Loyalties

As you can tell by my icon, I follow the Clemson Tigers.  (Woo! Big wins over Wake and UVa this week!)  I am emotionally invested in their performance (for better or for worse...) for a couple of reasons: I attended the institution, so their performance academically and athletically reflect on me, whether that's fair or not, and my performance reflects on them as well; awareness and support is good for the school; it is fun.  I get something out of it, and when I give/spend money on their stuff, so does Clemson.  It also lets us talk about stuff other than work at work.

That relationship gets further away when you look at professional sports, because I didn't attend anything to do with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers; I was simply born near where they play.  A lot of people at work have brand loyalties to their cars like sports teams, and that's kind of fun, too, because cars are so oddly personal while the corporations themselves are still quite distant.  If you dislike a design decision with Ford or a racing team hire they make, it is not easy to voice that opinion to someone who cares.  So the give and take is a little further removed from university teams (which is one of the reasons I prefer college to professional, and why I think it's ok to use "we" in reference to college but less so for professional teams).

One brand loyalty that makes even less sense to me is the political party.  I understand why candidates and elected officials show loyalty: the parties give them money.  But why should I, as a voter, give money to a party rather than a candidate?  What about either the Republican or Democratic Party is constant enough to foster such a relationship?  Aside from getting their people in power, what vision do they serve?

I think they are obsolete, and the evidence to support this really started in 2004 when Howard Dean revolutionized the way that political candidates raised money.  Ron Paul and Barack Obama pursued that tack as well, and other movements, notably the Tea Party, has also shown that a group of people can focus their political interests without the structure of existing political parties.  There will be future ad hoc coalitions like the Tea Party, and I think they are a more appropriate representation of popular will than something entrenched, precisely because they are not entrenched.  If they lose the pulse of the interested participants, it fades away.  There is clearly a large minority (or possibly plurality) of disaffected voters for whom the mainline Republican and Democratic platform is not adequate.  Part of the problem is the arbitrary restriction of the growth of the size of the House of Representatives to an insufficient 435 members.  Making the seats more accessible (which was the Constitutional intent) would allow for those coalitions to be able to participate.

Even still, there are those people who will refuse to vote for another party because they are in the other party, much like people who refuse to buy Ford because Dale Earnhardt drove a Chevy, even when the candidate of the other party could (conceivably) represent his or her (let's be honest, probably his) values better.  Ever heard of a yellow dog Democrat?  Why should that concept even exist?

So stop.  Forget them.  Pick the guy you like best.  Start locally, because they aren't partisan.  Defy the arbitrary strictures of platforms.  Why are pro-labor, secularism and pro-abortion lumped together?  Why are free trade, conservative social values and strong defense?  Any of those could be separated from any other, but they are not because the political parties and their platforms require them to be, due to the binary nature of partisan politics.  That's silliness.

I need to go change into my orange shirt and make fun of a Tarheel.  It's a big game this Saturday.

I know I shouldn't use the R word

I was reading a couple of NY Times articles online recently (this and this) and, while the content was troubling, the fact that these are online added a new wrinkle to bring all kinds of other trouble: comments.  This could very easily be a self-defeating topic since this blog has a label "comment-whoring" since like all narcissists who write these things, comments are like money, crack and Reese's cups all rolled into one.  (I love Reese's cups, by the way.)

The comments in the two stories kind of remind me of the reaction to the Halftime in America ad, which I'm pretty sure you've seen already.  People saw what they wanted to see in it, regardless of response.  I know I myself am not above bias, so I do that too.  But, being an engineer, I also know that data is important.  I want to point you towards this link of of Confirmation Bias and Hostile Media Effect, both are cognitive biases that I think are relevant.  (There are probably more, but who are we kidding?  You're not clicking those links.)  For example, the Depression and Post WWII eras are cited by both Keynesians and anti-Keynesians as justification for their positions.  The same data yields wildly different conclusions.  How?  Those biases.

Another example: last week, the latest unemployment numbers came out, and they declined and currently sit at 8.3%.  To quote from Businessweek, "While the unemployment rate has declined 1.4 percentage points over the past 24 months... the population-to-employment ration hasn't budged, holding at 58.5%..."  Both supporters of the president and his opponents have cited the unemployment decline as a vindication, as an improvement of the statistics on the one hand on the one hand, and a demonstration of the ineffectiveness of his policies on the other. 

In each case, they both can't be true at the same time.  Yet, the folks who leave comments on those articles assert each position with such verve that the other side must be stupid or deceptive to disagree.  I'm not sure that deception is entirely out of the question in some cases, but really, a lot of this is driven by confirmation bias and seeking out data that supports your established position, rather than looking for real data.  Data is, after all, boring.

