Nathaniel

Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site. Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children. In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.

What’s Behind Rising Police Militarization and Violence?

by

Obviously one of the big discussions since Ferguson has been race relations. But another big discussion was prompted not by the initial shooting of Michael Brown, but by the heavy-handed response of the police to subsequent demonstrations. In particular, there were a lot of pics of the heavily-armed police with comments from Iraq and Afhganistan vets saying, basically, that the cops in Ferguson had heavier body armor and weapons then our front-line combat troops in an actual war zone.

2014-10-01 Ferguson Police Iraq Comparison

There’s a lot going on, including historical reasons why police departments in black neighborhoods tend to be staffed by white officers from other neighborhoods, but one of the biggest problems fueling the rising militarization of police forces is the message the the world is becoming a scary, threatening, hostile police for cops in some new and dangerous way. In a conversation with a friend on Facebook, I decided to do some really quick back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine if there was any evidence of the idea that cops today face new threats that make their jobs more dangerous in the past. I found some police mortality data here and stuck it in Excel. Then I did look backs for 10-, 20-, 30-, 40-, and 50-year periods with a simple linear trend. It was clearly negative in every single case. You want to get police death tolls as low as they have been in recent years? You have to go literally back to the 1950s. And that’s not adjusted for population, so it was actually probably safer back then, too.

Meanwhile, the list of botched, military-style police raids is growing. To give you an anecdote, Salon covered a story in June of a SWAT raid where the cops tossed a flashbang grenade into a two-year-old’s crib, blowing a hole in his chest and nearly killing him. No drugs were found in the house, and the target of the raid wasn’t even present. The good news is that the little boy survived. The bad news is that–after promising to pay for the nearly $1,000,000 in medical expenses required to save his life–the Georgia county changed their mind and is refusing to help at all. Lest you think that this is just one rare, isolated incident, the CATO Institute has an interactive map of hundreds of botched SWAT raids from across the country.

The most recent story is of a South Carolina state trooper panicking and shooting an unarmed man in the back when the man tried to get his wallet to show his ID as the trooper had requested. The state trooper has already been fired and faces criminal charges, and luckily the unarmed man survived. Radley Balko wrote an article about this (A (sort of) defense of South Carolina state trooper Sean Groubert) in which he made a lot of the same points I had already uncovered: police fatalities are trending downwards. Despite this, however, rhetoric about danger and violence is on the rise and police training is increasingly focused on aggressive violence instead of de-escalation. Balko writes:

Yesterday I wrote about another police shooting, the killing of John Crawford in a Beavercreek, Ohio, Walmart. I suggested that the incident may have been due to the sensationalization of mass shooting incidents, and the misperception that such incidents are common. After my post went up, the Guardian reported that indeed, the officer who shot Crawford had recently attended an a “pep talk” for police about responding to calls that may involve an active shooter.

He goes on to describe the “pep talk” as a highly manipulative presentation in which police officers were encouraged to imagine that their own family members were at risk unless they acted with “speed, surprise and aggressiveness” to take out the threat. Even if, as the case happened to be, the threat was a man holding an empty BB gun.

So here’s one of the big problems: humans are really, really bad at dealing with risk in a rational way. Mass shootings are exceptionally rare events,[ref]Although they might be less rare, thanks to all the attention they get.[/ref] but they are horrific and grab our attention the same way that, for example, shark attacks do. This isn’t to say no changes were needed, however. During the Columbine shootings, the police waited for hours while victims bled to death because doctrine at the time called for establishing a secure perimeter and waiting for overwhelming force. This was because the threat was assumed to be some kind of hostage situation, not a murder-suicide killing spree. Since that time, cops have adapted to new policies that call for first responders to engage immediately (even without backup) in the event of in-progress killing. That’s good[ref]It’s also heroic.[/ref], but Balko’s article suggests we’ve gone too far in that direction and are training cops to jump to the worst possible assumption and pull the trigger. Similarly, and this is my own hypothesis, but it seems as though necessary social reactions to ease the trauma of officers who have used deadly force[ref]Dave Grossman, in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, describes the important social functions that are necessary to help combat veterans reintegrate into peaceful society, for example.[/ref] may also have gone overboard:

