Spiders are scary... or are they?

I read this today: "people tend to develop phobias for evolutionarily relevant threats (like snakes and spiders) rather than for things that are far more likely to kill them (like automobiles and electrical sockets)". So I got these 4 pictures and if you're anything like me you'll find that 2 of the objects appear benign, while two appear sinister to the point of causing discomfort.

Then it struck me that, once one understands evolution, this should have been incredibly obvious. One shouldn't find out something so simple and experience a feeling of enlightenment. Especially someone like me who considers themselves relatively intelligent and (accounting for age) relatively well-educated. This apparent paradox frustrated me, so naturally its been on my mind since I first read the original sentence.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how utterly fantastic it is that we're able to experience such frustrations. There are 2 main reasons: we exist in a time where we can have the knowledge of something like that, and what the actual knowledge means.

We can compare time from the earliest life to 2012 by using a calendar. I calculated the calendar by scratch using a yellow pad and Wikipedia, so feel free to verify. There are of course some limitations to any such representation, but the underlying theme is well established fact. I set the start date of the calendar to January 1 at midnight, and the end date is December 31 at 11:59:59, and I'm using the calendar of the year 2012:

January 1st: Primordial ooze beings to exist

May 16, 9:00 pm: The great oxygenation event

September 12, noon: Sexual reproduction arises

November 6, 6:00 am: The first multi-cellular creatures arrive

November 10, 7:30 pm: The earliest brain appears via a flatworm. And these are still around! So consider that before defining *Homo sapiens* as the pinnacle of evolution.

November 14, 10:03 pm: The first vertebrate appears

November 27, 4:39 pm: The first recognizable limbs begin to appear

November 30, 10:12 pm: The first mammals appear

December 21, 9:00 pm: At this point there's a common ancestor of mice and men

December 27, 8:24 am: Primates diverge into subgroups

December 28, 5:15 pm: Old World Monkeys diverge from apes

December 29, 7:13 pm: The common ancestor of humans and great apes is alive

December 30, 2:08:44 pm: Very early hominin genus, they had brains 1/5 the size of modern humans

December 30, 5:25:48 pm: Loss of body hair, full bipedalism

December 30, 8:01:09 pm: Homo erectus is thrust into the world

December 30, 8:42:54 pm: We learn to control fire

December 30, 11:13:11 pm: The earliest anatomically modern humans

December 30, 11:50:19: pm: Behavioral modernity (e.g. using tools, symbolic thought, cooking food)

December 30, 11:52:02 pm: We leave Africa and interbreed with Neanderthals

December 30, 11:58:25 pm: Europeans develop light skin, Homo sapiens become the last living species of the genus Homo

This isn't comparing, say, from the Big Bang or even from the Earth's creation. This is just our ancestry! For the "first 364.99" days every living creature was incapable of anything much more complicated than fishing or drawing crude pictures. Even once Homo sapiens emerged, our first ~100,000 years we lived to around 25 and if we were lucky enough to avoid a brutal violent death our teeth would kill us. For emphasis from Jared Diamond: "the actual percentage of the population that died violently was on the average higher in traditional pre-state societies than it was even in Poland during the Second World War or Cambodia under Pol Pot."

And yet here we sit! The beneficiaries of a previously inconceivable explosion of safety and progress. We can reliably bet that we won't be murdered, we won't be robbed, and we can freaking download Wikipedia on a handheld device. We're so powerful our contraptions will render the Earth largely uninhabitable unless we purposely change our behavior. We're capable of walking on the moon, or investigating quantum mechanics. We're capable of studying human brains and behavior and the Universe in general and learning so much more than has ever even been conceived by previous generations! We're capable of recognizing the common link between spiders and ourselves, recognizing why we behave a certain way when we see one, and easily disseminating that information to anyone with access to books, the Internet or other people who know. Just think about that for a moment. Throughout almost all of time there has never been a creature capable of anything even remotely comparable to what we can do. Unless of course one wanted to define "greatness" as longevity in which case I think we'll have to hand that trophy to trees and flatworms.

Which brings me to the second reason my frustration, once reflected upon, became utterly fantastic. Think about everything that happened that led to the feeling of discomfort when looking at a spider. Untold generations of our ancestors had to get hurt by spiders - entire lineages dying out because of one interaction with one small spider - before we learned to instinctively recognize that a spider is dangerous. That feeling of discomfort are the genes of your ancestors crying out to you! The states of your brain today are being influenced by the interactions your ancestors had in the Pleistocene era. The lessons they learned by watching their neighbors die were learned so well that we can sit in our AC, drink tea imported from Japan, watch a video from Syria, eat fruit imported from South America, discuss the finer points of philosophy, and yet just the sight of an insect is enough for our ancestors to cry out so strongly it changes our brains. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson's stardust quote, that's a whole new level of connectivity we share with the world.

