Mythologizing

One of the dead horses that people love to flog is the habit of the Trump Administration to make demonstrably false statements, a.k.a. lying. Pretty much from the outset, with the hullabaloo over how many people attended President Trump's inauguration, the administration has been telling one falsehood after another. Their critics have called them on each and every one of them; the Washington Post appears to have appointed themselves to the task of keeping a running tally. Administration supporters, on the other hand, have either ignored the false statements, gamely argued that they were, in fact, true or busied themselves with updating the catalog of Democratic sins (especially those of President Obama) in an attempt to keep the ledgers balanced.

As I see it, the Trump Administration is doing what most of the recent administrations before it (with the possible exception of the Carter Administration) have done, which is mythologizing. What sets the Trump Administration apart is the limited intended audience for said myth-making, and thus its greater willingness to employ lies when a workable truth is not at hand. They can get away with this because, for the most part, the President's supporters aren't doing anything with the information that the administration puts out that relies on it being accurate, so there are no real consequences. In other words, no-one's livelihood or investment portfolio depended on the administration accurately describing the size of the crowd at the inauguration. And it's a pretty safe bet that the same goes for any of the 10,000+ false or misleading statements that the Washington Post claims that the Presidemt has made since taking office.

Rather it's about buying into a myth; namely that the Trump Administration will "Make America great again" by returning the nation to a rightfully lofty position that it once held, but that was cravenly surrendered by treasonous Democratic politicians and the disloyal Liberal voters that support them; and in doing so, will reverse the declining fortunes of "real Americans" who have been targeted for economic displacement and poverty by the aforementioned Democratic politicians and Liberal voters for their refusal to go along with the Evil Socialist™ New World Order. As long as the Trump Administration is in the business of providing external validation for its supporters' view of themselves as unfairly victimized and of President Trump (and, by extension, the Trump Administration) as being targeted for supporting them, then the truth or falsehood of statements made doesn't matter, so long as it serves the myth. There's not much use in expecting anything different.

Undefined

I was listening to the radio the other day, and the topic of discussion was whether or not the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria had been "defeated." Given the left-leaning politics of the program I was listening to, the consensus seemed to be that it had not been, and President Trump was incorrect in stating that it was.

But missing from the entire conversation was a working definition of what "defeat" meant in this context. Presumably, if "defeat" is a recognizable state, one could compare the current state of ISIS to this, and make a determination. The host and guest of the radio program seemed to presume that a defeated ISIS would be unable to coordinate or launch deadly attacks anywhere. This struck me as a very high standard given the nature of ISIS. But then it occurred me that I didn't really know the definition of ISIS, either.

Despite its designs to create an Islamic Caliphate, ISIS is not a nation-state. And at the same time, it's not, strictly speaking, a separatist movement, in the same way the Catalans in Spain, or the Kurds. But it seems to have greater ambitions than simply being a terrorist organization. And having a concrete idea of what ISIS is, or is not, is also important, because that also bears on what a definition of defeat looks like, and what that means going forward. A defeat of ISIS is not going to look like the defeat of Japan in the Second World War, or the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War; even with the understand that the supposed War on Terror is significantly different from either of those conflicts.

But perhaps this is just a standard feature of conflicts that are political as much or more as they are military, and also have a political component that is important to the combatants, but really isn't about the actual fight. Whether or not ISIS is defeated seems, for many commentators, to be tied to their feelings about the overall competence of the Trump Administration. And in this sense, the overall lack of definition is useful. But it means that it's not really possible to make a determination for oneself as to where things are that should at least roughly line up with how another observer sees it, preventing the public from understanding not only what progress is being made, but what it being progressed towards in the first place.

Whatever It Takes

Every time I'm in a discussion of whether or not politics has become too dishonest, I come back to this. It remind's me of what my father once taught me about how some crises demand action, and so a truth that doesn't motivate people is worse than a falsehood that does. Of course, a politics that's constantly driven by a feeling that there is a looming catastrophe is incredibly stressful, and that stress often makes people unpleasant. But in the end, it doesn't matter how good one's plan to save the world is, if you're never able to implement it. And this leads to ethical considerations being relegated to the realm of unaffordable luxuries.