In its damning report on the Albuquerque Police Department last April, for example, the Justice Department noted that the city’s police “too often use deadly force in an unconstitutional manner in their use of firearms,” “often use deadly force in circumstances where there is no imminent threat of death or serious body harm,” and that this was caused by serious deficiencies in training. In fact, the DOJ report found that officers who did use improper deadly force were often held up as heroes or examples within the department. [emphasis added]

But there’s another possibility that Balko doesn’t consider, and that is that the cops might be responding to a very real increase in violence despite the lack of an increase in fatalities. The problem here is a subtle one, but it’s one that’s been reported before. Essentially: we tend to measure violence in terms of fatalities, but as medical technology improves you can end up getting an apparent decrease in violence (fatalities) even as actual violence is increasing (number of gunshot victims, for example). This isn’t hypothetical. As the Wall Street Journal has reported:

The number of U.S. homicides has been falling for two decades, but America has become no less violent. Crime experts who attribute the drop in killings to better policing or an aging population fail to square the image of a more tranquil nation with this statistic: The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half.

So the murder rate is going down, but the number of victims of gun violence are going up. And the driver for that is medical technology:

Emergency-room physicians who treat victims of gunshot and knife attacks say more people survive because of the spread of hospital trauma centers—which specialize in treating severe injuries—the increased use of helicopters to ferry patients, better training of first-responders and lessons gleaned from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Our experience is we are saving many more people we didn’t save even 10 years ago,” said C. William Schwab, director of the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the professor of surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

It’s possible–and this is just my speculation–that the same trend could be taking place to an even greater degree among police officers. The trend of greater survival after gunshot would be based primarily on two things: 1. superior equipment (e.g. ballistic vests) and 2. superior training. In other words, it’s possible that the wide perception among police officers that they face a more hostile and dangerous world may be true even if the raw statistics on fatality don’t bear it out because measuring just fatality is missing the underlying violence.

I don’t have the data to draw conclusions on this, but there’s definitely enough evidence that commentators like Balko might want to be more cautious in their dismissal of the concerns of LEOs and the easy conclusion that “By most any measure, the United States is less dangerous than it’s been since the 1950s.” The truth might not be so simple, and on an issue this important we’ve got to dig a little deeper and find out what is really going on.

First Things: Ruthless Optimism

by

2014-09-29 First Things

I neglected to mention this a few days ago, but First Things ran a post I wrote about Mormonism’s tendency–historical, cultural, and perhaps theological–towards “ruthless optimism.” It’s a piece that meant a lot to me, and I was really happy to see it find such a great home. I’ve even seen it mentioned a few times from other folks since it came out, including a nod from Dan Peterson on his Patheos blog and a mention at the Cultural Hall podcast. So, if you haven’t read it yet, you might want to give it a read.

Sameness or Sexism

by

2014-09-24 Ginger Rogers

Just came across a blog post by Patrick Rothfuss that made me a little sad. Here’s the relevant portion:

Today Oot came up to me and asked me if I’d like to play a game.

“What kind of a game?” I asked him.

“Oh you know,” he explains, sounding very matter-of-fact. “A guy game. Because we’re both guys.”…

[T]his stuff is insidious… This constant, low-grade sexism is everywhere. It sneaks in.

I’m skipping some text, but it really is the case that Rothfuss goes straight to sexism without any other statement from his son at all. A distinction is drawn between guy games and girl games and that alone is the basis for crying sexism.

So let’s get a couple of things straight. First: the presumption that any gender difference is a form of discrimination or sexism is pernicious. There really are differences between the sexes, and refusing to acknowledge those differences will hurt someone. Since I’m responding to a particularly extreme view, I can pick particularly easy examples to illustrate this point. If you deny physiological differences between boys and girls, then there’s no basis for girl- and boy-only versions of sports. No WNBA aside the NBA and no USWNST aside the USMNST. Obviously, in sports, denial of stereotypical differences would be mostly bad for girls. And, although there’s still controversy, an increasingly large number of people believe that denial of differences in education are mostly bad for boys. Wherever there are significant differences between male and female, and there are at least some such differences, denying those differences will do at least some damage to boys, girls, or both.

