How Long Before I Get Tired Of This?

So, let's go through the top 5 hits for "israel" on Google News (a site which won't include LGF).

First

Annan ... said Israel was responsible for most of the violations of the fragile cease-fire

Hezbollah is supposed to be disarmed, but that's not going to happen.

Lebanon is supposed to secure its borders, but that hasn't happened.

Hezbollah is supposed to release the Israelis they kidnapped to start the war, but that hasn't happened.

Hezbollah isn't supposed to smuggle new weapons into Lebanon, but that isn't going very well.

To be responsible for most of the violations, Israel will need to have a list of at least about twenty (except it wouldn't be very hard to find twenty specific violations by Hezbollah, so the list ought to be a lot longer). I can't wait to see the list.

Second

War proof of Israel lobby's power

Why does the headline report as fact what was only alleged by two idiots?

Their argument, as best I can decode it, says that US support for Israel during the Lebanon war has increased the likelihood that Iran and Syria will continue to supply Hezbollah with weapons, because it strained the US (diplomatic) position in the Middle East.

So, we must avoid supporting Israel against Hezbollah, because that would cost us the credibility required to be able to help Israel against Hezbollah.

Third we have an article that doesn't care to differentiate between terrorists and innocents:

Israeli troops killed five Palestinians and wounded a dozen in attacks on militants in the Gaza Strip

See, it uses the word "Palestinian" where it should say "terrorist". Perhaps a case can be made that there isn't much difference, but I don't think that's what Reuters intended.

The confusion continues with comments like this:

The Israeli army has killed more than 190 Palestinians in Gaza since ... June 25

Where is the effort to figure out how many of those people should have died?

Here, I'll help generate criteria. Anyone who died while firing a machine gun at Jews, wasn't innocent. Anyone who died while planting a bomb, like the people mentioned earlier in this article, wasn't innocent.

Fourth we have an article about how most Israeli Arabs are disloyal. The author doesn't know that's what he's writing about, but he is:

Seventy-five percent of the Arab public in Israel believes that the military operation in Lebanon was a war crime

...

Sixty-four percent said they watched al-Jazeera, and rated it as being highly credible. Forty-six percent said they relied on al-Manar's reports, the channel which identifies with Hizbullah. Only 5 percent said the news on the Israeli network Channel One was credible

...

55 percent of the respondents rated Hizbullah's reports of the war as more credible than the Israeli ones. Only nine percent believed the opposite.

My main complaint about this article is the headline:

Israeli Arabs: Israel committed war crimes in Lebanon

Do we really need more headlines about how some idiot accused Israel of war crimes? Why not use, "Israeli Arabs: Hezbollah Is Credible"? It's a lot more informative than yet another accusation against Israel, and it *implies* the original title anyway.

Fifth we have an article which is a mix of accusations by a "human rights group" and insistence by Israel that it investigates abuses. Which makes a great excuse to use this in the headline:

Israel abused Palestinians

If the *Palestinians* said they investigate complaints about *their* abuses of Palestinians (let alone their abuses of Israelis) it'd be a bad joke. So why does the "human rights" group focus on the party that tries to do the right thing, over the one that does not try?

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Message (1)

Exclusivity

On Dawson's Creek, Dawson and Pacey both like Joey, and she likes both of them. There lots of tension and she feels pressured to choose one of them to be with.

Dawson and Pacey both want to have Joey in a romantic, exclusive relationship. They can't share. Sharing sounds horrible to them.

And in general, people don't see how anything but exclusivity could work. They want the girl all the time, so they'd be missing out if they only got her part of the time.

But here's the thing. In the show, for the last episode they skip forward in time 5 years, and neither is with Joey (yet). But both Dawson and Pacey are pretty much OK with that. They are both capable of getting over it, and having a happy life with no Joey.

So when you see it from that perspective, feeling that only exclusivity could work is silly. They can be happy with nothing, so certainly they don't need everything. Now compare with if Joey spent one day a week with Dawson, and one day a week with Pacey. In those 5 years, she'd have had 250 days with each of them, instead of zero. That's a lot of days. And as their lives went on, it'd be a huge improvement over having nothing.

The fact they can be happy with no Joey, proves they can also be happy with some Joey. They shouldn't think of it as "not enough", they should think of it as something positively good that they can have without anyone being hurt.

Having someone *all* the time is crazy, anyway. Everyone should have his/her own life. Everyone is different, so no two people have exactly the same interests.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (4)

Amnesty Fucking International

top google hit for: israel collateral damage

is a piece titled:

Israel/Lebanon
Deliberate destruction or "collateral damage"? Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure

by guess who:

Amnesty International

and guess what their conclusion is

but wait, get this...

the piece is FAR WORSE than the crap i'm used to reading from like the BBC or NYT. some quotes:

The widespread destruction of apartments, houses, electricity and water services, roads, bridges, factories and ports, in addition to several statements by Israeli officials, suggests a policy of punishing both the Lebanese government and the civilian population in an effort to get them to turn against Hizbullah. Israeli attacks did not diminish, nor did their pattern appear to change, even when it became clear that the victims of the bombardment were predominantly civilians, which was the case from the first days of the conflict.

Israel has asserted that Hizbullah fighters have enmeshed themselves in the civilian population for the purpose of creating "human shields". While the use of civilians to shield a combatant from attack is a war crime, under international humanitarian law such use does not release the opposing party from its obligations towards the protection of the civilian population.

Many of the violations examined in this report are war crimes that give rise to individual criminal responsibility. They include directly attacking civilian objects and carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. People against whom there is prima facie evidence of responsibility for the commission of these crimes are subject to criminal accountability anywhere in the world through the exercise of universal jurisdiction.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Mental Illness

Imagine that 4% of the population hears voices. Imagine further that 25% of those people are psychotic (note: this may not be the proper, technical usage of the term, but it doesn't matter to my point). No amount of explaining the situation seems to help them. The psychotic rate in the general population is thus 1%. The voices drive them crazy and make them completely dysfunctional.

Now, we know that hearing voices doesn't cause psychosis all by itself. 75% of the people who hear voices function perfectly fine. They ignore their voices, or make friends with them, or write books about them. As real as their voices seem, they are able to go on with life normally.

So, we can conclude that the psychotic people have a second thing wrong, which the non-psychotic people do not have. We'll call this disorder_2. disorder_2 may be a combination of many things, but it doesn't matter to my point. It's the set of whatever things are needed to make people with disorder_1 (hearing voices) psychotic. Note there could also be multiple separate options for what disorder_2: different ways to turn hearing voices into a problem. But this also isn't important right now.

So, what do we know about disorder_2? We know that it prevents people from understanding our advice about voices. They don't seem to listen when we tell them the voices aren't real. Or they can't figure out which voices we mean. But there's something a lot cooler than we know.

Assuming disorder_1 and disorder_2 are statistically independent, then the rate of disorder_2 in the population is an amazing 25%. So we have this thing, which is very common, and it makes people not listen to reason.

First we will consider that it might be a brain lesion. But if it is, why can't we tell people that? Why can't they step back, and know their brain is damaged, and not trust their own judgment and listen to us? Well, maybe they have a second brain lesion on the part of the brain which allows for that. But then, why can't they know *that*, and get some perspective, and figure out something to do that is rationally compatible with their brain malfunctioning? Why doesn't the person say he's really confused and just sit down, and not do anything, and ask for help, and get people to help him work out what is real? Well, maybe there is a brain lesion on the part of the brain needed for *that* too. But no matter how many brain lesions we postulate, there will always be a creative solution for how to continue rationally. Unless: there's one way there won't be a creative solution: due to all the brain lesions, the person isn't creative anymore. The person isn't a thinking human being anymore.

But most psychotic people aren't that far gone. Sure they're crazy, but they are also people. They still speak English, and do all sorts of things that a cow can't do. So let's imagine that disorder_2 is *not* a brain lesion.

What else might disorder_2 be? One possibility is that it's being irrational. Bear in mind that not all irrationality is the same. So imagine there is a specific type which is disorder_2. When someone with this form of irrationality hears voices, he can't be talked into reacting rationally, because he's not a rational person. This would explain all the data.

Now, let's consider how to treat these people. First consider treating disorder_2, assuming it is an irrationality. Suppose we have a set of arguments and explanations which cures this irrationality. This would be the best course, because we know the voices will then be harmless, and we know that being irrational will have other bad effects besides causing psychosis in people who hear voices.

Now imagine we have a drug which cures hearing voices. This would instantly cure psychosis in these people. But they would remain irrational. The cure would still be a very good thing. However, there is a danger. The person might be confirmed in his irrationality. If he believed that his only problem was disorder_1, the voices, he would wrong believe his worldview wasn't causing any problems, even though it was. If one of his friends told him that part of the problem was his irrationality, he could take his cure as proof that his irrationality was not the reason for his psychosis.