Morning In Seattle

Was out watching the ferries this morning, since it was too overcast to see the sunrise.

The Guys Are Alright

I encountered this group, earlier this month, hanging out just outside of a local mall. They just stood there in their Guy Fawkes masks, holding silent video screens. I presume that it was some sort of protest, but it just as easily could have been street theater. With no signage or anything, it was impossible to be sure.

Want To Know Basis

I was reading a thread on Reddit posted by a young man who had been rear-ended while driving by a young woman who turned out to be uninsured. Her lack of insurance sparked a lively (if not always entirely serious) debate over the requirement that insurance be required for all motorists, given that many places, even urban ones, within the United States lack the public transportation infrastructure to allow a person without access to their own vehicle to reliably cover significant distances. The sides in the debate generally aligned with the idea that people who cannot obtain insurance (especially as a result of having been deemed uninsurable by private insurers) are a) dangerous, and thus should not be driving or b) should not be condemned to a life of being unable to work due to lacking transportation.

But it occurred to me that the availability or lack of insurance shouldn't be a surprise to most people; especially those who have lost access to insurance services due to multiple accidents or driving infractions; a person doesn't go from having a spotless record to being uninsurable as the result of, as some Redditors deemed it, "a single mistake." Living in an area where public transportation options are scarce to non-existent should likewise not be a surprise; although it is worth noting that a lot of people who are accustomed to driving themselves are fairly uninformed about the local public transportation options.

All of this left me with a question: Is this a situation where people have become conditioned to simply not think about the consequences, due to their seriousness? If losing the ability to legally drive runs the risk of completely torpedoing a person's life and future life chances, with little agency or chance of recovery on the part of the impacted individual, is there any rational response to it other than anxiety? And if worrying is the only possible response, what good is that? And it's worth noting that this is simply one of a number of possible situations that a person may find themselves in. I was reminded of the young woman I saw risk a nearly $1,000 fine by throwing a cigarette butt from her car window. Given the plethora of laws that she could possibly run afoul of while conducting here day-to-day life, did it really make sense for her to be educated enough to know a substantial number of them. Or is putting them out of her mind and hoping that the boom doesn't come down on her a rational act under the circumstances.

Hoping for a radical simplification of society seems quixotic, at best. Even if one thinks that laws in the United States, especially when multiple jurisdictions are involved, aren't intentionally Byzantine to the point of being completely incomprehensible, the fact remains that it would take a highly-educated legal expert to keep track of the legal implications of many mundane and apparently inoffensive actions that many of us engage in every day. If knowledge would lead to little more than stress and helplessness, perhaps ignorance is bliss. Until the final straw, that brings everything crashing down, is pulled away.

Unlawed

During an online conversation, the question of Natural Law came up. Personally, I don't believe in any sort of natural law, as I don't understand there to be concepts of rights or strictures that are objective in that they are independent of human reason. It turns out that there is a standard rebuttal to this, that being the universal prohibition against murder. And while to do concede the point that murder is universally considered wrong, I also pointed out that "murder is wrong" is a tautology, as a justified homicide is not considered murder; that is, the fact that a killing is wrong is what makes it "murder." This lead an interlocutor to press me on why people were able to live in groups without killing one another.

I admit that I find the question strange, since I understand the answer to be a simple one: Individual and collective self-interest.

As far as I'm concerned, the social convention that allows us to live in peace is the understanding that I don't need to resort to violence to achieve my ends. And since violence is a) risky and b) comes with personally unacceptable external consequences, I don't bother.

There is nothing that says that violence is always the best option, or even a worthwhile option. Sure, there are people who see violence as a marker of strength, but there are circumstances where, even for them, it doesn't justify the costs. In other words, violence, like anything else, is not a solution, it's a trade off.

In societies with weak overall social structures, rates of violence are high, because personal violence is often answered with more violence. Hunter-gatherer societies could have rates of death by homicide as high as 30%. Blood feuds and vendettas were common, in part because of an arms race between being violent enough to intimidate others and being proud enough to not want to be intimidated. One can make the point that omniscient/omnipotent deities and punishing afterlives were an attempt to tamp down on this by positing a power that couldn't be hidden from, couldn't be overpowered and that would dole out punishments. This changes the calculus for believers, in the same way that not knowing who may be a secret police agent chills speech critical of the state, as speakers never know when an unacceptably high price may be exacted. (Of course, making paradise or perdition "certain" works a bit differently.)