Second: a big motivator for calling out sexism is that doing so is a powerful cultural signifier. If you want to be popular with the right sort of people–and if the right sort of people are intellectual, progressive, etc.–then you write about sexism. There’s a cadre of sci-fi and fantasy authors in particular (Patrick Rothfuss, John Scalzi, Jim Hines, and Mary Robinette Kowal all come to mind) who regularly use their prominent blogging voices to personally weigh in on this issue. I’m sure that a lot of their motivation is genuine, but it would be foolish to ignore the role that displaying in-group status has. Meanwhile, it’s easy to find similar cadres of sci-fi and fantasy authors (notably Larry Correia) who do the exact same thing from the opposite end of the spectrum.[ref]The values they espouse are different, but the process of subsuming values as mere symbols of in-group status to maintain tribal boundaries is the same.[/ref] It’s bad because it’s polarizing, and it’s downright creepy because of the overt religiousness of so much of the language. White male privilege is the new original sin:

It’s like trying to keep dust out of your house. You can do a lot, but ultimately, *you* are one of the main reasons there’s dust. You track it in on your clothes without knowing it. And even if you somehow managed to avoid that, you’d still shed skin cells. Even if you don’t want to.

Third, the fact that discussion of sexism functions so prominently as a means of expressing tribal loyalty means that there’s enormous pressure to discard nuance. Every instance of sexism you can find to write about in a poignant and self-aware way will raise your status. So there’s a strong incentive to (1) see sexism everywhere and (2) not think too critically about any given potential instance. People who think about these things in more detail will protest that I’m taking a kind of straw man because virtually no feminist who’s thinking and writing seriously about the issue is going to take the extreme position that there are no gender differences or that we should ignore the gender differences that exist. No one seriously wants to merge the USWNST and the USMNST, right? I get that. I’m not trying to paint all social liberals with the brush of this one blog post by a highly gifted author with (to my knowledge) no actual expertise or training in sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, etc. What I want to show, instead, is the way that potentially usefully sophisticated and productive critiques of society can be subverted by the gravitational pull of popularity.

Of course this applies to both sides of the political spectrum. There’s an incessant gravitational pull towards extremism the moment you declare an allegiance to a particular ideology. It becomes an arms race to see who can show they are more committed than their fellow partisans. It also ensures that opposed ideologies have a steady stream of prominent but incompetent spokespersons who constantly pump out a dumbed-down, inflammatory version of the ideology to keep the other side’s anger and righteousness sufficiently aroused. As someone who is staunchly conservative in their beliefs, I am in no way immune to these effects, but my hope is that writing about the non-partisan aspect of the question as I’ve tried to do in this post can suck some of the oxygen out of the partisan flamewar.

There is a fourth and last point, and it’s an important one. Nothing in this post should be construed in any way as an argument that Patrick Rothfuss is a bad person or a bad parent. The biggest reason for that is that judging him on such grand scale based on one blog post would be lunacy. I don’t know him personally, and even if I did I would still not have any basis for forming a judgment like that. Honestly, my impression of Rothfuss as person and parent based on that blog post is rather high. Parents always get a lot of things wrong. The most important thing we can do, I believe, is try sincerely to get it right. Rothfuss sounds like a father who is really trying, and I respect that immensely. I can say no better for myself. Besides, when all the angst was said and done, he went and played with his kid. As far as parenting goes, that’s all that really mattered in that blog post.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Saint of Scientism

by
2014-09-22 NDT
Doesn’t this look like it could be a screen shot of a televangelist?

 

The overtly religious behavior of supposedly secular, anti-religious opponents is becoming increasingly obvious, but the reaction to revelations of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s plagiarism are surprising even to me. This, my friends, is what happens when you tip a sacred cow.

The story comes from Sean Davis by way of The Federalist. Davis has done some digging and has found that many of the punchiest and most perfect quotes Tyson uses to excoriate religious believers who don’t grasp the magnificence of science are punchy and perfect because he made them up.

The fabrications were not a one-off thing. They were deliberate and calculated, crafted with one goal in mind: to elevate Tyson, and by extension his audience, at the expense of know-nothing, knuckle-dragging nutjobs who hate science. Tyson targeted journalists, members of Congress, even former President George W. Bush. And what was their crime? They were guilty of rejecting science, according to Tyson.

There’s only one problem. None of the straw man quotes that Tyson uses to tear them down are real. The quote about the numerically illiterate newspaper headline? Fabricated. The quote about a member of Congress who said he had changed his views 360 degrees? It doesn’t exist. That time a U.S. president said “Our God is the God who named the stars” as a way of dividing Judeo-Christian beliefs from Islamic beliefs? It never happened.