To avoid this danger, what would we need to do? It's pretty simple: we'd tell people that we are not curing their real problem. We are removing something from them which is completely harmless, but which reacts badly with their real disorder (this would be true whether the real disorder is irrationality or not). We might try an analogy to explain, like this one: they are like a man who gets angry a number of things including pillows, and we've removed all pillows from his house. Instantly, he is not angry when at home. But we haven't really cured him.

So the two primary conclusions we should take from this are:

1) irrationality may be a necessary component of many mental illnesses

2) many cures for mental illness, no matter how effective they seem to be, may be just like removing pillows. they may not be cures at all.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Israel Lebanon Update

Israel Sets Goal of Pulling Troops Out of Lebanon by Sunday

I haven't read the news for a while. Last I heard, the UN was supposed to bring in 15,000 human shields (troops not allowed to shoot at terrorists, and positioned so that terrorists can shelter next to them, like they did in the Lebanon war) to protect Israel from Hezbollah. It looked like many of these soldiers would be from countries that don't recognize the state of Israel. Somehow that isn't insane enough to be laughed out of the UN. Meanwhile Israel was going to get nothing but a new government (because the current one messed up the war by taking a UN deal instead of killing more terrorists). Included in unkept promises, Israel was not going to get back the soldiers who were abducted to start the war, Hezbollah was not going to be disarmed, and Israel was not going to have security. Oh, and those UN peacekeepers would be sure to help rebuild things for terrorists. Like they did during the Lebanon war when they repaired roads that Israel had just bombed out of military necessity.

Now things are worse.

the United Nations forces, which are supposed to reinforce the Lebanese Army, were not up to strength. They number barely more than 5,000 now, only about 3,000 more than when the war ended and far short of the 15,000 called for under the resolution.

So Israel is about to leave, and the UN still hasn't really arrived. I'm actually not sure if the lack of UN presence is a good or bad thing.

last Friday ... Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, appeared in public for the first time to declare a divine victory.

That can't be good. He's no longer scared that we will kill him if he shows his face. We should kill him.

Israel also said it would continue aerial surveillance over Lebanon to prevent the resupply of weapons to Hezbollah until the resolution was fully carried out. That includes the release of two captured Israeli soldiers and the monitoring of the largely unmarked border between Lebanon and Syria, which helped to supply Hezbollah with sophisticated arms from Iran and Syria itself.

The United Nations forces say that such flights constitute Israeli violations of the cease-fire.

The UN thinks that trying to enforce the terms of the cease fire is a violation of the cease fire. No wonder they aren't enforcing the terms...

Since the cease-fire, 14 Lebanese have been killed and 90 injured by the bomblets, the United Nations said

Why don't we hear about dead Israeli kids who played with unexploded Hezbollah rockets? It's not because Hezbollah has high quality munitions that always explode. It's because Israeli parents are responsible enough to warn their kids about the danger.

Who is blamed for the irresponsibility of Lebanese people? The Jews, of course.

Israel captured the strategic plateau in the 1967 war and unilaterally annexed it in 1981. Some Israelis have suggested that given the threat from Iran, Israel should accept a Syrian offer for peace talks to try to wean Syria, a Sunni country, away from its alliance with Tehran.

Does the New York Times think this is subtle? When they want to give their opinion, they just say "some people said" and call it reporting. They even had the nerve to say this is the opinion of Israelis.

So what is their opinion? They want Israel to give away the Golan Heights to Syria so that terrorists can shoot off it to kill Jews. Why is this a good idea? Because it's appeasement, and if we learned anything from World War II, it's how well appeasement works. And if Israel doesn't understand this, it shows a lack of nuance.

So in conclusion, I'm glad I've been ignoring the news, and I will return to that policy for a while.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Morality

Caeli: Hi!

Elliot: Hi, Caeli.

Caeli: Will you tell me about morality?

Elliot: Morality is an area of knowledge. It includes theories about how to live well, and how to make good choices, and what's right and wrong and good and evil. You could also call morality the theory of decision making.

Caeli: How can we determine what is moral, or not?

Elliot: For a lot of questions, we don't have to figure it out. We already know. We know stealing is wrong, and murder is wrong, and being kind to our friends is right. The usual thing to do is to use the knowledge we already have. We don't have to justify it. All we have to do is be willing to improve on it if it seems to have problems or flaws. But as long as it seems to work, then philosophically there's nothing wrong with using it even if we can't prove it's right.

Caeli: Then how will our moral knowledge get better? Do we really have to wait for problems -- for things to go wrong -- before we can fix them?

Elliot: No. If you want to, you can think about morality. If you do thought experiments, and imagine situations, and what you'd do in them, you can find problems now. And if you're suspicious there might be a problem, or just curious, then go right ahead and look for improvements.

Caeli: What else will help?

Elliot: It is good to fit theories into more general frameworks, or alter them to be more universal, or connect them with other ideas we have. Doing this is interesting in its own right; it's part of how we learn. But it also helps us correct errors. When our ideas don't mesh together nicely, that is a sign they could be improved. And the more generally they apply, the more varied examples we can try them out on, which will help reveal hidden flaws.

Elliot: Note that all this is exactly the same way that we would approach any other topic.

Caeli: What if I do want to know justifications for morality? Why are things moral?

Elliot: Well that's tricky, and we don't know the whole answer. But to start with, morality is the right way to live. That means it works well, in terms of whatever criteria are important. We have a lot of ideas about what those criteria are, like happiness, wealth creation, freedom, scientific achievement, or creating a lasting and valuable political tradition such as the United States government. And there are smaller things we value, like helping a friend, or teaching our child something he wanted to know, or cooking a tasty meal, or eating a tasty meal. Some of the things I just said might be wrong. Maybe they aren't so good after all. One of the things morality is about is figuring out which are right.

Caeli: I'm getting a clearer picture, but what about the foundations? What do we justify moral ideas in terms of?

Elliot: Let me be very clear and say again that we do not have to justify ourselves. And the whole idea of foundations is confused: we never discover ultimate, final, true foundations upon which we can never improve. There are always more subtle problems that we can work on.

Elliot: And knowing the correct foundations, or the reasons for things, is often not very helpful. Just because you discover how your fear of spiders came into existence doesn't necessarily mean you're any closer to getting rid of the phobia.

Elliot: Note, again, that this is the same for other topics besides morality.

Elliot: But with that said, it is interesting to think about why things are right. We have a lot of answers to that, but they aren't very well connected, and we could do with some deeper truths. I do have thoughts about that. I think I can answer your question to your satisfaction.

Caeli: That sounds good. Go ahead.

Elliot: What does morality consist of? Well, it's not supernatural. And it's not from God. What's left? It must come from physics, logic, and epistemology.

Caeli: What's epistemology?

Elliot: It is knowledge about knowledge. It answers questions like how we learn. But it doesn't just apply to humans. Lots of things contain knowledge. The obvious example is books or computers. Those contain the knowledge we put into them. Animals and plants also contain knowledge. Or perhaps saying they express knowledge would be clearer. I don't mean they have a compartment inside in which the knowledge is stored, though they do have DNA. But consider a tree. It expresses knowledge about how to turn sunlight into energy. A wolf expresses knowledge about how to hunt prey. There's also less obvious human-made examples, like a table embodies knowledge of how to keep items in locations that are convenient for humans.

Caeli: Alright, I get the idea. You mean knowledge very broadly.

Elliot: Yes.

Caeli: Isn't epistemology a type of logic?

Elliot: Yes, you can think of it that way. In that sense, math is logic as well. And how to argue is a matter of logic. And how to lie with statistics is a matter of logic. I consider epistemology important enough to mention by name.

Caeli: Is logic part of physics?

Elliot: I don't know. But I do know that brains are physical objects, so our knowledge of logic comes only through physical processes, which we know about through physics.

Caeli: Alright, so morality consists of physics, logic, and epistemology. Now what?

Elliot: This might appear completely useless. It's a bit like saying a computer consists of atoms. Yes, it does. But that doesn't tell us anything about how it works.

Caeli: It's reductionist.

Elliot: Yes. But we can move on from here. Morality is going to let people get good things. Let's ignore what the things are for now, and consider the getting. How do people accomplish their goals and get what they want? What will let them do that?

Caeli: Hey, it seems like we are getting somewhere already.

Elliot: Yes. So we're going to want power, in a very general sense. The more humans can shape reality, and have the power to get what they want, the more they will be able to get good things, whatever those are.

Elliot: Second is knowledge. People will need to know what is good or they might accomplish the wrong things.

Caeli: No wonder you mentioned epistemology in particular.

Elliot: Third is error correction. People might make mistakes while getting these good things, or they might be mistaken about what is good. So we're going to need to be able to deal with that and fix mistakes.

Elliot: Fourth is consistency. If people try for contradictory things, that won't work. Another way to say this is not to be self-defeating. If you're trying to get two different things, but it's not possible to get both, then you're bound to fail.

Caeli: This is cool so far.

