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.
This is a very, very long article about deafness, but it’s a very interesting one for people who are not familiar at all with deaf culture. I’m hardly an expert myself, but I took 2 years of ASL in high school, and part of our coursework was learning about deaf culture. What we learned surprised me. The two things that stick out the most are first, the fact that so much deaf humor is based on making fun of hearing people (like you and me). We’re the butt of most of the jokes, and we’re usually depicted as stupid and greedy. Given that I didn’t even realize there was such a thing as deaf culture before taking the class[ref]As a simpler option than other foreign language requirements to graduate high school, no less[/ref], I can see where that resentment and disdain comes from.
The second is that the deaf community[ref]Most folks believe that there is no such thing as “blind culture” because blind people communicate in the same language as seeing people do.[/ref] do not see the inability to hear as a defect. It’s the ticket to entry into their unique culture. For this reason, there are many who view attempts to cure deafness as literally attempts to exterminate their culture and community. Specifically: cochlear implants. These are little electronic devices that bypass the tiny hairs in our ears that help us hear (which are missing, for people that can benefit from CIs) and instead translate vibration directly to electrical signals to your nerves. It’s hearing, sort of. The quality is substantially lower than what people with full hearing can experience, although it is enough to understand speech and advancements are starting to make even listening to music possible.
There are two major problems, however. The first is that children can be diagnosed and given a CI at a very young age, and that once they learn to speak and hear with their CIs, the chance of them ever learning to sign or joining the deaf community are minimal. The second is that many deaf children are born to hearing parents who, overwhelmingly, opt for CIs. As a result, as some in the deaf community see it, they are essentially being robbed of new entrants to the deaf community by a hearing population that doesn’t even really know that they exist.
It’s not hard to imagine a future where virtually all forms of deafness can be cured. Would that be akin to the complete extinction of an entire culture? These are some of the questions raised by this article, which I definitely recommend.
And, the next time someone shares one of those touching YouTube videos of a baby or grown person hearing a loved one’s voice for the first time, just think that the very video that brings tears of joy to a hearing person can bring sadness and loss to a deaf person.
I’ve noticed a couple of really interesting articles going around about how, in order to create Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto[ref]That’s the pseudonym of the creator of Bitcoin[/ref] may have actually created something much more important than even the biggest fans of Bitcoin realize. As Business Insider reports:
By many accounts, Satoshi came up with a real-world solution to a longstanding computer science paradox known as the double-spend problem, or the Byzantine General’s problem (the professor who named it explains why he did so here). The challenge is how to send and receive money online without the need for a trusted third party, such as PayPal, ensuring that the same digital credit standing in for the amount being exchanged isn’t being spent twice…Satoshi does not appear to have been looking to solve this problem when he created Bitcoin. But his design for the blockchain, which he spelled out in his 2008 Bitcoin spec paper[ref]It’s only about 10-12 pages, by the way, and is fairly comprehensible. If you have any comp sci or math background at all, you should read it.[/ref] (PDF), has profound implications.
Look out for that word “blockchain.” You might start hearing it a lot. The concept of the blockchain is, in a way, nothing less than a solution to the problem of distributed trust. It’s not a perfect solution. If you read the paper, you’ll see that being able to trust a transaction in Bitcoin depends on the honest nodes in the network having more combined CPU power than any collection of attacking nodes, and even when the majority of the network nodes are honest you don’t get guaranteed validity. You get pobabilistic validity. In other words: there’s a chance that someone could try to spend their Bitcoins twice (think of someone dropping a coin into a vending machine and then yanking it back out again to reuse), but it’s a very small chance. That’s a mature approach to security. In the real world you can’t really prevent attacks. You can just make them too expensive to be worth the effort.
Well, what if instead of using the blockchain to verify transactions, you use it to verify files? Turns out somebody has already done that:
Perhaps the most straightforward example of a post-Bitcoin service using Satoshi’s blockchain is Proof of Existence. Created by Manuel Araoz, a 25-year-old developer in Argentina, the site allows you to upload a file to certify that you had custody of it at a given time. Neither its contents nor your own personal information are ever revealed — rather, all the data in the document gets digested into an encrypted number. Proof of Existence is built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain (there’s a 0.005 BTC fee), so the thousands of computers on that network have now collectively verified your file.
There are other ideas too, and they could be really, really important. For example, what about replacing ICANN (the organization that oversees web addresses on the Internet) with a blockchain? You know all those fights about whether the US should maintain control of the Internet or hand it over to the UN? They could potentially (potentially) be sidestepped.
You see, it’s not that hard to imagine other blockchain-based systems which aren’t currencies and don’t attract as many “colorful personalities.” Suppose you replaced the Internet’s centralized Domain Name System with a blockchain for Internet names (like Namecoin) such that every DNS request included some proof-of-work effort. Or you used any blockchain (including Bitcoin’s) as a notary service. Or you built a new blockchain for crowdfunding. Or you replaced a centralized system which absolutely does need to be scrapped — that horrific barrel of worms known as TLS/SSL Certificate Authorities — with a blockchain-based solution powered at the browser level.
Or you built a new distributed email service, with a blockchain for email addresses, and every time you checked your email you contributed to the network. Or a new distributed social network, with a blockchain verifying identities, powered by code that ran every time its users launched its app or visited its web page.
