For Sex or Money

So I read the blog post by Professor Robin Hanson that started the whole "redistribute sex" hullabaloo, and I think I agree with his point (way down at the end) that most of what people are reacting to is their reflexive disgust at the "incel" movement.

And I suspect that this is something that people should tune into a bit more. The ire that Professor Hanson has brought down upon his head is mostly, I suspect, driven by the idea that "If a person cannot find a partner who is willing to sleep with them, then they should become used to the idea of celibacy." And people who find that unpalatable are "stupid rude obnoxious arrogant clueless smelly people" of little "moral or personal worth." Okay fair enough. But, and this is what the Professor is asking, why is "If a person cannot find an employer who is willing to pay them well for their labor, then they should become used to the idea of poverty," considered heartless by so many?

If it's legitimate for those of us who are satisfied with the amount of sex we have in our lives to be completely unsympathetic to the plight of those who don't, why should there be anything wrong with those who are satisfied with the amount of money they possess being similarly unsympathetic to the poor?

I'm going to hazard a guess that a lot of it has to do with general public attitudes towards sex, and the relative ease of obtaining it. People understand that one can be effectively locked out of the world of a well-paying job through no fault of one's own, but if one is effective locked out of romantic love and sex, it must be through a direct personal flaw, and one that's easily correctable at that. An acceptable sex life then, is infinitely easier to obtain than an acceptable financial life.

And as I understand it, Professor Hanson's point is that this distinction is fundamentally arbitrary. It's a social convention that most of us never give any thought to. People understand how capricious societal standards of attractiveness can be; there are even people who see the shunning that not living up to those standards can produce as harmful. But our sympathies end when someone goes from being desperately lonely to violently angry, even if we tolerate violent anger in other contexts. This isn't something that we have any real need to change. It is, however, worth understanding.

The Misery Trade

(With this post, I'm doing some thinking "out loud," as it were. I'm likely going to have to revisit this topic to write something more coherent, but I'd like to put this out as an initial stab at it.)

Back in a past life, I worked with children in a residential treatment center. It was pretty much what it says on the tin - a therapeutic setting for children who had been taken out of their parents' (or other caregivers') homes for abuse or neglect that was also their full-time residence. Because of this, the facility needed to be staffed around the clock, every day.

When I started, one of the rules of scheduling was that no-one had a "regular" weekend. That is, it was not permissible to schedule someone so that they had both Saturday and Sunday off. After I'd been there a couple of years, there was talk of changing that policy. And one of the objections that was raised was that it wasn't going to be determined solely by seniority. Unit managers could chose which, if any, staff members would have normal weekends off. One of the senior staff who I happened to work with put it this way: "People shouldn't be able to have weekends off until they've paid their dues, just as we have."

I am reminded of this because I was hanging out with friends yesterday, and the subject of student loan forgiveness came up. And the objection that this penalizes people who did what it took to pay their loans off was noted.

This is a common thing in society. I had been thinking of a similar situation just the other day. That time, it had concerned job training and employment assistance for ex-convicts, and the similar objection: What about those people who played by the rules and didn't commit crimes? (Although this usually means "weren't caught at something that includes jail time" in practice.) Why should they be punished in favor of criminals?

American society has a problem in that the stereotypical American is neither poor enough to simply be happy that someone has attained something at a relatively low cost, nor wealthy enough to be dismissive of the costs that they themselves have paid. In other words, our stereotypical American has enough to be able to pay costs for things, while at the same time lacking enough that they are sensitive to those costs. And that, I think, lends itself to the creation a society that values punishments for "wrongdoing" as a means of balancing out the perceived costs of virtue.

The United States is a wealthy nation that is filled with people who are acutely aware of their own personal poverty. Or perhaps I should say misery, instead, since "misery loves company," and many Americans, it seems (and no, I am NOT referring simply to "Trump Voters"), resent it when other people suffer less misery than they themselves do. And this leads to a form of "misery hot potato," where the goal is to not wind up holding the misery ball when the music stops, rather than reducing the amount of misery to a point where no one has to deal much of it.

And this strikes me as a fundamental issue with the way in which the United States deals with capitalism. Capitalism, it is said, is the best way of dealing with the issue of allocating scarce resources. Which is fine and good, but what happens when a given resource is no longer scarce? In my opinion, American capitalism looks for a way to make it scarce again, rather than ceding that resource to another means of managing it. And resource scarcity breeds misery, as people are willing to suffer for access to things that they find to be more valuable than a certain amount of comfort. But not too willing. They feel that suffering acutely, and thus feel like chumps when someone else isn't required to suffer for that same level of access. This, I think, is going to be difficult to expunge from anyone, Americans or not. Even monkeys have been shown to actively dislike being taken for chumps, even when a calmer response is to their direct benefit.

