Nuh-uh!

I just read this blog entry.

It's so full of holes I don't know where to begin.  I'll start with this paragraph:

As for the history lesson. The twentieth century is full of examples of people that exploited the fears and insecurity of the massess [sic] to satisfy their own ends. From Hitler in Germany to Pol Pot in Cambodia, there are numerous examples of where the powerful have used propaganda to get the masses to perform their biding.

Nonsense.  Hitler and Pol Pot both applied a heavy use of coercion to get their way and anything they didn't coerce is the fault of the doer, not the suggester.  We only want to see things another way because it is easier.  It's easier to imagine one wizard with magical powers could be evil than an entire country.  The ease of accepting something has no bearing on the degree to which it is true.

Let's look at another sample.

Mind control is real. The question is as a society what do we want to do about it?

No.  It isn't.  It's unsubstantiated nonsense and a result of magical thinking.

This post is fraught with false assertions an irrelevant appeals.  Here's another one:

US elections have become affairs that can be bought.

This is not true.  It is true that well-funded candidates tend to win.  That does not mean that people can buy elections.  It means that the American voter is unprincipled enough that he just votes for whoever the advertiser tells him he should.  That's not the advertiser's fault, nor is it the fault of the person who is funding the advertisements.

The blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the people who vote that way.

The person who posted the entry in question has made the claim that, for instance, brainwashing is a scientific fact, so coercion is not a sufficient criterion for the determination of wrongdoing.

This claim is both unsubstantiated and irrelevant.  True, effective brainwashing typically includes a corresponding physical component.  Cults use sleep and food deprivation to cement their grip.  Despots use and enforce threats of death, torture, and incarceration to get their way.

Paul, I would recommend that you visit and peruse this site on logical fallacies if you ever hope to convince anyone of anything.  I do not feel these discussions are a good use of time and do not wish to continue them.

Busted wrist

I'll probably keep things short and sweet for the next six weeks.

Regulation versus recommendation

I have a long drive to get home and it gives me time to think.  Today, I was ruminating on the fact that I am so okay with traffic signals and lanes while I am against government-imposed regulation in almost every other form.

Why?  I think the reason is because traffic control works and it does not impose an undue cost.  Why does it work when, in my eyes, government almost always fails to accomplish its goals?

Why does a stop sign work?

I'll tell you one reason that is definitely not why it works.  Stop signs do not work on account of enforcement for the simple reason that there is not enough enforcement to make them work.

If stop signs worked on account of enforcement, people would come to a full stop every time because they were afraid of the consequences.  People don't because they aren't.

The reason why stop signs and other traffic signals work is because they inform people in a way that is useful to them.  They say "someone has thought about this intersection for a while and they think people should come to a full stop, here, or they'll risk collision."

Different people do different things with that information.  Some people, like me, come to a full stop and look at all the other directions from which vehicles may approach and then proceed through the intersection.  Other people slow down and look around to make sure there is not risk and then roll through the intersection.

Almost everyone, however, pays some level of attention to a stop sign and, really, to almost any traffic sign or signal.  Again, that's because there is a useful recommendation being made that is trusted by its recipient.

This is the direction I think I would like to see our regulations go.  Instead of telling bankers what they can and cannot do, we should provide benchmarks that must be met in order to be a "Grade A Financial Institution" or some such.  Instead of telling people what they can and cannot put on the air based on Christian values, we should provide ratings that Christians can use to regulate their media intake.

Instead of trying to control what food people can eat or what drugs they can consume we should simply say "this has't been tested... knock yourself out but don't come crying to us when things go south."

Why do I like this system better than one wherein regulations occur?  The obvious reason is that, instead of infringing on the liberties of producers, it increases the freedoms of consumers by way of education.  There's another, less obvious reason though.  I bet that yielding recommendations cost a lot less than enforcing regulations; a lot less.

Even less obvious is the fact that ratings probably work better than rules in the first place.  Psychologically, they are positioned as tools of collaboration rather than oppression, which probably helps them get adopted more quickly and thoroughly.  Mechanically, they have the property of aiming markets at problems and markets have conclusively shown themselves to be better decision-makers than central planners.

This seems like a good balance, to me.  Any rational do-good-er should be satisfied with the outcome of government simply recommending what is safe and what is not.  Any rational Libertarian should be satisfied with the increase of liberty and reduction in expense.  Some of us are willing to entertain the thought that there really are "greater good" things where the impact is so high and the burden is so low that it makes sense to couple them to government.

Now, I'm not saying that there is no place for regulation at all.  For instance, there is a real conversation to be had between environmentalists and Libertarians.  My guess is that the two frameworks can be reconciled nicely as (for instance) things like dumping poison into a water table, which is a sin from the perspective of an environmentalist, also constitutes an assault in the Libertarian model.

