Blogs you need to know about

I write a blog about things I think are annoying. It's included topics like Amy Schumer, the fact that people still say "bye Felicia," and people who refer to themselves as intellectual.

Res Annoying 

http://resannoying.tumblr.com

And our cat writes a blog about living with us. 

barnabyscatblog

https://barnabyscatblog.wordpress.com

Useless Gun Post

We don't have any way of saying whether or not carrying a gun makes you safer, or prevents (slows, stops) mass shootings, etc. 

The best we can manage is either tapping our forefinger against our chin, checking our gut instincts and offering a yay or nay, in which case if I say Yay and you say Nay, we're again at an impasse, and that didn't help us at all; OR we can point to cases where a person used their weapon to "prevent" (more about "prevent" later) a bad thing and say "SEE?" And the problem here is, well, it's anecdotal. And because we don't and can't have all of the data from all of the events of this type, or even a representative sample of the data, we can't say for certain if this case is an outlier, or part of a general trend. Of course, for public relations it's an entirely different matter. But we're not interested in merely creating an impression of legitimacy, are we? We want to be able to say, to the best of our ability, whether or not we're any safer. And to do that we need data.

But before we get data, we need to clean up some definitions. "Safer", for example, is a pretty nebulous term. For example, say in the data we found that with guns, there is a 10% decrease in the likelihood of death, but a 30% increase in the likelihood of injury. Is that acceptable? Is death the only thing we're interested in? Either way we hash it out, we need to say explicitly ahead of time how we're measuring or we'll only be drawing a circle around the data that seems to support our own biased position and saying we proved it, not unlike the anecdotal case above.

Also, safer for whom? Are we interested in self-protection only, or the protection of others as well? Clearly the answer to that question will change the way we look at data.

Also, "prevent" is a tricky word. It suggests we're stopping people before they start. That either means a stare down with nothing happening afterwards, or it means shooting people in cold blood. Presumably no one would advocate shooting in cold blood. So we would probably want to look at stopping or slowing down a shooter. Here the problem is we have to enter the weird world of counterfactuals: what would have happened, or what could have happened, i.e. What did happen in the possible world where there was no intervention. We don't have access to that information, because that information doesn't actually exist. We can speculate, but this will lead to estimation, and estimation is heavily subject to bias. (Suppose your hypothesis is that guns do not make anyone safer and you estimate the "could have killed" number at 5, whereas my hypothesis is that guns do make you safer, and I estimate the "could have killed" number at 100). Perhaps I interpret a (relatively) innocuous bar fight as a potential mass shooting (ahem), or you interpret a mass shooting a several distinct separate incidents. Clearly our beliefs will taint our analysis.

And lastly, we need to count everyone who was there. This probably seems obvious, but in detail it gets tricky. Suppose there is a shooting in a mall where there are 5000 people. 10 die, 20 are wounded. We need to know about the other 4970 people. How many of them are carrying weapons? How can we get that information? Are we considering them to be participants or not? Are they causal factors in determining safety rates? This is important because if it turns out that in most cases there are other gun-carriers present who did nothing/ran away, their protect-self rates would be high, while their protect-other rates would be no impact. 

Now suppose it is a mall (not a ticketed event where we can get an attendance figure) and we just don't have a good way of knowing how many people are present. Again, the estimation bias issue creeps back in. How many others we estimate will impact ratios, as above. 

I say all this not to say we shouldn't research these things. We obviously should. Just because something is tricky doesn't mean it should be avoided. I simply mean to point out that if you think the evidence clearly supports your position, whatever your position is, you are grossly over-estimating the evidence that's available. 

If we talked about the NCAA like we talk about anything else

Actual Story: School A beat School B 102-81.

News Story: "School A and School B played each other today. We'll give each school the same amount of airtime to state why they won. You can weigh in on who won on our Facebook page."

Facebook Story: 

"Free throws cause autism!"

     "No they don't!"

     "We need to study whether they do better!"

"In 1992 someone from School B said something bad."

"The troops go to School A"

"The troops go to School B"

"School A contains ingredients I don't know what they are!"

     "If we don't know what it is, it's probably scary!"

"Hitler would support School A!"

"Hitler would support School B!"

"I don't believe in School B, and I shouldn't have to acknowledge that it exists."

"The troops go to School B."

     "They go to School A, too!"

"What are you all talking about? The score was 102-81. End of discussion. There's no argument to be had!"

     "Shut up, nerd!"

     "You're an elitist!"

     "You're trying to take away my right to free speech!"

Rightness and Popularity are independent of one another

Lately I've been thinking about the old adage "What is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular," which is true I think. 

The problem I have with it is that it doesn't give you any clues about whether or not you are right. Some may think, indeed evidently some do think, that unpopularity is itself a sign of rightness. Which doesn't follow at all, as I will endeavor to show by and by.