And so now we come to what seems to be a heavier lift than it really should be. Lowering the costs of things people actually want. And I think, paradoxically, the trick here may lie in helping people to feel that the costs are already lower. To the degree that Americans are price sensitive, it's often because they are worried that they don't have enough resources. Addressing that worry would, I believe, make them less sensitive to taxes and other forms of funding the projects that would allow other people to be better off. But this tends to run afoul of political and ideological incentives, which often use stoking the fear of being a chump to fish for votes.

And perhaps in the end, this is the issue. The general public doesn't follow politics. And because they're not engaged, they only way their interests are really going to be looked after is if political figures place the public's interests first. But because the public is disengaged, political figures tend to place their own interests first, because there is little accountability. And because the system tends to be opaque, it's difficult to understand if policies that are described as being in the public's best interests genuinely are (although it sometimes less difficult to ascertain if a given policy makes logical sense, given its stated goals). The general disunity of the American public (the lack of homogeneity or shared goals) creates rifts between sizable groups within the populace that allow politicians to run for office on a platform of directly harming other segments of the electorate. And while those harms tend to come in form of raising costs for disfavored groups, the favored groups rarely see a direct benefit. Rather its the people who provide services that reap the excess costs, because even though voters may be hoping that service providers will cheat the disfavored and pass the benefits along to them, what tends to happen is that the disfavored are cheated and enough of the excess is kept that eventually, the resource imbalance allows for the wealthy to be able to walk away from deals that don't benefit them as much as they would like, and so other people are left to use their tolerance for risk as a bargaining chip. And once one in the business of trading a defined benefit for the chance to gamble, they are unlikely to be able to keep up.

And the only way to really combat this, is through unity. Partisans realize this, but, being partisans, they tend to demand unity on their terms. And so the divisions remain. And misery grows.

Booking Cancellation

Despite personal reservations about Facebook’s interwoven privacy, data, and advertising practices, the vast majority of people find that they can’t (and don’t want to) quit. Facebook has rewired people’s lives, routing them through its servers, and to disentangle would require major sacrifice.
Even Amid Scandal, Facebook Is Unstoppable

One of the things that gives Facebook the "power" that it does is the idea that people are helpless to do anything about the company's practices. But Facebook is just like anything else. Right now, some two-thirds of Americans are on the service. It took the company years to amass that user base, and there is no reason to expect that it wouldn't take just as long to unwind it. But yes, disentangling people's lives from Facebook would require work, and the company counts on people being averse to that level of work to maintain them as customers. But it's not as if Facebook itself did the work to entangle those people - they did it for themselves. And while leaving Facebook would require walking away from some amount of that work, there is nothing stopping people from working over time, until they'd built a new online life for themselves.

The constant litany of stories about how Facebook has become indispensable all rely, as I read them, on the assumption that the only way to leave Facebook is a quick and painless exit. One that allows, with the stroke of a keyboard, people to take all of the benefits of a social-media connected life with them and decamp to a platform that can maintain the massive footprint needed to maintain vast human networks without the need to actually pay any bills for the capability. While we're being completely unrealistic, I'd like to file my request for a space-superiority fighter craft.

The Power To Choose

“When you hear about slavery for 400 years — for 400 years? That sounds like a choice. Like, you was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all? It’s like we’re mentally in prison.”
Kanye West

This statement, made to TMZ by the entertainer has started yet another teapot tempest, as one expected it would, but maybe the discussion that it sparked should be redirected. Many people are angry at Mr. West because of a narrative that tends to use the understanding of people having a choice as a way of criticizing them for making the wrong choice. Mr. West's statement that Black slaves were "mentally in prison," speaks to this. While what he's referring to is nothing more than a variation on the phenomenon we now call Stockholm Syndrome, there is a degree to which it is considered a deliberate choice on the part of the prisoners; the enslaved, the hostage, what have you.

And when people argue with Mr. West over his characterization of slavery, and its effects on the Black psyche, the argument leaves out a very important point. Namely that there is a difference between lacking an easy and available choice, and lacking a choice. It's worth keeping in mind that the relative merits of choices do not map to their absolute merits; when the available choices are ranked against one another, the best of them may still be a crushingly crappy choice, compared to what one would want in that situation.

