel morally entitled to sacrifice my future self's well-being, when I wouldn't feel entitled to sacrifice the well-being of proper other people. But since it's my future self, and not "me," that suffers this - am I really any more entitled to make my possible future selves suffer than to, say, make you suffer?

Implicit Theories of Interpersonal Utility Comparison: Procreation and Circumcision

2011-06-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

1. Folk Ethics: "If you don't like abortion, don't have one."

Proponents of the idea that "life is a precious gift" (i.e., that life is always worth getting) often cite as evidence the fact (based, presumably, on introspection and a quick, imaginary survey) that most people are glad to be alive. Generalized a bit, the underlying argument can be restated as an accurate proxy is a morally acceptable proxy.

On the other hand, situations where a proxy decision is anything but accurate are often defended as moral, for reasons not related to the accuracy of the proxy "prediction." Often, such arguments contain implicit assumptions about the relative value of utility to one being over another.

One such argument is this:

Although I am obviously pro-abortion, this is a pretty stupid argument. It is an argument about privacy - one that would have no problem with New Abortion, which is obviously a moral horror. It is an argument that, specifically, the utility or disutility of a fetus upon coming into existence is so connected to the actions of the proxy (here, the parent) that the utility of the fetus is not a proper concern of anyone but the proxy. That is, the utility or disutility of the possible person does not matter in the greater scheme of things, and must never be used to influence, in the slightest way, the actions of the proxy. It seems that the implicit account of interpersonal utility valuation is this: the caused owes his being to the cause, such that his utility is only of value - positive or negative - to the cause.

I have recently seen this argument applied to circumcision. In the United States, the genital mutilation of female babies is illegal, but the genital mutilation of male babies is widely practiced. The "accurate proxy is a moral proxy" argument obviously fails here, since despite all the arguments for the benefits of circumcision, the rate of adult males choosing voluntary circumcision is lower than even the suicide rate. I have actually seen the knee-jerk liberal bullshit argument for privacy applied here, however - the idea that "if you don't think circumcision is right, don't circumcise your babies." (I think this is more metonymy than actual argument.)

This is also one of the more easily dealt-with oppositions to the antinatalist position - the idea that, if you think it's wrong to have babies, don't have one - leave the rest of us alone! This implies that the well-being of the baby is of no concern to anyone but the potential parent. It is a very strong position to take about interpersonal utility comparison, but it is the only position consistent with the folk argument from privacy.

2. Classical Economics: "You can't create a negative externality by creating new people."

Another place where an implicit theory of interpersonal utility valuation resides is in the definition and treatment of the "externality" in microeconomics. A "negative externality" is a cost imposed on someone without his consent through a voluntary transaction of others, that these others don't pay for. It's the thing that's not allowed in Pareto efficiency: you can't make somebody worse off without compensating him; that's wrong.

However, it is often asserted in the classical economics tradition (to the understandable consternation of mortals) that it's impossible to create a negative externality on existing people just by making new people. That is because any harm the new people do to the old people (e.g., by raising demand, hence prices, for goods) is compensated by the good the new people do to themselves. This contains a very strong implicit statement about the comparison of interpersonal utility: a possible person's utility is just as important as an already-existing person's utility. This is nearly the opposite of the "if you don't like abortion, don't have one" claim, where a possible person's utility is valued at nothing compared to the existing person's utility. Here, they are valued strictly equally.

Obviously, they can't both be true.

Political Metonymy

2011-06-08T08:50:00.000-07:00

Metonymy is the least interesting way our minds work.

Metaphor is a much more interesting cognitive pattern. To use metaphor, we must notice a way in which two things are similar. This is a difficult task. It's true, an African grey parrot can do it, but when we see him do it, we are rightly amazed. Metaphor requires an understanding of abstract relationships, separate from the things themselves. "I dissolve connivers like saliva on tic tacs." "Shake it like a polaroid picture." (And of course the conceit underlying Rich Boy's section of the Diplo Street Remix of M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes.")

Compare this to metonymy, which is the linguistic phenomenon of calling something by the name of something associated with it - and represents the cognitive pattern of noticing that two things occur together. It's pretty primitive. (Think Pavlov.) E.g. "Two to the ski mask." "All I love's my dope and dead presidents." (Synechdoche is a species of metonymy, the part associated with the whole - e.g., "Get your ass on the floor." Or "pussy" or "gash" as collective nouns - though those are metaphors when used to denote an actual vagina.)

Metonymy notes correlation - proximity in space or time. Metaphor requires us to form a theory about how things are similar.

You can see how both would be extremely useful, in terms of evolution. Metonymy is easier, and it goes lower down the phylogenetic ladder (<--metaphor). Both processes can, of course, get things wrong. Metonymy, however, is such a dangerous temptation for lazy human thinking that we have had to invent statistical analysis to get science to work.

Unfortunately for our species, metonymy seems to dominate political thinking. Bad things are allowed to "contaminate" metonymically anything associated with them - even if not similar or even rationally related in any way but association. Why do most people oppose eugenics? 'Cause the Nazis did it. Similarly, good things are allowed to "rub off" on associated phenomena, e.g., "the family" with anti-gayness since same-sex couples can't procreate (well, by themselves).

Metonymy, I think, is a prime driver of bullshit – a pretense to truth minus any actual concern for truth. Metonymy is the way in which mere facts can seem dangerous. When we are candid, we admit as much. It is uncomfortable to entertain the hypothesis that, for example, the etiology of homosexuality might be in some way environmental or volitional, because that is associated with the claim that homosexuality is wrong, and hence with retarded attempts to forbid it, “cure” it, or otherwise persecute gay people. It is uncomfortable to entertain the hypothesis that the mental abilities of men and women are different, because that is associated with the practice of female subjugation.

If we are to think well, the challenge is not to get rid of metonymy, but to root out knee-jerk, unexamined metonymy. “The Nazis did it” is not an argument against a practice. Nor is it a legitimate challenge to a factual assertion to point out that the fact might be used to support a nasty conclusion.

Victims of the Suicide Prohibition: Collateral Damage

2011-06-07T09:43:00.000-07:00

Prompted by Jim, I'm collecting reports of incidents (and stats, if anybody has any) where non-suicidal bystanders are killed or injured when other people attempt suicide. I will collect these in a piece demonstrating the harm of the suicide prohibition to non-suicides.

Examples:

After four unsuccessful suicide attempts, Steven Osadacz crashed into and killed Steven Fagbewesa, a 46-year-old father of three, in another (also unsuccessful) suicide attempt.
Fifty-four people were sickened by a toxic fume suicide in Japan in 2008.

If you know of any, stick them in the comment thread or send them to my email. Thanks!

Tenth Try

2011-06-07T08:42:00.000-07:00

When I took the California bar, there was a guy in the room with me who was on his seventh try. Poor guy. (I passed; no idea if he did.) That's nothing, since Maxcy Dean Filer took it 48 times before he passed (and then promptly got suspended for crappy practice). (He died this year.)

Poor Fransisco Solomon Sanchez finally succeeded in committing suicide this week on his (at least) tenth try. Like me, he had been involuntarily hospitalized. Guess it didn't help.

One previous attempt was so serious that he had his legs amputated and used prosthetic legs as a result.

Please think about that the next time someone assures you that suicidality is a temporary state, and people who attempt suicide really want to be rescued.

Why Less Rape?

2011-06-06T14:51:00.001-07:00

Via erosblog: According to Mark Kleiman (and the Department of Justice), forcible rape has gone WAY down in the United States over the past few decades. It peaked in 1979 at 2.8 per 1000 population 12 and over, and in 2009 the rate was .5.

Like homicide, the rate has really tanked since the 1990s, but the downward trend for rape has been more secular and more dramatic than that for homicide.

As Kleiman notes, it does seem like pretty damning evidence for the theory that pornography promotes rape, as a practical matter. And there's some evidence that access to porn prevents rape.

Culture is not my favorite explanation for human behavior, but I think there might be something to it here. Rape used to be accepted as a natural consequence of sluttiness (even the species of sluttiness where you merely let yourself be alone with a guy in a room); see, e.g., that gem of criminology writing from 1967, "Victim-Precipitated Forcible Rape" by Menachim Amir. Pornography was forbidden for the same reason: to repress sexuality.

It's now extremely clear that sexually permissive societies are better for women. Only the very religious and your dad believe otherwise.

Also: here's a 2008 paper with up-to-date information on what we know about the evolutionary biology of rape, which I found while doing my sacred duty to humanity.

Chemical Suicides

2011-06-06T05:22:00.000-07:00

From the Associated Press:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The suicide of a young woman in the Hollywood Hills might have seemed just another sad Tinseltown story but for large notes plastered on the window of the car in which she died: "Danger! Chemicals Inside! Call 911."

Police and coroner's investigators had seen this before — three or four times in the past year — and they knew the danger was real to them and the neighborhood. Had the chemical cloud escaped from the car with people nearby, many others could have died, according to authorities. An evacuation of residents was contemplated but never carried out.
...
While most suicides affect only the deceased and their families, these cases have the potential to kill strangers.

Of course, the focus in the article is on the big, bad Internet, and those irresponsible folks who put others at risk while ending their own lives (but who are, however, responsible enough to post notes warning of the danger - good job, guys).

What you'll never, ever see in a mainstream media outlet: an acknowledgment that the problem is a lack of availability of quick, painless, effective means of suicide that don't put others at risk.

Legalize barbiturates and you'll never see another chemical suicide.

See also: "The Unspeakable Solution to Japan's Toxic Fume Suicide Epidemic"

Ross Douthat's Victims

2011-06-05T21:24:00.000-07:00

Me and my eyes, which were injured from repeated, violent rolling upon reading this, which boils down to, "people support assisted suicide because people have merciful empathetic feelings toward dying people in pain, but there's no logical way to support assisted suicide without supporting a right to suicide in general, ergo assisted suicide must be WRONG!"

He really pretends not to see any other possible consequence from putting (a) and (b) together.

And I think he must mean fictims.

Check the comments, though - Dr. K was righteous and everybody knows it.

My extremely moderate comment here.

What Things Are Worth

2011-06-02T08:32:00.000-07:00

Quick! How would you calculate the value of:

A live chicken?
One eighth-ounce of high-grade medical cannabis?
Your sense of smell?
"Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity"?
A Ph.D. in philosophy?
A day spent working in a coal mine?
A three-day migraine headache?
A human embryo?
A human heart?
An act of oral sex with an attractive person?
An act of oral sex with an unattractive person?
Your memories from ages 5-13?

In order to put a figure on such disparate items as these, we must have a somewhat rigorous idea of what we mean by "value."

One feature of value is audience - who values the item? What is it worth to whom? The same act of oral sex might have different values to the performer and the recipient (not to mention any bystanders). It also might have different value to different recipients. We must be clear about for whom we are calculating the value. What is an embryo worth to would-be parents? To the world? To the potential person created?