What I am saying is that, in most cases, there really isn't a useful conversation to be had about whether or not an individual should be told what they can use or a company can be told what they should sell.  If you want to restrict what consenting people do with their own bodies and properties, you are wrong.  Simple as that.  Until you can accept that you have no right to interfere in such things, you have no right participating in the political process at all.

In fact, anyone who believes that it is one person's right to tell some other group of consenting individuals what they can do should really do us all a favor and just shut the hell up altogether.

We still aren't qualified to tell people what to do

I've thought about this some more and I've come up with a scenario in which giving someone the answer works.  It's worked on me and it's worked for me.  In a true mentor/coach type role, you can tell someone what to do if you happen to have experienced a problem very much like what the person you are helping is going through.  You cannot dictate what they shall do but you can tell them what they should do.

This, again, has very to do with intellect or training and very much to do with real world experience.  If you've never ridden a bike before and someone else has, you could possess twice their mental capacity and they would still be able to teach you something because they've done it before.  Furthermore, it's an offering of knowledge rather than a binding of rules.  There is no guarantee that you will follow the instructions but, if  you do, there is a benefit to you.  If you don't, then you get the benefit when you eventually come around.

I've experienced this in the work world.  Those who've taken it upon themselves to help me have patiently explained how to patiently explain things, knowing that I won't necessarily (or even likely) do what they suggest.  Likewise, I've explained how to do technical things to people who refused to adapt, knowing that even though they weren't going to start that day, they may eventually start seeing things my way.

In contrast, the opposite has happened.  I've see brilliant and enthusiastic students try something out right away to see if it works.  Likewise, certain things have clicked with me right away, leading to nearly instant adoption.

In all those scenarios, it didn't matter who was the teacher or how intelligent they were.  It matters a little bit how smart the student is but it matters a lot more how ready to hear the lesson they are.

So if you really feel the need to go out and better people's lives by telling them what to do, you can do a lot of good by picking a topic on which you have experience and mentoring young people.  A hell of a lot more good than you would by trying to get rules made that people must follow.

I'm not qualified to tell anyone how to live and neither are you

I'm a pretty smart guy.  Smarter than most.  I have a lot of natural abilities that allow me to solve complex problems much faster than people of average intelligence and, really, even most people who are significantly above average.

That's not bragging.  Some people are born rich.  Some are born good looking.  Some are born smart.  Some are born with absolutely nothing to distinguish them from the next guy.  It's just the way things are.  If you don't like it, tough.  That's still how things are.

A lot of people are of above average intellect.  By definition, half are above the median.  If you are on the smarter side of the spectrum, it's pretty easy to look at someone who is struggling through a problem and think you can improve their lives by dictating how they should live.  Sadly, people who are on the dimmer side of the scale seem at least as able to imagine that someone smarter than them should be telling them what to do.

It doesn't work that way for a couple reasons.  I'd like to set the stage for those reasons by examining what motivates most people to try and tell others how to live.  There are really two basic reasons:

• To help others by improving the quality of their decisions.
• To help one's self by tweaking the decisions of others in favor of one's own interests.

It doesn't really matter how many people are driven by one of those forces or the other or even how many people have a foot in each camp.  One of those motives is not even worth considering as valid: the latter.  If you want to improve your lot in life, do it by making your decisions better, not by making others' decisions better for you.  So we can safely disregard the self-enrichment motive and focus on the do-gooder impulse.

Why does the motivation matter?  Because dictating how other people live is observably contradictory to the goal of improving their lives.  Ironically, people who have a lot of influence in my life told me this a long time ago and it took me nearly a decade to internalize it.  You'll see why that's ironic in a moment.

The reason why making decisions for other people runs contrary to their interests is that there are more forces involved in making a quality decision than just how smart the decision-maker is.  I wouldn't even pretend to guess at how many favors there are in making a good decision but two that are always present are intimacy and context.

Everyone has a very intimate relationship with themselves.  Few people, if any, truly know you better than you know yourself.  Really, it's not very likely that anyone - even your wife of twenty years or your husband of forty - knows you even half as well as you know yourself.

Why does that matter?  Because there are too many variables in the universe for anyone - no matter their intellect - to pay attention to all of them when making a decision.  We all have an innate sense of what is important to us and that helps us focus on the factors that we think will drive the outcome we desire.  Even a terrible assessment of what matters that based on one's true desires yields a better outcome than decisions made by some ivory tower intellectual who has never met or even heard of you.

Another important factor is context.  It doesn't matter how smart you are, you cannot plan the future.  You cannot even have perfect knowledge of the present.  It's outside the current scope of human intellect to do either of those things.  Because you cannot predict all of the contexts in which someone will face a problem, you cannot know the forces involved in solving that problem.