That’s already a pretty interesting story, but before I had a chance to write about the other shoe dropped. Folks, naturally enough, started adding this information to Tyson’s Wikipedia page. This is pretty standard fare: whenever a person with a Wikipedia entry gets connected to some major controversy, there’s usually a section in their entry dedicated to discussing the charges. But, in this case, Wikipedia editors did not take kindly to anyone besmirching the honor of their patron saint!

According to a review of the edit history of Tyson’s page, one long-time Wikipedia editor deleted an entire pending section summarizing the issue of Tyson’s fabricated quotes. Another editor attempted to insert a brief mention of Tyson’s fabrication of the George W. Bush quote. That mention was also deleted. When it was reinserted, it was deleted yet again by an editor who describes himself as a childless progressive and an apostle of Daily Kos (h/t @kerpen)… Literally every single mention of Tyson’s history of fabricating quotes has been removed from Tyson’s Wikipedia page.

The only thing possibly worse than the fanatical desire to protect Tyson’s image from reality is the viciousness with which Davis, for daring his sacrilege, is pilloried by his opponents. It is, as he describes, overtly religious.

These lovers of science don’t actually love science, because science requires you to go where the evidence takes you, even if it goes against your original hypothesis. What many of Tyson’s cultists really like is the notion that one can become more intelligent via osmosis — that you can become as smart and as credentialed as Tyson by merely clapping like a seal at whatever he says, as long as what he says fits the political worldview of your average progressive liberal.

Davis’s analysis is particular interesting from a Mormon perspective, because the Book of Mormon closely identifies false prophets with flattery. Examples:

  • And he [Sherem] preached many things which were flattering unto the people; and this he did that he might overthrow the doctrine of Christ. – Jacob 7:2
  • Yea, and [the people] also became idolatrous, because they were deceived by the vain and flattering words of the king and priests; for they did speak flattering things unto them. – Mosiah 11:5
  • And [Nehor]  had gone about among the people, preaching to them that which he termed to be the word of God, bearing down against the church; declaring unto the people that every priest and teacher ought to become popular; – Alma 1:1
  • But behold, it is better that thy soul should be lost than that thou shouldst be the means of bringing many souls down to destruction, by thy lying and by thy flattering words; – Alma 30:47 (This is Alma speaking to Korihor, another false prophet)

It’s not just a generally religious template that Tyson is enacting. It’s some of the worst religion has to offer: the promise that if you give a prophet loyalty this means you are superior to your neighbors. It’s a message seductive as it is sinister.

The Spirituality of U2

by

2014-09-18 U2

Obviously I know the band u2. Everyone knows the band U2, and I like the songs of their’s that I’ve heard. And I now all about Bono’s humanitarian efforts. But I’ve never really gotten into u@ in a big way, so I’ve never really paid attention to the lyrics, so I never really knew that Bono’s Christian faith is important to him; important enough to show up in his lyrics on a regular basis. Thankfully, a long article from Deseret News headlined The biggest band in the world is also one of the most spiritual has cleared that up for me.

The article goes through too many examples of religious themes in the music across many of the bands albums for me to list here, and easily enough to convince me that–like songwriting from Brandon Flowers of The Killers–the religious themes are deeply intertwined with their music. Looks like I’ve got a lot of listening to do.

The Primordial Origins of Marriage

by
Michelangelo's Creation of Eve. Detail from the Sistine Chapel.
Michelangelo’s Creation of Eve. Detail from the Sistine Chapel.

You can find plenty of attacks on “traditional marriage” these days. These pieces generally take a historical approach, looking at how the institution of marriage has changed throughout history and how widely they differ from 1950s stereotypes. There is a legitimate point to this analysis, marriage has changed quite dramatically from time to time and from place to place, and there are certainly modern embellishments that are anachronistically applied to the tradition backwards throughout time.

Unfortunately, the political assumptions that frequently accompany such critiques distort the analysis. Closer inspection reveals that the same core aspects that defenders of traditional marriage emphasize are much, much older and more deeply embedded into the institution of marriage than critics and maybe even defenders of traditional marriage realize.