The issue of audience is pretty easy to formalize. A more difficult issue is how, exactly, we measure value.

One option: ask people. How much is your sense of smell worth to you? What is the value of not having to give Ron Paul a rim job? How much are your childhood memories worth?

The "ask people and see what they say" option we can call stated preference. The main problems with this method are that (a) people don't necessarily have introspective access to these values, and (b) even when they do, there is a great danger that they might not tell us the truth.

There is a proverb that actions speak louder than words. Economists employ this fact to get around these problems with stated preference - they try to measure how much we act like things are worth.

Where markets exist - as they do for many of the items in my list, from chickens to blow jobs - we can measure value to some degree by price. What a person is willing to pay for the item in question, and what another person is willing to accept in exchange for it, can give us a good idea of the value of an item. An offer (e.g. a statement that one "has five on it") in the context of a potential transaction is better evidence of the value of the item than a mere assertion of value - and an accepted offer is better evidence still, a principle embodied in the essentially-informational request to "put up or shut up."

What about when there's no market?

Certainly there is no market for a sense of smell. Yet we often have a need to calculate the value of such things - e.g. in tort lawsuits when one's sense of smell is lost because of the wrongdoing of another. Are we stuck with stated preference? Willingness-to-accept is often as far as it goes in the law; juries might be asked, for instance, how much they would accept to be without their sense of smell for a day, and then multiply that by the life expectancy in days of the plaintiff.

But there is another set of evidence available. We can measure how much people act like their sense of smell is worth. For example:

How much do people demand to be compensated for a given risk to their sense of smell? If people are observed to be willing to take a given risk of losing their sense of smell for a particular value (e.g., to get rid of a cold a few days earlier), we can arrive at a figure based on that.
How much do people who have lost their sense of smell pay to try to fix it? If a procedure with a given probability of success is regularly bought for a certain amount, we can calculate based on that.
How much does one increase one's consumption of quick-fix utility boosters when faced with a loss of one's sense of smell?

And perhaps there are other sneaky ways to indirectly measure the value of a sense of smell, childhood memories, a human heart.

The point is that when a thing's value is difficult to evaluate because it lacks a market, we can often calculate the thing's value not just based on the reports of the valuers, but based on their observable actions.

The ultimate question of value that I am concerned with is: how much is it worth to you to have been born? What is a human life worth to the individual human?

Too often, when faced with the question of the value of life, even normally rigorous economists default to what I term the "imaginary survey justification" - not even pathetic stated preference (for which the evidence is not even that great), but an extra-lame-out imaginary survey of stated preference ("Of course everybody's glad to be alive!"). It is my position that we can do better.

In the next post in this series I will outline how we might indirectly, empirically measure the value of a human life to the individual living human. This will be largely based on an unpublished paper by Richard Posner and Gary Becker, called "Suicide: An Economic Approach." If you read this in combination with "Behavioral Economics and Perverse Effects of the Welfare State" by Bryan Caplan and Scott Beaulier, you will have an idea where I'm going with this!

This also seems related: (via Rob Sica)

We introduce the concept of life salience (activation of biophilia) as a compliment to the concept of death salience (activation of a fear of death), which plays a prominent role in Terror Management Theory. Four experiments tested whether life salience decreases the need to defend one’s cultural worldview, including consumption patterns. Death salience, in contrast, should increase worldview defenses and consumption patterns. Life salience was manipulated by writing about a situation that made participants feel fully alive (Experiment 1), by watching plants grow (Experiment 2), by watching a baby movie (Experiment 3), and by subliminally priming the word ‘life’ (Experiment 4). As expected, life salience increased life-related thoughts, decreased support for consumerism, and lowered spending intentions. Death salience had the opposite effect. These findings suggest that consumerism may be rooted in the existential need to “love life.” [Emphasis mine.]

—Abstract of "Feeling Alive Without Spending a Dime: Life and Death Salience Exert Opposite Effects on Worldview Defense and Consumption Patterns."

Five Reasons to Have an Abortion

2011-05-31T08:46:00.000-07:00

A PDF tri-fold pamphlet version of this article is available here.

Are you pregnant and deciding between abortion, adoption, and raising the child? You have probably heard the arguments against abortion; here are five reasons why abortion is the right choice for everyone involved.

1. For Your Own Good

You will be happier and healthier if you abort.

Even a normal pregnancy inevitably results in disfigurement, including stretch marks, scarring, loose stomach skin, and obesity.
Carrying a pregnancy to term is much riskier than having an abortion. Death, injury, and life-threatening illness (such as gestational diabetes) are all more likely to occur with full-term pregnancy than with abortion. (Source: Centers for Disease Control)
Incontinence is also a frequent result of pregnancy; one-third of American women experience pelvic floor disorder in their lifetimes, resulting in vaginal prolapse and urinary or anal incontinence.
The risk of mental health problems after abortion is the same or less than that for a full-term pregnancy. (Source: American Psychological Association)

2. For the Good of the Father

Think of the child's other parent.

The father has no choice whether to have a baby, like you have.
All of a sudden, he will be financially and socially responsible for a child he didn't want or plan for.
He may feel his life is ruined.
Many fathers of unwanted children commit suicide.
You have the power to prevent this. At some point, you cared for him enough to have sex with him; now show you really care by not drastically changing his life without his consent.

3. For the Good of the World

Your child will need food and energy, and will get it from a world that already doesn’t have enough to go around – for wildlife or people.

About a billion people in the world are hungry.
All over the world, habitats have been decimated and species threatened or destroyed because a growing human population demands food and energy.
A child from a wealthy country like the United States will use vastly more resources in its lifetime than a child from a poor country.
The birth of a child is, in many ways, an ecological disaster.

4. For the Good of Other Children

Giving a child up for adoption means there will be one less loving home for some other needy child.

Even if you are able to find a loving home for your child, giving up a child for adoption deprives another child, somewhere out there, of that very loving home.
Some child who would have found a great home will merely get an okay home.
And some child who would have gotten an okay home will be left with none.
This is particularly true for older or disabled children, who will not be able to compete with your newborn, presumably healthy infant.

5. For the Good of the Child

Life is NOT a precious gift.

A child who is never born can never suffer pain, fear, or loneliness.
A child who is never born can never experience death.
By having a child, you ensure that it will suffer during its lifetime, and that it will die.
A study published in the American Journal of Sociology found that 30% of children wish they'd never been born.

Carrying a pregnancy to term is NOT the morally right thing to do. Abortion is not only the less dangerous choice for the mother, it's the morally responsible choice for everyone.

If you think abortion is wrong, how about New Abortion?

Lest anyone downplay the seriousness of the physical aspects mentioned in the first section above, here is a quotation from a woman struggling with the physical consequences of pregnancy:

So I use to be hopeful. I use to think I could change my body back to semi-normal or at least into something I could accept. I know differently now. Now I know that with out surgery I will be miserable forever…. Ok maybe that’s a tad bit dramatic. What I know is that I’m currently about 40 lbs heavier than I was when I posted last. . . . I hate my body more than I ever have in my life. I don’t look at other women and think “oh she looks awful” for some reason I can totally see beauty in others but in myself? Not at all. Everyday is a challenge. As dramatic as it sounds I sometimes think about dying over it. I wouldn’t take my own life (I couldn’t do that to my children) but sometimes it seems like dying would be a nice way out… An easy way out. [Sic throughout. Emphasis mine.]

What is the Value of a Death?

2011-05-25T12:20:00.000-07:00

The effect of a death, particularly a suicide, on society in general is, in large part, measurable. Rather than simply assume that by continuing to live, we can have a net positive effects on others, we must pose this as a question: to best help others, is it most effective to live or to die?

What is the value of a death? In order for our answer to this to have any informative content (and not to be mere bullshit), we must at the outset not make assumptions, but recognize that the answer may turn out to be positive or negative - including not just monetary measures, but non-monetary effects as well.

There is some evidence that contrary to popular belief, the net effect of a suicide on the general population is positive, at least in monetary and material terms. There is another way in which suicide could have a strong positive effect on the rest of society, but which effect is artificially prevented by the current de facto suicide prohibition in effect in most countries. Committing suicide could not only leave one's compatriots better off in monetary terms, but better off in terms of health and life. This is because a suicide is in a position to give a number of suffering, life-preferring people all of his healthy, functioning organs.

What is the value of a kidney? A cornea? A heart? A monetary value could be calculated from market data where markets exist for these "commodities," but the value is essentially this: they save human lives, and most humans desperately want to stay alive.

Currently, over 100,000 people are waiting for organ transplants in the United States. Over 6,000 of them die every year waiting for a transplant that never comes. Meanwhile, over 34,000 people die from suicide every year (and many more, no doubt, want to die, but cannot).

Why not let us die peacefully in a hospital and donate our organs to people who want to live?

An objection might be raised that this would reduce the costs of suicide, thereby resulting in more suicides overall. First, this objection relies on the conclusion that suicide is bad. One raising this objection must explain why suicide is bad, even when it is voluntary, informed, and saves many lives. Second, this intervention would only raise the number of "good suicides" - people trapped in miserable lives by the high "costs" of suicide. It would not increase "bad suicides," impulsive suicides or insincere attempts. It may even decrease these "bad suicides."

The costs of suicide, as outlined by Becker and Posner in their unpublished paper "Suicide: An Economic Approach," include the evolutionarily adaptive fear of death (which might prevent one from putting a gun to one's head and pulling the trigger even if one rationally wished to end one's life), the pain or unpleasantness of the actual killing, and the risk of failing and being left crippled. Organ donation in a hospital setting eliminates these costs, in addition to possibly (and rightly) decreasing social disapprobation for suicide.

To get here, we must be willing to admit that the subjective value of life is heterogeneous for individuals. Rather than denying and suppressing this truth, we should utilize it to genuinely achieve higher levels of well-being for everyone in our society. The simple act of suicide could increase expected well-being for the suicide (to 0 utility from an original state of negative expected utility) and the man, woman, or child dying of organ failure as well, without necessarily decreasing well-being for anyone.

A single organ donor can save up to eight lives, and provide tissue transplants to help dozens more. Who among us can say with any kind of certainty that by continuing to live, we will save eight lives and help dozens more people in a concrete, measurable way?

Suicides Represent a Net Gain for Society

2011-05-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

Or, Altruistic Reasons to Commit Suicide

Arguing against suicide, a correspondent writes:

By choosing to live one can prevent much more suffering than by killing oneself (hundreds or thousands times more!). Everyone who thinks about suicide knows how horrible suffering can be (and therefore should know how important it is to prevent as much of it as possible). I agree that it is better not to be born at all, but now that we are alive, we have the choice. If I kill myself I can spare myself some amount of suffering, but if I choose to live and dedicate my life to helping others I can spare them hundreds or thousands times more suffering.