For me, this is a really big “ah ha” moment. It’s always been a bit confusing that a serious guy like Andreessen Horowitz would put his capital into what was, until now, basically understood to be more of a goldrush / speculative gamble than a new technology. Well, it turns out that he’s been talking about this for months already.[ref]That’s what he means when he says “All over Silicon Valley and around the world, many thousands of programmers are using Bitcoin as a building block for a kaleidoscope of new product and service ideas that were not possible before.”[/ref] Horowitz gets it, and now I get why a serious guy like Horowitz is so vested in Bitcoin. It’s not about Bitcoin. It’s about the blockchain. It’s about a distributed trust system.
This is a big deal. If you’re interest is as piqued as mine was, here are a couple more articles for you to check out.
“Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet,” says Naval Ravikant. “Our 2014 fund will be built during the blockchain cycle,” concurs Fred Wilson. And Andreessen Horowitz have very visiblydoubled down on Bitcoin.
The bitcoin platform (or blockchain) allows for the deployment of decentralized applications that combine the benefits of cloud computing — in terms of ubiquity and elasticity — with the benefits of P2P technologies in terms of privacy and anonymity.
This is an older Wall Street Journal article (from October 2010), but it’s one of those great articles that is at once intrinsically interesting and also really offers a glimpse into how us anti-social free-marketeers see the world: Why Some Islanders Build Better Crab Traps. The research is pretty simple: scientists found a way to quantify the complexity of crab traps made by various Pacific tribes, and then they compared complexity of traps to population size.
What they found was that the bigger the population, the more varied and more complex the tool kit was. Hawaii, with 275,000 people at the time of Western contact, had seven times the number and twice the complexity of fishing tools as tiny Malekula, with 1,100 people.
But it’s not just the size of the population on the island group that matters, but the size of the population it was in contact with. Some small populations with lots of long-distance trading contacts had disproportionately sophisticated tool kits, whereas some large but isolated populations had simple tool kits. The well-connected Micronesian island group of Yap had 43 tools, with a mean of five techno-units per tool, while the remote Santa Cruz group in the Solomon Islands, despite having almost as large a population, had just 24 tools and four techno-units.
This is what makes markets great: it’s a way of pulling together more people to cooperate, exchange information, and have a better life for everyone. Markets are, by their nature, impersonal but by that token so are penicillin and electricity. What matters in all three cases is the good they do for all of us.
Couple of minor corollaries: every now and then I’ll hear a serious academic talk about how things aren’t really better in the modern world. Like Jared Diamond who, apparently in all seriousness, decried agriculture as The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. These people are idiots. I suppose if an academic sang the praises of subsistence living and then actually left the modern world to adopt that lifestyle I might take them seriously. Or at least think that they weren’t a raving hypocrite. Until such time: the fact that rich and famous academics aren’t willing to trade medicine, literacy, and travel for the pleasures of 20-hour work week with the Hadza nomads in Tanznia suggests that they are either trolling or insane when they write such articles.
Which might sound like some kind of cultural smugness (aren’t we so much better than “primitive” tribes) if it weren’t for the second corollary:
Archeologists suggest that the ephemeral appearances of fancy tool kits in parts of southern Africa as far back as 80,000 years ago does not indicate sudden outbreaks of intelligence, forethought, language, imagination or anything else within the skull, but simply has a demographic cause: more people, more skills.
In other words: I have no basis whatsoever for feeling that I am in any way personally superior to a human who lived 80,000 years go or to someone from a less-technologically sophisticated civilization today. People are just people. The difference isn’t who we are, it’s where we live. The convenience of modern society doesn’t reflect any superior intellectual or moral sophistication on our part, but is just a natural result of having so many people all contribute to a shared social project.
The proper attitude is not arrogance for what we have, but rather humility for what we’ve been given.
This Wall Street Journal article didn’t ring any bells with me at first because it started with the description of Facebook as an envy-generator. I don’t really get that. I’ve read about the research that shows the more you use Facebook the worse you feel, but it just doesn’t really match my experience. I suppose FB could make me sad in a subtle way that I wouldn’t notice, but I think I would notice if my friends FB statuses were making me feel envious of their awesome lives. And… I just don’t feel that. Not ever, really.[ref]OK, after thinking about it I can think of one example. But other than the occasional update from this one law professor about how cushy the tenured life is, there’s really nothing there.[/ref]
So… I didn’t get it. But then this:
Psychologists and other experts aren’t immune to these feelings either. “There’s a man in my field who has made a big name for himself by so brilliantly promoting his work,” says executive coach Marcia Reynolds. “Whenever I hear his name, I feel something in the pit of my stomach.” But instead of dismissing her envy, she reflects on it and asks herself, “What’s holding me back? Can’t I play at his level too?”
Now that resonated. The paragraph thunked home like an arrow hitting the bulls-eye, and I vibrated to the core reading it, and especially the question at the end: “Can’t I play at his level too?”
For me, my nemesis/role-model (although he has no idea I exist) is John Scalzi. I vividly remember not only reading his excellent novel Old Man’s War, but also the sense of overt jealousy at the blurb on the cover that compared him to Heinlein (Heinlein!), and even more so at the discovery that he ran one of the most-viewed blogs on the entire web, and had been running it since the 1990s (before the word “blog” was a word). In fact, the very launch of this blog back in 2012 was heavily influenced by the years I spent reading John Scalzi, following his blog, following his Twitter, and thinking about what he did that could work for me and what he did that couldn’t.
