Wednesday 18 October 2017

On Bullying and Virtue Signalling

I do try (very occasionally) to be reflective and ask myself if what I'm putting out on social media, mostly Twitter, is really helpful, does it make a difference, am I just virtue signalling and making myself feel better?

Do my tweets have any effect on the behaviour of, say, Donald Trump or Harvey Weinstein? No. Of course not. Except in the miniscule way they might contribute to reaching some kind of critical (in both senses of the word) mass, but if that was the only benefit it wouldn't be worth my time. What I hope they might do is help anyone who sees them who is in a situation where bullying is happening. That's what sets me off, triggers me if you like. I hate bullies. They are reprehensible cowards, across the board.

To start with, let's just clear a couple of things up. I have seen, on Facebook (that was my mistake), the witless argument "well bullying is good in poker, so why not in life?". To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson, context motherfucker, have you heard of it? Similarly I have seen people write things like "well you play poker, how can you complain about exploiting people?".

There's nothing wrong with a competitive instinct (when properly channelled). Most of us, myself included, enjoy a contest. A battle of wits, for example poker, or a battle of wits and physicality, like cricket, or if you prefer boxing/MMA. There's nothing wrong with a contest provided a) it's a fair contest and b) everyone involved agrees to play. It's also good if there are structures in place to keep things from being too one-sided - league systems in cricket or weight divisions in boxing. But that's not absolutely necessary, poker doesn't really have that, except in terms of the level of the stakes, to a degree.

The point is that it's a fair game and everyone's consented to play. If I play cricket and some fast bowler cleans me up because he's fitter, stronger and too quick for me, fair enough. I'd hope that over time he'd progess through teams/leagues and play at a higher level than me, but on the day, them's the breaks. What happens through the rules and accepted practice of the game is fine. Going back to poker, if you "bully" me by betting and raising and forcing me out of pots, that's fine, even if it's because you have a deeper stack, it's up to me to be mentally strong enough to make correct decisions. It is *not* fine to "bully" me by saying "you'd better fucking fold when I raise or I'll see you in the car park". Another boneheaded point I've seen made on Twitter is "You Lefties think everything's about consent". Yes! We do! BECAUSE IT IS.

Taking Trump as the archetypal bully, people who work for him have signed up to do a job and be paid for it - not to be berated, belittled and harassed. Contractors who deal with him have signed up to a contract both parties agreed on, not to be stiffed and battered into submission by teams of lawyers. Contestants in reality shows or beauty pageants he's "judging" haven't signed up to be groped or ogled by him. And while this is somewhat more galling because Trump hasn't earned any of his power or privilege, even if he had built his way up from nothing with hard work and intelligence, it still wouldn't be acceptable.

If you make a pass at someone who works for you, you're playing a game that's not fair and that the other party hasn't consented to. If you hassle someone in public who's minding their own business because you're a jerk but you're bigger than them so you can, same thing, or a dozen other examples. If any perpetrators come across my views and I can let them know I think they're a pathetic coward, they might stop to think that others around them have had enough of their shit too. If any victims read me, I can let them know I've got their back and hopefully there are others around them who will have their back too. If I can do that, it might help.

And it makes me feel better.

Postscript

Serendipitously enough, the FA have just apologised to England Women players who had to suffer racist remarks from coach Mark Sampson. The exact same point applies. These players were not in a position to answer back or smack him one because of the power he held over their careers. Even complaining through the proper channels risked adversely affecting their careers. Playing for England represented a huge difference for them in terms of pay and prestige, and Sampson decided who played for England.

Mark Sampson is a coward who abused his position to bully black players. He should have been sacked for it IMO. Maybe he was, but the FA fudged it through another form of cowardice. At least he has now gone and the players concerned have an apology, for all the good it will do them. Other members of the squad who mobbed Sampson on scoring a goal in the next game should have a look at themselves as well. 

Monday 6 February 2017

Risk




OK, quick pop quiz. You live in a major western capital, population 5 million. What would be more likely to kill you in a given time, a terror attack per week that kills 100 people or a 1% annual chance of nuclear destruction?

This isn't hard maths. 50x100 in a year would be 5,000 terror deaths. 1% chance of 5 million deaths is 50,000. The nuclear attack is TEN TIMES more likely to kill you.

What we have in the current sphere is of course a lot, lot less than one terror attack per week per capital. One per year of that size is significantly odds against. In London we've had one in living memory (7/7). There's always a small chance of a 9/11 style larger attack but in 20 years that's happened once in one capital with 3,000 deaths.

What I'm getting at of course is that we over-estimate the risk *to ourselves* of the small, localised attack and under-estimate the risk of the unlikely but devastating global event. Any time a terror attack of that size happens, a good example would be the Paris attack last year, it's all over the news for days. We see the pictures, it sticks in our minds. We're being told about the terrorist threat all the time. How often do you hear about the nuclear threat? Finger in the air, you might hear about the terrorist threat 100x as often, when it's the nuclear threat that's 100x more likely to kill you. That's probably an underestimate in both cases.