The proximate provocation for this post is a piece by Angela C. at By Common Consent: The Myth of Traditional Marriage.[ref]This piece is an extrapolation of the comment I left there.[/ref] The core assumption that leads Angela astray is that marriage is an invention. As she writes:

Depending on whom you ask, marriage was either invented by men to protect or to oppress women.  And some men would argue that marriage was invented by women to domesticate men (a pouty version of the protection argument).

Of course, Angela is also employing the highly partisan assumption that the invention of marriage had to have been sexist: either the outright misogyny of exploitation or the insidious sexism of assuming women need protection. As objectionable as this assumption might be, it’s actually far less important than the subtle assumption that marriage is an invention.[ref]Astute readers might also point out that by dismissing any explanation in which women play a proactive role rather than exist as passive subjects she risks enacting a pernicious form of sexism herself.[/ref] Which is to say that it is a social construct.

The explanation of why this idea of social constructivism is associated with socially liberal politics is an interesting one, but it is mostly also outside the scope of this post. I will just point out that it is associated with socially liberal politics. The most obvious example, of course, is the argument that gender is a social construct distinct from biological sex.

2014-09-17 Everything is ChemicalsImplicit in these theories is the peculiar notion that society is not biological. It is peculiar because it is most often embraced by those who either outright deny the role of a supernatural deity in creating humanity or at least downplay it in favor of scientific explanations. But it’s quite difficult to see how science can provide any metaphysical justification for treating humans and our society and its constructs as one class of beings and the natural world as another. It’s very much like the natural foods advocates who warn against eating anything “chemical” without realizing that everything is chemicals. Social constructivism—at least in its most extreme and naïve form—is a modern superstition.[ref]I anticipate getting some stern replies from those with expertise in this area. I welcome the contribution of experts, but the popular understanding of technical concepts is also a relevant target of analysis and critique.[/ref]

So let us set aside the assumption that marriage is an invention, a deliberate construction willfully created by humans to accomplish a consciously desired end. I don’t mean to say let’s assume that marriage is not an invention. I’m merely saying: if we don’t make that assumption do we find any more likely candidate explanations? And, as it turns out, we do.

To understand the origins of marriage we first have to understand a little bit about the differences between human beings and other animals. The answer is that humans have evolved to make a very high-risk, high-reward tradeoff. The risk is that our offspring are basically helpless for an exceptionally prolonged period of time. This requires enormous resources to feed them and keep them safe. The reward is that, in exchange for that helplessness, our offspring are incredible learners (and then, later in life, incredible teachers). Learning and teaching are what humans do better than any other species. Human babies are useless at running or fighting or hiding, but they are tremendous geniuses at things like language acquisition. We have highly plastic brains that take a long time to learn anything, but that can eventually learn just about anything. That single difference pretty much explains the difference between chimps using sticks to forage for ants and humans launching the Space Shuttle.

The reason why this change has such huge dividends is that it separated human knowledge from human genetics. Other animals are capable of some pretty amazing behaviors (like migration), but these are often instinctual. That means the information is genetic. Advantage: no one has to teach it. Disadvantage: the animals can only learn and change as the speed of genetic evolution, which takes place across hundreds or thousands of generations. If the migration pattern needs to change in an abrupt way, monarch butterflies can’t just tell the next generation to take a different route next time.

Humans, on the other hand, initially used society as a repository for knowledge. Each generation could teach the skills (from language to tool use) to the next generation. This meant that exchange of knowledge (for example when a new tool was discovered) could be exceptionally rapid both across generations and across tribes. That was the basis for creating (eventually) written language, which only further increased the pace since now our knowledge can be transmitted and reproduced even more rapidly and cheaply and widely. In short: other animals learn at the speed of genetics. Humans learn at the speed of memetics which, in the Internet Age, is the speed of light.

This is pretty cutting-edge science because it relies on concepts like group selection that—although initially proposed by Darwin—have been considered more or less impossible until recently. No one could figure out how to make it work: why would one individual sacrifice altruistically in order to benefit his tribe? In short: how do you get trust? Advances in game theory and complexity science have for the first time made it possible to illustrate how these obstacles can be overcome, and therefore how it is possible for groups to compete against each other (and therefore to have group evolution) rather than just individual organisms.

So now we’ve learned two key things. The first is that the chief difference between humans and other organisms is that we have really, really expensive but also really, really high-performing offspring. The second is that this idea carries with it the notion that groups compete and evolve, which is to say that societies can compete and evolve. Most notably, these are intrinsic to what it means to be a human being. They predate any history and go back to the origins of our species.