It might seem a bit weird to focus just one guy that much, but John isn’t the only one. Every time I read a sci-fi book I’m thinking, “What works here?” and “What doesn’t?” And the more I like what I read, the more I try to learn from it. The difference with John Scalzi is just that he was the first author who burst onto the scene while I was watching, as it were. I read Old Man’s War, which was his first novel, within a year of it coming out. So I’ve been able to follow his career from first novel to his winning of the Hugo for Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas last year.[ref]Not my favorite book.[/ref] The other folks I’ve been envious of include Jim Butcher and Larry Correia: two other relatively young writers who write books I like and whose careers I have been studying and following as they unfurl before me.
So yeah… now that I think about it, I do get this notion of envy. I think the researchers are right:
“Those painful pangs of envy are there for an evolutionary reason,” says Texas Christian University researcher Sarah E. Hill, “alerting us that someone has something of importance to us.”
It’s not malicious at all, for me. These guys are my heroes (even if I disagree strongly with some of their political views). And it’s not competitive either. I don’t want to defeat anyone. I want them to keep writing, and write more books and better books. I’m a fan! And it’s not just imitation either, but I’m acutely aware that I’ve got to do my own thing. But, when I think about it, there really isn’t a better word for how I feel than “benign envy.”
I have a new post up at Times And Seasons this morning, continuing the series of posts that has, intentionally or not, sort of become my Internet testimony. Not sure that’s how it comes across to others, but it’s pretty much how I see it. The post also features a quote from my favorite Dresden Files book. Some might take a quote from popular urban fantasy to be an indication that I’m not taking my subject matter seriously. They would actually be underestimating how seriously I take my urban fantasy. I say this partly in jest, partly because of how much I genuinely love the Dresden Files, and partly because I just really like the idea of finding serious lessons about serious topics in unexpected, mundane places.[ref]This is why I’m excited about the new focus for fellow DR Editor Walker Wright’s own blog, The Slow Hunch. He’s a genius at this topic, especially when it comes to business.[/ref]
In the past couple of months I have had a couple of people say that Difficult Run is a conservative blog. It’s a statement that bugs me, because it presumes (1) that the editors of DR agree on everything (we do not) and (2) that DR is one of those blogs where the viewpoint comes first and the facts come second. So I’ve wanted to write about it, but I didn’t really know how to address the topic. But then I posted this somewhat glowing piece about Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital, and it gave me the perfect opportunity to address this issue.
Here’s the thing: liberals love Piketty and they loveCapital. The article I based my own piece from was in The New Republic. Slate is crowing that “The French economist gives the American left a sturdy framework for its economic ideas.” The HuffPo seems breathless in their announcement that Thomas Piketty Is No. 1 On Amazon Right Now. Not that I needed these cues to understand that the book I was praising and publicizing is decidedly left-of-center. It presumes that income inequality is a self-evident problem, forecasts a dire future, and (best of all) proposes more taxes, new taxes, higher taxes, and even international taxes.[ref]Also: Piketty is French and the book had to be translated from French into English. Need I say more?[/ref] None of this escaped my mind as I wrote my own excited post about it.
But I posted it anyway, despite the fact that the book gives substantial weight to liberal concerns and policies, for the simple reason that I was impressed by the argument. I was impressed on an economic / technical level. The theory is elegant in its simplicity and rigorous in its research. I’m sure it will be criticized by economists who are much smarter than me, and maybe in the coming weeks or months or years I will see that I was a fool for getting excited so quickly. That could happen. But the reality is that it looks legit to me (and I do have some small expertise in this field) and that if it were a conservative-friendly book, I’d definitely be posting about it. I’m not going to treat the book differently because it’s politics are uncomfortable to be.
I consider myself a conservative in the general sense of the word. Your mileage may vary, but on a wide range of issues I’m right-of-center. But I aspire to be an intelligent and honest human being first, and a conservative only so long as that is dictated by my efforts at the first two. I preach about confirmation bias and irrationality as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t mean that I give up. I still want to be rational when it comes to important issues like economic policy. I want to be the kind of person who will change his mind when new evidence emerges. I want to have the integrity it takes to give opposing viewpoints fair treatment, honest consideration, and–where applicable–praise.