I think it's pretty cool.

Corporations are people my friend!

http://prometheefeu.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/mankiw-is-right-buffet-is-wrong/

I read the above article this morning and its been bothering me since. It's a well-written informed opinion piece with a conclusion I disagree with. God knows it's a pleasant diversion from "Newt Gingrich's adultery is *actually* an indication he should be president" style drivel. I couldn't help but feel something was off about the argument but until just now I couldn't translate my gut feeling into words.

A corporation is more than a group of people (eg shareholders) who have pooled their money. I'm not up on my financial lingo but entities exist to fulfill that role: partnerships, limited partnerships, limited liability corporations and the like. The U.S. tax code has provisions for people who want to pool their money and have the resulting entity basically be "a group of individuals".

(My understanding of) the reason people form corporations is precisely because they want to form an entity separate from the people involved. They want an entity that can go bankrupt, for example, without the shareholders as individuals go bankrupt. They want an entity that the Supreme Court can rule - ಠ_ಠ - as having freedom of speech. Again, my knowledge limits me, but I hope the point is accepted: people form corporations precisely to create an entity apart from the shareholders.

Which is why, once we keep that in mind, it's bizarre to argue that corporations should be independent entities in every way except when it comes to calculating tax burdens. I don't want to blame someone for arguing for something that benefits them (although that sentence alone speaks volume about society) but it's transparent that the argument only holds water if one is a shareholder themselves. I can't see any justification for arguing that corporations are people when it comes to tax burdens but very much aren't people when it comes to everything else.

A quick thought on those who demonize SNAP

I was having a conversation with some friends, and it just hit me what I dislike about the attitude that leads to demonizing people who receive food stamps. I'm on my lunch break, so I'll be brief. Although I do officially recommend trying Seitan, I just had it for the first time and it's pretty great. It's the resentful attitude of "us vs them" that attacks those who often can't defend themselves.

Obviously when it comes to SNAP recipients this resentment is often drawn along racial lines, but I think it's entirely possible to draw lines using some other method. But it's the attitude that while every government service we use is justified, a black person receiving money from the government for groceries is over the line. Proponents have to admit that everything they use: clean air, clean water, education, knowledge that the ER has to take them (absent freaking universal healthcare), education of workers, police, fire, safe products, the justice system, everything they use is a normal and accepted government function. They have to argue that there's something unique about SNAP, and I think that argument is always fueled by A) racism or B) an "us vs them" mentality.

It's really clear when you pay attention to some of the language. The theme is always something like "they're spending our money" or "I, as a taxpayer, shouldn't have to give them money". It's unique in that this attitude is never applied to, for example, the mortgage interest deduction or occupying two countries. There's criticism of those things - and a lot more! - but this "us vs them" attitude seems to only rear its head when talking about welfare or SNAP. It's not acceptable in society to demand that someone claiming the mortgage interest deduction has to humble themselves before you, there are no chain emails discussing how Social Security recipients should "get rid of their flatscreen and 20's if they want our money".

It's used to A) serve as a scapegoat for real problems, which means it's also a false solution (AKA the country's budget would be in shape if it weren't for lazy unemployed black welfare recipients) and B) it serves the *really important* function of defining groups. It's our money; they're taking it. We work hard; they don't. We're employed; they aren't. We don't waste money on flatscreen TVs and 20's; they do. I don't think this is a good function! But in the context of the conservative "every man for himself, let the chips land where they will" demonizing SNAP is extremely effective. It's divisive, its claims are untrue, it's resentful, it's irrational, but it's really freaking effective.

Follow up on Occupy

This (video) and the aftermath is a perfect example of the sort of behavior that I was trying to characterize in my previous post. The message that was spread after this incident was basically "police officers needlessly pepper spray innocent protestors". That message is inaccurate, or at best shows poor judgment with all the facts (of course my conclusion is also assuming I have all the facts!) available

The videos released, the pictures accompanying the news articles, all the evidence seemed to indicate that the police acted inappropriately, to put it very mildly. The Google personalizes results so it's anecdotal evidence, but when I typed in "uc" "uc davis pepper spray" was the 6th suggestion, and when searching "uc davis" the bottom half of the first page of results were all related to the pepper spray incident. Some of the police officers involved were put on leave, and I just realized anyone who cares enough to read a blog post about the UC Davis pepper spray incident probably knows the basic message about what happened and the aftermath.