Elliot: So these are our ingredients to build with. Now keep in mind that I could have named other ingredients. It isn't very important. There are a lot of ways to cover the same general ideas and name them different things.

Caeli: Alright, so what's the next step?

Elliot: Next we will do a thought experiment.

Elliot: The following is partly due to David Deutsch. It was his idea that for almost all practical purposes, it does not matter what the foundations of morality are, so long as you take morality seriously and apply it universally. And it was his idea to apply this to a morality based on squirrels.

Elliot: So, we haven't said what the good stuff people are trying to get is. Let's imagine the answer is maximizing the number of living squirrels, and see what happens.

Caeli: Isn't that absurd? And easily variable: why not bison?

Elliot: Yes it's absurd. But the consequences are interesting anyway. I don't want to give away the ending, so let's keep going.

Caeli: Let's clarify first. Do we want to maximize the number of squirrels today, or how do we count?

Elliot: The goal is the most squirrels at the most times. Take the average number of live squirrels at any given time, since the universe started, until the present, and that's your current score. The goal is to increase the number as high as possible.

Caeli: So should I start a squirrel farm and raise squirrels?

Elliot: Heavens no! Squirrels are dirty rodents. They might have diseases. You won't be able to sell them. Maybe you could get the government to pay, but then you'll be beholden to them.

Caeli: It sounds like you don't like squirrels. But for the sake of the thought experiment, shouldn't you pretend that you do?

Elliot: No. That isn't one of the things we're imagining.

Caeli: But we are considered a squirrel-based morality.

Elliot: We want to maximize their number over long timeframes. We don't have to like them.

Caeli: Won't liking squirrels help us treat them better, and increase their population?

Elliot: So, you build a squirrel farm. You have thousands of squirrels for tens of years. You increase the squirrel score a tiny fraction of a point.

Caeli: Isn't that better than nothing?

Elliot: It's not good enough to get a score of one.

Caeli: What should we do instead?

Elliot: Plan for the long term. The first thing to worry about is that a meteorite, exploding sun, or other large scale disaster wipes out humanity or squirrels or both. Making sure that doesn't happen is far more important than any farm. So we should focus on science before farms.

Caeli: That's counter-intuitive.

Elliot: Next, I'm worried about nuclear war, terrorists, and large problems here at home. They probably wouldn't be able to destroy us entirely, but they'd set us back and set science back. So we need good diplomacy and foreign policy to protect our scientific research.

Caeli: OK, that makes sense.

Elliot: And we need a powerful economy in order to produce materials for setting up millions of squirrel farms (or more). So capitalism and free trade are important.

Caeli: Hey, now we're getting somewhere, you've actually mentioned squirrels again.

Elliot: Yeah. Now where should we put these farms? On Earth, they'll just get in the way of people. Squirrels are dirty rodents that no one likes, and we need happy people to do science and capitalism.

Caeli: Shouldn't people change to like squirrels? Squirrels are the focus of morality!

Elliot: I don't see any need for that. We're going to put the squirrel farms on other planets. Humans and squirrels don't need to share any planets.

Caeli: Don't people like to have some squirrels around?

Elliot: Yes, I suppose so. Our dogs need something to chase. So we'll have squirrels in parks still. The point is we don't need to locate any squirrel farms on Earth. We want human civilization concentrated to reduce travel time.

Caeli: So your general idea is that the best way to maximize squirrels is to work on science, diplomacy, capitalism, and normal things -- the same things people care about today in real life -- and then eventually, when we are powerful enough, to colonize other planets with squirrels?

Elliot: Yes.

Caeli: Is there anything we should do differently? Maybe farmers shouldn't shoot squirrels.

Elliot: If a farmer shoots a squirrel, we get a tiny reduction in our squirrel score. If a farmer is unhappy because he didn't get to shoot a squirrel, we get a reduction in farm productivity, which will delay the squirrel colonies. Every day those are delayed, with their trillions (or whatever) of squirrels, counts for a lot.

Caeli: Will we colonize the moon with squirrels, or Mars?

Elliot: No, human colonization will come first. That will help us get the raw materials and production plants needed for a truly massive squirrel colonizing effort later.

Caeli: When will we finally make a lot of squirrels?

Elliot: Basically, once it's easy.

Caeli: Should we at least do it slightly before then. Perhaps as soon as we could do it universe-wide, instead of when it's easy to do it universe-wide?

Elliot: That's a good question. But we need to be able to do it reliably. If we barely have enough resources, and we're stretched thin, then that's very risky. Something could go wrong. When it's easy is approximately when the risks will be gone.

Caeli: OK, that makes sense. We need to get this right. We wouldn't want all the colonies to die because we made a mistake.

Caeli: I guess reliability is very important. If our ultimate goal is lots of squirrels, we should do everything we can to make absolutely sure that that happens. So, what if people forget about the plan to colonize planets with squirrels? Or change their minds about the squirrel mission?

Elliot: That's a good question. And the solution is to have institutions in our society for error correction. What that means is we must have lots of criticism, all the time. In an environment heavy on criticism, bad ideas are refuted, so no rival theories will ever be able to challenge the squirrel theory. If the criticism ever went away then what would matter is things like how easy a theory is to remember, not whether it's true. So then squirrels might lose. Criticism is their best defense against false ideas.

Caeli: Won't there also be criticism of the squirrel theory.

Elliot: Yes. But so what? It's true, so it will survive the criticism. Whatever question you ask of it, it will have an answer. And all arguments will eventually lead people to squirrels.

Elliot: As a bonus, institutions of criticism like this have the happy property that if the squirrel theory is not right, or we've slightly misunderstood it, or whatever, then that error will be corrected.

Caeli: What if we just entrench the squirrel theory. We'll indoctrinate our kids with it. Everyone will be required to believe it. I know it's heavy handed, but squirrels are worth it. Won't that be even more reliable? People can be stupid and might not understand the squirrel theory's brilliance, even though we know it's true.

Elliot: That would not work reliably at all. People might start to question the indoctrination. Or they might be indoctrinated with something else. Institutions might change over time. Preventing that is very hard. Or our civilization might go extinct because it has a static culture and can't do science. Or we might just never reach the stars and make the colonies it dreams of: we aren't indoctrinated with how to accomplish our mission, and indoctrinated people don't think freely so might not invent the answers.

Elliot: The one and only advantage squirrel theory has over rival moralities is that it's true. That does not mean it indoctrinates people better. So the only reliable thing to do is play to our strength and use criticism and persuasion.

Caeli: That makes sense, and it also is a much nicer way to live. We get to think instead of be taught to mindlessly obey.

Elliot: Yes :)

Elliot: Another thing to consider is that institutions of criticism, which keep the squirrel theory prominent, are far more important than actually creating lots of squirrels. If we neglect the squirrel project, we'll be led back to it. People will argue that we aren't making enough squirrels, and we'll change our policies. But if we ever neglect our institutions of error correction and criticism, then no matter how many squirrels we already have, we might stop caring about them and throw away the project overnight.

Caeli: OK, I think I've got the idea now. So, what's the overall point?

Elliot: This way of thinking applies to more than squirrels. Take any pattern of atoms, and make the goal to spread it across the universe, and what we'll need to do is maximize human power first, and then when we're ready, spread it in a stable, reliable, risk-free way. (Note: for squirrels, the pattern is not a single squirrel, it's a habitat with many squirrels, oxygen, water, and food.)

Elliot: So for any goal like that, we should ignore the goal and focus on human power. We need to enable ourselves first. And we need to learn how to accomplish the goal, and avoid mistakes, so knowledge and error correction come in there. And we wouldn't want to start a campaign to ban space flight, or science: that'd be inconsistent with our goal.

Caeli: OK, I see how all goals like that are best accomplished with the four ingredients you mentioned earlier.

Elliot: Amusingly, the goal of minimizing the number of squirrels also has very similar steps to maximizing squirrels. We need human power to reliably keep squirrels extinct, and make sure aliens never create any, and make sure a terrorist doesn't build a squirrel, and make sure squirrels never evolve again somewhere. So we must monitor the whole universe vigilantly, and we must keep the eradication of squirrels alive in public debate. Everything is the same, except what we do at the end.

Elliot: So, if the basis of morality is squirrels, or bison, or crystals, and we think carefully enough about what to do, then what we'd end up with is almost exactly the same morality that people believe in today: we'd first value human happiness, freedom, science, progress, peace, wealth, and so on. The only difference would be one extra step, much later in time, where we'd fill most of the universe with squirrels or bison or whatever.

Caeli: That's interesting.

Elliot: So each theory of morality is partly the same, and partly different. The part that's different could be maximizing squirrels. It could be maximizing bison. It could be minimizing squirrels. That part is easily variable, which makes it a bad explanation. But the other parts, about knowledge creation, wealth, happiness, human power, and freedom are all constant. They seem more universal. They at least universally apply to moral theories that minimize or maximize things (which includes any sort of utilitarianism).

Caeli: So, it doesn't really matter what the basis for morality is?