While societies tend to come up with rules that allow for a certain level of harmony, but they also tend to enforce arbitrary mores. One can understand where "You will not kill outside of the rules," is essential to social trust broadly. "You will keep holy the day of rest" seems a little less important; at least to me.

But in the end, what makes it function is the idea that right now, the trade-offs favor peaceful interactions more than the alternatives, because a) humans are pretty crappy at taking on their environments completely unsupported. Bear Grylls can jump out of plane in BFE and be living like a king in under a week, but for most of the rest of us, we need backup or we starve in the cold or are eaten by Grue. And the more advanced (and affluent) a society becomes, in general, the more backup we need to keep things humming. And b) generally speaking, more people allow for greater division of labor; more people can specialize and that makes it easier for everyone. (This doesn't scale indefinitely, however.) So larger and large aggregations of people allow for yet larger aggregations.

Now, I admit that I could be wrong about this. But what I often find interesting is the idea that outside some sort of enforced Natural Law that people would find that resorting to violence suits their purposes on a regular basis. I suppose that not believing in any sort of deity, yet seeing the world as a (reasonably) peaceful place requires that I understand there to be incentives for non-violence. But I do find it curious that so many people believe that the opposite is true.

The Deal, It Is A-Changin'

Social contracts made between entities of unequal power are always tricky, and they become even more so when the terms of the agreement don’t really have a one-to-one mapping with the interests (or worse, perhaps, the requirements) of one or both parties.

The social contract that “working class/blue collar/low skilled” workers of the Baby Boom generation thought that they were entering into seems to have gone something like this: “In return for labor, and loyalty to the company’s interests, the company will in turn take care of the workforce by paying workable wages and providing for those who have completed their working lives.” And on a greater level, another agreement could be characterized as: “Work hard, play by the rules, and everything will be okay going forward.” This arrangement worked well for some time. It should be pointed out, however, that it was not universal. Social convention decreed that men, as the breadwinners for families, should have greater access, and that non-Whites could be relegated to work that was not valued enough to qualify.

But as society changed, the companies (or rather, the people running them) found that their interests were no longer being served by that arrangement. There is always a danger, when one makes a commitment, that future circumstances will conspire to render either party unable or unwilling to live up to that commitment. The primary interest of any for-profit enterprise is not profit for its own sake. Rather, profits are there to be doled out to the primary owners of the enterprise as income. As the opportunity to increase profits by moving jobs outside the company and/or outside the country presented itself, there was pressure from those people who stood to gain the most from increased profitability to take advantage of those opportunities. At the same time, many of those people were insulated, often entirely, from the day-to-day impacts of those changes; when a business replaces, say, the night cleaning staff with contracted (and perhaps ineligible) immigrant labor, the difference in dividends may be minuscule, but to a shareholder who doesn’t work in the building, any other changes are invisible.

A company here or a factory there doesn’t make a national crisis. But when the greater society decided wholesale that the old agreement wasn’t cutting it anymore, people started running into trouble in large numbers. Lacking any real leverage other than the social contract itself, they had no way of punishing organizations that reneged on the agreed-upon terms. Meanwhile, those above them on the social ladder, the college-educated professional class and knowledge workers, were too busy pressing for more cost cutting (in the name of making it easier for them to purchase their way into the appearance of affluence) or (although quite often, and) sneering unsympathetically at people who they chose to characterize as lazy and/or stupid; in any event, not as worthy as themselves. This is a common factor when a society labors under the perception of scarcity (real or imagined); adoption of the “just world” hypothesis, especially its focus on the idea that people bring their misfortunes on themselves, is ego-syntonic, implying, as it does, that the world actively responds to individual virtue.