I have previously indicated that one of the reasons I have not committed suicide to date is that I know my death would cause considerable pain to others. But this made me wonder: what is, in fact, the net effect of suicide?

Actually, it turns out that suicides are probably on balance good for society. A 2007 study found that considering all the economic impacts of suicide, the 30,906 suicides completed in 1990 actually saved the United States $5.07 billion - in 2005 dollars (about $160,000 per suicide). That's right - suicides, on balance, represent an economic gain for society.

What about the environment? An American produces about 20 tons of carbon dioxide per year. A 33-year-old female like me, with 50+ years left of her natural lifespan, could presumably prevent 1000 tons of carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere by packing it in early.

That is not to mention the many other harmful effects that people, particularly first-world people, have on the environment and its inhabitants.

I have argued that the possibility of doing good for others is extremely limited, partially by what I term the altruistic treadmill. I am highly skeptical of the claim that a person can sustainably increase the well-being of other people. (See, e.g., Lykken and Tellegen's "Happiness is a Stochastic Phenomenon.") I suspect that a real-life It's a Wonderful Life would be much more ambivalent than the theatrical version. At any rate, such an increase in well-being would have to outweigh the concrete, measurable gains to society from ending one's life - $160,000, a thousand tons of carbon dioxide, and one less mouth to feed - not to mention never, ever again triggering an ostracism response in another human being, nor hurting anyone or anything again, ever.

You would have to be a pretty stellar human being to make up for that. I'm mostly speaking for myself here, but I doubt most people who have gotten to the point of considering suicide have the capacity to drastically improve the lives of others in a sustainable way, to reach a magnitude large enough to offset the very real gains to society that their suicides would entail.

Also: this is probably the point where I should get the hell off of blogspot before they delete all my shit.

The Practice of Euphemism

2011-05-23T08:08:00.000-07:00

Powerful, generally undetected euphemistic processes in language give us a falsely optimistic model of the world.

The Origin of Euphemistic Distortions

The formation and use of euphemism is a powerful, inevitable process in human language. Every day, subjects must be discussed or alluded to that could cause discomfort in the parties to the conversation, detracting from both the informative purpose of the conversation and the (generally more important) social bonding function. To avoid the discomfort, taboo subjects are discussed in a circuitous manner, removed as much as possible from the disturbing aspect of the topic. Disturbing aspects are ignored, reframed, treated symbolically, or otherwise elided.

On the level of diction, words and phrases are found to bring to mind the relevant aspects of a topic, while minimizing the disturbing or irrelevant aspects. Metaphor and metonymy are common mechanisms for euphemism, but there are many such methods, with not just new euphemisms, but new euphemistic mechanisms, being invented all the time.

But euphemism does not only happen on the level of word choice. From micro- to macro-, from the foundational narrative/legend of a society to the way social relationships are cognized, human language users and language-using communities and even nature (via evolution) are acting on language to orient human thought in euphemistic directions. How our brains conceive of the world (including language) is not related to what's actually important in a universal sense, but to what was important to organisms' fitness goals in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. We do not perceive all wavelengths of light or sound, but only those that (a) were relevant to survival in the EEA and (b) for which a perceptive apparatus was evolutionarily available. (And we do not perceive things like X-rays at all.) Similarly, language does not give us a picture of what is, but only a picture of what was relevant to survival in the EEA.

Artists Explode Euphemism

The project of artists (and of phenomenology) is often to explode euphemistic ways of thinking. In "Dulce et Decorum est," Wilfred Owen does so for the romantic idea of glorious death in combat. Patriotism and a euphemized conception of those fighting may be more comfortable and politically expedient for the folks back home, but here's how it really is, says Owen, here is what is elided: the boy who doesn't get his gas mask on in time, "guttering, choking, drowning," "the white eyes writhing in his...hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin," at every jolt of the wagon they "flung him in," the "blood/come gargling from his froth-corrupted lungs." Happy Memorial Day.

No Counter-Process

What does this tell us about the accuracy of the model of the world we have from language? Is our conception accurate? Too rosy? Too negative?

We might expect our visual picture of the world to be "too rosy" if we found that our instrument for detecting red light (eyes, brain) were set too high compared to the mechanism for detecting other kinds of light. Analogously, an understanding of the linguistic phenomenon of euphemism might lead us to suspect that our conception of the world may be too optimistic - unless, of course, there were a countervailing, dysphemistic process. However, a moment's reflection shows us that the effect of any dysphemistic process is only a tiny fraction of that of euphemism, at best.

A main function of euphemism is to avoid social discomfort. The idea of suffering is always socially uncomfortable - we should expect it to be edited out. There is rarely any reason to add pain (or social awkwardness) to already-comfortable language - this is the task of the artist and the philosopher alone.

The Mistaken Notion of Pure Language

Less subtle thinkers than Wilfred Owen have hoped for a world of clean language, without euphemism. This is a mistaken hope.

All language has connotation as well as denotation - an emotional message as well as an informative one, even if that emotional message is one of blank neutrality. We do not think without emotion; in a practical sense, we are incapable of doing so. Without the swift functioning of our emotions, we are crippled at such "simple" cognitive tasks as making decisions (see, e.g., "The role of emotion in decision-making: Evidence from neurological patients with orbitofrontal damage," by Antoine Bechara, Brain and Cognition 55 (2004) 30–40). Why should language not take advantage of this fast system of cognition whose output is chemicals?

Language "cleaned of its emotional message" is not purer or realer or truer language - it is systematically distorted language. Making a project of eradicating euphemism immediately begs the question of the objectively correct word or conception for a given thing or act. "Crack baby" or "drug-exposed infant"? "Crack baby" one might call politically incorrect, vernacular, plainspoken, suggesting that "drug-exposed infant" is the euphemism. The latter, though, is the term used by child welfare professionals (nurses, social workers) to indicate that a horrible violation happened to this innocent infant child, emphasizing the wrong done to the child. Can you hear the screams more from "crack baby" or "drug-exposed infant"? See the tubes and the shaking and the tiny hands? And which better expresses that the mother of said infant used drugs to ease her pain from having been viciously sexually abused during her childhood?

All words are euphemisms. All language is euphemism - selection of relevant, comfortable aspects, and elision of pangs of empathetic pain so far as possible.

"Rape" is a euphemism. "Prison" is a euphemism. Even "prison rape" is a euphemism. Words indicate concepts, but cannot ever express how bad these experiences are for those who suffer them.

Memento Mori. (Population and Reproduction: A Modern Euphemistic Process)

Check this out: the writer of erosblog.com discusses my article Living in the Epilogue: Social Policy as Palliative Care in his piece Porn and Not Being Cheery. It's dope. NSFW!!! There are pictures of nekkid people OMG!

The Two Main Ways In Which Evolution Is Not Our Friend

2011-05-23T07:41:00.001-07:00

With millions of years of evolution behind our species, and a billion behind life in general, we might expect - in a Panglossian frame of mind - to function very well, and to be free from unnecessary misery. Wouldn't the ruthless process of selection have removed causes for fitness-draining suffering and poor well-being in general?

There are two main reasons why we should expect a great deal of unnecessary suffering to be the product of evolution.

1. Adaptation Executors

A maxim of evolutionary biology is that organisms (like us) are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers. Evolutionary processes create organisms that execute biologically-mediated strategies - it does not create rational beings that maximize fitness in all instances.

In many cases, the detection mechanism is "too sensitive" for our own good - our pain response and our startle response, for example, both generate lots of "false positives" in terms of fitness threats we may respond productively to. This is because in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, the cost of tons of false positives was outweighed by the benefit of being "right" that one time that counts.

Our social ostracism detection system has also been posited to be hypersensitive, for the above evolutionary reasons. Social belonging has such a high survival value that any potential threat must be addressed immediately. This is true even if it means 100 "false positives" - instances of social ostracism with no actual fitness threat - must be suffered by the individual organism.

What's a good idea for evolution is not necessarily a good idea for you. Evolution works fine - it just doesn't give a fuck about the well-being of individual organisms.

2. Failures

In other cases, complex systems interact in such a way that the detection system is "broken." This may be because the EEA doesn't match current conditions, as may be the case with asthma, allergies, diabetes, and obesity. In other cases, it may be because organisms aren't created perfectly every time, and are not perfectly matched even to EEA conditions. Evolution can only act on the mutations it's given. The pain of a migraine, for instance, is not an indication of a necessary response the way the pain from a burn is. Problems may not reflect any adaptation at all - it might be a defect in the system, or in the organism.

Written in response to this comment by The Plague Doctor.

Maslow Be Damned: How Social Belonging Trumps Everything

2011-05-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

The need for social belonging is the primal human need - and failure to have it satisfied is subjectively worse than death.

Social Pain Causes Suicide

People don't commit suicide out of just any sorrow.

What suffering, specifically, is bad enough to cause people to want to pull the plug on existence itself? It is only and exclusively social pain.

The most modern, scientific model of the causes of suicide that we have is that articulated by Thomas Joiner in his 2005 book Why People Die By Suicide (my review here). Joiner's model, supported by a large body of empirical evidence, posits three conditions that reliably predict suicide: a failure of social belonging, the perception of oneself as a burden on others, and the development of competence in actually carrying out the difficult act of suicide. Only the competence factor is not a direct function of social belonging.

Other kinds of pain aren't sufficient to cause suicide - not hunger, not remorse, not even extreme physical pain. The research suggests that being a valued member of a social group, with a role to play in supporting others, is the most basic human need - not just on par with, but frequently surpassing other human needs such as those for food, shelter, sleep, and sex.

For example, the misery of prison is primarily one of failed social belonging. In the general population, marriage is protective against suicide, as is employment. But married prisoners and prisoners who were employed prior to incarceration are more likely to commit suicide than unmarried, unemployed prisoners. For the first group, incarceration represents a severance of important social bonds and a failure of belonging. For the second group, prison may merely be a continuation of previous social belonging experiences.

The fear of death itself may be, when reduced to its essence, primarily a fear of the ultimate social cutting-off, the final ostracism. The data on suicide and social belonging support the idea of suicide as revealed preference - that the value of life is not as high as the negative value of complete social ostracism. This is in contrast to the idea of suicide as necessarily irrational and a product of mental illness.

Hunger and Sympathy

The United Nations reported in 2009 that over one billion people are hungry in the world; that number currently grows by about a hundred million a year. The suffering of physical hunger is the easiest form of suffering to empathize with; indeed, a recent Foreign Policy article noted that the statistic of a billion hungry "grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did."

Here's the fascinating thing about hunger, though: as bad as prolonged malnutrition is - and we all agree that it is very bad - poor, hungry people do not spend every extra cent on more calories.

When staples like wheat and rice are subsidized so that people may buy them at a cheaper price, in many cases they buy less of the staple, and more meat and shrimp. People suffering from severe malnutrition (wasting, growth stunting) still spend money on alcohol, tobacco, and festivals. Starving families still have televisions and cellular phones.