Elliot: Exactly. And suppose we thought the basis for morality was squirrels, but we were wrong. This would not cause any significant problems. We'd end up doing the right thing for now, and learning of our mistake long before we actually filled the universe with squirrels.

Caeli: OK. I think I'm getting the idea. But can you clarify how things like science follow from our ingredients?

Elliot: Yes, certainly. Science helps increase our knowledge. And this understanding of reality helps us better avoid errors. Power to shape reality comes from knowledge, but also from having great tools, and having resources. So we want robots, computers, factories, brooms, freezers, toilets, and so on. How do we get these? Capitalism. Free trade.

Caeli: What about fair trade, communism, and so on?

Elliot: Some people think those are what we need. It doesn't really matter to my point. We need a good economic system, whichever one it is. And we already know how to argue about which is good. We have lots of professional economists, and philosophers, who know about this. And we have lots of good books about it.

Caeli: OK. So go on.

Elliot: Acting consistently, and avoiding self-defeating policies, is a matter of knowledge too. If we wanted, we could boil it all down to knowledge, and useful physical manifestations of that knowledge. But it's better to go the other way, and boil it up to freedom, science, and so on.

Caeli: Why is freedom important?

Elliot: Thinking freely means there aren't any good ideas that are being automatically ruled out. And it means being free to question any ideas we already have, so we can find errors in them. Living freely means being able to shape our part of the universe in the best ways for us. And when everyone agrees about freedom, there will be no wars, and no fighting. Everyone will work on their own goals, and no one will mind, and no one will want to control others. Even if they disagree.

Caeli: So let me try to summarize the structure of your argument.

Elliot: Go for it.

Caeli: There are certain ingredients that help us get what we want, whatever that may be. And it turns out that what specifically we want is not critical: the way to get it will be about the same regardless. In short, the ingredients are knowledge and human power. But they imply valuing science, freedom, wealth, and roughly the same things we value today.

Elliot: That's right. So there you go. A justification of the morality we already know, from simple principles.

Caeli: What about rationality? I don't believe you mentioned it.

Elliot: You're right. We've been looking at issues on a large scale. How individuals should make choices is an important matter too. Rationality is one of the things I advocate they strive for. I'll tell you about individual-sized morality tomorrow, OK?

Caeli: Yes. :) Bye.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (11)

Morality Is Not For God

Caeli: Hi!

Elliot: Hi, Caeli.

Elliot: Here's something I find fairly amazing. Read this quote by Jack: "Morality is about things like how can there be a good God when there is evil in the world, and honoring thy parents. I'm an atheist and don't believe in that stuff."

Caeli: What's amazing about that?

Elliot: Jack believes that a typical example of a moral question is a religious question about God or a religious commandment. He is handing morality over to religious people. He thinks it is in the religious domain. He doesn't want it.

Caeli: Should he want morality?

Elliot: Philosophically, morality is about how to live. That's an important thing to know about, so he should be interested. But he believes the utterly absurd religious dogma that morality is a matter for God.

Caeli: Why would an atheist do that?

Elliot: Well, maybe he just never questioned that idea. Maybe he was turned off of the subject by the religious perspective on it that he was taught, and then he never realized that religion was wrong about what morality consists of.

Caeli: Should he have noticed?

Elliot: If his policy was not to be faithful to religion, that would mean questioning all of it. So that isn't his policy. That's not necessarily bad: religion is massive so it's hard to question all of it. But if he has a different policy, which consists of only questioning parts of religion, how does it work? Does he question parts he doesn't like?

Caeli: He could have questioned the religious monopoly on morality, but not realized the monopoly is false.

Elliot: Perhaps. But Socrates argued convincingly that morality cannot be determined by God, and his arguments are well known. It's in the Euthyphro dialog which can be read here.

Caeli: What was Socrates' argument?

Elliot: The argument takes the form of a difficult question with two answers, and then we can examine the consequences of each answer. The question is: is God's morality right because God believes it, or does God believe it because it is right?

Elliot: Either way we answer, religious morality will lose out. First consider that God chooses his beliefs about morality because they are right. What that means is that there is a conception of right outside of God, and God has no control over it, he simply uses his wisdom to figure it out. This is analogous to if God did not create the laws of physics, but did figure them out and tell them to us. In that case, he is only a messenger.

Caeli: That is surely unacceptable to the faithful, so let's answer the other way.

Elliot: Alright. The other answer is that something is morally right because God believes it. God can choose what's right. If God changes his mind, then morality changes too. So if God decides murder and theft are good ideas, then they are morally right. If that's the case, what's so good about morality? All it means is doing what we are told, no matter how horrible it seems to us.

Caeli: Perhaps God could do that, but He wouldn't.

Elliot: Why wouldn't He? Because it'd be wrong to?

Caeli: I guess that's why.

Elliot: If so, that refers to a morality independent of God.

Caeli: Back to murder, I don't think many religious people would accept a morality like that.

Elliot: Indeed. Which means they can't honestly give that answer. But the first answer didn't work out, either.

Caeli: What do you mean that the first answer didn't work? The world you described then made sense.

Elliot: It didn't give God or religion any special relationship with morality. He was just a messenger. So if the goal is to defend a religious monopoly on moral truth, then it didn't work.

Caeli: Let's back up a little. Most people wouldn't like a morality that allows for murder. But that doesn't mean it's logically invalid.

Elliot: True. But consider this: how would we know what morality was, if it was purely what God said?

Caeli: We'd listen to him.

Elliot: God doesn't talk to us. Except insane people.

Caeli: Good point. But let's pretend he did.

Elliot: But we might mishear him. Or we might misunderstand one of his ideas. So what we'd need to do is think about whether what we believe he's said makes sense. If it doesn't, then our best guess must be that we've misunderstood.

Caeli: Isn't that how it works when talking to other people, too?

Elliot: Yes. We have to come up with an interpretation of what they were trying to communicate, and we can only believe we've understood if we can invent one that we believe makes sense.

Caeli: So back to God, then even if moral truth was whatever God said, we'd have to use our own judgment to understand what he'd said?

Elliot: That's right. So the morality we acted on would still be human morality, created in human minds, according to what humans think makes sense.

Caeli: That's cool.

Caeli: So changing topics again, are there any religious defenses against Socrates' overall argument?

Elliot: No good ones. There is one idea which says morality is an aspect of God; it's an essential part of his nature.

Caeli: What's wrong with that?

Elliot: Consider if someone said physics was a part of God's nature. First, can he change his nature? If he can, we have the same problem as when he changes his mind and approves of theft and murder.

Caeli: So let's assume he can't change this part of his nature.

Elliot: Then, he's really no more than a messenger. There is a thing that exists, call it an "aspect of God", or not, it doesn't matter, God can't change it, so it's independent of his wishes. Calling it part of God is no more than a choice of terminology.

Elliot: People can still discover the laws of physics, just as if they were not part of God. So what difference does it make, for reality, to call the laws of physics an "aspect of God"?

Caeli: Is it the same for morality as physics?

Elliot: Yes, the logic works the same. He can't change the nature of morality, and humans can discover it the same way, and everything is exactly as if morality was not an aspect of God.

Caeli: Does it make any difference if we call the laws of physics an "aspect of God"?

Elliot: If it doesn't, then nothing meaningful is being asserted. If reality acts as if there is no God, then our explanations of reality do not need to include God.

Caeli: Could there be a God that isn't part of our explanations?

Elliot: I don't see any reason to think there is. But it's not important. Socrates never denies the existence of God, and he never denies that God is good (actually, the people of Athens were polytheistic, but that's not important). He argues only for morality independent of God. It isn't anti-religious at all, or at least one need not see it as such.

Caeli: I think I'm lost. Can you remind me of the structure of the discussion so far?

Elliot: Socrates asked a question, that either way you answer, you can't reasonably hold that morality is a matter for God. There's a claim about it being part of God's nature, but that didn't work either. So the conclusion is that morality is not God's domain. And then the larger conclusion is that Jack could have known this, because the argument is ancient. But he doesn't. That's meaningful.

Caeli: What does it mean?

Elliot: That he took a religious dogma for granted, despite a well known refutation. So, when he questions religion, he does it selectively.

Caeli: How does he select what to question?

Elliot: I don't know. But the most obvious guess would be that he questions the parts he does not like, or has a problem with. For example, he doesn't like the lack of science in religion, and the lack of scientific and rational attitudes, so he questions that and changes his mind.

Caeli: Is there anything wrong with being selective like that?

Elliot: Not at all. It's a very good thing to improve parts of your beliefs that you find problematic. However, Jack is loudly anti-religious. He would surely be very surprised to know that the sort of faith and adherence to religious dogma that he hates in others, is something he himself still has in at least one major way. And it isn't just some technicality, or some flaw shared by all people because no one knows better yet. The right idea actually predates Christianity.

Caeli: Well noticed.

Elliot: Thanks.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Message (1)

How To Ask Questions

Caeli: Hi!