The sending of jobs outside of borders can be a boon to a society, so long as the driving force is to shed those jobs that are “wasting” a portion of the workforce that would otherwise be available for “bigger and better” things. We saw this with the tech boom. As the burgeoning technology sector scoured the landscape for warm bodies, many jobs at the low end of the wage and status scale were offshored or opened to migrants; there was no one else to do them. But often, the idea is to simply find poorer people to do the work, relying on more abject poverty, a relative difference in standards of living or both to lower expenses, while at the same time capturing the difference, rather than passing it on to customers.

The Paradox of Thrift can be summed up quite simply; an economy that depends on a certain velocity of money suffers when enough people begin to hoard wealth, and even though individuals help themselves through such hoarding, the reduction or even cessation of income (due to others’ hoarding) means that all but the independently wealthy eventually starve, if they live long enough. And because so much of the modern economy depends on discretionary spending, it’s easier to trigger a vicious cycle than may be appreciated. And this is likely how capitalism ends; without some shock to the system or external source of resources, it succumbs to a sort of entropy and begins to grind to a halt. Transfer payments from sympathetic (or captured) governments can keep the machine going for a while, but since that doesn’t create new resources, it’s only a temporary solution.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, all solutions are temporary; the Universe itself only has a finite amount of time. So the more pertinent question becomes what do people want things to look like, and what trade-offs are they willing to make. No only to implement their chosen solutions, but to purchase support for them.

Shepherd Wanted

"A global team reviews audio clips in an effort to help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands." You wouldn't think that something so mundane would be much of a big deal. But when Bloomberg revealed the fact that there are, in fact, actual human beings that listen to some items that have been recorded by Alexa digital assistants, the reaction was fairly intense.

Part of this can be chalked up to the fact that the Bloomberg article was vague and alarmist. This is, of course, somewhat to be expected. In an attention economy, information will be tailored to grab people's attention. Alarmism is attention-grabbing. And the article needed to be vague, as it was sourced mostly anonymously, and there wasn't a complete breakdown of the processes involved.

It can be said that there is another factor at work here, however, and that is a suspicion that many people appear to have that "Big Data" (or some other buzzword that many people don't really understand all that well) is being used to compile dossiers of damaging and/or incriminating information about them as individuals; and that technology companies intend to deploy those dossiers in ways that will cost them. Because late stage capitalism (as the kids are fond of saying these days). Given the general prevalence of that assumption, it's in the best interests of news organizations to go along with it; or at least not push back against it.

Back in 2011, I noted that political scientists John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse had found that "the American Public" (as a whole) tended to want two things: a) to be disengaged from politics and b) honorable and public-minded politicians who wouldn't rip them off while they weren't paying attention. At the time, I was somewhat incredulous as this finding, as it didn't seem to be that we expected this sort of behavior from non-governmental actors. At the time, I cited automotive mechanics and McDonald's cashiers as my examples, but I figured that people expected that active disinterest in how businesses operated would bite them. (Even though a commenter doubted my logic at the time.) So color me somewhat surprised to learn that I was wrong about that. People appear to want to be disengaged from business, yet not want that inattention to cost them, in the same way that they often do with governments. And I think this may explain why the Bloomberg article resonated with people; it feeds their concern that because businesses aren't as civic-minded as they "ought" to be, disinterest results in being left holding the bag. The vague alarmism of articles like the one in Bloomberg allow them to fill in the gaps, while Bloomberg can honestly say that they never accused anyone of wrongdoing.

My personal belief is that in the end, the hands-off approach is going to have to give way. It strikes me as unworkable in the long run. But then again, I've been wrong before...

By the way, I still haven't gotten around to reading "Stealth Democracy" yet. I should likely remedy that.

Value Proposition

There are a number of policy debates, from abortion to the death penalty to health care to safety regulation that typically turn on perceptions of the value of life. Which raises the somewhat obvious question of how the value of life, or any given life, is determined. The "simple" answer that seems to be in play, which is "A life is worth what people are willing to pay to preserve it," is unsatisfying for many people. And I would suspect that this is because many people tend to place a higher value on certain lives than they are able to fund from their own resources. This leads to many policy debates around life being really about how much other people should value certain lives.