That's why this more complete video of what actually happened is so important. IANAL, but it appears that a crowd of protestors surrounded a group of police officers, refused to let them leave, were pepper sprayed, then the police were allowed to leave. I've never been involved in a protest but it seems like refusing to comply with the police results in the police giving up or being arrested. And the police action should be reasonable because police brutality is something I take very seriously. The right to legally protest is something I take very seriously.

I always understood protests - civil disobedience - is when one is saying "I'm protesting by breaking the law with the understanding that while my stand is morally justified in my mind, it's illegal and I refuse to stop until I'm forced to by police". And what happens is some variation of:

1) Police/Law: What you're doing is illegal so stop doing it

2) Protestors: No it isn't! Or, it's illegal but I'm publicly going to continue doing it to raise awareness of my cause or somehow change society

3) Police/Law: We get that. It's still illegal and you still need to stop doing it

4) Protestors: No, we can continue. It's so important that we're willing to risk arrest

5) Police/Law: Seriously guys, we will arrest you and physically make you stop.

6) Protestors: That's the price of taking an ethical stand

7) Police/Law: We're *this* close to making you stop. We've told you repeatedly, we told you yesterday, and now we're standing in front of you literally shaking the pepper spray can. It's about to happen.

8) Protestors: (they literally said this) Don't shoot children!

And then the police used pepper spray. And guess what? The protestors were forced to comply without the police using unreasonable force. On top of that, the police didn't even force them to comply with what had been ordered the day before. The police settled for just being allowed to walk away. 

Occupy's response? Label it police brutality, and release edited video and pictures that seemed to prove that it was police brutality. I just can't sympathize with a group or with people whose mentality is that the truth is less important than furthering their goals. That isn't to discount the distaste for their general mentality that I find easier to describe rather than justify. Screaming don't shoot children? Believing they have a right to civil disobedience without repercussion? They consistently adopt all sorts of ideas that I take very seriously and ruthlessly cheapen and exploit them. The best parallel I can think of is the phenomenon of adding "-gate" to the end of everything, but of course Occupy does this in a much more directed purposeful way. 

I agree with a lot of their goals but I can't support using lies and misrepresentations as evidence or cheapening serious ideas. TBH, I think my distaste for the movement stems from how close they are to something I would love to support and yet they're also so far away.

The Occupy movement

I've been back and forth on the Occupy movement. On the one hand I sympathize with their goals, as a liberal agree with many of the typical liberal stances. I see the people making 53% pictures bragging about working two jobs without having healthcare as if that's something that's desired. As if one needs to work 60 hours in order to be a hard worker, or one needs to go without healthcare in order to demonstrate self-reliance. These are horrible ideas, and it's a shame people genuinely are duped into believing them, and being proud of those beliefs. My sympathies overwhelmingly lie with the 99%/Occupy folks. But I have very serious misgivings about everything beyond their general goals, and any brevity in the objections I list below is more likely due to tiredness rather than running out of objections.

• They've taken the admirable goal of equality and gone too far trying to achieve it
• They try to obtain false meaningfulness using cheap tricks
• They abandon facts-based reality when it suits their message
• Everything has a pathological need to be recognized as smart/clever/original/valuable running through it

To begin with, they've taken a healthy fear of leadership co-opting the movement thereby not truly reflecting the interests of the participants and turned it into something plain silly. Any group has to express common things (otherwise why band together?) and they've constructed an elaborate system of working groups, spokes councils, and assemblies with participation via hand signals. As can be expected, some people have split and formed their own councils, groups, and assemblies. There are no leaders, there is no method to ensure cooperation, decisions can be reversed immediately, and no individual is accountable. They've taken a desire for equality to such an extreme that their decision-making process resembles a dysfunctional sociological classroom experiment.

The Guy Fawkes masks. I guess they feel that wearing them automatically renders one cool, or that by putting a piece of plastic on your face your message is automatically transformed into something deep and respectable. A person merely speaking? Rubbish! A person speaking while wearing a piece of plastic covering their face? They're transforming the nature of society! It makes no sense to me, it's a cheap ploy designed to carry the false impression of serious meaning and being an important person. It's an attempt to get something important without working for it, and that's the opposite of their overall message.

Pretending they're innocent bystanders being brutally attacked by Big [anything] via police officers. I get that police brutality exists, I get that we've given police officers special authority and they should be held to a higher standard, I get that some police officers abuse that authority. These are all things we agree on. But... they take that reality and exaggerate it beyond the facts. The Occupy movement often pretends that when you physically assault a police officer they won't protect themselves. There's a line as to how aggressive you should be able to get with the police. That isn't advocating that Statist Jack-Booted Thugs should be able to beat citizens – it's the reality of what a police force is.