Elliot: Hi, Caeli.

Caeli: I was told that I should ask you about parenting, but I'm not sure why.

Elliot: OK, go ahead. Perhaps you'll learn why, after you ask.

Caeli: What do you think of parents, today?

Elliot: I am not impressed.

Caeli: Why not?

Elliot: They use false epistemology, they don't think about and address the primary issues they are responsible for addressing, they don't notice when they act cruelly, or worse sometimes they do notice and continue anyway, they...

Caeli: Let's stop there for now. What are the primary issues that a parent needs to consider?

Elliot: He needs to think about what role he should play in his child's life, and what his responsibilities are, and he needs to consider whether conventional parenting practices make sense before adopting them.

Caeli: What are his responsibilities?

Elliot: A parent should help his child become independent. This has various aspects. He needs to give material support, and he needs to help the child find interests, and he needs to help the child to learn a variety of things.

Caeli: What sort of things are important for children to learn?

Elliot: Morality is near the top. That means knowledge of what a good life is, and how to make good choices. Then there's various things loosely called philosophy: how to ask questions, how to approach learning about something new, how to think of good ideas, how to solve problems, how to be optimistic, how to treat other people well, how to treat one's self well, how to decide which ideas to believe or not, how to explain reality. But let us never forget that the goal is not to force a child to learn what the parent deems important, it is to help the child learn things he is interested in. The things I've mentioned are things I think pretty much everyone would like to know and find helpful. There will also be other things. They may include how to play chess, or build lego castles, or beat a video game, but they may not.

Caeli: What if my child doesn't care for most of the things you mentioned? I don't remember meeting any children who asked me about any of those.

Elliot: Did you offer them?

Caeli: No, I guess not.

Elliot: Most people you meet already have ideas about what all the things I mentioned are. About whether they are fun, hard, useful, and what the answers are. And most people you meet have already learned that most people give bad advice about those things. So I don't think you can expect someone to just start asking you about them.

Caeli: Still, what if my child isn't interested in them?

Elliot: Well, first of all, is there a problem? If he knows other things and is doing well, maybe you shouldn't worry. And maybe he knows more about them than you've realised. So, consider what the topics have to offer, and then offer those things.

Caeli: And if he says no?

Elliot: There will be a reason. He may not tell it to you; he may not know what the reason is, explicitly. But you can try to figure it out.

Caeli: I don't know how to.

Elliot: Aha! I think you're demonstrating two things here. The first is that philosophy is very useful: your lack of knowledge of it is an obstacle to being a good parent. And second, perhaps the reason you find it difficult to imagine persuading your child that you have valuable philosophy to offer, is that in some areas, you don't.

Caeli: Am I a bad person?

Elliot: No, I didn't mean it that way. Ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of. Especially because good philosophy is hard to come by. Most people don't know any, explicitly.

Caeli: What's explicitly?

Elliot: It means in a language, like English. It's like conscious thoughts. If you can put an idea into words, it's explicit, but if you can't, it isn't.

Caeli: Alright, continue.

Elliot: A bad person is someone who chooses bad things for his life, or who values bad things.

Caeli: Isn't it important to actively choose good things for my life?

Elliot: Yes, but did you ever turn down a chance to learn philosophy that looked promising?

Caeli: No, I guess not. But wouldn't it be better if I knew more, now?

Elliot: It would undoubtedly be nice if you did. But if there was no way available to you to do better, surely you've done nothing wrong. Also, bear in mind that if you did know more, you could still say, "Wouldn't it be nice if I knew more?". You can say that no matter how much you know. It's just the human condition.

Caeli: What if there was a way I could have known more already, but I didn't notice it?

Elliot: I'm sure there were ways, if you knew how to find them. But you didn't, and I don't see how anyone could fault you for that. What you're really getting at is that it's possible to do better than we actually do. And that is great thing. It means improvement is possible.

Caeli: Is it bad to not improve really fast?

Elliot: It's important to try to improve, and to care about improving. It's also important not to beat yourself up over any mistakes you might make. That won't help anything. I like you now; you ask good questions.

Caeli: Thanks, I feel better. Shall we get back to parenting?

Elliot: OK.

Caeli: So one thing a parent should do is help his child learn about life and philosophy and his interests. But you said not to force him to learn these things. Can you expand?

Elliot: The way conventional parenting works is that the parent feels a huge responsibility towards his child. There is this person, and he's vulnerable, and the parent doesn't want him to be hurt. And he could grow up to be a criminal, and the parent doesn't want that. And he could just grow up to be boring, and have a mediocre life, and the parent doesn't want that either. The parent wants to protect him, and guide him to good things.

Caeli: That sounds good to me.

Elliot: Well, the motives are good. But that doesn't mean the results will be.

Caeli: Go on.

Elliot: Parents are so keen to prevent mistakes, that when they disagree with their child, they force the child to do it their way. And they make rules, again to prevent the child from doing anything the parent thinks would be a mistake.

Caeli: Do you think children are usually right?

Elliot: No, of course not. Children have a lot of ignorance. But they aren't always wrong, especially when the issue is their own life.

Caeli: If parents are right most of the time, would it maybe be best to just always do what the parent suggests? It'd work pretty well, most of the time.

Elliot: I don't think it would. But the best way to discuss this may be to look at the alternative, which is clearly better.

Caeli: OK, what is it?

Elliot: Most of the time, parent and child will agree. The parent will say he knows best, and suggest something, and the child will have no idea what's best, so he'll take his parents advice, willingly. That's the common case. So without any mention of using force, we already have a good thing happening most of the time.

Caeli: OK, so I guess the important case must be when they disagree.

Elliot: That's right. When they disagree, what the child is saying is, "I do know something about this topic. I have some knowledge, and I think it's enough knowledge to make a decision, and this is what I want to do."

Caeli: Isn't the child probably wrong?

Elliot: I can't evaluate the probability. But it isn't important. What's important is that we don't dismiss the child out of hand. There's no good reason to, and it messes up the times the child is right. And it teaches the wrong lessons about how to think.

Caeli: What do you mean?

Elliot: It's important to think for yourself, and to learn about how good your ideas are. That way you can learn to create better ideas by avoiding mistakes you've made in the past.

Caeli: So, if the parent doesn't discuss a child's ideas, he won't find out which ones are good and which are bad?

Elliot: Right. So, when there is a disagreement, the first thing that should be tried is to consider the disagreement and try to persuade each other.

Caeli: What if they don't want to?

Elliot: If things are going well, they will want to. I think it'd be best to first consider the case where life goes smoothly, to see how things should work. Then, if you still have questions about alternative lifestyles, or how to get to the right lifestyle from a flawed one, we can address them. Does that sound good?

Caeli: Yeah, that makes sense. OK, so they are trying to persuade each other...

Elliot: Right. Now the most common thing will be that the parent persuades the child. The reason is that although both could be wrong about the subject itself, the child has less knowledge about how much knowledge he needs to venture an opinion. And he has less knowledge about what subjects might be related and important. There are a lot more ways the child is likely to go wrong.

Caeli: OK, so what's the point?

Elliot: Well, the most common case is that the child agrees immediately. In a disagreement, the most common case is that the child had a parochial misconception and is easily persuaded. But after that, the other case is that they still disagree, and then they are on even ground. There is no way to tell, automatically, who is right. We can't just assume the parent is.

Caeli: Are you sure it's even? I think a lot of parents misjudge how much they know about their child's life and interests.

Elliot: That's a very good point. Most disputes are about the child's life, so the child is in a better position to know about it.

Caeli: So what should happen if the parent and child can't agree?

Elliot: Well, first off, they can agree. It's possible. There's no powerful force stopping them.

Caeli: No? But people find it hard to agree.

Elliot: Well, communication is a very hard problem. That covers a ton of cases. And then there's the issue that maybe to come to agree they need to think of some new idea to help reconcile their positions. They can do that, and nothing is stopping them, but maybe they won't.

Caeli: OK, so they can agree. But let's say they don't. Then what.

Elliot: Well, the child's life is the child's life. Why shouldn't he make his own choices?

Caeli: He doesn't know what's best for himself.

Elliot: Well, remember we are only discussing the cases where first the parent's initial idea didn't win the child over, and then when they talked about it, the parent wasn't able to think of anything very persuasive. Or cases where the child has a really powerful idea of his own. So in these cases, either the parent hasn't been able to show that he knows what's best, or the child has an especially good idea. So this is the time it's least possible to say that children don't know what's best for themselves, because we are only discussing the few times when maybe they do.

Caeli: I'm not sure about that, but let's go on and maybe it will make more sense. Why should a child make his own choices, exactly?

Elliot: Because he's a person. A human being. One of the things we value in our culture is freedom. Everyone gets his own life, and his own property, and makes his own decisions about what to do with them. That's a great thing, and we should apply it to everyone.

Caeli: I think I'm losing track of the point. Can you summarise?