In short: I want to be the kind of conservative who is willing and able to engage with liberals in good faith on matters of substance and who would change his politics in an instant rather than compromise on following the truth as best as I understand it. It’s not easy and I don’t always succeed. I take flack from liberals who find me insufficiently kind from time to time [ref]I was told to go to Hell and unfriended on Facebook when I thought I was being perfectly polite just a couple of days ago. It’s the Internet. It happens.[/ref], and I know that I make some staunch conservatives uneasy when I go yammering off in liberalese about privilege and structural inequality (which I believe are valid concerns). Believe me, I know that I could get a lot more Internet traffic and adulation if I spent more time beating the conservative drum, but I’m just not comfortable with that.[ref]I also realize that advantages accrue from trying to appear to be the moderate voice above the crowd, so it’s not like I’m claiming to be a saint here. But I do think the folks who are attracted to moderate voices are outnumbered, or at least a lot quieter, than the folks on either side who want unwavering validation. If I was going for popularity, I know which route I’d pick.[/ref]
So that’s me, but what about Difficult Run? That’s just a little bit more tricky. I’m not looking for partisans or ideological allies when I look for DR editors. I’m looking for folks who (in addition to writing well) share my values and bring diversity.[ref]When I say diversity, I mean diversity of ideas.[/ref] Not everyone who shares my values shares my politics, but it is easier to find people who share values and politics than to find folks who share values but not politics. So, being perfectly candid, I expect that DR will always reflect to some degree my own politics because I pick the editors here. Therefore, DR will always be coming from a generally conservative place, or at least as long as I myself continue to come from a conservative place.[ref]DR Editors, of course, are free to change their politics as well.[/ref] But at the same time, I sincerely want to be a site where liberals, conservatives, and who-knows-what-else all feel that their views are treated with respect and fairness.[ref]Caveat: of course I can’t actually make everyone believe I’m being fair. Even if I was perfectly fair, and I can’t be, folks would still think I wasn’t. But it’s a goal, nonetheless.[/ref] I want commenters who push back, raise new ideas, and take the conversation in new directions. But not just commenters, I want diversity in the editors as well. We have or have had among our editors radical feminists, socialists, social liberals, etc.[ref]Whether or not they choose to write about those topics explicitly is up to them. I exercise zero editorial control once I pick someone to be an editor.[/ref] Shared commitment to honest inquiry comes first, but diversity is something I actively want to find.
Let me just finish this long, but honest answer, with two more observations.
First: I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I’m already working on a piece about white male privilege. It ends up in a conservative place, roughly speaking, but it gets there by way of taking seriously the concerns of liberals. So no one is happy. That’s how I roll.[ref]You should see bedtime around here. No one being happy is sort of my baseline.[/ref]
Second: We don’t just write about politics! My favorite piece to write, recently, was the one about constructed realities and Game of Thrones. OK, one Facebook commenter called it “The best take on not watching naughty things that I have ever read,” so I guess it’s kind of conservative in a social way, but it just wasn’t really about politics at all. And I loved that. I’m also working on a piece right now about the politicization of science fiction and why I hate it. I talk about politics as much as I do not because I care about politics (I don’t) but because I care about people and values that (tragically) are intertwined with politics.
One of the most useful things I learned about economics when getting my master’s was simply who to pay attention to. When I read an article and it references someone whose research was brought up not just once, but again and again in my classes, I know I’m reading about a serious economist. Well, this article[ref]Note: I left out the link in the original version of this post.[/ref] is written by Bob Solow about a book by Thomas Piketty based on research he conducted with Emmanuel Saez and Anthony B. Atkinson. That’s the most big-name economists I’ve ever seen in a contemporary piece, so even though I had a busy day today I took the time out to read this article.[ref]Solow invented the Solow model, which comprised about the first half of my macroeconomics coursework. I studied papers by the other three in my public finance courses.[/ref]
I was not disappointed. This is a really important article if you want to understand income inequality. Unfortunately, it’s also rather technical (although it tries not to be). So I’m going to attempt to give the plain English version of the simplified review of a French book on income inequality. Believe it or not, I think some really important core concepts will translate all the way through.[ref]Obviously I’m basing this just on my reading of the article, ’cause I haven’t read the book. I don’t even speak French.[/ref] So here are the take-aways:
The question of rising income inequality cannot be fully explained by nation-specific laws or circumstances. It’s a broad-based problem, so we ought to be looking for a broad, comprehensive, long-range explanation. That’s what Piketty provides.
The explanation is based on an unusual measurement of wealth that compares a country’s total wealth (at a point in time) with it’s total productive capacity (at a time) in what is called the capital-income ratio or the wealth-income ratio. So, for example, if the wealth-income ratio is 5 (in this case, for the UK in 2010) that means that it would take 5 years of accumulating all the income in a country to equal the amount of capital that nation has on hand. In very, very simplified terms: how many years of income would it take to buy all the factories and land in a country? When wealth-income is high, that means that there is a lot of wealth/capital (relative to the country’s income). When wealth-income is low, that means there is relatively little wealth/capital. The historical range is from more than 2 to less than 7, and we’re currently around 4.5-6 (depending on what country you live in). If you can’t remember the details, just remember this: high capital-income means lots of capital.
Countries have a natural resting point of capital-income that depends on two things: s (the amount that everyone in the country saves by buying more capital every year) and g (the rate of economic growth for the country). This is important, because if s and g are relatively stable, you know how much capital the country is going to move towards. Piketty has estimates for s and g, and based on that he believes that modern, developed countries are trending towards 6.5. In other words: we have lots of capital now, and we’re going to get more.
Once you know how much capital a country has and you also know what the return on capital is (that’s a number that is fairly stable over the long run), you can determine how much of a country’s income comes from capital as opposed to labor. And, since return on capital is relatively stable, the more capital a country has, the more profitable it is to have capital.
Here’s the final point: wealthy people always own proportionally more capital.
You should be able to put points 3, 4, and 5 together to reach this simple conclusion: all developed nations are on track to have more capital, which will make owning capital more lucrative, which will disproportionately favor the rich, which will continue to drive income inequality.