One response to this is to harden one's heart: if they're not hungry enough to spend every spare rupee on more calories, they must not be hungry enough to deserve our sympathy (much less our money).

A more productive response would be to view the data for what they are: evidence that some things are more painful than hunger. Specifically, the need for social belonging is more pressing than the need for food. Alcohol and tobacco are addictive substances, but a quick look at actual practices reveals that they are generally used socially (as in the fixed men's social groups that smoke together late into the night, in the 600-person Indian village Christopher Alexander studies in the appendix to his Notes on the Synthesis of Form). Spending on "festivals" is by its nature social. Television, described by one interviewee in the Foreign Policy article as "more important than food," functions both as a social focus for actual people, and a pleasant, comforting substitute for actual socialization. (Cellular phones need no explanation.) Even the "better tasting" food the poor seem to buy rather than more cheap, boring, nutritious food - the meat and shrimp from the China wheat study - is "high status" food, conveying a social message at least as important as its nutritional function.

As I have stated before, poverty doesn't just suck - it hurts. I think it a valid hypothesis that poverty is actually dreadfully painful - not only physically, but emotionally and socially. There is only so much pain we can expect a being to endure before his attempts to relieve it through future-damaging means becomes perfectly understandable and, in fact, rational.

What We Know About Social Pain

Why and how do we perceive social pain and social belonging, and how do these perceptions affect us? A recent body of research has provided some surprising answers.

Social pain hurts like physical pain. fMRI studies have demonstrated that the pain of perceived social rejection involves the same brain regions as physical pain. Social pain even responds to acetaminophen!
Social pain is ubiquitous. Everyone experiences it, even if they don't register it as such. People experience about one episode of social ostracism per day.
Social pain is irrational. Subjects experience pain and lowered mood as a consequence of social ostracism even when they are explicitly told that it is merely a computer doing the "ostracizing." The pain of exclusion affects even people playing a computer ball game who are told their computers are not yet connected to the other computers, making inclusion logically impossible! Even ostracism by a despised outgroup - say, the KKK - induces the same misery as ostracism by other groups.
Social pain affects individuals differently. A normal individual will experience depressed mood after minor social exclusion, but will recover within 45 minutes. A person with social anxiety will not have recovered even from a minor social exclusion after 45 minutes. Repeated exposure to cues of social rejection may even sensitize individuals to these cues, resulting in even more needless pain.
What about autists? A 2011 study found that the brains of adolescents with autistic spectrum disorder did not process cues of social rejection the same as neurotypical brains, but they were just as hurt and concerned after experiencing social rejection! Not even autistic folks are immune from the pain of failed social belonging.

(For more on this fascinating subject, here are lists of publications for Kip Williams and Naomi Eisenberger, two major researchers in the field of social pain and ostracism. Williams' "Ostracism: The Kiss of Social Death" is an excellent introduction to the field.)

To sum up, social pain is more common, more painful, and less rational than is widely understood. Experiencing social pain is not optional; unfortunately, neither is causing social pain. By virtue of being born, each of us will cause innumerable incidents of social pain in others throughout our lives - most commonly without realizing it at all. But it's actually much worse than that, because one of the most common, effective responses to experiencing social ostracism is aggression toward others, even others not involved in the original ostracism event. Negative ripples spread out from each incident of social pain - and all the while the proximate source of the social pain may be entirely unaware of having caused it.

Analysis of a Decision to Smile

To illustrate the problem, consider the following everyday decision: whether or not to smile at a passing stranger.

A conscientious actor with a passing familiarity with evolutionary psychology literature will know that smiling at a stranger is potentially damaging, especially if the actor is attractive. When a woman smiles and acts warmly toward a man, he becomes less satisfied with his current partner. So smiling at a stranger may damage his relationship - negatively affecting not just him, but those around him as well, such as his partner and children.

However, the actor must also be aware that failing to smile may induce feelings of social ostracism in the stranger. This will not only cause the stranger suffering (especially if he happens to have social anxiety), but may cause him to act aggressively toward others to recover from the social pain.

A great deal of attention has been paid to the idea of the hedonic treadmill - the fact that an increase in welfare (say, from winning the lottery) does not lead to greater happiness, but causes one to reset one's expectations at a higher level. A benefit may only make the same level of happiness more expensive. I hope that this example illustrates that there is also an altruistic treadmill. It is impossible to do good for someone, because his expectations will reset to account for the deed. Unfortunately, others - even strangers - already depend on our altruistic inputs to them, and will feel their absence even while their provision would not make them any happier. It's a Giant's Drink situation: the only winning move is not to play.

But we've already all been forced to play.

The Lonely Modern

In learning about social pain, we have discovered a new Civilization and Its Discontents issue. Philippe Rochat, in a postscript to his excellent Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness, presents a picture of the kind of social life we evolved to experience:

Walking around in South Pacific island traditional villages, during the
day or in the pitch dark of moonless nights, it is almost impossible to cross paths with someone, young or old, woman or man, familiar or absolute stranger, without some greeting, without some acknowledgment of your existence, either called by your name or being asked what you are doing and where you are going, even if the response is very obvious. For individuals like me who grew up in rich postindustrial regions of the world, who struggle for their career and place in society, constantly under the spell of a panic fear of failure, of having failed, or of being an impostor, such simple, yet constant social acknowledgment amounts to the experience of tremendous relief. Finally one experiences the peace of being effortlessly recognized by others, the absolute sense of being socially substantial, as opposed to socially transparent.

This kind of small village experience lifts the curse of social transparency. One rediscovers what might be a long-lost intimacy and bonding with others, something like the absolute trust and acknowledgment we might have experienced once in love or with our mother in the long-lost high-dependence state of infancy. Who knows? What I am convinced of, however, and have tried to convince the reader of this book is that this kind of intimacy and bonding with others that is the wealth of small traditional society is what we all strive for, regardless of where we live and where we grew up. It is the force that leads us toward self-consciousness, probably more forcefully if we grow up in an industrial region of the world. If there is such a thing as a universal criterion for ‘‘the good life,’’ a comfort we would all aspire to, then it must be the sense of social proximity. It must be the sense of being acknowledged and recognized, of being included and intimate with others, no matter what. It is being safe, the ultimate prize and the ultimate refuge. [Emphasis mine.]

Rochat provides a glimpse of the alternative to our modern experience of daily social ostracism and consequent social pain: small village organization. Of course, this is not a real alternative; it is not possible for our enormous, complex modern society to operate in this way. Most of us would not even wish to live in this way, with its concomitant social control and extreme conservatism. I certainly would not. But it demonstrates that we are adapted to something very different than the environment in which we live. And this necessary mismatch - which, in fact, defines us as moderns - ensures that we will all suffer, and make each other suffer, interminably.

Suicide and Justice

2011-05-10T09:24:00.000-07:00

Is a potential suicide a "flight risk"?

Woman charged with causing fatal I-95 crash put on suicide watch

STAMFORD -- A Superior Court judge on Monday set bond at $35,000 for the Hartford woman accused of causing a crash that killed two people over the weekend on Interstate 95 in Darien.

Yadira Torres, 26, of 100 Benton St., Hartford, was put on suicide watch after her arraignment at state Superior Court in Stamford, where she faces two counts of second-degree manslaughter and single charges of reckless driving and driving under the influence of alcohol. Around 6 a.m. Saturday she was driving a rented 2010 Dodge Caliber SXT north on I-95 when she tried to pass a tractor-trailer but lost control and hit it, according to a State Police accident report. (ctpost.com)

The most interesting thing is that the prosecutor argued that the defendant is a flight risk in large part based on her being "distraught" over what happened:

Before the ruling Assistant State's Attorney David Applegate argued Torres was a flight-risk.

"The defendant does pose a flight risk due to the serious charges and the anxiety that attorney Crosland has pointed out," Applegate said, referring to earlier remarks from Crosland that detailed his client's distraught state of mind over the fatal crash.

Is killing yourself the same as flight from justice?

In response to an article describing a particularly spectacular suicide, that is, a leap from the world's tallest building, one commenter asserts:

The man surely needed psychological help. Sane people do not commit suicide unless they're evading public humiliation & arrest (avoiding justice).

The commenter implicitly accepts a dichotomy: suicide is either the result of insanity, or a moral wrong.

Seemingly sane people commit suicide all the time in order to avoid "public humiliation & arrest" or other forms of social death. It is impossible to maintain the conviction that only insane people commit suicide when the plain evidence is to the contrary: sane people frequently commit suicide for completely understandable reasons.

People who commit certain actions must suffer the socially-imposed consequences we deem appropriate. We chase them down if they run away. We lock them up. We force them to participate in our reality.

For the good of whom, though? Certainly not their own. The good of the victims, perhaps - if any remain - although it must be an ambivalent and diffuse sort of "good," in that case.

Perhaps it is for the good of the future victims of similar actions. If people knew they could just commit suicide instantly and painlessly at any moment - like switching a computer game off - would that be incredibly dangerous? Would people commit massively antisocial acts knowing they can always unplug if shit gets too real?

I think they might. And I think this shows us something very important about existence:

In actual, real-life decisions that we can observe, people do seem to choose death over negative social consequences.

This demonstrates that life is inherently less valuable, to individuals, than avoiding social pain.

It puts an upper bound on the value of the so-called precious gift of life.

New Abortion

2011-05-05T14:31:00.001-07:00

A thought experiment about creating and valuing lives

Roe v. Wade does not say what you may think it says. Yes, it creates a right to abortion that cannot be unduly interfered with by the states. But it explicitly states that there are two interests that must be balanced: the woman's privacy interest, and the state's interest in protecting the "potentiality of human life." If this "potentiality" for life could somehow be protected without unduly interfering with the woman's right to end her time as involuntary host organism, it would seem that this would be completely constitutional (not to mention wildly politically popular).

How would that work?

Step 1. Technology is developed such that an implanted embryo may be removed and transplanted to a different woman's uterus.

Step 2. Such technology becomes cheaply available.

Step 3. Lots of wombs in poverty-stricken slums are available for rent. (Check.)

Step 4. New Abortion: for the same price and the same intrusiveness of a standard termination, your uterus is scraped and the embryo harvested, shipped to Nairobi, and implanted in a starving woman's uterus, and after gestation, the child is raised until age 6, when he or she is sold to a factory or a brothel.

This procedure could give the precious gift of life to over a million babies a year from the United States alone.

To those who object on sentimental grounds, I direct them to Robin Hanson: do not slum children sold into prostitution also smile? Isn't the only relevant ethical question whether those children would themselves find their lives to be worthwhile?

Some Motherly Advice To My Male Readers

2011-05-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

I have an acquaintance who just found out she's pregnant. She's my age (early thirties) and the father is a 24-year-old guy who had recently broken up with her, but apparently they got together one last time and . . . boom.