It turns out that people who are terrible at problem solving but know what the actual problem they are solving is are way better at solving that problem than someone with great problem solving skills but no idea what the actual problem being solved is.  Don't believe me?  Maybe you should run an experiment with someone you consider to be your intellectual peer.  You make up a set of rules to deal with a category of problems and have your friend try to find contingency in which the rules set doesn't work. Repeat that process until one of you gives up and see who wins.

There is yet another reason why telling people how they should live does not work.  Compliance is not the same thing as agreement.  If you make rules for someone that they don't understand or agree with, then they will either ignore the rules or comply with the letter of the law rather than the spirit.  So, even if you are right and do really know what should be done, getting someone to do those things in a way that will help them by way of mandate is extremely ineffective.

This by the way is the source of irony to which I earlier alluded.  Someone told me not to tell people what to do and to let them figure things out for themselves and I ignored that advice until I figured it out for myself.

So what should you do?  Well, if you're the sort of person who wants to make other people do things in order to improve your own life... well... go fuck yourself then jump off a cliff, I guess?  If you are in the other camp, I'm not going to tell you what to do.  I will tell you that improving people's lives - truly improving their circumstances appears to stem from helping people change how they think, not telling them what to do.

If you can persuade someone to understand why you want them to do a certain thing for their own benefit and believe that it benefits them, they will start making the right choices on their own.  If not, all the regulation and coercion in the world will only make the tiniest and most fleeting of impacts before backfiring to make things worse than they already were.

But most importantly, I must reiterate: If you want to make rules for the simple purpose of enriching one group of people at the expense of another, fuck off and die.

I'm so sick of hearing about how unfair the campaign funding system is

People aren't stupid.  At least, that's what I keep hearing.

Yet, whenever it comes to a matter of advertising, everyone gets up in arms about how the person with the biggest advertising budget wins.  It doesn't matter whether it is for a product or a political contestant.  The complaint is always the same "oh, he only won because of all the money he got from X so now he's going to be beholden to that entity."

So which is it?  Are people smart enough to make their own decisions and vote or not?  If they are, then you don't get to blame the advertisements they see for their decisions.  If they aren't, guess what: You still don't get to blame the marketing to which they were exposed.  Being stupid is a defect, not an excuse.

The problem isn't that Johnny Politician gets too much money from entity X.  The problem is that someone can win an election using a lot of campaign funding even when they are a complete douche nozzle.  In other words, let's not blame campaign funding for the bad decisions that voters make.

You may ask "Okay, so maybe people are too dumb to make their own decisions, shouldn't we control the media to which those people are exposed?"  The first and most obvious answer to that question is "You should probably replace 'people' with 'we.'"

The fundamental problem you are trying to address is that people are gaming the system... at least, that's what some of you believe is happening.  I defy everyone reading this to come up with a true example from history wherein adding a layer of rules to a system reduced the extent to which that system could be gamed.

If you want better decisions to come out of elections, your only real option is to try and get the voting population to be smarter or at least to be better decision makers.  You have a lot of options you can try.  Here are a few of them, and I'm not recommending any of them:

• Educate voters in critical thinking so their behavior is more their own
• Provide incentives that entice intelligent voters to activate 
• Provide incentives that entice unintelligent voters to deactivate
• Provide a filtration system that weeds out stupid voters
• Reduce the number of stupid voters to raise the average

Education is controversial if you are teaching the issues.  It's not so controversial to teach critical thinking skills themselves.  The real problem with that kind of education is that most people who think the can teach it actually cannot.  I'm guessing we have something like 1% of our population that can even approach objectivity when considering something.  Maybe less.

I'm not sure what incentives you can provide for intelligent people to get them to vote more.  The thing that would get me voting would be if voting were worthwhile, so maybe just doing other things to get the quality of the voting population up would do the trick.

Incentives to get dumb people not to vote aren't hard at all.  The main obstacle is giving someone the ability to prove with reasonable certainty that they didn't vote.  Once you've done that, almost any trinket would do.  I bet you could keep five percent of the worst voters away from their ballets for $100 a head or less.  The great part is, so long as you don't run out of funding, you don't even care if someone managed to defraud you.  After all, if they can outsmart even the simplest amount of bureaucracy, it's probably okay for them to be voting.

A filtration system is dangerous as anything that is not opt-in would be.  It could quickly convert from a quality-assurance tool to one of oppression.  I can't imagine any system where the government says "no, you cannot vote," that doesn't degrade into something Orwellian in decades.

Reducing the number of idiots in the world has the same problem.  Or, at least, it did until the advent of modern birth control.  Offering free vasectomies in exchange for small prizes would let the worst portions of our population select themselves out of the gene pool while leaving them, the entities that are already born, free to enjoy the rest of their lives.

Whatever the case, the problem we have right now isn't the few who have the funds to buy ad-space for their favorite candidate.  It is the many who are so easily influenced by such parlor tricks.