The ability to choose between multiple bad outcomes does not negate being victimized at the hands of someone who has closed off the other options. Or in other words, simply having a choice does not saddle one with moral culpability for the outcome. But it's unsurprising that people may have difficulty with this. The moral logic of the terrorist, which claims that the murder of a hostage is the fault of the person who refuses their demands, had also become the moral logic of the police official, which states that the shooting of a suspect is that person's fault for failure to follow commands. In both cases, there is a forgetting that the fatal act was in the hands of someone who had to make choices of their own. And while the expectations of them may have been constrained, their actions were still of their own doing. And in the same way that the terrorist or the police spokesperson use the actions of others as a shield against culpability, so do the defenders of the South of old. If culpability must be shared, then there is less for the slave holding generations (and their modern descendants) to bear.

Later, in an attempt at damage control, Mr. West took to Twitter, and said: “Of course I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will. My point is for us to have stayed in that position even though the numbers were on our side means that we were mentally enslaved.”

And in this, he tapped into another part of our thinking about choices, a concept that many people in the Black community want an exemption from, but seldom challenge; the tendency to fetishize resistance to the death, considering it a corollary to "Quitters never win, and winners never quit." But many people fear death, and understand it to be the absolute worst outcome of a situation, one that people should do anything to avoid. The debate over physician-assisted suicide speaks to this; there is a train of thought that holds that no matter how painful, hopeless or deprived a life is, the very living of that life is infinitely better than being dead, and so that life must be preserved.

And against that backdop, being, or remaining, enslaved can be seen as a rational choice. But perhaps it is not so surprising that Mr. West may feel otherwise. After all, he wholeheartedly backs President Trump, who landed himself in hot water when he derided Senator John McCain's status as a war hero on the basis of his capture and imprisonment by the enemy. They are perhaps united in the sense that submission to a perceived superior force should be considered a form of complicity, if not collaboration.

There is another concept I think is in play here: A belief in the power of Virtue to overcome the power of brute force. But, at least as I see the world, being a good person, or an honorable one, does not lend one the power to defeat all odds, except in fairy tales. And so we can understand that enslaved Africans and their descendants had a choice to rise up, or remain docile, but that neither one of these may have had good ends. While Mr. West may view the likely outcome of a mass slave revolt as the self-motivated slaves quickly winning their freedom from their outnumbered White owners, it's just as possible that it would have ended in the mass slaughter of millions of people. Again, we can make the point that there was an available choice. And that it was impossible at the time, to understand precisely how it would have worked out. But perhaps the hand had written enough on the wall to make an educated guess.

If we say, though, that Mr. West refuses to understand that the choice of being a slave may have been the most sensible choice among bad options, criticizing him for saying there was a choice reinforces that lack of understanding. And this may be seen as corrosive, because the idea that having only bad choices is equivalent to not being able to choose contributes to a sense of helplessness in the face of adversity, when agency is needed most. The person who has only good options, or a clear and easy choice between good and bad outcomes does not need to be particularly active in pursuit of their own self-interest and betterment to the degree that someone tasked with choosing the least bad of several uncertain and undesirable outcomes has to be.

Lastly, I would make this point about how choices are viewed that could perhaps do with a rethink. It may be possible to understand the Black community in the United States over time as being an entity, but it shouldn't be thought of as being an individual. It's individual members are not neurons that contribute to a collective consciousness, personality and, perhaps most importantly for this context, decision engine. For the whole of the 400 years that Mr. West references, each and every individual slave (or even free Black person) had choices to make as to how to conduct their lives, and they had to make them for themselves. Not that they couldn't collaborate, but they were no more able to completely outsource their decision making than I am.

It's worth noting that some number of them chose to take some pretty intense risks to obtain their freedom. And it's also worth noting that for some of them, those risks did not pay off. And while I suspect that people know this, this may be another part of history that suffers from being taught primarily in grade school. It's unlikely that the horrors of being a recaptured slave would be taught to even junior-high school children. I can imagine traumatized children and angry parents without much effort. And while a collective uprising may have insulated many from the direct costs of failure, attempting an escape alone, or only with family members meant understanding what could very well happen.

Because the Kanye West controversy touches on so many aspects of what it means to be Black in the United States, American history and the modern politics of race, it's unlikely to result in a reexamination of how many people think about what it means to have choice. And that's unfortunate, because there is a benefit there.

Get My Good Side

There is something that I really enjoy about taking pictures of people who are taking pictures of people. Perhaps it's the meta-ness of it all.