During the US election campaign, and now more than ever, this was the main reason I was anti-Trump. There are a shit-ton of other reasons of course, but completely aside from policy, completely aside from the misogyny and racism, the number one issue for me is not ending up trapped under a pile of rubble with third degree burns, dying by inches screaming for water. Trump is mentally unstable and completely unsuitable, in terms of temperament, to control the US nuclear arsenal. And control it he does, the whole system is SET UP to ensure that the President has immediate and unrestricted control of the system.

This is what worries me far, far more than a random terror attack. This is why, in practical terms leaving morality and ethics aside, it simply does not make sense to defend the Trump administration because they are "making us safer". Trump is in his seventies, and as pointed out on Twitter, if you see clips of him from even 15-20 years ago it's very striking how much more articulate and generally together he is (while still being an awful person LDO). He is in mental decline, I still believe that it's a job he didn't want, at least to start with, and the constant criticism is something he's not at all used to facing.  If he lasts 2 years (if we last 2 years) I can see him going full Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes with the nuclear codes.

Sleep well.

* Image is the album cover to Megadeth's "Risk". Much criticised at the time for being too radio-friendly, I quite like it.

** Anyone who actually reads this might notice I have deleted the previous post on Whataboutery. I just don't think on reflection it's particularly strong.

Saturday 21 January 2017

Is This The Real Life?

This is a departure from what I've been writing about so far, but something that I've been looking into recently and that seems to make a lot of sense to me in terms of how our brains evolved and how modern life has subverted that evolution.

I stumbled across a video on YouTube about porn addiction, and I must admit my first thought was "Porn is fine, masturbation is natural, this is just prudery".  It turns out though, maybe not.  I'm not going to go deep (sorry) into this particular topic right now as it certainly merits a post, if not many posts, of its own.  If you are interested a good starting point is yourbrainonporn.com .

The basic thrust (sorry, I'll stop now) of the argument is that we evolved in an environment of scarcity.  If you saw food, especially energy-rich food like fruit, best to eat it.  If you had a chance for sex, best to take it.  That's how you passed your genes on.  Our brains evolved to reward these behaviours with the associated endorphin rush.

Now though, we are not in an environment of scarcity.  That sugar-rich food isn't halfway across a forest, it's in the shop down the road, or your fridge.  You don't have to find a sexual partner from another tribe [1] , in fact you don't have to find a sexual partner at all.  A few clicks on your laptop and even though you're not actually having sex, you "win" the same endorphin rush at the end.
And so we come to fairly standard addiction theory, where each rush isn't quite as good as the last and you have to find more, different, better ways to scratch the itch.  It's all about the dopamine receptors, look it up if you're interested.

This can manifest itself in more subtle ways too.  Let's have a look at three areas.  Firstly, sport.  Sport has in some ways replaced the things we used to do to survive, like hunting and fighting.  Sports like football have a clear relationship to the hunt, where team mates communicate, organise themselves spatially and physically exert themselves for a common goal.  Target sports like golf directly mimic throwing your spear or shooting your arrow at the prey, giving that "rush" when you nail it between the eyes, or next to the pin.

The problem is, playing sport is quite hard.  You have to be fit, you have to practice the technique, you have to find a team, be picked, fit in.  A bit less so in individual sports but you still have to make the effort.  How much easier is it now to put on your replica shirt and turn on the TV.  Cheer the goals and call the phonein to say how great "we" were or how the referee robbed "us".  But while you share in the rush, you're not reaping any of the actual benefits of *playing* sport.  You're not any fitter, you haven't improved your people skills by working as a team, you don't have the satisfaction of working towards a goal and achieving it.

I realised some time ago that I had a real problem with this, and you may have noticed now that I don't tweet much about QPR.  In fact I generally try to find something else to do during games, something better than pressing F5 every minute to see if I win the good hit or the bad hit.  In my twenties I used to go and watch a lot, which at least involving getting off my arse and into the fresh air, but it was an expression of a frustrated desire to actually play myself.  You can see now, if you like, how the most "passionate" fans are often in awful physical condition.

Another area I'm very familiar with is poker.  This one is something of a double edged sword though.  Online poker probably did destroy my ability to play live poker.  Once I was used to 6 tables at once online, live poker seemed interminably slow.  But...online poker was much more profitable and live poker was always annoying to some degree simply because every table of 9 would generally have at least two complete arseholes whose only goal was to irritate people while losing as slowly as possible.  Online poker gave me a career, my independence and a great deal to be satisfied about how I applied myself to it...but at one point it certainly had many hallmarks of addiction.  In the end I tired of it, and to be honest I wasn't really winning much if at all towards the end.  All the same, I do miss that high of winning a tournament!  Now I'm more involved in sports betting I try to sweat the games at an absolute minimum - that up-down pleasure-pain reaction to every result or even every shot isn't good for you or your betting.

The last one I'm going to touch on today is interacting with people online.  It is better than nothing, but it's really not as good as going out there and being face to face.  In many ways it's a lot easier on the Internet, especially if you're arguing with someone.  It's easier to be rude, it's easier to change the subject, if you're put on the spot it's easier to google up a link and say "what about this" than it is to actually respond to a point in real time.  The same can be said of making fun of people on TV, or a good old Internet pile-on.  There's also no possibility of being thumped in the face, as Richard Spencer found out yesterday.  It's easy to have those "hits" without the effort of thinking about it, or reading the other person's cues, or even trying to understand what they're saying at all.