Which means that marriage predates our history and goes back to the origin of our species, provided we define marriage as (1) monogamous sexual pairing of males and females who (2) cooperate to feed, protect, and teach their offspring. This behavior must be as old as humanity because humanity is impossible without it. Without cooperation, human children cannot be raised by subsistence cultures. They are too expensive. But without sexual monogamy, males and females are not equally vested in the offspring. These behaviors therefore co-evolved with humanity itself.

So we’ve just bypassed all the historical, cross-cultural analysis of formal marriage institutions by a couple hundred thousand years, at least. So much for an “invention.” What does the story look like from there?

Well, all of the individual cultural variations around the kernel of marriage (monogamy and cooperative child-rearing) end up only being possible because of the integral role that the kernel of marriage played in our society. The logic can’t work any other way. Why would someone use marriage as the basis for political alliance, for example, if monogamous, child-rearing relationships weren’t already fundamental to human society? No one would think to invent marriage from scratch for the purposes of political alliance and, if someone did think of it, it would never work because there would be no foundation to build upon.

So it is absolutely true that marriage comes in a wide variety of cultural and legal and historical instantiations, but it is only the variety that is in any sense invented or constructed or arbitrary. They inventions only exist because there was a stable foundation upon which to build them.

Oral language was not invented. It evolved. Written language was not invented. It evolved. Nation-states were not invented. They evolved. Markets were not invented. They evolved. And, like these other bedrock institutions, marriage was not invented. It evolved. Just as oral and written languages vary widely, just as forms of government run the gamut from tribal chiefs to Prime Ministers, and just as the laws for doing business vary from place to place: so do does the institution of marriage alter and change from time to time and from place to place.

But there are individual characteristics that languages, governments, and markets must have in order to exist at all, and similarly there are traits that marriage—despite its many variations—must exhibit in order to exist. Those are sexual monogamy between men and women raising their biological children. Which, not at all coincidentally, are the characteristics that are of utmost importance in the minds of social conservatives defending “traditional marriage.” Whether you believe that marriage was ordained of God by divine fiat in a literal Garden of Eden, was orchestrated by God through the process of natural selection and evolution, or simply evolved spontaneously without any help from a Creator of any kind: marriage remains the fundamental institution that made the human species possible.

The key lesson to learn here is not necessarily that marriage should never change. Marriage—the entire package including the biological kernel and the social embellishments on top of it—changes all the time. Some of those innovations are bad. When society codifies marriage in a way that treats women as property to be bought or sold or gives men a legal right to rape their wives, then society is leveraging the power of the biological kernel of marriage to do great evil. But when marriage is used as a model to care for those in need—like with fostering or with adopting children—then in that case we’re building something beautiful and worthy on top of the foundation that we’ve inherited to work with.

Because this isn’t an argument that marriage should never change, this post cannot function as a direct argument against same-sex marriage, open marriages, or other currently controversial topics. It is possible to believe that the kernel of marriage has filled its evolutionary purpose. Now that we have enormously greater economic prosperity, perhaps the old rationales no longer apply.

This may be so, but at least those who advocate changes to marriage at a fundamental level ought to admit that they are tinkering with the evolutionary foundations of human society. To use a computer analogy: debates about marriage that get to its essential characteristics are not like swapping out one app for another. They are about making changes to the kernel of the operating system. It would be best to know what one is doing before one undertakes such an endeavor. Those propounding the “myth of traditional marriage” manifestly fail to apprehend its true nature and significance. Therefore, they are the last folks I want involved in the process.

NYT: What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola

by

2014-09-17 Ebola_virus_virion

Michael T. Osterholm’s piece on Eblola for the NYT pretty much confirms what I’ve been thinking about this unfolding crisis. First: what’s to stop the virus from spreading from West Africa to megacities in the developing nation. He mentions Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasha, or Mogadishu (in Africa) or even Karachi, Jakarta, Mexico City, or Dhaka. If you’re curious, here are the population figures for those cities:

Just for some context, New York City has a population of 8,405,837 and a density of 27,779 per square mile. So some of these cities are more than twice as big and Dhaka, at least, is more than twice as densely populated. Of course, unlike New York City, they don’t have First World sanitary and medical services. The devastation wreaked by an outbreak in such densely populated regions could be horrific, not to mention the accompanying chaos from fear and quarantine measures.