Sometimes, though, finding legitimate data is a challenge.  For example, who is a credible source on climate change?  (Honestly, I don't believe either side.  I don't think anybody understands the science to nearly the degree they say they do.)  Or, if you saw Meet the Press on Sunday, Mitch Daniels asserted that a lot of the stifled business climate is a result of excessive government regulation, to which Michael Bloomberg later agreed.  However, neither really said which regulations.  It's just a mantra that people say.  Then again, there are plenty of people think that the business climate is the way it is due to insufficient regulation.  They can't both be right at the same time.

Many comments in the first NY Times link talk about how the Constitution is both obsolete and hard to change and, just like Daniels, don't really talk about why.  There is also a sense that the stagnation caused by the Republicans as an opposition party is somehow contrary to the intent of the document is a rather sever misunderstanding of its purpose.  An active government was not considered a positive by the authors of the Constitution.  Additionally, it being hard to change is by design.  That is a problem, though, for people who think that government should be more active regardless of how they feel.  On the other hand, it is venerated as a sacred document by those who think it is from the hand of God, and any desecration is blasphemy.  They both can't be right at the same time.

I frequently call these discussions, especially on public pages like that as arguments between retards on the internet, so I don't know how seriously I should take them.  I feel bad about calling them retards, though, because it's not a nice word.  It carries a weight, though, that I think is hard to convey otherwise.  How can I imply that same weight without being offensive? 

That's not fair

Next Sunday, the Super Bowl between the Patriots and the Giants will be played for the second time in 4 years.  I'm about as disinterested in this Super Bowl as I've been in any in a long time, because I don't have particularly strong feelings about either team.  I like the Buccaneers, and they stunk.  I dislike the Panthers, and they stunk, so that's fine.  Cam Newton's smug smile will haunt my dreams.

Tom Brady, the quarterback for the New England Patriots, has won three Super Bowls, and Eli Manning, the quarterback for the New York Giants, has only won one Super Bowl.  All the talk this week in the news about fairness has gotten me thinking that maybe, in the interest of fairness, they should adjust the rules in this game to accommodate Eli (since he's only won one championship) to correct Tom Brady's touchdown throws and make them worth one third of Eli's (since he's won three Super Bowls and, objectively, is three times the quarterback that Eli is) and only be two points a piece.  (Note: The NFL touchdown is worth 6 points.)  That would be fair, right?

What is fair?  Fairness is, to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter, "Hard to define but easy to identify."  (Note: Potter was talking about pornography.  Isn't that weird?)  Equal chance of outcome?  Well, I personally think the Patriots are a much better team than the Giants, so making an adjustment like I described would make the game "fairer" in that sense.  However, I also thought that the Packers were a better team that the Giants, and look where that got us now.

The thing about football, much like the tax code that the president is arguing about making fairer, is entirely arbitrary.  It's a set of rules agreed upon before "play".  If the NFL decided that next season every team's running back must wear a tiara or be disqualified from play, they could do that.  There is no universal standard by which football must be played.  The rules of the college game are different than the professional one.  Taxes can similarly change from year to year, and there is no definitive truth as to what the best tax plan is, or what an individual's fair share is.  How much is your fair share?  How much is mine?

Changing rules like this really serve to change incentives.  In the Super Bowl, if Tom Brady's touchdowns were in fact worth less, then the Patriots would run more inside the red zone, because that would maximize their scoring potential.  But, it wouldn't necessarily take away Tom Brady's advantage anywhere else besides the end zone.  Likewise, if the tax regimes were different, people would spend their money differently to maximize their return.  It seems exaggerated for rich people because they have more disposable income than the rest of us do, and are better able to take advantage.

Think of it like this: Dr. Sighted loves beef jerky.  If beef jerky costs 3.99 at Publix, but 4.59 at Bi-Lo, I would buy beef jerky from Bi-Lo.  Now, what if Publix were 30 miles away?  How much beef jerky would Dr. Sighted have to eat for making that trip to be worth it?  There comes a point where the economics for rich people are really different.  It may seem unfair, but possession is 9/10ths of the law.  (In the interest of full disclosure: I don't really understand that phrase.)

If I have a lot of money and investing yields the best return, that's where I'm spending it.  Simple as that.  Is it unfair that the tax rate is unequal?  Maybe.  But, remember, our tax code is progressive, so it's more exacting on higher incomes.  However, people with more income (and thus more to lose) have more incentive to find ways not to pay it -- so with a code like ours, rife with loopholes, people with means are able to find them.  But, honestly, if you had the resources to find ways to pay less, you'd do it.  I think it's very easy to make an argument that it's not fair that rich people pay more simply because they can.  Elton John can sing really well, why shouldn't he sing at my wedding as well as Rush Limbaugh's?

Fairness is ultimately arbitrary, unless you cite a standard.  (Really, everything is arbitrary without a standard.)  So why do we think that the rich should pay more, other than we think they don't really deserve what they have?  Or they don't need what they have?  What standard are we using?  And at what point to you become rich?