She's emphatically keeping it.

THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU.

They used condoms, but apparently one broke. And now his life is completely changed, and there's nothing he can do about it.

It is important to realize that MEN HAVE NO REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS in Western countries once their semen has left their body. So what can you do to avoid this situation?

Always use condoms, every time, even if she's on the pill, even if she claims she's had tubal ligation, even if she's 42 (n.b. ESPECIALLY if she's 42).
Even when using condoms, ALWAYS PULL OUT before you come. This is the only way to ensure against condom breakage.
Flush that shit when you're done. In wastewater treatment facilities, condoms and other debris get strained out of the water before it's treated and released into the ocean or wherever.

It's not fair or good that this should be the only sexual experience a man can have without fear of being an unintended parent. But it's the way the world currently is. Don't get caught out there, guys. Your reproductive rights begin and end with your semen; control that stuff before it gets made into a baby.

Have fun!

Press: Traumatic Brain Injury Makes Suicide Rational

2011-05-02T10:17:00.000-07:00

From a story on a professional athlete who committed suicide, suspecting he had traumatic brain injury:

BOSTON — The suicide of the former Chicago Bears star Dave Duerson became more alarming Monday morning, when Boston University researchers announced that Duerson’s brain had developed the same trauma-induced disease recently found in more than 20 deceased players.

What is amazing about this story is this: there is no recommendation for greater mental health screening, detection, and services among former professional athletes. There are recommendations, however, to actually SOLVE THE PROBLEM that made the guy's life hell in the first place.

Duerson shot himself Feb. 17 in the chest rather than the head so that his brain could be examined by Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, which announced its diagnosis Monday morning in Boston.

In this case, the reporter seems to clearly accept the proposition that the former athlete's suicide was caused by his traumatic brain injury - but NOT because his traumatic brain injury made him insane. Rather, it seems that his traumatic brain injury made his life bad enough that it's impossible to completely reject the notion that he committed suicide rationally.

The medical model of suicide - the idea that suicide is a pathological symptom of a curable medical condition - has always been dubious, but it is clear from accounts like this that not even the media (repeatedly warned by well-meaning bullies to self-censor) fully buy the story. Everyone knows that there are good reasons to commit suicide. What few acknowledge is that most genuinely good reasons to commit suicide are not as easy to verify as this former athlete's brain injury.

As David Foster Wallace describes it in Infinite Jest:

Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. [Emphasis mine.]

Chinese Factories Make Workers Promise Not To Kill Themselves

2011-05-02T09:03:00.000-07:00

Workers in the miserable Chinese factories with embarrassingly high suicide rates are being made to sign "suicide contracts" agreeing that they won't commit suicide, and that their families will get only minimal damages if they do.

Lots of folks in these factories want to commit suicide, and it's easy to understand why, especially with a basic understanding of the causes of suicide (that is, failed social belonging and perceived burdensomeness). Workers may not talk to each other, stand for 12-hour shifts, work for subsistence wages, and must work upwards of 40 hours of overtime a week, which breaks even the minimal worker treatment laws in freaking CHINA. "Badly performing workers were humiliated in front of colleagues," says the article ominously.

Conditions at the factories seem basically designed to create the "subsistence conditions" Robin Hanson imagines for his "ems" - conscious AI human brain emulators that must work to pay for their existence, competing against ever-more-efficient creatures being created all the time.

But Robin Hanson seems sure his em-creatures will be fine. Apparently, American middle- and upper-class workaholics are a better model for them than Chinese iPhone factory workers.

No Life Is Good

2011-05-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

David Benatar, in The Philosopher's Magazine:

One common and instant response to [the claim that no lives are good] is indignation. How dare one claim that no lives are good when there are billions of people who say otherwise about their own lives? I dare to make such a claim partly because there is excellent empirical evidence for the conclusion that people’s judgements [sic] cannot be trusted as a reliable indicator of how good their lives really are. For example, research psychologists have shown that people are prone to optimism and to optimistic (that is, inaccurately positive) assessments of their own lives. There are many manifestations of this phenomenon. People are more prone to remember good experiences than bad ones; they have exaggerated views of how well things will go for them in the future; and most people think that the quality of their lives is above average. When it comes to assessing their own moral goodness, people also tend to be overly optimistic. Very few people think of themselves as bad. If we were to trust self-assessments, we would have to conclude that there are very few bad people and evil actions, which is patently false.
...
Cheery people – those who think that life is, or at least, can be good – invariably attempt to reconcile the many bad things in life with the possibility of a good life. That is to say, they offer what might be called a “secular theodicy”. But, like conventional theodicies, which attempt to reconcile the vast amount of evil in the world with God’s existence, the secular theodicy of optimists puts the conclusion before the evidence. [Bolded emphasis mine.]

Read the entire piece here.

Thanks Rob Sica!

Status, Empathy, Dignity

2011-04-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

From Am Yisrael Chai/Israel Is Living by Rabbi Schlomo Carlebach:

Reb Zusia was a poor humble rebbe and on this particular day he looked it. He was taking a coach to the city and waited to board with a few other passengers.

One of the passengers was a rich man and he was looking at Zusia, thinking to himself 'Ah ha, now here is a man I can make fun of; . . and that is what he did.

They arrived in the city and thousands of people gathered around the coach. Zusia stepped off and disappeared into the crowd. The rich man got off and asked someone what was going on. He said that Reb Zusia has come and we've gathered to greet him.

When the rich man found out the man he had been making fun of was Reb Zusia he went up and apologized.

Reb Zusia said, "It's not me you should be apologizing to . . it's all the poor people of the world you're insulting. You have to ask every poor person for forgiveness."

Memento mori

91-Year-Old Woman Selling Suicide Kits Online Claims First Official Fictim

2011-04-28T11:27:00.000-07:00

From the Daily Beast:

A shadowy online company selling suicide kits recently claimed its first confirmed victim. Winston Ross talks exclusively with the entrepreneur behind it: a grieving 91-year-old woman.

People who wish to kill themselves and who order a kit THROUGH THE FREAKIN' MAIL to enact those wishes are not "victims."

People who die in an automobile collision caused by a man attempting suicide, who was unable to commit suicide by other means, are victims.

People who are forced to remain alive when they want to die, often in horrible circumstances like akinetic mutism (can't move or speak) after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, are victims. (That goes double when they have medical experiments performed on them without their consent, as happened in the case linked above. There was no ethical outcry; the study was widely touted as a breakthrough. It makes me want to vomit.)

People who want to die and commit suicide are just lucky.

I envy the fictim in this case, Nick Klonoski, a 29-year-old man with chronic pain and depression. However, his bereaved brother Zach sees things differently. He testified at a hearing:

"In a society where so many people suffer from depression and other mental-health disorders,” Zach said, “this company has found their niche in the market by peddling death. This is analogous to putting a gun-vending machine next to a depression clinic. The Gladd company, so named as to avoid suspicion in case family members happen to sign for or come across the package, made $60 off my brother’s death."

What about the people making money off our misery - like the medical industry, which makes billions every year forcibly "treating" would-be suicides in an often horrific manner? What is wrong, exactly, with "peddling death" when death is heartily desired? None of us asked to be here.

The fact is that while people's willingness to pay to improve people's lives is extremely limited, their willingness to demand regulation to prevent people from taking their own lives is nearly infinite. In essence, this is an involuntary, uncompensated transfer of wealth from suicidal, miserable people, the worst off of society, to their nonsuicidal friends and relatives. It is all done under the flag of the medical model of suicide, which is treated as a religious fact rather than examined as a scientific proposition (since examined as such it is clearly erroneous).

One important piece of information here: the helium thing apparently works (here's a video, even). I wonder how long it will take for forced life advocates to make helium illegal. Oh wait - it's already happening.

Born Obligated: A Place for Quantitative Methods in Ethics

2011-04-27T09:02:00.000-07:00

Behavioral economics methods may be more reliable than unsupported, sweeping assumptions in understanding the degree to which being born is okay.

See also: The Mathematics of Misery: What Human Behavior Teaches Us About the Value of Life

Obviousness

That being born is a good thing is treated as axiomatic by the majority of thinkers who consider the issue.

Thomas Nagel, for instance, states that "All of us, I believe, are fortunate to have been born," even while affirming that not having been born is no misfortune (Mortal Questions, "Death," p. 7). Bryan Caplan has said, regarding IVF, "How can I neglect the welfare of the children created by artificial means? But I'm not 'neglecting' children's welfare. I just find it painfully obvious that being alive is good for them [emphasis in original]."

There are two elements to this kind of thinking. First, it represents a judgment that life is, on the whole, worth getting and having; but second, all the talk of "obviousness" also implies that there is something wrong with even asking the question.

I want to address here how quantitative methods, rather than intuition and assumption, might be used to measure the downside of existence. I argue that there is a need to analyze quantitatively the obligations that we are all born with and the inherent pain of life, and that, if our lives are to be worth having on the whole, must be made up for with valuable experiences.

Work and Leisure

We might characterize the central unpleasant obligation in our lives as the obligation to "work" (broadly construed) in order to meet the salient and potentially misery-inducing needs we are born with or naturally develop. These needs include not only food, clothing, shelter, and medical care, but also status, love, sex, attention, and company.^[1] We can even quantify these needs, by quantifying work done to satisfy these needs, for which we have a great deal of data.

Some of these needs, of course, may actually be satisfied by working - the need to belong, to feel valuable, to not be a burden. However, at the same time, some of these needs are actually increased by working - that is, work may create disutility as well as utility. How can you tell the difference between what people do to merely to ease the pain and discomfort of existence, and what people actually want to be doing?

Many economists have addressed the question of the difference between work and leisure, and how we may quantify and measure them. One crude-but-tempting measure of the value of leisure time is merely a person's wage. But as Larson & Shaikh (2004) explain, this is much too crude to get at the true nature of work and leisure:

Assuming the average wage is the appropriate opportunity cost of time presumes that the individual faces no constraints on hours worked, derives no utility or disutility from work, and has a linear wage function.... This is unlikely to be true for many people....an individual's average wage does not necessarily reveal anything about the shadow value of discretionary leisure time, either as an upper or lower bound.

The question of the value of leisure time is intimately related to the question of quantifying the unpleasant obligations placed on us by virtue of existence, so that we may have a starting point for a meaningful comparison of life's costs and life's benefits.

How do we characterize "work"? What is the difference between "work" and "leisure"?

Intuitively, we know the difference - or at least, there exist clear cases of "work" and clear cases of "leisure." Operating a cash register is work. Washing dishes is work. Doing bong rips is leisure. Reading novels is leisure. Watching television and having sex are generally leisure (unless you're in advertising or a prostitute). For most people, child care and lawn care qualify as work - whether paid or unpaid - but for some people, these may qualify as leisure some of the time.