Even if we dismiss all false allegations of police brutality, I still have issues with their legitimate allegations of police misconduct. The perfect example is the YouTube video where several female protesters were sprayed with mace. In my opinion, they shouldn't have been sprayed. They have my sympathy and support at that point. But... the protesters then drop to their knees and cry out with hands outstretched, they put on a performance. The non-protesters appear unaffected, the police officers appear unaffected, the only people suddenly putting on a false performance of agony are the people trying to spread the message of police brutality. Only the protesters were directly sprayed, but considering how close everyone else was – it was a crowd – it seems like a dishonest performance. It's that moment when they leave reality and begin twisting it to fit their ends that we disagree. Perhaps it's a personal shortcoming, but I believe in a facts-based reality. We can only have constructive discussions about the world if we agree on a facts-based reality, leaving that behind means constructive discussion is no longer possible.

The fact that any police officer or veteran who does or says something positive about Occupy is immediately held up as heroic. Either A) the action of being a police officer or veteran supporting Occupy is heroic, or B) it's a false assertion of heroism. Obviously A isn't true, so we should ask why B is true. My personal opinion is that it fits perfectly into the overall theme of cheaply trying to obtain a false status of being meaningful and important. One can either work to sway the opinions of police officers and veterans, or one can hold a handful up as a token symbol.

Admittedly the next one is somewhat an indictment of my generational peers, but it's particularly relevant to the Occupy movement. There is a pathological need to constantly demonstrate how clever, smart, and worthy of praise they are, and it manifests itself in childish displays. Wearing a mask popularized by a film is one aspect of it, but it's in everything they do. For example, the Denver mayor wanted representatives of the Occupy Denver movement to talk to city and state officials. One would think this is normal – we've developed a system of representatives for negotiations and discussions because you can't have a meaningful conversation with several hundred people at once. It's remarkably basic, and it's how groups can communicate effectively.

But representatives aren't very clever or original, so Occupy Denver elected a border collie to be their leader and claimed “[the dog] is closer to a person than any corporation: She can bleed, she can breed, and she can show emotion. Either Shelby is a person, or corporations aren’t people”. It's utterly stupid. It's misstating the concept of corporate personhood, it's not engaging in dialogue with the people who can do what you want, and it's referring to a statement that's actually true! When Mitt Romney used the phrase “corporations are people” he was making the point that raising taxes on corporations is effectively raising taxes on the shareholders because they will have less money coming in. Whatever the corporate tax rates are, whether we should raise or lower them, it is a factual statement describing reality. Leaving reality behind in an attempt to demonstrate how clever and right one is... it's stupid, and not something I can support.

Basically: I like the goals of the movement, but the movement is trying to reach those goals as if they were children unable to operate in an adult world. Until they begin behaving in an adult way I don't see any similarities between Occupy and myself.

Kidneys!

I was recently part of a discussion about whether kidneys should be legally bought and sold in the US. It's worth noting that the discussion usually concerns body parts we can't readily notice rather than eyes, ears, hands, etc. The simple act of changing one word for another "should there be a market for the poor to have their eyes gouged out?" can shed light on the answer. But for the sake of argument, we can pretend the same people who want to buy kidneys have no interest whatsoever in buying anything else.

One of the main problems with allowing organs to be bought and sold is that the seller often can't afford not to sell - it's rarely a voluntary choice. Selling the kidney could mean: the difference between sending a child to a decent school or a poor one; the difference between healthcare or not; the difference between having a car to drive to a better job or staying at an old one; the difference between trying to find space in a homeless shelter or getting an apartment; the difference between eating that week or not. This is a market designed solely to exploit the poorest and most vulnerable members of our community - and it's designed so only the wealthy can benefit. Applying the typical "people behave towards their own self-interest and everyone benefits from voluntary choice" model does not work in a market like this. It produces an efficient market, but it produces a deeply unjust market. Exploiting the most vulnerable members of society should never be respected, and it certainly should never be allowed to masquerade as moral.

All men are created equal. When we take by coercion the bodies of the most vulnerable, we forget this basic tenant of humanity. We turn the most vulnerable into the least equal. When we take the poor and transform their bodies into commodities to be bought and sold, they lose their dignity and we lose our humanity.

Observations and Examples

So my economics professor has a tendency to run little social experiments on the class in an effort to get us to more fully understand the material. Like equating grades on an exam with wages earned, time spent studying with effort spent working, and talking about how a more equal distribution of grades results in less over all effort because of diminishing marginal returns (ie I'm not going to spend an additional 2 hours studying if the “reward” is going to someone else). And it's a neat way to connect the material with real life, so hopefully we understand the concepts in the class better.