The other fear, however, is that the virus will mutate to become airborne. Right now it is spread only by direct contact with bodily fluid of someone who is infected, which is why First World nations are probably not as vulnerable to widespread contagion. But, like many viruses, Ebola mutates a lot. What’s particularly worrisome, however, is that the more people that get sick, the more copies of the virus there are to mutate. Every new host is trillions of new chances for an airborne version to emerge. This is why fighting the outbreak now is a global concern, other than for the obvious humanitarian reasons.

I’m not writing this as a scare article. There’s no guarantee that the virus will mutate. This is the worst Ebola outbreak ever, but it’s certainly not the first. I had just wondered, myself, if mutation to an airborne strain wasn’t the primary reason for concern. But I hadn’t heard anyone mention it. Until now. Looks like it is the primary concern. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. (Osterholm’s piece has recommendations for hos to fight the virus now, most of which involve the UN.)

The Intimacy of Crowds

by

2014-09-16 Intimacy of Crowds

There’s an absolutely fascinating article on crowd psychology in aeon that I’ve been meaning to share for several weeks now. The article questions and rejects the conventional wisdom on crowds, which focuses on violent mobs and on the idea that, once they had joined, individuals had “surrendered their self-awareness and rationality to the mentality of the crowd.” In contrast to a kind of brute mob mentality, modern research supports the conception of crowds in which “crowds behave not with mindlessness or madness, but by co-operating with those around them. They do not lose their heads but instead act with full rational intent.”

That approach might sound counterintuitive, but that makes sense because in reality crowds don’t actually behave the way they are supposed to in popular imagination. And so, “the model also explains why crowds in emergency situations are disinclined to panic, putting them at higher risk.” The article cites many people who milled around in the Two Towers 13 years ago instead of immediately fleeing, which is something they might have been much more prone to do if they’d been alone, and also cites several other disturbing historical accounts such as “the aircraft fire at Manchester airport in the UK on 22 August 1985, when 55 people died because they stayed in their seats amid the flames.”

This isn’t the first I’ve read of this research. Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who invented moral foundations theory, has done a lot of work on crowds and his theories are closely related to the idea of a “superorganism“. A superorganism is “an organism consisting of many organisms,” and the textbook example is a beehive. A beehive is not just a collection of bees. It can be thought of as a creature in its own right that happens to be made up of bees in the same kind of way (although not exactly, obviously) that we human beings are made up of many cells. The human capacity for “groupish behavior,” which is to say behavior that doesn’t make sense from a strictly individualistic standpoint, is a major differentiator and perhaps the essential differentiator between humans and all other primates. This gets into group-level selection, which is something that Darwin believed in but which has only been rigorously outlined and defended very recently. Group-level adaptation is the idea that not just individuals are evolving as they compete for resources, but groups of individuals, too. Like beehives. Human capacity to function as individuals or, when circumstances are right, to lose themselves in part of a larger collective are the reason Haidt describes us as “90% chimp, 10% honeybee.”

Keep that in mind when you read this next sentence about crowd behavior:

Contrary to popular belief that crowds always panic in emergencies, large groups mill around longer than small groups since it takes them more time to come up with a plan.

In a real sense, it’s not that the individuals within the group take longer to come up with  a plan. it’s that the group itself takes longer to come up with a plan when it’s a bigger group.

There isn’t just one pithy practical or political implication of this research. It’s the kind of fundamental change in how we look at the world that can end up taking you in any one of thousands of different directions. To me, it’s just another part of the major advances in understanding human nature that are becoming possible now that we’re developing some rudimentary tools for analyzing complex systems.

Some Things I’ve Learned from Ferguson

by

2014-09-09 Ferguson

A lot of the writing that has come out since Ferguson has focused on the disconnect between anger in black communities and apparent indifference in white communities. A lot of these articles have been unhelpful. They start with the premise that Michael Brown’s shooting was obviously illegal and immoral when the reality is that we don’t know. There are reasonable grounds to suspect the shooting was justified. From that erroneous premise, these pieces quickly conclude that the only reason for white people to remain silent on the issue is cowardice, racism, or both. This is unfair, often self-righteous[ref]Especially when the writers are white and don’t demonstrate any deeper awareness of the problem.[/ref], and never helpful.