Or, perhaps put differently, is the choice of how much life is "worth," either as an abstract idea, or in relation to a given person, a choice that is significant enough that the legal power of the state should be brought to bear on it?

In practice, lives are cheap. Many of the political debates that are waged in the name of "saving lives" are as much, if not more, about dealing with people's fears. Dangerous pursuits that people aren't particularly afraid of tend to be less lightly regulated than less hazardous things that frighten people. This is to be expected; for many people, perception is reality, and so thinking that they're safe and actually being safe are generally indistinguishable from one another.

This complication aside, understanding what people actually believe the value of life to be, when they need to act on that belief, is of importance because it informs how they're actually going to behave. It's generally easier to alter a behavior that one understands, as opposed to one that's a mystery. It may also force the discussion of what resources we actually have at our disposal, and how, as a society, we chose to deploy them. It's one thing to say that the value of a human life is immeasurable. It's another thing to then decide that measurable resources are going to be spent on it.

Fists of Glass

For another group of conspiracists, it’s more comforting to think that, because Hussle joined with the real-estate developer David Gross to open a co-working space and STEM center in his old Crenshaw neighborhood, and was scheduled to meet with the Los Angeles police to discuss solutions for curbing gang violence in South L.A., the establishment feared him so much that it took his life. (Don’t even ask why the establishment would cut him down for preventing violence.)
It Hurts to See Nipsey Hussle’s Life Not Mattering

To talk about conspiracy theories, it helps to understand the conspiracy mindset. Why would "the establishment" have Mr. Asghedom killed for working to prevent violence? Well, if you believe that violence in Black communities in the United States is in the interests of said "establishment," it's only a short logical step from there.

In her article in "The Atlantic," Jemele Hill notes that many Black men and boys are both the targets of violence and its perpetrators, seeing it as their primary means of resolving conflicts with people like themselves. Despite the exhortations of Arrested Development in Raining Revolution, poor Black Americans have not "saved those rounds for revolution." Working to create greater opportunity, better education systems and higher levels of equality for the Black community (to the degree that we can be reasonably envisioned as a single community) as a whole has never really taken hold. Neither has taking their anger out on what they understand to be an oppressive system. Many people would disagree with Ms. Hill's assessment that the factors that result in such widespread poverty within the Black community are the causes of Black-on-Black violence. They advance an argument that they are, in fact, the effects.

And so to the degree that "the establishment" or "the White power structure" or whatever you want to call it is understood to be highly invested in denying safe, stable and prosperous lives to Black people, either out of hoarding such for White people, or out of simple malice and perversity, promoting violence in Black communities (and, therefore, preventing its reduction or elimination) is an obvious tactic in the maintenance of "White supremacy."

It's not all that difficult to understand that blaming the woes of Black America on shadowy Whites can be ego-syntonic for many. The idea "black masculinity is complex but at times riddled with toxicity" smacks of the Black pathology mantra that many people believe to be little more than a form of victim-blaming. The perception of choosing between seeing themselves as broken (and perhaps morally culpable in that) and as being on the receiving end of intentional and/or systemic injustice may lead to seeing conspiracies where none exist, but it may also be preferable to believing that bad things sometimes happen for reasons other than someone wants them to.

People realized decades ago that the violence that tends to blossom in poor, urban Black communities does nothing to improve them, even if using lethal violence to resolve interpersonal conflicts my serve the purposes of specific individuals. But when individual motivations and interests are left out of the equation, either the violence simply is or it is in the interests of another community. And I have met far too many people who are uncomfortable with an uncontrolled universe to believe that people won't see another hand at work.

Unpacking the violence in the Black community means accepting it as a rational response to a set of perverse incentives that have grown up, and potentially ossified, over the years. That may produce, as unlikely as I think it, an external culprit; some organization or institution that has deliberately created this situation out of a nefarious motivation. But it may also produce the understanding that life is simply full of perverse incentives; that this is simply the nature of living. There may be no one or nothing to blame, it may just be, and need to be changed.