Some may also understand the adage to mean "stand up for what you believe in, irrespective of popularity." Again, this is unhelpful. What you believe may be wrong. How do you tell?

An extreme version of this adage I read in an article about the Westboro Baptist Church. "If you are doing all the right things the world will hate you. The world hates us. So, we must be doing something right."

This is a very simple argument as far as its logical components go: we have two premises and a conclusion, and I can tell you straightaway the argument is invalid. But let's prove it. (What follows will seem awfully pedestrian to anyone who's ever taken a 100-level Logic course).

First let's remove the content. It's irrelevant anyway. Because once we reveal that the logical structure is bad, the argument will be bad no matter what content we replace it with. 

We'll replace "You are doing the right things" with "A", and "The world hates you" with "B". Then replace them in each occurrence in the argument . We're left with:

If A then B.

B

Therefore A

Logicians among you will recognize the formal fallacy immediately. To reveal it to the rest of us, all we have to is find suitable replacement sentences for A and B. So let's use the legendary thoroughbred Seabiscuit. Who we all acknowledge is a horse, I hope.

Let A= Seabiscuit is a cat, and B = Seabiscuit is a mammal. 

Now we have "if Seabiscuit is a cat, then Seabiscuit is a mammal." It may seem odd to say, but this is True. If he were a cat, he'd be a mammal.

We also have "Seabiscuit is a mammal" this is true, too. Horses are mammals.

And the conclusion "Seabiscuit is a cat." Which we all know is false.

Now the definition of a valid argument is that if all the premises are true, the conclusion must be true, and yet here we have two true premises and a false conclusion. This is an invalid argument structure. Which means both our dreamed-up argument and the one from the WBC are invalid. And it would still be invalid if all the sentences were true: if Barnaby is a Cat, he is a mammal. Barnaby is a mammal, therefore he is a Cat. All of that is true, but the argument is still invalid, because the conditional arrow flows in one direction (from being a cat to being a mammal), not in the other. He is not a cat due to being a mammal, he's a mammal due to being a cat.

So, rightness is independent of popularity, or indeed hatred. Which is why I think the old adage is true. What is popular is not always right. But what is popular is not always wrong, either. And since popularity and rightness are independent of one another, we must look for other, more accurate criteria.

Bigotry, Definitions, and Point-Scoring

Let's just say racism, there are a host of analogous forms of bigotry, but let's start there. I think it's a safe assumption that we all agree racism is a problem. Even people who do racist things are quick to say, "It's not racist." That seems to me to be a small piece of evidence that suggests maybe we all do. 

I'm sure, if I scramble, I can find a few fringe people out there who are proud to be labelled racist, but I'm going to act under the assumption that's a very small minority, and for the purposes I'm after at the moment, a negligible one.

So we all agree racism is a problem. That must mean that, if it's possible to eliminate, we'd all think the world would be a better place without it. So, what might eliminating racism look like?

That's where it all goes to hell. The answers to that question are myriad, and they're all predicated of diverging concepts of what racism is. We don't, I sure hope, want to claim that racism is subjective or relativized. We'd rather all be talking about the same thing. But it isn't sufficiently clear that we are. 

Let me give a wild, beetle-in-the-box example to exaggerate what I mean. If I idiosyncratically call roses "baseball games", and you are unaware of this idiosyncrasy, we might get into a very serious argument about whether or not I saw a dozen baseball games in a vase.

What we think the meaning of the word is has huge impacts on what we think should be done if we want to eliminate the phenomenon, just as we might have radically different strategies if we both want to eliminate baseball games. 

So my first point is that we'd better be clear what we're talking about.

My second point is, I hope, a bit broader.

Whatever we think racism is, we must at least acknowledge that it involves very deep-seated, engrained attitudes about people, some we might not even be aware of consciously. These kinds of attitudes do not simply fall off overnight. It requires years (decades? generations?) to identify and acknowledge them, confront them, deal with them, eliminate them. A well-crafted pithy jab simply isn't up to the task. 

And here's where I hope to get broader: the idea that there's an Us and a Them, and that by making these little jabs at Them will "take down" those views we find so contrary to our own doesn't just miss the point. It's positively counterproductive. Across the spectrum--Us and Them--there is work to be done sniffing out these attitudes in ourselves and setting to work on them. Point-scoring does nothing to aid this process, it causes us to bury these attitudes even deeper. It polarizes the conversation and pushes diverging points of view to unnecessary extremes. It prevents the process. 

(I would say something similar about political discourse. Then again, one could argue that toeing the party line is another form of bigotry).

I don't have a nice clean solution to conclude with, because that's the nature of the thing. To assume otherwise is dangerous and arrogant. However, Voltaire does come to mind: "Il faut cultiver notre jardin."

"What kind of music do you like?"