The problem, I think, is that the shooting of Michael Brown was just a spark that ignited a powder keg. As a symbol, it’s potent, but in terms of understanding the real problem it’s a distraction. Not only because the events are unclear, but also because it puts focus on police-community relations, which are a small part of the real problem: the larger relationship between municipal governments and poor communities. The best article I’ve read on that is the Washington Posts’s How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty. The story is relatively simple: fairly innocent violations that would be a speed bump to someone in the middle class are much more disrupting to people who don’t have the same kinds of safety nets and flexibility. These folks are easily trapped in a cycle of violations that are too expensive (literally, in terms of dollars) for them to escape. Meanwhile, the local governments profit from the unending cycle of fines and fees: “Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts.” Read the article, however, to truly understand the scale and perversity of the parasitical relationship between local governments and the populations they are supposed to serve.

It’s a serious problem and a serious injustice that underscores another criticism that I’ve seen liberals make of social conservatives. For all that social conservatives are worried about federal overreach, it’s historically federal or state governments that have stepped in to stop injustice perpetrated by state and local governments. Fear of federal tyranny seems utterly inexplicable in communities that have a history of seeing federal law defend them from local tyranny. Perversely, it doesn’t help that conservatives do see an issue to be angry about in Freguson: the violent initial overreaction of local police to peaceful protests. Militarization of local police is a serious concern, and the fact that conservatives see something legitimate to be upset about can make them all the more mystified when that concern is not acknowledged or shared by liberals.[ref]This isn’t to say that liberals ignore police militarization, but they certainly don’t seem to see it as fundamental to the Ferguson story./[ref]

It’s an old story, really. Both sides have points, but they fail to apprehend each other’s respective points of view. It is deeply unfortunate that sensational, random, tragic stories–like what happened to Michael Brown–seem to be the only thing that gets people talking. It’s not really a conversation when both sides are talking past each other.

Porn Leads Teens to Coerce Girlfriends into Sex

by

2014-09-12 Porn Coerce Sex

I don’t like writing about porn any more than I like writing about sex, but I think it’s important. Earlier this week I posted an article about how one man stopped watching porn because he felt it was warping his ability to express warm, respectful, and compassionate sexuality. This link is to the flip-side of that, a study in England that demonstrates how boys who don’t moderate or (better still) abstain from pornographic content end up coercing their girlfriends into sex. Where does one draw the line between convincing a partner to do something, pressuring a partner to do something, and outright rape? No matter where that line is, it seems clear at least some of these young men have crossed it.

Researchers interviewed 130 men and women aged 16–18 from diverse social backgrounds in three different locations in England. The report, published last month, states that young people “frequently cited pornography as the ‘explanation’ for [engaging in] anal sex,” although masculine competition between boys to see who could engage in the activity the most often also played a role.

They found a “key element” in this risky new behavior is the “normalization of coercion and ‘accidental’ penetration. It seemed that men were expected to persuade or coerce reluctant partners.”

“Some events, particularly the ‘accidental’ penetration reported by some interviewees, were ambiguous in terms of whether or not they would be classed as rape (i.e., non-consensual penetration), but we know from [one] interview that ‘accidents’ may happen on purpose,” wrote Dr. Cicely Marston and Ruth Lewis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in a report published in BMJ Open.

Historically, social conservatives have a reputation for crying wolf about dangers to children. The usual examples are the Dungeons and Dragons scare in the early 1980s and, more recently, the connection between violent video games and real-world violence.[ref]Obviously there is a connection between violent behavior and violent video games since one would expect people who are violent to enjoy violent entertainment. It’s much, much less clear that violent video games cause violent behavior in any serious or lasting way.[/ref] This history of hysteria is going to make it easy for articles and studies like this to be dismissed as “social conservatives say Playboy turns normal kids into rapists.” That’s the exaggerated version. The actual point is that pornography–especially hardcore pornography that is easy to find online–correlate with violence towards women and that we have good reason to suspect some of that relationship is causal. This doesn’t mean a nice, caring man will turn into a serial rapist after watching 30 minutes of porn one day, but it does mean that–aggregated across society–porn is very likely having an impact in fueling a very real culture of rape that treats women as objects to be exploited for pleasure and prestige.