These examples suggest that leisure is that which is done for the sake of the experience itself, whereas work is done with some goal in mind other than the experience itself, and is done only in service of that goal.^[2] Running ten miles is leisure for me, because I do it for the pleasure of the experience; running those same ten miles might be work for someone else, because he does it to lose weight, not for the pleasure of running. A third person might run for both reasons, in which case the action has aspects of both leisure and work. We should not necessarily expect that every action and every hour can be neatly categorized as "work" or "leisure," even for a particular individual.

This should give us pause when considering the definition of "leisure" preferred by Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst in their 2006 paper "Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades," an hour-by-hour tally of time not spent in market or non-market work (e.g., at work, or doing unpaid work around the house or around town). In reality, a single hour may have substantial aspects of both work and leisure.

Aguiar and Hurst remark on a potentially definitional characteristic of leisure: the degree to which market inputs (money, technology) are consumed to reduce the amount of time spent in the activity. They say:

...one definition of whether an activity is “leisure” may be the degree of substitutability between the market input and the time input in the production of the commodity. That is, the leisure content of an activity is a function of technology rather than preferences. In the examples above, one can use the market to reduce time spent cooking (by getting a microwave or ordering takeout food) but cannot use the market to reduce the time input into watching television (although innovations like VCRs and Tivo allow some substitution). [Emphasis mine.]

Let me give a definition of my own, to fit my question:

Work is any action (or omission, perhaps) that we undertake in order to prevent or remedy some unpleasant state, and that we would not undertake if the unpleasant potential state were not a factor. An activity has a strong work component if technology is demanded by individuals to reduce the amount of time they spend in the activity.

In other words, work is what you do only because you have to eat, and you spend as little time doing it as is possible to satisfy your (present and projected future) needs.

Many studies since the 1980s have found that physicians' demand for leisure directly affects the prevalence of cesarean sections. Cesarean sections are highly correlated to time variables associated with doctors wanting to get the hell out of there, although (further strengthening the theory) this correlation is dependent on the type of insurance covering the patient.

Instead of relying on the "imaginary survey justification" to "prove" that coming into existence is a good thing, economists and ethicists could use more creative, quantitative methods to examine the question of how bad (and how good) life is. Specifically, we need to figure out how to tell the difference between suffering people attempting to remedy their shitty situation, and happy people chilling out - both of which may describe any of us at different times in our life, or even our day. "Are you glad you were born?" is unsubtle, an all-or-nothing approach that relies heavily on people knowing the answer to questions they may have only limited capacity to understand. Analyzing behavior in smaller chunks would give us a better idea of just how happy people are to be here.

Poverty and Pain

Behavioral economics is a strong tool for understanding ourselves and each other. However, many behavioral economists, consciously or unconsciously, rely heavily on the "imaginary survey justification," and no economist, to my knowledge, has attempted to use behavioral economics methods to figure out how bad, or how good, life is to individuals.

Bryan Caplan published a fascinating, even audacious paper in 2007 entitled "Behavioral Economics and Perverse Effects of the Welfare State." In it, he argues that giving the poor more life choices through charitable assistance seems to actually harm them, because they are irrational and fail to choose the best option for them. From his abstract:

Critics often argue that government poverty programs perversely make the poor worse off by encouraging unemployment, out-of-wedlock births, and other "social pathologies." However, basic microeconomic theory tells us that you cannot make an agent worse off by expanding his choice set. The current paper argues that familiar findings in behavioral economics can be used to resolve this paradox. Insofar as the standard rational actor model is wrong, additional choices can make agents worse off. More importantly, existing empirical evidence suggests that the poor deviate from the rational actor model to an unusually large degree. The paper then considers the policy implications of our alternative perspective.

The option Caplan fails to consider is this: the lives of the poor are unacceptably bad without charitable aid.

We don't think it irrational, exactly, when a person in extreme pain does something to relieve his pain that may have negative future consequences. A shrieking, sweating patient in horrible pain might be perfectly aware of the potential for developing a long-term addiction to opiates, but we do not consider his decision to take opiate medication to be irrational. His pain is so bad that we think it makes sense for him to use any means to stop it, even if they harm his future interests.

Connecting to my discussion of work vs. leisure, I think it a valid hypothesis that poverty is actually dreadfully painful - not only physically, but emotionally and socially. There is only so much pain we can expect a being to endure before his attempts to relieve it through future-damaging means becomes perfectly understandable and, in fact, rational.

The Demand for Pain Relief

An economic theory of rationality, to be in touch with human ethical reality, must include an account of pain. We must attempt to define and study pain (in the broad sense) in a behavioral economics context, rather than to define it away, as Caplan attempts to do.

Karl Smith notes that studies consistently show that health care consumers do not seem to take into account mortality data when choosing between health care providers, even when very good mortality data is widely available in a user-friendly format. Perhaps the demand for life is not as high as we might think. People seem to like spending money on health care, but not to care about outcome. One approach suggested by this is to study revealed preferences/willingness-to-pay for death risk reduction and pain relief (broadly defined), respectively, in different contexts and populations.

Is Loss Aversion Irrational?

A recent paper on behavioral economics, using tufted capuchin monkeys as subjects, demonstrated that the monkeys exhibit what is considered a typical human departure from rationality, "loss aversion." That is, monkeys trained to use metal discs as money preferred to buy fruit from a graduate student who would give them a smaller food reward but sometimes add a few grapes to it, rather than from a graduate student who would give them a larger food reward but then maybe remove a few grapes. The monkeys weren't maximizing the number of grapes they got; they specifically exhibited a preference to have things added, rather than have things taken away.

This does not, I think, exactly illustrate irrationality in the capuchins: it illustrates that they are utility maximizers, not grape maximizers. Monkeys experience a loss of utility from losing grapes that is greater than the utility produced by those grapes. Losing grapes, we might say, is painful. Doing the resource-maximizing thing does not necessarily equate with doing the utility-maximizing thing.

A Place for Quantitative Methods

Caplan's conclusion is that we must not treat the poor as rational actors, because they deviate so heavily (compared to the wealthy) from being long-term best-interest maximizers. Therefore, he says, we should not expect to solve their problems by giving them money or other charitable aid.

An equally supported conclusion would be that being poor is so awful it is unendurable, like severe physical pain, and poor people actually are rational, taking this into account. Caplan also gives us a hint at what might be an indicator of painfulness: the degree to which the actor deviates from resource maximization. He says, "The behavioral literature has documented that the average person frequently violates neoclassical assumptions. But it rarely investigates variation in the tendency to violate neoclassical assumptions. Casual empiricism and limited formal evidence suggest that the poor do deviate more. A great deal more could be learned at low cost if new behavioral studies collected information on participants' income and education to test for heterogeneity. [Citations omitted.]" Analyzing LOTS of factors for correlation to deviation from resource-maximization rationality, not just income, education, and intelligence, could help us understand the circumstances under which life is so painful that we act irrationally.

1. The extreme seriousness of the basic human need for affiliation and belonging is not widely acknowledged, even though data is available to that effect from a wide variety of sources. Kipling Williams' meta-studies, Ostracism: The Early Detection System and Ostracism: Consequences and Coping are a good place to start to review the literature on the consequences of failed belonging. For instance, Williams explains experiments using Cyberball, an interactive computer game that can be used to give test subjects the impression of being ostracized in a controlled way. He says experimenters have "found strong negative impact on mood and need levels for those participants who were ostracized" in the Cyberball game, and when the experiment was conducted under fMRI, participants "showed significant increases in activity in their anterior cingulate cortexes, where people also show significant activity when enduring physical pain." Further, he states that "In all of these Cyberball studies, the effects sizes of the ostracism manipulation are over 1.00 (often above 1.50) indicating strong effects, and subsequent meta-analyses indicate it takes only three people per condition to reach standard levels of significance. [Citations omitted.]" See pp. 17-19 of Ostracism: The Early Detection System. What's especially amazing is that the effect is clearly not rational - it holds even when ostracized participants have been explicitly told that they're only playing against a computer (NPCs).

Thomas Joiner's book Why People Die by Suicide (see my review here) is a book-length treatment of an empirically-tested theory of the causes of suicide, and concludes that three factors are the best predictors of suicidality: failed belonging, feelings of burdensomeness, and competence (ability to physically do it). Two of the three factors are measures of failed social affiliation. Other kinds of sadness (including sadness for other reasons and clinical depression) are not very predictive of suicide. And Phillipe Rochat's excellent book Others in Mind details the formation of the human "self" through child development studies and other empirical research, concluding that what he terms the Basic Affiliation Need is not only an extremely critical need, but one that is primordial to, and directly causes, the formation of the self. The need to belong and to have a place in society is not a luxury, but a basic need the absence of which is more painful than prolonged hunger or injury.

2. Yesterday, I overheard two high school girls having a conversation. One revealed to her friend that although she realized it meant giving up one's life, she could see the upside to a diagnosis of terminal cancer - a kind of peace, and an exemption from the future-oriented unpleasantness we must all endure if we are to be considered socially responsible. "You could just have fun in school," she said. "I work my ass off every day with work and schoolwork, but if you were going to die anyway, you could just relax. You wouldn't have to worry." Her friend agreed, but said she wanted to see what it was like to be an adult anyway. "I'm not sure I do," said the first little girl. School is generally work, not leisure.

Heteronormativity and Gay Youth Suicide

2011-04-19T11:32:00.000-07:00

A recent study published in the journal Pediatrics determined that being surrounded by heterosexuals (especially Republican ones) and a heteronormative culture is associated with increased risk of suicide in gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth.

The study by Mark L. Hatzenbuehler ("The Social Environment and Suicide Attempts in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth") found that in a sample of 31,852 Oregon 11th graders, queerness was a major risk factor in having attempted suicide in the previous 12 months (21.5% of queer kids vs. 4.2% of straight ones), but that the presence of a "supportive environment" was associated with a 20% reduction in suicide attempts by queer kids. From the study:

We created a composite index of the social environment in 34 counties, including (1) the proportion of same-sex couples, (2) the proportion of registered Democrats, (3) the presence of gay-straight alliances in schools, and (4) school policies (nondiscrimination and antibullying) that specifically protected lesbian, gay, and bisexual students . . . .

Among lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth, the risk of attempting suicide was 20% greater in unsupportive environments compared to supportive environments. A more supportive social environment was significantly associated with fewer suicide attempts, controlling for sociodemographic variables and multiple risk factors for suicide attempts, including depressive symptoms, binge drinking, peer victimization, and physical abuse by an adult (odds ratio: 0.97 [95% confidence interval: 0.96–0.99]). [Emphasis mine.]

This is the first study I've seen that links gay youth suicide attempts specifically to the crappiness of living in a controlling, breeder-dominated, heteronormative, redneck culture. The more they're surrounded by fellow queer folks and Democrats, and the more they're protected from bullying, the less queer kids try to off themselves.