There's a clique (about 1/3 of the class) who has all the same classes, all sit together, all economic majors, all really conservative, all homogeneous with their opinions on these experiments. Obviously I can't claim to know the political leanings of everyone in class, but for clarity I'll refer to this group as “the conservatives”. Their opinions are generally along the lines of “personal responsibility! I bear no duty to help others, in fact it's virtuous if there are no rules making us help each other. The rules are what they are, we all have an equal opportunity to do well”.

So in the “grades are wages” example, the professor used hypotheticals like “what if a student is a single parent, their child is sick, and they can't study?” or “what if a student is forced by his or her boss to work all night before the exam?” or other examples generally trying to say that sometimes doing poorly on an exam isn't indicative of laziness, it's indicative of chance or being exploited by an employer. So he was suggesting that the fair thing might be to re-appropriate the grades somehow (upper/lower limit, average, grading curves, etc). And the response from “the conservatives” was positive, until they realized it might mean they would have a lower grade with the re-appropriation than without it. At which point they took up the banner of personal responsibility: maybe he shouldn't be in school, maybe he's just using an excuse to be lazy, life isn't fair, it's an incentive for people to be lazy and that's bad, maybe he should just study sooner, etc. The gist was “it's not my problem, changing the rules to benefit someone else is unfair to everyone”.

We also had a discussion when “the conservatives” asked the professor to post the class notes online before class. The professor said that he was hesitant to because people would stop coming to class until right before the exam, they would do poorly, the entire vibe of the class would diminish. There would be less learning and lower grades. So he turned it into a class wide discussion, and the end result was “the conservatives” picking up their personal responsibility banner once more. They used arguments like “those people wouldn't learn anyway; those people wouldn't study anyway; we aren't forcing them to do anything; those people would do poorly anyway”. And because “the conservatives” felt that having the slides posted online before class would help them, they were advocating changing the rules to benefit them in a way that would hurt others – and they rationalized it by stereotyping, de-humanizing language, and absolute personal responsibility.

Nothing particularly eye-opening so far, but recently the date of an upcoming exam was close to another exam “the conservatives” had. So they loudly objected, and the professor ran another experiment asking the class if we should change the date of the exam. Personally, I couldn't care less. But some people wanted to keep the date the same, and about ¼ of the class wasn't in class. Those that were there said they had already formed their schedule around the date set, one said moving the exam to a Tuesday would mean two exams in one day, another said she works Sunday and Monday so a Thursday exam is really preferable to a Tuesday exam, etc.

But, and this is key, every objection raised by an individual in favor of keeping the exam date was met by “the conservatives” as a group explaining why that objection wasn't valid. Even when it was literally the word-for-word objection they were using themselves. They used this sort of bullying tactic of having an individual say “I don't want that” and then the group of ~10 people all loudly say why that individual is wrong. They used the same tactics as before: the people who disagree with us have invalid objections because they're lazy, the best thing for everyone is whatever is best for “the conservatives”, And it all led to advocating a change in the rules to benefit them at the expense of everyone else.

There's a clear pattern they've been showing all semester, and I think it's indicative of the pattern of behavior conservatives in general have been exhibiting:

1. When a proposed change to the rules would benefit someone else: claim the others want the change so they can be lazy
2. Claim personal responsibility is the best policy for everyone, changing the rules to benefit one group at the expense of another group isn't the role of [the government, the professor, etc]
3. Therefore the proposed change designed to benefit someone (while appearing to be fair) is actually unfair to everyone
4. Keep the original rules that benefit them, and claim we all have equal opportunity to succeed

vs

1. When a proposed change to the rules would benefit them: claim they want the change so the rules are fair
2. Claim fair rules are the best policy for everyone, changing the rules to benefit one group at the expense of the other is just making fair rules
3. Therefore the proposed change designed to benefit just them (while appearing to be unfair) is actually fair to everyone
4. Change the rules to benefit them, and claim we all have equal opportunity to succeed

It's possible, in the future, that they might claim a rule that's detrimental to them is fair, and a rule that benefits them is unfair. It's possible, in the future, that they use a metric other than self-interest to determine fairness and unfairness.

It's unfair and untrue to claim that every conservative person uses the selfish metric for ethical claims. But that doesn't mean we can't study and judge their behavior as a group. Hopefully I've given an accurate example of how the meme of “personal responsibility and fair rules with equal chance at success” is often code for “I have no duty to help others, the rules should be set up to benefit me, any attempt to change those beneficial rules is unfair”.