Elliot: You asked about parenting. One of the issues parents face is helping their children learn important things about life, to prepare them for independence. Parents commonly make rules, and insist on their way by force, but they shouldn't. It's better to persuade children, and in the rare cases where the parent can't figure out how to do that, he has just demonstrated his own ignorance of either the subject or the child, and either way he's now in the one situation where he'd want to use force, but also the one situation where he has lost all justification to use it.

Caeli: I'm getting tired, do you mind if we continue tomorrow? I promise I'll reread what you said. There's so many things I wanted to ask that we didn't get to. Like what is parochial, and how do you know about all this stuff, and what if the parent says persuasive things but the child won't listen.

Elliot: I don't mind taking a break. I'm glad you seem excited by this.

Caeli: By the way, why is the title "How To Ask Questions"? It was all about parenting.

Elliot: The topic was parenting. But the Caeli character asked a question for most of her lines. So this conversation serves as a good example of how to ask questions.

Caeli: Oh, that's great. I'm proud.

Elliot: You should be. Goodnight.

Caeli: Bye!

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

How To Ask Questions 2

Caeli: Hi!

Elliot: Hi, Caeli.

Caeli: What's parochial?

Elliot: This is going to take a little while to explain, so bear with me.

Caeli: OK.

Elliot: In the distant past, life was very different, in some ways. But in other ways, it was similar. In the distant future, life will be very different, in some ways. But in other ways, it will be similar. Things that are constant between different places, different times, and different cultures, like logic or math, are not parochial. Features of our personal circumstances that are unique to our lives, are very parochial. The main idea is that parochial thinking is lacking in perspective. It mistakes local features of reality for universal patterns. The opposite of parochial is something like universal, necessary, or fundamental.

Caeli: What do you mean by "local"?

Elliot: Local usually means "here". It's stuff that's close to us, usually physically close, like in terms of location. But more generally, a local thing is one that isn't attached to the universe in general. It's something we can think about in isolation.

Caeli: Is anything really unrelated to anything else?

Elliot: Not perfectly, but we can think about the aspects that are unrelated, or make some approximations.

Caeli: OK, so parochial ideas are like local ideas?

Elliot: That's very close. But if an idea really is local, it's not wrong to think so. Parochial thinking refers to making mistakes about what is local. It's thinking stuff is not local, when actually it is.

Caeli: Can you give an example?

Elliot: There's a saying that death and taxes are universal. The reason people think that is that they play a huge role in our lives. But the saying is very silly. Already people are putting off death for many years using new medicines. And already there are books describing how we could have a good society without taxes.

Caeli: I think I see what you mean. So, should we just avoid saying that things are universal, if we don't know?

Elliot: What we need to do, is think carefully about what we do know, and what makes sense. Explanations have their own logic which says what they apply to, and you can't make it more or less just by saying something different. Now consider taxes. Lots of societies in the past didn't have any. So it's hard to imagine how a careful thinker could conclude they are a universal feature of human existence.

Caeli: What about death?

Elliot: Well, that one is easy to forgive, at least until recently. Let's not worry too much about whether people should have known better in the past. The point is that if we try, we can identify a lot of parochial mistakes and avoid them. Surely we will be making others we don't know about, but the goal is to get better at this.

Caeli: Why is this important?

Elliot: It's related to a lot of things. For example, parenting. Because of their extreme ignorance, young children are prone to make parochial errors. They have such a small data set to work with that unless they get a lot of advice about how to not think parochially, they are bound to make a lot of mistakes.

Caeli: That's cool. I like when seemingly different topics are related.

Elliot: Yeah. It happens a lot. The reason is that explanations have reach. I was actually just talking about this a moment ago. I was saying that you can't make explanations apply to more or less stuff. So, another word for "apply" there is "reach".

Caeli: What's an example that goes the other way: making an explanation have less "reach" than it should?

Elliot: Suppose someone says that it's wrong to hit people, because hitting hurts, and hurting is wrong. That applies to all hitting, whether he likes it or not. It applies to self defense. Hitting an assailant hurts him, and hurting is wrong (or so he says).

Caeli: That's silly. Of course not all hitting, or hurting, is wrong.

Elliot: Indeed, but people say stuff like this all the time. Another example would be if a parent says that pornography is sinful, so a child can't see any. Well, if that's so, then to be consistent the parent better not look at any pornography either, or by his own logic he is a sinner.

Caeli: A lot of people think life is different for parents and children, and different rules should apply to them. Does that make sense?

Elliot: Yes and no. Parents and children have different circumstances, and different characteristics. For example, parents are generally taller, so they have less need to keep things on low shelves. I think the important thing is that any difference between what's right for parents and children has a reason. It needs to be based on different characteristics. But what is the characteristic of children that makes pornography more sinful for a child than a parent?

Caeli: I don't know. Why don't you tell me?

Elliot: I think what people say is that children can't handle it as well until they are more mature. But I don't agree with that.

Caeli: Why not?

Elliot: I don't want to dwell on this, but I'll say briefly that people's obsession with sex is very parochial, and the ideas surrounding sex are full of error.

Caeli: That sounds interesting. Can I ask you about it some time?

Elliot: Yes, I'd be happy to talk about it. I just don't want to get too far away from parenting for now.

Caeli: OK, I agree, let's try to keep focussed. So, umm, what's next?

Elliot: Yesterday you asked, "What if the parent says persuasive things but the child won't listen?"

Caeli: Oh yeah! That's a good question.

Elliot: One issue is that the word "listen" is ambiguous here. It could mean that the child still disagrees, or it could mean that he plugs his ears and doesn't hear what the parent says.

Caeli: Well, I meant that he hears the parent, but he acts like he isn't listening.

Elliot: OK, I think I see the confusion. What you're imagining is a very common scene. It's a family where a lot of things have gone wrong in the past, and now the child doesn't trust the parent, but he also doesn't know how to stand up for himself, so he doesn't like what the parent is saying, but he doesn't know what to do about it, so he just sort of ignores it.

Caeli: What should be done about that?

Elliot: That's a very hard question to answer, because it's very parochial. First, there's no universal reason that things should go disastrously wrong in that way. It's a feature of our culture, and a fairly recent phenomenon. Second, every family is different, and the solution will depend on subtle details of the people involved and their lives. Third, if we focus on the wrong way to live, that misses the point. What people really need to know is the right way. If they understood that, they could work out how to get there.

Caeli: Hmm, so I guess you want to tell me the right way to live?

Elliot: Yes :)

Caeli: What is :) ?

Elliot: It's a smiley face. It's sideways.

Caeli: Oh, I see. Neat :)

Elliot: You can add a nose, too :-), or stick out its tongue :-p

Caeli: Haha, mine is winking ;)

Elliot: When things are going right, what does it mean for a child not to listen? It means he is not persuaded. It means he disagrees. It means he thinks his own idea of what to do is best, and nothing the parent has said has changed that. (Or, more likely, the child has changed his idea in small ways because he thought the parent was right about some side issues.)

Caeli: So, what should the parent do about this?

Elliot: Well, he should consider that he might be wrong. And he should also consider that it might not be very important either way. And if he thinks he is right and it is important, he should think about how to express this better. Maybe what you're really getting at is you want to know how to be persuasive?

Caeli: Yeah, that sounds right. And also, does persuasion always work, if you're right?

Elliot: That's a good question. OK, the key elements to persuasion are argument and suggestion. By argument, I mean pointing out flaws in the ideas other than yours, and saying criticism of them. I'll call those ideas "rivals", by the way. So, we give reasons that rival theories don't work. If you can convince someone his idea is no good, he won't want to do it any longer. By suggestion, I mean suggesting your own idea that you think would be best. To be persuasive, you don't have to conclusively rule out alternatives. If you highlight the great merits of your advice, people will take it even if other courses of action still look OK.

Caeli: What if someone is having trouble seeing the merits, and you know what they are, but you're having trouble putting it into words?

Elliot: That's hard. If it's important enough, you can keep trying and you will be able to figure it out, especially with the other person's help. He can say what he understands so far, and make guesses about what you mean.

Caeli: That sounds nice. I wish the people I talked with were so helpful.

Elliot: Maybe you should suggest that they try that.

Caeli: I will, now that you mention it. So, do continue.

Elliot: Well, if it's not really important, and you can't put your idea into words, then it won't be a disaster if the other person doesn't take your advice. So just relax.

Caeli: Would it be better if he did take my advice though, if I'm right?

Elliot: You can't be certain you're right, so it's important that he make up his own mind about who's right.

Caeli: OK, but the point is he can't make up his mind because I haven't expressed my idea properly. But if I am right, and I don't express it, isn't he missing out?

Elliot: Well, yes, I guess so. But consider that the time it takes to put your idea into words could be spent doing something else, which would also be valuable.

Caeli: So, I don't think I really understand how to be persuasive, yet.

Elliot: Well, you criticise rival ideas, and suggest your own. If you explain why your idea is good, and others are flawed, and you're right, and the person understands, surely he will be persuaded.