What about the straight kids? They seem to benefit from liberality as well, with a 9% lower suicide attempt rate in "supportive" counties compared to more anti-gay counties.

It is my hope that findings like these, to the extent that they are replicated by cohort and/or case-control studies as well as studies examining other populations, be used in determining custody and visitation of children when these are contested, and also in placement of children for adoption. To the extent that it is replicated, evidence like this should be considered within the context of neglect and emotional abuse investigations.

Elements of Suicide

2011-04-13T20:14:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace, who killed himself by hanging in 2008, gave this phenomenological account of "depression" in his 1996 novel Infinite Jest:

And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue:

Some psychiatric patients — plus a certain percentage of people who've gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul's core system — these persons know firsthand that there's more than one kind of so-called 'depression.' One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia or simple melancholy. It's a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it's not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and . . . well, depressing. Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy — happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love — are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify. . . .

* * *

Hal isn't old enough yet to know that . . . dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also throughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably the most indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.

The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

But and so the idea of a person in the grip of It being bound by a 'Suicide Contract' some well-meaning Substance-abuse halfway house makes her sign is simply absurd. Because such a contract will constrain such a person only until the exact psychic circumstances that made the contract necessary in the first place assert themselves, invisibly and indescribably. That the well-meaning halfway-house Staff does not understand Its overriding terror will only make the depressed resident feel more alone.

One fellow psychotically depressed patient Kate Gompert came to know at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton two years ago was a man in his fifties. He was a civil engineer whose hobby was model trains — like from Lionel Trains Inc., etc. — for which he erected incredibly intricate systems of switching and track that filled his basement recreation room. His wife brought photographs of the trains and networks of trellis and track into the locked ward, to help remind him. The man said he had been suffering from psychotic depression for seventeen straight years, and Kate Gompert had had no reason to disbelieve him. He was stocky and swart with thinning hair and hands that he held very still in his lap as he sat. Twenty years ago he had slipped on a patch of 3-In-1-brand oil from his model-train tracks and bonked his head on the cement floor of his basement rec room in Wellesley Hills, and when he woke up in the E.R. he was depressed beyond all human endurance, and stayed that way. He'd never once tried suicide, though he confessed that he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His wife was very devoted and loving. She went to Catholic Mass every day. She was very devout. The psychotically depressed man, too, went to daily mass when he was not institutionalized. He prayed for relief. He still had his job and his hobby. He went to work regularly, taking medical leaves only when the invisible torment got too bad for him to trust himself, or when there was some radical new treatment the psychiatrists wanted him to try. They'd tried Tricyclics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Serotonin-Reuptake-Inhibitors, the newand side-effect-laden Quadracyclics. They'd scanned his lobes and affective matrices for lesions and scars. Nothing worked. Not even high-amperage E.C.T. relieved It. This happens sometimes. Some cases of depression are beyond human aid. The man's case gave Kate Gompert the howling fantods. The idea of this man going to work and to Mass and building miniaturized railroad networks day after day after day while feeling anything like what Kate Gompert felt in that ward was simply beyond her ability to imagine. The rationo-spiritual part of her knew this man and his wife must be possessed of a courage way off any sort of known courage-chart. But in her toxified soul Kate Gompert felt only a paralyzing horror at the idea of the squat dead-eyed man laying toy track slowly and carefully in the silence of his wood-panelled rec room, the silence total except for the sounds of the track being oiled and snapped together and laid into place, the man's head full of poison and worms and every cell in his body screaming for relief from flames no one else could help with or even feel.

The permanently psychotically depressed man was finally transferred to a place on Long Island to be evaluated for a radical new type of psychosurgery where they supposedly went in and yanked out your whole limbic system, which is the part of the brain that causes all sentiment and feeling. The man's fondest dream was anhedonia, complete psychic numbing. I.e. death in life. The prospect of radical psychosurgery was the dangled carrot that Kate guessed still gave the man's life enough meaning for him to hang onto the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled from the flames. That and his wife: he seemed genuinely to love his wife, and she him. He went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to be over, while she prayed or did that devout thing with beads.

The couple had gotten Kate Gompert's mother's address and had sent Kate an Xmas card the last two years, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills MA, stating that she was in their prayers and wishing her all available joy. Kate Gompert doesn't know whether Mr. Ernest Feaster's limbic system got yanked out or not. Whether he achieved anhedonia. The Xmas cards had had excruciating little watercolor pictures of locomotives on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of times, which the present was not.

— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, pp. 692-998 (Little, Brown, 1996). Footnotes omitted.

When I first read Infinite Jest, around 1999, I felt particularly comforted by this passage. I was comforted at seeing the thing It named and described, but on a more practical level, I was comforted by the reminder that I could always try ECT, and maybe even surgery. (I read about the practice of trepanation with longing.) Something about this thought seemed a little traitorous to me, believing as I did at that point that suicide was wrong. Is there, at the most essential level, any difference between suicide on the one hand, and attempting to erase one's experience with electroconvulsive therapy or psychosurgery on the other? What is the difference, if there is one, between suicide and having one's capacity to feel emotion removed?

I suspect that many people who would want to prevent Ernest Feaster from committing suicide would want to allow him to get his desired emotion-destroying psychosurgery. This, I think, is inconsistent.

The most essential thing another human being is to us is a co-experiencer. To experience ourselves and to have a truly human experience of the world, we need to see ourselves and our environments reflected through the eyes of another person. A body without an experiencer within is but an animate doll, of no use to the doll himself, and by that fact of no morally appropriate use to those who love him.

If we want to offer mercy to a man by ridding him of painful aspects of his experience, how different, then, to allow him to rid himself of all aspects of his experience, if all he experiences is pain? What reason, save religion or cruelty, to force a man to experience pain against his will?

Female Choice and Its Discontents

2011-04-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

Would morality be different if we had evolved from big cats instead of great apes?

Nature's moral horrors are monstrous and plentiful. Lions exhibit a polygynous mating structure, in which males compete for territories containing groups of females and their hunting territory. A male lion usurping the territory of another will kill all the cubs sired by the previous male (in order to promote his own genetic line at the expense of others).

If we had evolved from lions instead of from Australopithecus, would we find infanticide by stepfathers to be completely morally acceptable? Perhaps more importantly, would it actually be morally acceptable? (This latter question is really a question about the existence of moral facts.)

Are some mating and survival strategies inherently more legitimate than others? Is parasitism less honorable than predation? Is predation less honorable than photosynthesis? Is K morally preferable to r? Does symbiosis have a privileged moral status?

Some of our moral feelings about the natural world are mere products of our biological history. If we see parasitism as worse than predation, it may be because we have been predators, but never parasites, and we see things from the point of view of a predator and a "host." But we also reach for - and to a limited extent, I think, find - a more abstract moral sensibility that may be applied to the natural world and human history alike.

I suspect nearly all moral realists would agree with me that if we had evolved from lions, it would still be wrong to kill babies. Contra Wittgenstein, it is even possible that we would have come to realize that infanticide - along with, perhaps, other central aspects of our evolutionarily determined life - is wrong.

I will argue here that most of our evolutionarily important sexual behaviors are immoral and undesirable from the perspective of our most abstract, species-neutral, organism-centered perspective. Specifically, I will argue that socially imposed monogamy is immoral, despite the fact that it is a strategically viable solution to mating coordination problems and may encourage investment in socially optimal behaviors. I will argue that the social conditions necessary to enforce monogamy include reducing female economic self-sufficiency. I will argue for individual ownership of our own bodies (including a legal right to prostitution), but with the caveat that women are not morally entitled to exploit the structurally unmet sexual needs of men, either through prostitution or through economic marital support. And I will argue that while monogamy should be permissible (from individual body ownership), we are not ethically required to recognize the monogamous sexual contracts of others.

Female Choice and the Kenyan Baboons^[1]

Baboon mating strategy is bimodal. Males compete for rank among themselves, and the alpha male mates with any females in estrus and prevents other males from mating with them. We can call "alpha male" one strategy. However, lower-ranking males frequently engage in years-long liaisons with a female, grooming and being groomed by her even when she is not in estrus, sleeping snuggled up with her, and even babysitting her children (who are often not his genetic children). What is the point of this "friend male" strategy? When in estrus, female baboons often sneak off out of the view of the alpha male (who may be otherwise engaged in combat) and mate with their "friend male" grooming partners, allowing the lower-ranking males mating opportunities they would not have had if not for the "friendship."

Male baboons essentially have two choices: either compete with other males for dominance and the mating opportunities it brings, or compete/cooperate with a single female for a mating opportunity with her, unmediated by the usual dominance hierarchy. In the former situation, females do not have genuine choice as to whom they mate with; the alpha male determines this by force. The latter situation is driven almost entirely by female choice.

For much of human history, especially since the introduction of agriculture, sexual access to females has been largely controlled by competition between males, not by the individual females themselves. A female was a special kind of chattel to be sold by her parents to her husband.^[2] Only very recently, and in certain enlightened parts of the world, has it been widely believed that an individual female owns herself, and is herself entitled to choose her sexual liaisons.

In baboons and humans, it often appears that female choice necessarily entails a move in the direction of monogamy. However, enforced monogamy is only a first - and very unsatisfactory - step toward true female choice, and toward individual sexual choice in general.

Monogamy as Schadenfreude

The essence of a monogamous relationship is limitation. It is a special kind of contract that is mostly characterized by promising to refrain from doing something (having extramarital sex). It is what in the law is characterized as an output contract - a contract wherein a seller promises to sell his entire output to a buyer, who in turn promises to buy the entire output. It is not, in practical terms, a requirements contract - a contract wherein a seller might promise to sell to a buyer all the goods the buyer requires. The promise entailed by monogamy is the promise not to have sex with anyone else. It is not a promise to meet the sexual needs of one's partner (nor is this kind of promise desirable, much less enforceable - what's less sexy than being obligated to fuck?).

The person contracting a monogamous relationship is gaining utility from his partner's promise to reduce her own utility. It is, in essence, an agreement explicitly to benefit at the expense of one's lover.

A more idealistic conception of love (and sex) is one in which one desires one's lover to be happy and have as much pleasure as possible - a situation in which one derives utility directly from one's partner's utility. Non-monogamous paradigms (open relationships, polyamory, swinging) allow participants to be ultra-cooperators - to mutually agree to refrain from limiting each partner's sexual opportunities.

Within nonsexual social relationships (e.g., friends), the idea of gaining utility by limiting the utility of the other is repugnant. The idea that one should shut oneself off to cooperation with all but one friend is ludicrous (and would make for a social nightmare). In the abstract, monogamy appears to be the morally worse option. So why is monogamy broadly considered the moral gold standard of sexual relationships?