That's an important o

I read an interesting article on the New York Times blog the other day.  It's a philosophy professor at Amherst, Louise Antony, trying to defend her point of view of moralistic atheism.  The basic premise is that she considers there to be a natural right and wrong in nature independent from God, whether He exists or not.  She breaks down two concepts of morality that she calls the Divine Command Theory (DCT) -- where things are good because God wills them -- or the Divine Independence Theory (DIT) -- where God wills only things that are good.

She talks about how the second is a more enlightened way to think because, well, it allows people not to need God and people like her to feel better about the fact that they are living in a similar fantasy that she thinks people like me do.  She has a long explanation about how different the two theories are, centering around the arbitrariness of DCT versus the steadiness of DIT.  If "goodness" were a natural property, like mass or electrical charge, then for us to make any use of it, there must be a way to measure (or at least detect) this property.  She posits that we can, and cites some examples involving home invasion, slavery and torture.  And I think we can all agree that those are in fact, wrong. However, they weren't always. 

Private property is a very old concept and violation of it has been considered socially unacceptable behavior outside of wartime in just about every culture as long as we have written things down.  Slavery was practiced by just about every major culture for a very long time, with most Western countries banning it in the 19th Century and some Middle-Eastern countries acting as late as the 1960s.  The Geneva Conventions were adopted in the 20th Century, not because we became enlightened and grew out of it like witchcraft, but because the practice was rampant and the countries that did not abandon a Judeo-Christian worldview wanted to stop it.

That's not to mention cultures like the Aztecs who practiced human sacrifice, Indians who had the institution of sati until the British outlawed it, the Arab concept of honor killings, and our very own policies of institutionalized racism that were finally taken off the books in the 1960s.  I think we can also agree that they are wrong as well.

So why didn't we know enough then that it was wrong?  The simplest answer is that there is no universal and innate natural "goodness" outside of an agreed upon standard.  The laundry list of sins that humankind is evidence that we need such a standard, and Western culture (and Middle-Eastern culture as well) has adopted the Abrahamic traditions as that standard.  Prof. Antony's concept, absent some sort of evidence that this idea of natural goodness can be identified is no different than pagan pan-theism -- there are petty gods in everything (or a single universal force permeating everything) providing its intrinsic value -- not unlike George Lucas's Jedi religion.

She also makes a point about how it is better to be good absent the threats of punishment or promise of reward.  Maybe.  But if there are no consequences to our behavior, why is it better?  We call electrical charge positive and negative, and I always preferred working with positive charges in class because it's easier to work with, and the word negative carries bad connotations.  Think of another example.  The NCAA has myriad arbitrary rules about what college students can or cannot do in order to play their sport.  Reggie Bush used his talent to provide a house for his family beyond their means.  However, that was against the rules.  Did he do anything wrong?  According the NCAA, yes.  Is that rule right or wrong?  Does it matter?

The largest point, though, is that her worldview requires faith.  Just like mine does.  And it is intellectually dishonest of her to argue that she is morally superior because she subscribes to DIT and thinks she can arrive at moral behavior without needing God because she's smart, without regard to the moral infrastructure that was built by a history of religious people.  The two concepts ultimately are different only in the academic sense that she presents, not in the real world in which we live, because the objectivity she claims cannot be divorced from the culture that surrounds us.

She also discusses interpersonal relationships, and says that by acquiring value through God you are essentially denying the human value of everyone else.  We kind of do that now, as well; society determines value by the law, and for a while in the United States, even, black people were worth less than white people, and we even defined the ratio.  Fetuses are worth very little in the eyes of the law.  That changes when society decides it would.  We, as enlightened smart people, changed our minds. 

Tribalism, where we prefer and value people who are like us or related to us more than others, kind of fits the mold as well.  Most of history was driven by this or the similar idea of nationalism.  In many places, history still is driven by them.  We look at the Janjaweed and know that they are doing wrong, but they see themselves as looking out for their own people, because they feel that their people are worth more.  The Japanese thought they were worth more than the Chinese in Nanking.  I could go on.

I suppose her counter-argument would be, "Those things were wrong even then, we just disobeyed them.  We were wrong, too."  Maybe, but how would we have known?  She cites Plato as positing this argument before the birth of Christ, so it's not like we haven't had the material to work this out until the 20th and 21st Centuries.

If there really is a natural goodness we can identify without God, humans suck at it.  Christians already knew that, though.  We need a standard.  Christians identify that as the unchanging Bible and the life of Christ. 

There are good arguments about the ability of atheists to be moral people.  However, this one, this particularly condescending one, is not it.  (That's why people don't like atheists: they tell you that you're wrong while claiming to be morally superior.  It's not a very becoming look.)  An example is quite simply to follow the Golden Rule -- but then again, that owes its origin to millenia of religious thinking.