Thomas Piketty, the author of “Capital.”
This is pretty important. It’s important because it tells us that income inequality is going to continue to increase towards levels not seen since the late 1800’s.[ref]This isn’t mentioned, but on the bright side it also says they won’t go any higher than that.[/ref] It’s also important because it explains why this is happening, and it does so in terms of cross-cultural, international, non-partisan (mostly) terms. It’s not as simple as the Democrats or the Republicans selling you out to corporate America (although that probably doesn’t hurt). It’s driven by fundamentals.
Lastly, it’s important because it suggests a policy solution. Unfortunately, the policy solution is politically impossible. I mean, if you think that consumption tax would be a neat idea but you don’t think it’s realistic, that’s trivial compared to what would be required to combat this trend. Basically: you need to make capital less profitable. And that means you need to tax it. But, in order to be effective, this tax has to be international. Otherwise, if the UK taxed their capital, they would just be shooting themselves in the foot because all their rich folk would invest in French and American capital and legally avoid paying taxes.[ref]That’s called tax avoidance. It’s called tax evasion when you’re breaking the law.[/ref] So not only would the EU, US, Japan (and others) all have to agree to an incredibly unpopular tax, they’d also have to figure out how much to tax, how to enforce it, and what to do with the revenue. As Solow (the one doing the review says): Not. Going. To. Happen.
In simple terms, this means y’all should buckle in because we’re in for a bumpy ride. Income inequality foments radicalization and discontent, and so things could very well could ugly and even revolutionary.
Now, some caveats.
First, and obviously, if the forecasted numbers don’t pan out, neither do the results. Significantly change how much a country chooses to invest, or the rate of economic growth, of the long-run return on capital and the model veers off in one direction or another. Second, there is a contention that many wealthy Americans are already “the working rich” who get their compensation in labor rather than wealth. This would appear to contradict a key point (#5), but Piketty addresses that, Solow is convinced by it and so am I. (Although up until reading this article that was actually something I took seriously in my qualms with income inequality arguments.)
I have two unknowns of my own, however, which don’t come up in the model. First, I’d like to know more about the impact of international economic growth. We’re focusing on income inequality among people in the developed world. That’s what we tend to focus on because of what liberals would ordinarily call ethnocentrism.[ref]Not a dig. Just an observation.[/ref] While income inequality in that sense of the word is rising, income inequality globally is actually falling, and has been for decades. This is because the poorest countries are getting richer (in aggregate) faster than the richest among the developed world are getting richer than the poor among the developed world. And this advance of the poor countries is not just the mega-rich within those countries. As China has shown (again), you don’t get sustained economic growth without creating a middle class. The rise of the rest (as Fareed Zakaria dubs it) has important economic, ethical, and policy implications.[ref]Just to name one: if you think a capital tax regime is hard with just the EU, US, and Japan, what happens when you have to think about including the BRICS, too?[/ref]
But my biggest concern with this whole article is the focus on income taxation. In simple terms, you have to tax capital-based income so that it looks like labor-based income to mitigate the effects of rising income inequality. Not only is this politically infeasible, but it would also very negatively impact economic growth.[ref]If you tax factories, there will be less factories. If there are less factories, there will be less economic growth.[/ref] But do we really care so much about income? Or should we care more about consumption? Is it morally problematic that Bill Gates possess billions of dollars, or is it what he gets from those billions (yachts, influence, and safety) that causes the problem of income inequality? It seems, although this is just a first-glance at the issue, that a strong safety net and consumption based taxation goes a long way towards mitigating the problem of income inequality by looking at the problem in a new way.
Earlier this month, Time posted a letter written by Ayaan Hiris Ali, which she had written in response to Brandeis University’s decision not to give her an honorary degree after all. If a university decides not to give someone an award, you can pretty safely bet it’s because someone might be offended. But it’s always interesting to me when the person who might be offended (in this case the primary victim appears to be CAIR) and the alleged victimizer (Ali) are both members of politically correct identity groups. After all, Ali is not only a woman, but also black. She is also a woman’s rights activist. But she’s an atheist and a harsh critic of Islam. So who do you side with, the WoC[ref]That’s “woman of color,” there are all kinds of terms to keep up with if you’re interested in liberal politics.[/ref] or Islam?[ref]Of course, if Ali had been attacking Christianity there wouldn’t be a problem at all.[/ref]
I’m partially interested in this out of morbid fascination, like watching a car crash. But it’s also a kind blend of fatalism and professional interest. Given my aspirations (to be a fiction writer) and my politics (anything other than party-line left) it’s more or less a question of how much I’m going to pay for my beliefs, professionally speaking, not whether or not I will. So, which are the most taboo taboos? What matters more?
Turns out, though, we can’t really tell from this story. Ali is a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Suddenly: everything is clear. Doesn’t really matter what the rest of her liberal bona fides may be; she is tainted by association with the right. She’s even married to Niall Ferguson (who is practically a colonial apologist) so there’s really no hope for her at all.
I guess Brandeis didn’t really have a hard call to make after all.