In the end, part of what drives this is the idea that conspiracies are driven by giants made of glass. They may be vast and powerful, but they are ultimately Goliaths, and all that it takes to bring them down is a well-placed and courageous David. But this glass Goliath is aware of the danger. It's also aware that being David is beyond the reach of the ordinary person (even if slings and stones are not), and so all it needs to do is hunt the Davids wherever they appear. Striking down these chosen ones may only delay the inevitable, but what else had Goliath to do with its time?

Show Me

Even if an ad is targeted broadly, Facebook will serve it to the audiences most likely to click on it, generalizing from information from their profile and previous behavior. The system builds correlations to find this ideal audience: if techno fans are particularly likely to click on a specific ad for headphones, that ad might be served more to other techno fans in the future, even if it wasn’t an explicit targeting parameter.
[...]
Housing ads with a photograph of a white family, for instance, were apparently served to more white users than the same ad with a black family.
[...]
An ad for lumber industry jobs was shown to an audience that was 90 percent male, while ads for supermarket cashiers reached an 85 percent female audience.
"Facebook’s ad delivery could be inherently discriminatory, researchers say"

Based on the title of the article from The Verge, you can see where this is going. And it raises an interesting question. Are advertising platforms required to place advertising in from of people who are less likely to respond to it, when that correlates with some or another protected category?

It's easy for people to go after Facebook, because (in my opinion) of the general suspicion that Facebook has some untoward level of control over people's lives. But the question is bigger than that, because it would technically apply to any form of advertising. If I run an ad in The Atlantic, for instance, I suspect that it's going to reach a Whiter, more affluent audience than the same advertisement in Ebony. Likewise, if I buy space on a website devoted to tabletop role-playing games, I'm going to have that same effect.

And so that does raise the question of whether or not targeting some or another specific audience should always be viewed as suspect. Because to the degree that factors that lead an advertisement to be more effectively displayed for specific audiences are not always going to be neutral in regards to race, sex, income levels, political affiliation et cetera, selecting the people most likely to respond to an ad to see the ad will likely always be somewhat "inherently discriminatory." Because if people are more likely to click on ads that show people who resemble themselves, or that they otherwise identify with, it's to be expected that an algorithm that understands demographics will wind up reinforcing this tendency.

The internet, or internet advertising, to be more precise, is not going to undo the sorts of racial and sexual stereotyping that's become part and parcel of modern society. That job is going to have to belong to the public as a whole, and they're going to have to be actively invested in it. Forcing advertising platforms to show people advertisements that they're statistically unlikely to be interested in, effectively ignoring the data that comes back to them, isn't going to create an egalitarian society. People, changing their preferences, might. But I understand the impulse to go for the easier lift.

Aspirations

While I will admit to being somewhat surprised to find it on Physics.org, I found this article to be an interesting one. I signed up for an online dating site back in the day, at the behest of an ex-girlfriend who'd roped me into helping her out with some speed-dating events that she was hosting, but never really put much time into it, and so I find data on how they work to be fascinating.

It turns out, that out of four online dating markets studied, sending a longer message to a more-desirable potential partner one aspires to doesn't increase one's chances of having that person message back. Except here in the Seattle area, where a longer message does, in fact, increase the chances of having someone who's otherwise "out of one's league" send a reciprocal message. (How the fact that the Seattle area is considered a difficult market for men plays into this, I don't know.)

Like most academic papers, this one is written in "science-speak," which I have to admit didn't put me off reading it. There's something about the incongruity of the sentence: "Here, we report results from a quantitative study of aspirational mate pursuit in adult heterosexual romantic relationship markets in the United States, using large-scale messaging data from a popular online dating site (see the “Data” section)," that I find remarkably amusing. Not being much of a romantic myself, I'm of the opinion that one can quite easily apply the tools of science to understanding how people go about seeking partners for themselves, and so I tend to find these sorts of studies to be quite helpful in understanding how people see the world around them.

Although perhaps "people" is the wrong word to use here. After all, this is a study of online dating messaging patterns in four big-city markets. There are an awful lot of people who wouldn't have been captured in this, and the way they go about things could potentially be quite different than the urban and suburban hopefuls who found themselves gamely sending messages to people more desirable than themselves.

So I suspect that it's more accurate to say that in reading this, I have learned something about the particular segment of society that I inhabit. And that's always useful.