It's because our morality hasn't yet caught up with technologies such as birth control, paternity testing, and female citizenship. It's also because monogamy is a solution to a coordination problem. Monogamy really was the way to go when there wasn't any birth control, a simple test wouldn't reveal paternity, and females could not support themselves through their own efforts. From the perspective of a female under such conditions, monogamy was her best chance of having surviving offspring. And to a monogamous woman, a sexually receptive non-monogamous woman is a threat to her ability to extract resources from a male. Therefore, women - not just men - attempt to enforce chaste or monogamous behavior in other women.

In this way, in premodern societies, monogamy functions as a kind of sexual minimum wage for women - that is, it specifies that the only unit in which sex may be acquired is a whole woman for her life, and the only currency it may be acquired in exchange for is a promise of lifetime support and monogamy. This makes some amount of sense when babies are a likely result of sex, paternity is uncertain, and a woman cannot support herself. It makes a great deal less sense given that we now know where babies come from and can prevent them, we can test a baby's DNA to determine its parentage (if that is, in fact, morally relevant), and women are as able to support themselves as men, if not more so. If all the justifications for socially imposed monogamy have disappeared, perhaps it is time for sexual monogamy to go the way of infanticide.

Given that consensual non-monogamy is an option - one that many people in our society choose - why would anyone choose monogamy? One possibility, which I think is true for many people, is that they have a special preference for monogamy, perhaps because they find sexual jealousy to be an insurmountable obstacle. Such people would freely choose monogamy even if it were not socially enforced. Another possibility, which I also think is true for many people, is that they genuinely want to have multiple lovers, but are prevented from doing so by barriers - such as lack of available partners (men), the fear of slut stigma (women), or the fear of other social sanction (both).

Economic Constraint of Female Sexual Liberty

Many heterosexual males find chastity in females to be aesthetically appealing. But females only have an incentive to be chaste when women's ability to provide for themselves is constrained. The social conditions necessary to promote monogamy are incompatible with female economic self-sufficiency. And self-sufficiency is broadly socially desirable.

Again, the biological basis of monogamy is to promote paternity confidence and paternal investment. Because of DNA testing, legal father-child relationships and obligations, and female suffrage and economic equality, these objectives are no longer morally relevant.

In societies in which males do not heavily invest in their sexual partners or their children, females have more sexual liberty.^[3] Conversely, in societies in which women are economically dependent on males and are structurally prevented from being economically self-sufficient, sexual chastity (for women) is strictly enforced. For this reason, we should be extremely suspicious of norms of sexual chastity.

Supporting a Wife

Sexual chastity, then, is a tool (whether wielded by society or individual women) to get men to invest in wife and child. Children are morally entitled to investment from their parents, at least where their parents voluntarily conceived and bore them. Children are unable to provide for themselves. However, it is far from clear that an adult woman is morally entitled to seek investment from a man.

Women experience sexual desire for men, but male sexual services to women are so oversupplied that their value is zero (or even negative, at times). Women are born with^[4] a naturally occurring, enormously desirable "resource" largely unrelated to productive activity, or to any morally relevant characteristic. Men have no comparable resource.

Women are in the position of a hereditary landlord - born with a desirable resource that others desire and are willing to "pay" for (whether in currency or otherwise). But while I do feel that women should be properly considered the "owners" of their bodies, this does not entail that we should legitimize the equivalent of rent-seeking in women. Women are morally entitled to decide who they have sex with, and to have sex with anyone, for any reason - including, I think, for money or the promise of lifetime monogamy and economic support. But this does not mean we as a society should legitimize such transactions, either with state-sponsored marriage or through slut stigma.^[5]

Restraining Women's Sexual Freedom: Cui Bono?

Some men and some women benefit from restraining women's sexual freedom. Men who have the resources to do so and wish to "purchase" a female for life have an incentive to restrict the sexual freedom of their "property." Similarly, the subset of women who wish to attract such lifetime investment benefit from restricting the sexual freedom of other women.

But this is not to say that ALL women or ALL men benefit from restricting the sexual freedom of women. In fact, as I have argued, most people would benefit from lifting most of the societal sexual restrictions currently in place. Societal restrictions on sexual freedom function as a governmental taking: they prevent individuals from using their resources for their own pleasure, for the alleged benefit of the group (or at least those in positions of power in the group). Many writers, both male and female, confuse the issue by assuming group heterogeneity of preference. But "good for women as a group" does not justify an involuntary welfare transfer from individual women to the group, especially with a resource as intimately connected to the individual's body as sex.

Are Married Folks Morally Off-Limits?

Long-term output contracts are rare, and are generally entered into at arm's length. Lifetime output contracts executed under conditions of undue influence (inherent in almost any dyadic sexual relationship) are especially suspect compared to other contracts. And they are frequently entered into by young participants with poor access to information and a great deal of hormone intoxication.

The more a contract is obtained by shady means, the less we should feel inclined to enforce or abide by the contract. Contracts obtained by force or fraud are not enforceable at all, for instance. For these reasons, we are not always morally obligated to respect the lifetime sexuality output contracts of others. Doing so in fact assists with the undesirable rent-seeking behavior described above. It does not make sense to expend a huge amount of resources enforcing long-term contracts, when little is expended in making sure those contracts are voluntary and informed, and that other options exist.

Respecting property rights is as much a voluntary act as asserting property rights. We may be morally entitled to have some property rights enforced, but "property rights" in the private actions of agents that do not directly affect us are extremely questionable. When we respect property rights, we are actively giving support to the institutions and policies that created those property rights. I have argued that monogamy is broadly socially undesirable; respecting the lifetime sexuality output contracts of others when one party wishes to "breach" his or her contract promotes monogamy and the flawed social policy on which it rests.

How Will the Sexual Market Clear?

To review, women are born with a resource unrelated to productive effort. Men are born desiring this resource, but without any comparable resource. If material transfers to women from men in exchange for sex are morally undesirable (and I think they are), how will men's sexual needs be met?

One thing to remember is that the sexual market is far from clearing in its natural state. This imposes a great deal of suffering on men.

As humans, we intuitively feel that sex should be a gift. Sex provided enthusiastically, out of an altruistic desire to please one's partner and to be sexually pleased, is the ideal. As I have argued, this is incompatible with sex-for-resource-extraction (either in the form of marriage or of prostitution). How will the non-monetary market (gift economy) for sex ever clear when men's sexual services are worth only a tiny fraction of the value of female sexual services?

One solution is already being tried by a growing group of men. Sexual seduction techniques are really a way of learning to provide better sexual services to women in a way that they desire - increasing the value, to women, of male sexual services and making a gift economy possible for at least a lucky subset of the population.

Another solution is only possible on an extremely macro level: increase the ratio of women to men (while maintaining female economic self-sufficiency). This was "tried" in a natural experiment involving the Kenyan baboons mentioned earlier. The most dominant and aggressive males, but not the females or less aggressive males, would raid a nearby open garbage pit. As a result, those dominant males all contracted tuberculosis from meat refuse and died, nearly doubling the female-to-male ratio.

The result was a surprising cultural change in the affected baboon population. Male-female grooming drastically increased - males were groomed by females more frequently, and less time passed between a new male arriving at the troupe and his first being groomed by a female. The stress experienced by low-ranking males plummeted, measured both by prevalence of anxiety behaviors and measurements of the stress-related hormone cortisol. Essentially, everybody chilled the fuck out.

So one solution to the problem of the male-female sexual market not clearing is just to have fewer males - especially males of the type who attempt to subvert female choice. A rare male is more valuable than an oversupplied male. The sexual market could clear as a gift economy under those circumstances.

1. Sources for this section include Barbara Smuts' book Sex and Friendship in Baboons and the article A Pacific Culture among Wild Baboons: Its Emergence and Transmission by Robert M. Sapolsky and Lisa J. Share (2004). You may also enjoy this Radiolab episode about the change in baboon culture.

2. Except, of course, in societies that utilize a dowry system, which tend to be societies that enforce monogamy, thereby driving up the value of high-quality males. Women generally do not choose their own mating partners in dowry societies; they are still very much property. As Elizabeth Cashdan puts it (in "Women's Mating Strategies," Evolutionary Anthropology 5:134-143, 1996),

...cross-cultural analysis shows that the co-occurrence of stratification with socially-imposed monogamy is the best predictor of dowry, although it is also found in the upper strata of some extremely stratified polygynous societies. We might wish to add to the criteria of stratification and socially imposed monogamy the additional one of degree of female dependence on male investment. Competition for investing mates should be most intense where the payoffs to such investment are highest, hence greater economic independence of women might be expected to discourage the prevalence of dowry payments, even in monogamous, stratified societies. [Emphasis mine.]

3. See, e.g., Gaulin, S.J.C., and Schlegel, A., "Paternal confidence and paternal investment: A cross-cultural test of a sociobiological hypothesis. Ethol Sociobiol 1:301-309 (1980), and Hartung, J., "Matrilineal inheritance: New theory and analysis." Behav Brain Sci 8:661-668. Cited in Cashdan (1996), Note 2 (supra).

4. Okay, not "born with," but you know what I mean.

5. This is why I find it surprising that the "men's rights" camp can so frequently be found attempting to re-impose slut stigma. Slut stigma is directly opposed to female choice; most men, especially men into "game," benefit directly from enhanced female choice (one-on-one competition and body ownership).

Why Don't You Just Kill Yourself?

2011-03-16T12:47:00.000-07:00

On 3QuarksDaily (cool article by Tauriq Moosa btw), commenter Louise Gordon asks the question that's on everybody's mind: why don't philanthropic antinatalists just kill themselves? She asks:

If you are an anti-natalist and think being alive is hell and suffering and an overwhelming bummer, why are you still alive? Is there some life instinct that's driving you to stick around or you're just not ready to check out yet?

I explain:

Let me explain by analogy. Two birthdays ago, my friends had a surprise party for me. I was in a very antisocial mood at the time, and it was a very unpleasant experience - but I suffered through it because I didn't want to hurt my friends' feelings. I didn't just walk out and leave the party (though I feel I morally could have done, if it were bad enough for me). But mostly I wish they hadn't had a party for me in the first place - I would have been better off if they hadn't.

Ditto my mom giving birth to me. I wish she hadn't, but my family and friends would be very sad if I peaced out of the party (though I still have a moral right to commit suicide).

Another problem is that killing oneself is hard. Barbiturates are tightly controlled these days. You'd be amazed how easy it is to survive a gunshot wound to the head. And then they keep you alive and do medical experiments on you without your consent. Not a pretty picture.

In more general terms, the question may be phrased as: If you have been the victim of injustice and a solution to your subjective suffering exists, why not take it? And the answer is: because the proffered solution (a) through no fault of mine, harms others whose interests I care about, and (b) through no fault of mine, will very likely put me in a situation that is worse than my current situation.

See also: If You Love Life So Much Why Don't You Marry It?