I want to write a post about that controversial rape scene from last week’s episode of Game of Thrones, about why I don’t watch Game of Thrones, and about the ethics of creating and consuming entertainment and art, but first I need to explain the structure of reality.[ref]That’s a little but of humor there, folks. But also I’m serious.[/ref]
Naïve Realism
Realism is the idea that the external world is objectively there, whether we observe it or not. There are lots of different kinds of realism, but the default view (especially among folks who don’t go out of their way to study this) is naïve realism. That’s the idea that the world is out there and that we perceive it directly (and more or less reliably) through our senses. According to this view, objective reality exists, and we all live in it.
Subjectivism
The alternative to realism is idealism. These days, and throughout much of history, idealism has been a minority view but an important one. Descartes kicked off modern Western philosophy with his Meditations, the most famous line of which is cogito ergo sum, or “I think, therefore I am.” That’s a fundamentally idealist perspective, because it starts with the mind first, independent of any observation about the external, physical world.
The best way to think about the relationship between idealism and realism is this. According to realism we can all be sure of the fact that we have brains, but the question of whether or not we have minds is an open one. According to idealism, we can all be sure of the fact that we have minds, but the question of whether or not we have brains is an open one.
Subjectivism is a particularly extreme form of idealism that, as far as I can tell, is the most popular alternative to naïve realism among non-philosophers. Subjectivism is the idea that all truth depends on our perception. In that view, there is no objective reality. We all live in our own little subjective realities where things are true for us that might not be true for anyone else.
Problems with Naïve Realism and Subjectivism
The simplest argument for realism is stubbing your toe. No matter how much you didn’t perceive that the doorframe was going to hit your foot right there, it did. And then it hurts. Clearly objective, physical reality doesn’t really wait around for you to perceive it before it imposes consequences on your perception.
So there is strong argument for objectivity, but naïve realism is more than just objectivity. It also asserts that we directly perceive the world around us through our senses.
The counterexample to that is the existence of optical illusions. It’s not the simple fact that our senses can be mistaken that causes the problem for naïve realism, however, it’s the way that optical illusions hijack the unconscious processes that we use to construct an internal reality from raw sense data. This proves that there isn’t a simple, direct correspondence between what’s out there, what we perceive as sense data, and what we then perceive as being out there.
Believe it or not, the squares labeled A and B are the exact same shade of gray.
The situation is worse when it comes to subjectivism because the concept is obviously incoherent. For a full treatment, I recommend Thomas Nagel’s The Last Word, but here’s one quick example of why subjectivism makes no sense. Subjectivism says that no claims about reality can be objectively true or false, but subjectivism itself is an objective claim about reality. That doesn’t prove it’s false. It just proves that it’s incoherent. No sane person can rationally believe subjectivism.
So why is it popular? Well some things (like taste) really are subjective. More importantly, however, subjectivism is what some people run to because it seems like the only alternative that captures the idea that perspective really matters. You and I may look at the same situation and come to different conclusions, and we might both be right. This doesn’t actually require subjectivism (you can have different viewpoints and conditional / provisional truth claims within an objective framework), but it’s close enough to confuse lots of folks.
Enactivism
Every now and then I come up with some theory or other, and I tinker with it more and more over the months and years and when I know that it’s a really good, solid theory that’s when I can be confident that it already exists on Wikipedia. Enactivism is one of those concepts. From the entry:
Enactivism argues that cognition depends on a dynamic interaction between the cognitive agent and its environment: “Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems…participate in the generation of meaning …engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world.”
In this sense, enactivism is a fusion of naïve realism and subjectivism. It starts with the idea that objective reality is really out there. But we don’t perceive it directly. Instead, we take the sense data that is there as raw material, and we use that raw material to build our own private, internal models of the world. Because we’re all starting with the same objective reality, our individual constructed realities have lots of points of contact. This is one reason why communication is possible: because we’re often talking about the same basic reality.
Welcome to Your Matrix
Part of our constructed reality is a model of objective reality. Here, I’m thinking about everything relating to physics. We use our senses to identify objects, how far away they are, how big they are, what direction they’re moving in, etc. Part of our constructed reality appears to consist of patterns of organization that just are. Like math. 2+2 =4 for everyone, even though the number two is not a physical thing. In this sense our constructed realities are less than objective reality, which is the real thing. We only see some of what is out there, we sometimes misidentify what we do see, and we imperfectly apply rules of logic and math.
But part of our constructed reality is more than objective reality. The most essential concept here is narrative. Objective reality is just stuff that happens. There isn’t, outside of the rules of physics, a why. There isn’t meaning or purpose. That stuff exists in our constructed reality. Now, maybe it also exists in objective reality (because God says so, or for some other reason), but we can’t really be sure of that.
Shared Reality
There’s one last twist that I’ll put on enactivism before I get back to Game of Thrones (no, I hadn’t forgotten). That’s the idea of shared constructed realities.
Because we’re constantly interacting with each other, our individual realities are permeable. We have our own narratives, in which we are always the hero of our own story, but we share these narratives with other folks who agree or disagree with them. In addition, when we create things we are always cooperating in the creation of a shared, constructed reality. This is true even for individuals who do their creative work alone. Think about J. K. Rowling, writing her stories before anybody else had read them. At that point, they were strictly within her own reality. But once the world read them, then we became participants with J. K. Rowling in creating this shared reality.