Caeli: It sounds easy when you put it that way. But in practice isn't it hard?

Elliot: Yes. Life is complex, so there will be lots of factors to take into account. And communication is hard, so people aren't going to understand all the nuances of your position, at least not immediately.

Caeli: So let's try to tie this back to parenting. You were saying a parent should use persuasion and not force or rules?

Elliot: That's right. There are some huge benefits to doing it this way.

Caeli: What are they?

Elliot: First is error correction. If the policy is to always do what the parent originally says, then any errors the parent has in his thinking will never be corrected. But when persuasion is attempted, a lot of errors can be found. And I don't just mean that the child will point them out. When he tries to present his ideas rationally and persuasively, the parent himself will discover a lot of problems with them, and a lot of improvements that could be made.

Elliot: Second is that how is a child to learn how to think for himself if the parent never lets him? I realise parents will try to give their children some choices. But, the more the better. A child who is accustomed to considering rival ideas, and evaluating criticisms and merits will be much better prepared to be independent.

Elliot: Third, by involving the child, we have a whole new source of creativity. No longer is it the parent's sole burden to find good things for the child. Now the child will be able to help. Maybe he won't have many good ideas at first, but over time he will get better at it.

Caeli: That sounds good. Why don't more parents do it?

Elliot: They think that they do! A lot of parents say they listen and give reasons, and only "lay down the law" when their child is being really unreasonable and is obviously wrong. Unfortunately what this actually means is that if the parent fails to be persuasive, he interprets this as the child's error.

Caeli: Could it be the child's error?

Elliot: Yes, certainly. But the parent doesn't know that it is. It's never obvious that something is wrong. Sometimes it appears to be, but that could be a parochial mistake.

Caeli: Wow, this parochial thing really does come up a lot.

Elliot: Yeah, I told you :)

Caeli: Could you give an example of something that seems obvious, but is actually a parochial mistake?

Elliot: Suppose a parent sees his child pouring cereal on the floor. He may think this is obviously a mistake. The child is making a mess, for no good reason. He has some horrible misconception, or worse he's trying to hurt the parent. In the parent's worldview, there is nothing to gain by putting cereal on the floor, and a lot to lose. He assumes this must be true of everyone else's life too. But it isn't.

Caeli: What's a worldview?

Elliot: It means all of someone's ideas and values and explanations.

Caeli: Why might a child pour cereal on the floor? That doesn't sound good to me.

Elliot: Maybe it makes an interesting sound. Maybe it's fun to walk on. Maybe the child wants to have more cereal, and thinks pouring it is a way to create cereal. Maybe the child dropped something into the box, and is trying to get it back out. Maybe the child thinks the cereal is pretty and makes the floor look nicer. Maybe the child has seen the dog eating things off the floor before, and wants to see it again. Maybe the child doesn't like that cereal and wants to get rid of it.

Caeli: A lot of those aren't very good reasons to pour cereal on the floor. Like if the child lost a toy in the box, he could probably get it by reaching in, or at least he could dump the cereal into a container to avoid making a mess and to be able to eat it later.

Elliot: That's very true. There are probably improvements that could be made. But the point is that the fundamental idea the child has could be sound. There are many, many ways it could be sound. That the parent couldn't think of any shows there was a serious error in his thinking.

Caeli: Oh, I guess there was.

Elliot: What the child really needs is not for the parent to force him to stop. That's terrible. He could just use some help. It'd be good if the parent found out what he was trying to accomplish, and then gave some suggestions. Like if the child is trying to decorate, he might like to know about paint, which has a lot of advantages over cereal. And he might like to know about paper too, instead of using the floor.

Caeli: That's cool. After some improvements, the final result could probably be something the parent doesn't mind anymore.

Elliot: That's right. And also, suppose the child likes walking on cereal, and he's doing it on the kitchen floor which is actually a good place for that. Then the parent could change his mind and approve once he knows that reason, and sees that the child's action makes sense.

Caeli: What if the child's idea actually is bad?

Elliot: The worse it is, the more better ideas exist for the parent to suggest. And the worse it is, the easier it is to find bad parts that the child won't like once they're pointed out.

Caeli: Oh, that's cool. So the times it's hardest to be persuasive are the times it's least important.

Elliot: Yes, exactly!

Caeli: I need to go, but I'd love to continue another time.

Elliot: I'll be happy to oblige. Farewell.

Caeli: Bye bye!

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

How To Ask Questions 3

Caeli: Hey!

Elliot: Hi, Caeli.

Caeli: Last time we talked was fun. I'm glad to be back.

Elliot: That's excellent.

Caeli: So, where were we? Oh yeah. We were talking about persuasion. I don't think you clearly said if persuasion always works, if you are right.

Elliot: It doesn't, but that's OK. Keep in mind that the more important the situation is -- the more critical the error you wish to correct -- the easier persuasion is. So when persuasion fails, we're usually talking about cases where nothing too big is at stake.

Caeli: OK, but even then wouldn't it be better if we got the right answer? If persuasion won't work, maybe we can get it another way.

Elliot: There is no such thing as a way of acting that always does the right answer. It's not possible to have a system that makes mistakes impossible. What we should look for are policies that help spread good ideas to everyone, and help prevent mistakes from spreading, and help eliminate mistakes within ourselves.

Caeli: That sounds wise. OK, how do we do that?

Elliot: Let's compare persuasion and listening to people who feel completely sure that they are right. If someone is sure he's right, and everyone is required to listen to him, good ideas will have an easy time spreading. Someone just has to think of one, and be confident that it's good. Unfortunately, bad ideas will also spread easily. Every time someone mistakes a bad idea for a good one, that will spread just as easily as a good idea. And there aren't any mechanisms for correcting errors built into this system, so once they start to spread, there's nothing to stop them.

Caeli: What about with persuasion?

Elliot: Using persuasion, good ideas will often spread, and they will spread fairly effectively. Bad ideas, on the other hand, will have an uphill battle. Every step of the way, people will challenge them and criticise them. And if someone comes up with a powerful criticism of a bad idea, that itself is a good idea, and a persuasive one that many people will be interested in, so it could spread and cause the elimination of error. Further, if I try to persuade someone of my idea, he may end up persuading me that I was wrong, or I may realise I'm wrong while examining my own idea. So there are multiple levels of error correction.

Caeli: If someone's really sure he has a good idea, isn't that important? If we take that into account, maybe we can find and spread good ideas faster, while still thinking for ourselves some too.

Elliot: It does matter. There are a lot of steps people can take to get their ideas heard. For example, they can write and publish a book. If someone cares enough to do that, more people will be exposed to his ideas. Or he can go on TV, or give lectures. People can put effort into advocating their ideas proportional to how sure they are that it's true and valuable.

Caeli: Oh, that's cool. What if the author of a good idea is really busy, though?

Elliot: If he's too busy to ever tell anyone, then no possible system could spread his idea. But if he does tell some people, they are free to advocate his idea for him, with as much passion as they think is fitting.

Caeli: Are there any of your ideas that you'd like me to advocate for you?

Elliot: That would be nice. But I don't want to say which ones. Just pick whichever you find most interesting or important, or whichever ones come up frequently in your life.

Caeli: OK, I will!

Elliot: I will do the same for you, of course.

Caeli: But I haven't said any ideas.

Elliot: You've said some, but also your questions contain ideas in them. What I meant is that I learn things from you, and I won't hesitate to pass them on when good chances present themselves.

Caeli: Oh, thanks :)

Caeli: Will you tell people that the ideas came from me?

Elliot: Probably not. It's hard to keep track of where my ideas come from, and it's not very important anyway. We should judge ideas based on their merits, not their author.

Caeli: But I want to get credit, so people know I have good ideas.

Elliot: Don't worry about that. Anyone who talks to you will instantly see that you are bright. And if he doesn't, he's silly, so don't think of him.

Caeli: OK, I guess. Maybe I'll come back to this later. What I really want to know about today is you said parents act cruelly.

Elliot: That's right. There are a lot of well known things parents do or say which are cruel. Consider: "You'll understand when you're older", "Do what I say, or else", "Eat your vegetables", "Go to your room", "You can come back when you're ready to apologize", "Because I'm your father, and I said so".

Elliot: And then there's ideas like that children need limits and boundaries. Which are only meaningful and controversial because they mean limits and boundaries that children don't want. And there's the ideas of compromises, discipline, obedience, spoiling children, that "you can't always get what you want", and that a few dollars a week is plenty of money.

Caeli: Wow, that's a lot of stuff. I see why some of them are bad, like "I said so" isn't a good reason. But what about being a father? Don't parents need to be able to make some decisions for the family?

Elliot: As we've discussed earlier, the more critical the case, the easier persuasion is. If a parent can honestly say that something is very important, but for some reason, such as time pressure, he isn't able to explain things to the child now, then won't children voluntarily go along with it?

Caeli: Don't parents try that a lot, and their children don't listen?