It's over complicated to answer this question. It is for me, it is for you. No one treats it that way, and I don't know why not. 

Firstly, the idea of genrefication in music is pretty problematic. I can't make it make sense to say there are two artists in the same genre, barring some very general similarities or pretty general differences. There are general sounds, I suppose, but one artist can shift and re-shape, morph, bend, break, invent, etc all within the same genre, so that what is at one end of the spectrum, while ostensibly the same genre, has very little in common with what's at the other end.

Really all a genre name is meant to do is simplify out all of those little complexities: to find a way of talking about music while also ignoring every one of its interesting features. It is unhelpful shorthand. 

On the other hand, to dig into all of the fine-grained distinctions, multiply our genre lexicon to the extent that it would be able to handle all of those distinctions would also be unhelpful, because no one would know what anyone else was talking about. Setting up those genre lines would be just as nebulous as not setting them up: ask two country music fans what "real country" is, and you'll get three different answers, each of them supposed to mean "this is definitional of the genre", but actually just means "this is something I like".

In short, the genre game is just nonsense.

But Secondly, I don't pay much attention to genre anyway. I don't mean to say I have "eclectic" tastes, that's just as unhelpful and obnoxious as anything else. What matters to me most is lyrics, what they're about, how they're phrased. Whether or not I'm hearing something put in a way I've never heard it put before, etc. Individual people are "better" or "worse" at that (this is subjective, I just mean I like it more or less), and they're spread out all over. It's not eclectic, it's really only one thing I like. That one thing just doesn't map at all onto the concept of genre.

So is this a reasonable answer to the question?

Well, yes and no. It adequately answers what I'm looking for (I think), but that isn't what's being asked for is it?

Because, Thirdly, this question only exists to weasel the shorthand genre answer out of someone, not because that's helpful. It isn't. It's so that we can use this (non-)information to make character assessments of other people. It's to decide if you and I belong to the same category, and if we do, we can be friends, and if not it's going to be rocky. 

Based on practically no information at all!

It's amazing to me that anyone ever has friends.

Over-Simplifying doesn't give anyone's opinions legitimacy

Sometimes we like to discredit things, and we frame our discrediting with clear indicative phrases like "that's just...", "nothing more than...", "all that is...", etc.

Often, these indicative phrases not only indicate an ensuing discredit statement, but also indicate a massive over-simplification. 

An easy example is basketball: "That's just people putting a leather ball through an iron hoop." 

No. No it isn't. Basketball is significantly more complex than that, it has rules, strategies, actions, leagues, organizations, endorsement deals, scholarships, etc., all of which are left out of the above appraisal. 

That phenomenon, basketball, hasn't remotely been discredited, because it hasn't remotely been described. 

Has anything been discredited? I'm tempted to say the speaker, but that is yet another oversimplification. The statement simply discredits itself. 

What's frustrating about this kind of maneuver is it's ubiquity--anything can be incompletely described in such a way. 

Am I currently writing a blog post, or am I "just" touching the screen of my phone over and over?

I am touching the screen of my phone over and over, but (hopefully) it's evident that more than that is going on.

Is reading a book "just" looking at ink and paper?

Is building a house "just" swinging a hammer at some wood?

Is a family reunion "just" a bunch of people in the same place?

You get the idea. I hope. 

I think the reason we do this is to try to fortify subjective preferences with "objective" reasoning. We like our opinions, and we'd like other people to share them. But, there's really no reason why they should. Opinions are things we like, things we don't like, personal tastes, and so on. They are not facts. Facts are features of the world, which we all share in common. Fail to deal with them, and you are, in a very important sense, ignoring the world. Opinions are features of our own individual mental landscapes, which no one else shares in common. Why should anyone else have to deal with them?

So if we could give factual reasons to support mere opinions, our opinions take on an external authority that we, as well as our peers, must bow to.

But we can't give factual reasons to support opinions. We can explain them using facts : "I was forced to listen to this song as a child while my parents stole my money." But that's hardly the same thing. 

It doesn't make sense to say opinions are "better" or "worse", they are just different. Oversimplification is one way of attempting to make an opinion appear "better", but as we have seen, it fails.

More than that, it shuts the door to other experiential possibilities: if we write categories of human endeavor wholesale (no matter what the reason might be) we, ipso facto, preventing ourselves from experiencing them. That's fine sometimes, when there are good reasons. I'd very much like to preclude myself from being involved in a murder. Ending a life causes suffering. 

However, if I preclude myself from experiencing jazz because it's "just a lot of chaotic noise", I might be preventing myself from having an experience of something I later find out I really enjoy. 

On the other hand, if I'm honest and say something like, "I just can't get into it, it's not for me." I've kept my comments about my own subjective states, and haven't implied that the jazz musician sitting next to me is completely wasting his time.