Did the deaths of Sirius, or of Dumbledore, or of Dobby affect you? They affected me. Dobby’s, in particular, brought me to tears. That doesn’t mean that I was confused and thought that Dobby was out there in objective reality or that magic was real, but it does mean that there was as a sense in which at a deep, subconscious level, J. K. Rowling’s creation had become real to me.
For me it’s an open question if some narratives are objectively true. It may be possible that the shared, constructed reality is just our attempt to recreate objective reality, and that we can be right or wrong about narratives in the same way that we can be right or wrong about guessing size or distance or speed. But, practically speaking, there is a difference between objective reality (which can be quantified and objectively evaluated) and our shared, constructed realities (which cannot).
The Ethics of Sub-Creation
According to what I’ve read about J. R. R. Tolkien, he referred to world-building as “sub-creation.”
‘Sub-creation’ was also used by J.R.R. Tolkien to refer the to process of world-building and creating myths. In this context, a human author is a ‘little maker’ creating his own world as a sub-set within God’s primary creation. Like the beings of Middle-earth, Tolkien saw his works as mere emulation of the true creation performed by God.(Tolkien Gateway)
This is an extremely powerful for me, because I’ve always believed in a kind of grand universal theory of everything (only for metaphysics, rather than physics) that would somehow unify the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. On a more practical level, it provides a window into the ethics of sub-creation, which is the ethics of artistic creativity.
I know I’m going to lose a ton of people who bridle at the idea of imposing laws or commands on artistic expression (on the one hand) and who are horrified by the history of attempts to subvert artistic expression to propaganda for someone’s idea of right and wrong (on the other). These are serious concerns, but I do not think they apply to what I have in mind.
First, when it comes to rules and laws, I think we can all appreciate that a greater understanding of physical laws allows us to be more creative rather than less. This applies not only to what our engineers can build, but also to what our scientists and philosophers can imagine. I am not by any means suggesting that I could come up with the “right” rules for how to do art, or some objective metric for deciding what piece of art has more merit than another. It is not only foolish but vulgar to attempt to rank the Beauty of Mozart’s Requiem vs. that of Allegri’s Miserere, in my mind.[ref]I have no musical expertise. These are just pieces that mean a lot to me, personally. I have no idea what critics think of their relative merits.[/ref] But it isn’t vulgar or futile to wonder if there aren’t common principles—like symmetry and transcendence and struggle—which might animate both and help make each great.
Second, the grand unifying theory of everything is outside our grasp so, if we are appropriately humble, the danger of propagandizing is low. Propaganda is for people who already know what they want others to think, but someone who is searching for truth out there has no such agenda to sate and no pretext of certainty with which to sate it.
What I have in mind, by contrast, is a kind of unification of three activities that people might not ordinarily see as connected: faith, artistic creation, and artistic consumption.
Let me start out by illustrating that, because we have a wide range of freedom in constructing our realities, there is room for this to be a meaningfully moral activity. We cannot choose facts, obviously, but we still have great freedom. We can choose to look for light or to wallow in darkness. We can choose to find meaning or we can choose to see none. We can choose to be motivated towards a thing by love, or repelled away from something else by fear. What we desire is reflected in the world we create to live in, not in the banal sense of wish-fulfillment, but in a deep reflection of our truest desires.
Now let me make one simple comment: if our constructed reality determines our course of action, then it is in the truest and most accurate sense of the world what we believe. After all, beliefs are not about what we think is true, or even what we think we think is true (it’s possible to get that wrong), but rather about the things that must be true based on our actions. Therefore, another expression for constructing our reality is simply “having faith”. This need not be faith in a religious sense, secular humanists have ideals in which they have faith as firm and unwavering as any of the devout followers of religion, but it is absolutely faith.
Let me go farther and say that creating art is essentially the same thing as creating our own reality. There is a kind of symmetry between sub-creation as the creation of art and sub-creation as the creation of meaning in our day-to-day lives. I don’t think there is such a vast difference between Tolkien’s work creating Elven dialects vs. a parent’s work in feeding their child. To me: creation of meaning is creation of meaning. Faith, therefore, is not only about the construction of our beliefs, but also about the construction of art.
Lastly, let me bring back the concept of shared, constructed reality like the world of Harry Potter. When we read a book, watch a movie, listen to a poem, or hear a song we are not passively receiving information (like the failed theory of naïve realism), but are actively participating with the creator in constructing a shared reality. The audience, the performers, and the authors are all playing different parts, but in the very same activity.
In the end: The rules for what we should believe are related to the rules for what art we should create which are related to the rules for what art we should choose to participate in as the audience. And they amount, I think, to simply this: always strive for something truer, better, and more beautiful.
Game of Thrones is not the deepest, most subtle, or most innovative drama on TV. It is an example of what used to be called “meat-and-potatoes” storytelling: an R-rated yet classically styled epic. It’s mainly concerned with riveting the viewer from moment to moment, often through sex, violence, or intrigue, while keeping a vast fictional world, a complex plot, and a preposterously overpopulated cast straight in the viewer’s mind.
Does this sound like the kind of constructed reality in which you would like to exist? Not me. It’s not even the sex or violence per se that are the problem, but the fact that they are used as short-term goads to keep us interested. To the extent that these goads are linked directly into our “reptilian brains” (see next quote) they are essentially nihilistic. The next paragraph goes on:
Along with Hannibal, this is the most joyous, at times exhilarating nightmare on TV. Considering how unrelentingly bleak this world is — a State of Nature in which most characters are ruled by their reptilian brains, and those who show kindness or mercy tend to suffer for it — there’s no reason why it should be anything but off-putting.