The common theme is that taking easy dopamine hits is great in the now...but not so good for you medium and long term.  Taking that easy hit means you don't achieve any of the ancillary benefits of "working* for it.  Get out there and do it for real.  I'm going to try, and if you do go off and look at the research on porn, I'm trying out a "reboot" for myself!

[1] Not your own tribe because incest generally doesn't turn out well over generations.

Tuesday 3 January 2017

The Scientific Method

I wanted to talk a little bit about the scientific method, as I touched on it in both the previous posts.  There is a common misunderstanding (wilful or otherwise) that science lurches back and forward from one position to another - and thus you don't have to believe what it's saying right now, if you don't want to.  Now it's true that science is always evolving, that it isn't dogmatic and that it's always questioned and tested.  This is of course a GOOD THING (How to be Topp capitals).  But science generally builds on what has gone before, it doesn't tear it down.  As Newton said "I can only see so far because I stand on the shoulders of giants".

Here's an example from my first piece about Impossible Expectations, a quote from Trump transition team member Anthony Scaramucci

"There was an overwhelming science that the Earth was flat. And there was an overwhelming science that [...] we were the center of the world. A hundred percent, you know, we get a lot of things wrong in the scientific community. You and I both know that."

Taking his first example, no, there was not "an overwhelming science" that the Earth was flat.  It was what people believed.  We like to think we're much cleverer than primitive societies, but as Newton said again, that's only because we stand on the shoulders of giants.  If no one had ever told us, most of us would instinctively believe that the Earth was flat.  It looks flat.  A few might wonder about how ships drop below the horizon but that's about it.

People believed the Earth was flat *until* a very clever man called Eratosthenes applied the scientific method.  He devised and conducted an experiment [1] that would have one result if the Earth was flat, and another if it was a sphere.  He performed it and not only demonstrated that the Earth was a sphere [2], he estimated its diameter with remarkable accuracy.  Prior to that there was no "scientific position", because no one had done any science to try to find out.

Similarly, people believed that the Sun rotated around the Earth for a long time because it wasn't possible to perform an experiment to test it.  Even when Copernicus came up with his heliocentric theory, while it clearly fitted observation in a much simpler way (no need to screw around with epicycles), it wasn't possible to test it until telescopes improved and people like Brahe and Kepler could make the necessary measurements.  Once the scientific method of theory, prediction and experiment was able to take effect, it solved the problem.

For a final example, going back to Newton, while Newtonian physics was overtaken by Einstein, it's important to stress that Newton wasn't *wrong*.  His theories of motion were perfectly consistent with what he could observe at the time, and they work perfectly well until you approach the very small (subatomic scale), very large (galactic scale) and/or very fast (the speed of light).  If an Einstein had come up with his theories in the 18th century, there would have been no way to test them.  By the latter 20th century though, we could do things like fly atomic clocks around on planes and see gravitational lensing in action to test and verify his theoretical work [3] [4]

So while there are occasions where accepted science is wrong, they're quite rare and you have to do better than "science once thought the Earth was flat".  People thought the Earth was flat.  Some still do, although most modern "Flat Earth” types just enjoy arguing about it because they have nothing better to do.  A better example might be Lysenko's work in the Soviet Union, which certainly wasn't accepted worldwide and had a large element of ideology thrown in.

One reason for the popular conception that science “keeps changing its mind” is the way tabloids, particularly the Mail and Express which are notorious for this, like to pick up and sensationalise individual studies (rather than the scientific consensus).  Every now and then a study “reveals” that chocolate cures cancer, or causes cancer.  Why oh why can't these scientists make their minds up?  Because you're cherry-picking individual studies that are, by and large, not confirmed by the scientific method of peer-review, repeatability and use of proper sample sizes.  Unfortunately, by the time this is disconfirmed, the papers have moved on to the next half-arsed study about how drinking wine prevents Alzheimers, or causes it.  All fun and games until you have a situation like the Wakefield paper on vaccines and autism which has caused untold damage despite having been quickly and fully refuted by the scientific community.

Sooo, in conclusion, science does not have to be taken as gospel.  It can, and indeed should, be subject to constant testing, review and improvement.  However, the science we have at the moment is the result of huge amounts of continuous research by smart, qualified people.  Experts.  If you do want to contradict them, the onus is on you.  The burden of proof is on you, and you have to do a lot better than just saying “nuh-uh”.  I'll expand on this in the next post about Arguments From Authority.

[1] It really is very clever, I recommend looking it up.
[2] Yes alright, an oblate spheroid.  Close enough for someone in the 3rd century BC.
[3] And indeed the recent discovery of gravitational waves is another vindication of an Einsteinian prediction.
[4] Another one is that Satnavs wouldn't work if they didn't correct for relativistic effects of time, inasmuch as they work anyway, mine keeps sending me down dead ends :(.