Elliot: Yes, but I think you're proving my point. That situation doesn't happen very often. If a parent uses it frivolously, his children may notice and distrust him in the future.

Caeli: What about if they're at a restaurant, and the child is disturbing the other customers. I think that's pretty common.

Elliot: Yes, but it's nothing like the kind of emergency I was thinking of. What's the worst that can happen? You're asked to leave the restaurant. That's not very bad. It's nothing worth damaging your relationship with your family over.

Caeli: Wouldn't it be better if the child calmed down long enough for the parent to explain, so they wouldn't get kicked out?

Elliot: Yes, it would. And that can certainly happen. The parent could say, "Please stop. I think you're making a mistake, and I want to tell you why, but first it's very urgent that you lower your voice and stop throwing things." The child will get an explanation right away if he stops, so he doesn't have anything to lose. He doesn't have to take his parent's advice on faith for more than a few minutes. And once he does this, he'll have a better idea whether to do it again in the future. I think children who won't calm down for a little while to talk have almost always tried this many times in the past, and it didn't go well.

Caeli: How would it go badly?

Elliot: Well, the parent might say, "Great, now you're calm. So, you can't act like that in restaurants. You have to be polite to the other people, and it hurts me when you act like an animal."

Caeli: Wow, that's terrible. I wouldn't want any advice at all from someone who talked like that.

Elliot: Yeah, it's unpleasant. It says the child can't have what he wants, but it doesn't explain why in any detail, and it surely doesn't explain why the suggested way of life is nice and enjoyable. And it's manipulative. The parent has chosen to be hurt by behavior he doesn't like as a way to suppress it.

Elliot: By the way, there's a very important fact we haven't yet considered. It is that a parent does not have to take his child to a formal restaurant before explaining what sort of behavior is expected there. It's quite irresponsible to go to one without giving the child any warning. On the other hand, if the child knows what's happening in advance, and has chosen that he does want to go to the restaurant, then the only things that will stop him from acting with great decorum are either if he doesn't know how to, or he changes his mind.

Caeli: So, then what?

Elliot: If he changed his mind about the restaurant visit, perhaps you should leave. Oh well, but really not a very big deal. And if he doesn't understand decorum, despite the lessons he had before coming, that is almost certainly a very small problem. Just remind him, or tell him the parts he doesn't know. If he's truly interested in trying to act appropriately for a formal restaurant, that is, if he does want to be there, then he will be happy to get advice about how to do it better.

Caeli: I see. I guess most of the problems come when the child doesn't really want to be there, or doesn't want to behave.

Elliot: That happens a lot, yes. Another issue is that parents overreact. I've seen parents discipline their kids because they thought the child was bothering me, even though I said he wasn't. The parent refused to believe me, and thought I was just being polite.

Caeli: That's a shame. Why are parents to eager to be kind and helpful to strangers, but not their own children?

Elliot: Our culture values treating strangers with care, and being helpful to them as appropriate. And it's right to do that. It's just that it is also right to be good to our children.

Caeli: If treating strangers well is valuable, then isn't the parent being helpful by making his child do it?

Elliot: I'm sure he's trying to be helpful. But this gets back to using force or persuasion. There's no need, and no justification, to threaten a child if he has made a mistake out of ignorance. Won't he be happy to be told about a very good value that is present in the world, which he can enjoy?

Caeli: Oh, it sounds so much nicer when you put it that way.

Elliot: Indeed. What's going on frequently is that the child doesn't like the parent's advice, because it isn't persuasive, and doesn't seem to be good or nice.

Caeli: If most parents are bad at persuasion, even when they are right, is it understandable if they use force instead sometimes?

Elliot: Well, are they making a large effort to become better at persuasion? Any effort at all? I don't think they can be forgiven if they aren't trying.

Caeli: What if they don't know that persuasion is better? That's just ignorance, so can't we forgive it?

Elliot: Our society values freedom, and voluntary association, and not being forced to do things. Everyone in our culture knows this. If they decide it somehow doesn't apply to children, they are arbitrarily restricting the reach of one of our values to exclude people. It's well known that you shouldn't do this to other groups like blacks or women. But, yes, it's a parochial error and the real issue shouldn't be forgiveness, it should be how to help our society move past this blindness.

Caeli: That's very noble. What do you think would help to remedy this blight?

Elliot: Maybe writing dialogs.

Caeli: Do you like self-reference?

Elliot: Yes :)

Caeli: What are some ways persuasion can go wrong even though you're right?

Elliot: Persuading another person is a matter of communicating your idea and its merits, and discovering rival theories the other person holds, and communicating criticisms of those. Fortunately, the other person will often be helpful and refute some rival theories himself.

Elliot: So, successful persuasion isn't just about being right. It's also about being able to communicate with this person, and finding out about other ideas he has which are relevant, and responding to them. All those steps can go wrong even if your main idea is true.

Caeli: You've mentioned a few times that communication is hard. That goes against common sense. People hang out to talk all the time, and often use this to relax, and find it easy.

Elliot: How hard it is depends on what you want to say, and your culture. In our culture, some communication is common and easy, because everyone has knowledge to facilitate it. But that's cheating, in a sense, because it doesn't involve much knowledge getting from one person to another, it involves both people already having shared knowledge.

Caeli: OK, so tell me about the case when they don't already share an idea.

Elliot: If someone doesn't understand my idea already, the conventional theory is that I can just tell him, and then he will. But that doesn't make sense. He doesn't know what it is. I can say words that I think can be translated into the idea, but he will only be able to guess at the correct method of translating words to idea, because he doesn't know what he's supposed to end up with.

Elliot: By the way, far and away the best reference on this topic is the book Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. See chapter 6 on The Location of Meaning.

Caeli: Can you give a brief summary, now?

Elliot: Sure. OK, imagine sending messages to space aliens. We have to put the message in a language, say English. And we have to do something to indicate that this is a message, and not just random junk, so that they notice and try to understand it. And we can include some hints about how to decode the main idea, that we think might be helpful.

Caeli: Could we just include a dictionary?

Elliot: Yes, and that might be helpful, but unfortunately they won't know how to read it, when they start.

Caeli: Oh, well how will they ever get started?

Elliot: They can look for patterns, and they can make guesses about what things mean, and then try applying the guesses to other parts of the text, and if the guess makes sense in multiple places, then we know the guess has reach and that's a sign it's good and worth trying in more places.

Caeli: This idea of reach seems to have a lot of reach.

Elliot: Yeah. Now consider when we try to say something to another person. We face all the same problems as with a space alien, except for one difference. The difference is that we already have shared knowledge. In fact, we have a lot, including the whole English dictionary. So that makes it a lot easier, because whenever we want to express a new idea, we can say something that's partly new and partly old. Then it's easier for people to get started decoding it. It's like filling in the blanks, instead of guessing the entire thing at once.

Caeli: So this relates to how you were saying communication is easy when you already share knowledge of what you're saying, but hard when you don't already share the knowledge you want to communicate?

Elliot: Yes. Communicating new ideas to a person is exactly the same kind of problem as communicating them to a space alien. It's easier because we have more shared knowledge to start with. But as many people have pointed out, we can expect to have shared knowledge with space aliens too. They will have physicists and mathematicians, and know about logic and morality, just like we do. Communication is hard in both cases because it's hard to guess what idea someone has when you don't already know it.

Elliot: Now, there's a very important fact I haven't mentioned yet. It is that a baby is just like a space alien. What I mean is that he has very little shared knowledge with other people. So communicating to him is very difficult. And that he ever understands anything is amazing. Babies don't have a whole civilisation with foreign language specialists, physicists, mathematicians, and so on, to translate messages. They only have their own brain, and their extreme ignorance.

Caeli: But babies learn language, and lots of stuff. It doesn't seem like a problem.

Elliot: That happens for a few reasons. The first is that babies have fully functional brains. They are very creative. Otherwise learning human language would not be possible. The second is that our culture has evolved traditions about raising children. What that means is that over time ways to raise kids that work less well have been eliminated, and ways that work better have been found. I don't mean better for everything, but for specific issues like raising a child who can talk, we've evolved to be very good at it. (Of course, raising a child to talk intelligently is another matter, and many people would agree with me that there's room for improvement there.)

Caeli: Are there more reasons?

Elliot: Our children are immersed in our culture. There are people talking all the time. They don't have just one message to decode. There are thousands, and if they only decode every hundredth message, that will be fine. It's easier to find patterns in such a big data set.

Caeli: That's cool. So, I read that scientists have shown that young children don't have mature brains yet, not like adults.

Elliot: Those aren't scientists, they are psychologists and "social scientists". And they are not very interesting, so I'd prefer not to talk about them much. Maybe another time. For now, let me just say: if children don't have very functional brains, what is the explanation for how they learn so much?

Caeli: I don't know.

Elliot: Indeed. And neither do those "scientists" that you mentioned.

Caeli: Actually I better go now. But I'll prepare a few questions for next time.

Elliot: OK, see you.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

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