But of course, there is a reason why it’s not off-putting: spectacle. Which brings me to a more recent piece on Game of Thrones called Rape of Thrones. The article ponders why it is that the HBO show has felt the need to deviate from the text of the books in the particular way that it does. Obviously it has to make changes (for length if nothing else), but why has the show chosen not once but twice to render a consensual sexual encounter (in the books) into rape (in the show)?
It seems more likely that Game Of Thrones is falling into the same trap that so much television does—exploitation for shock value. And, in particular, the exploitation of women’s bodies. This is a show that inspired the term “sexposition,” and a show that may have created a character who is a prostitute so as to set as many scenes as possible in brothels.
So you have to ask yourself, what kind of a person voluntarily inhabits a world where women are being degraded purely to sate his animal interest? Who willingly goes along with that? Who wants to help create that world?
That’s not the only problem, however, and Game of Thrones is not my only target. I was also struck by an article(again, from Vulture) called Why Captain America Is Only Interesting If He’s a Prick. The article just elaborates on the headline: Captain America is devoid of artistic merit when he’s a good guy.
In 2014, of what artistic good is a flawlessly nice soldier? Can’t we get at least a little rough and dirty with this 75-year-old warhorse?
On one level, this (and the popularity of anti-heroes in general) is just a furtherance of “a silly idea” C. S. Lewis had already noted in his lifetime:
A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
So I just don’t buy this argument that only if we have characters who revel in immoral behavior can we have a meaningful conversation about morality.
This topic is more than I can handle conclusively in a single post, but here’s where I’d like to wrap things up for now.
Moral art does not have to be saccharine, optimistic, or “nice” any more than the actual creation made by God Himself is saccharine, optimistic, or “nice”. The two greatest arguments against God, in my mind, are the Problem of Evil and the hidden god. Why, if God is so good, is there so much suffering? And why, if God wants us to know Him, does he not make Himself obviously present? If the greatest creation of all can cause such incredible pain and confusion, then obviously we have absolutely no reason to suspect that our sub-creations ought to be relentlessly, oppressively cheerful.
Bearing that in mind, however, art is creation, and it is therefore morally significant in ways that are complex and open to interpretation and exploration. My point is not so much “no one should watch Game of Thrones“ as it is that we should all realize that what we watch literally contributes to the creation of the world we inhabit. That’s a big deal. It’s something to think about seriously.
I don’t think that the answer is to try and wall ourselves off from anything that challenges us or makes us sad, but I do think that we ought to avoid deliberate exploitation of sex and violence to hook viewers (because it is nihilistic) and also that we ought to seek out art that reaffirms the validity of moral striving. This will mean different things to different people. I’m not suggesting any kind of top-down censorship. I’m talking about bottom-up self-control in what we choose to participate in.
I don’t know all the answers. I just think, based on my theories of constructed reality, that the problem is more important than most folks realize. I believe there is deep significance to what we choose to consume as mere entertainment, and that it is worth thinking about.
I used to post these pretty frequently when I came across them: stories of law-abiding citizens using firearms to defend themselves or others. I’m not saying I don’t or won’t share these kinds of stories in the future again, but I just haven’t been doing it much recently. I did come across this aggregator, created by the NRA, that I thought was interesting. Based on a quick skim, it looks like they’re finding about one story per day, or at least multiple stories per week.[ref]Obviously the NRA is biased. That should go without saying. All of these stories appear to be sourced elsewhere, however.[/ref]
One thing you’ll note is that a lot of them don’t involve fatalities. Some of them don’t even involve firing a gun at all. In Gun carrying woman halts violent mob, The Detroit News, Detroit, Mich. 04/08/14, WJBK, Detroit, Mich. 04/08/14, WXYZ, Detroit, Mich. 04/07/14 a woman stops a mob from beating a man who had accidentally hit 10-year old with his car (the kid seems to have been OK). She had a pistol in her pocket, but she never had to draw it. Does that count as a gun-use? I think it does. She stated, “I had a gun in my pocket, I was ready to do some damage if I had to.” That’s pretty typical: sometimes a gun isn’t directly needed, but it changes the options that you have available. Another one was Woman scares off fugitive, Access North Georgia, Ga. 04/02/14. In that case a woman did fire the gun, but apparently didn’t hit anyone. It’s not really clear if it was a warning shot or she was trying to hit the guy (“a fugitive on the run”), but it’s another example of defensive gun use without any body count.
Keep that in mind when folks tell you that a gun is more likely to be used to commit suicide than to defend your home, or similar stats. Although the safety concerns of gun ownership as it relates to suicide are legitimate, these numbers are frequently based on only counting justifiable homicide, which ignores the vast majority of real-world defensive gun use.
, but also the sense of overt jealousy at the blurb on the cover that compared him to Heinlein (Heinlein!), and even more so at the discovery that he ran 
last year.[ref]Not my favorite book.[/ref] The other folks I’ve been envious of include Jim Butcher and Larry Correia: two other relatively young writers who write books I like and whose careers I have been studying and following as they unfurl before me.
) so there’s really no hope for her at all.
