Ignorance and Individualism

Confusion is an important tool in our cognitive inventory. It tells us when to pay more attention. Let me give you an example.

A month or two ago, I chanced upon an unusual synthesis: libertarianism and social justice. I didn't bookmark the article in question, but this one covers the same material. The argument in question states that we fundamentally can't know what it's like to be another person--correct--and therefore white, heterosexual men should check their privilege.

At this point I found myself quite confused. I'd seen Fundamental Ignorance of Others used many times in the past. Usually, it's employed by libertarians, arguing for individualism and against state control over our lives. What was it doing here?

If we can't know other's lives, then how are we supposed to figure out who has it better off? Now, it's undeniable that an individual of European descent, male gender, or heterosexual persuasion is statistically more likely to be better off than someone who isn't. (I spent a semester in Social Problems listening to a self-described Marxist, believe me, I know.) There're a few problems with this approach however.

First, most disadvantages associated with race and gender are caused by the culture one is raised in, and by misguided government policies.  Active discrimination plays a relatively small role in determining life outcomes in most cases. Nevertheless, as a rationalist and a libertarian, I'm trying to combat both bigotry and the structural causes of racial and gender inequality. Why should I be feeling guilty?

(If you don't think "privilege" implies guilt, you probably haven't spend much time on tumblr.)

More importantly, acknowledging that certain traits are statistically correlated with better outcomes doesn't tell us anything definite about the individual in question, nor how to compare two individuals in particular. You can generalize, sure, but that's kinda how this whole racism/sexism/homophobia thing started in the first place.

So why, then, are we expected to check our laundry list of privileges? How do you come so close to true individualism, and then swerve right into biocollectivist territory?

My confusion should have been a giant neon sign saying "PAY ATTENTION TO THIS." Instead of trying to figure it out, I wandered off to other posts. It never stopped bothering me, and finally I realized we were dealing with an Isolated Demand for Rigor.

Fundamental Ignorance of Others applies to everyone. Unless you're a telepath, you can only infer what other's lives are like from exterior evidence. This particular argument, however, makes strong assumptions about broad categories of people, and only then invokes Fundmental Ignorance as a defense.

This is incredibly convenient for social justice types. It allows them to shield off an entire group from criticism, on the grounds that their critics are unaware of their privilege. It may be the case that a particular individual does not appreciate the hardships [oppressed group] endures, but all too often privilege is used as a fully general counterargument.

Fundamental Ignorance of Others should not be a fully general counterargument. There will be times when insufficient data is present to make an accurate deduction, but that shouldn't stop us from evaluating each case to the best of our ability. If we're going to truly understand one another, we need to remember that inessential features are not determining factors, regardless of statistical correlation. Probabilities are just that: probabilities. This is the crux of individualism.

Obligatory December Post

I want to meet my goal of making three more posts before the year ends, but I've got nothing. Which is to say, I've got 15 drafts but not the willpower to finish any of them. Instead, I'm going to ramble a bit and you're free to ignore me.

Part of my problem is that I've got all these grandiose notions and no good way to implement them. Take, for instance, my forthcoming post on the Single Transferable Vote. I'd be just thrilled if every state of the union adopted it tomorrow, but that's not going to happen. No one with the power to do it, has the incentive. Indeed, many of them have a strong incentive against it. Minor parties love the idea, but Republicans and Democrats--not so much. How do we convince them to put it in place? I haven't the foggiest.

It's a great deal like issues of drug legalization. Despite widespread support, it moves along at a snail's pace. Part of that can be blamed on the federal government, which will pull highway funding and continue to conduct drug raids to confiscate legal substances. To end the drug war, we have to challenge the existing laws and regulations made in Washington.

That's basically impossible because a plurality, if not majority, of Congressmen will be voted out of office for seeming "soft on drugs." Even if they know a policy will be good for the country in the long term, their constituents don't know (or worse, don't care).

This is, incidentally, the reason that nobody ever cuts spending without a showdown. "We saved the country from a government shutdown!" goes over better than "We agreed to raise your taxes and cut your benefits," even if the latter is a smarter plan.

Scott Alexander calls this Moloch, the demon of perverse incentives. It basically rules our society, and there's no easy way to combat it.

There's a few things you can do, of course. First of all, extend your time horizon. If I ever run for a legislative office, I'm not going to plan on reelection. Unless the polls are in my favor, I won't even run for a consecutive term. I would rather do a good job, that people remember later, than gain their benefit at the time.

To put it another way: statesman should not be a career.

Another thing is to donate to charity. Yes, an Objectivist is telling you to be altruistic. But I do it a somewhat unconventional way. There's a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome called Tab For a Cause, which displays a few ads every time you open a new tab. Proceeds are directed towards reputable charities like Human Rights Watch, Water.org, and Conservation International.

Individual tabs aren't worth much, but they add up. Since I started in mid-September, my tabbing alone has raised about $7.30--or enough to give a year of clean water to six people in the developing world. This is without any significant time, money, or behavior change on my part.

(Also, if you follow the specific link there, I get more tabber points, called "hearts," which I'll be donating to Educate!)

Probably the most important thing you can do, though, is the recognize your own strengths and weakness (then improve on both). As much as it pains me to admit, one person can't make society rational, peaceful, and prosperous. However, you can increase your own rationality and productivity, and help those around you do the same.

Notes on Spaceflight Economics

[ICYMI: First Flight Test Is Successful for NASA’s Orion Spacecraft]

Since NASA decided to retire the space shuttle, it seems the trend in spacecraft design has been more intimidating rockets, with more intimidating price tags, for single use missions. I'm pretty much alone over in my corner says "smaller, simpler, reusable."

(If you follow space news, they you probably realize I'm not quite alone in advocating reusable launch vehicles, and there's exciting progress on that front. Yet most NASA fans haven't quite gotten the memo.)

After today's Orion test flight, I discussed frustrations about the dominant approach with my friend Ben. Once finals are over I'll follow up this post with a more detailed explanation, but I want to record the main insights--along with my own thoughts--before they're buried in the chat logs.

• Getting materiel out of the gravity well is most important.
• One large rocket is less efficient (with regard to fuel) than many small rockets.
• Launching one large rocket is less efficient (with regard to materials) than launching many small rockets provided the smaller rockets can be easily reused.
• Smaller payloads would be financially viable if they can be easily assembled in orbit.
• My aerospace aesthetic is "design with an emphasis on 'nothing that explodes and flies away'"

That's all for the time being

The Return of Snail Mail?

A few days ago, I did something unusual: I went to the post office and mailed a package. Consequently, I've been thinking about both online and offline communication.

We all know how, in recent years, the United States Postal Service has been suffering, primarily due to email and Skype, among other thing. Recently, they've attempted to fight back, in one case with an ad saying "no one ever hacked a refrigerator door." That's true (unless you have a networked fridge, because those apparently exist), but it's not exactly reassuring.

The simple fact is, the federal government can read your communications, and probably doesn't need a warrant to do it. Which makes me wonder if perhaps there's a market for physical mail, privately delivered.

The Marble Sorter

Outdated logo? Yes.

My shortlist of Things I am Still Not Over reads something like this:

1. All the arguments I've ever lost
2. The 2012 Republican Presidential Primary
3. The Marble Sorter

For those blessedly unaware, the marble sorter is an assignment in the Project Lead The Way pre-engineering program. Small teams of students are tasked with designing, building, and testing a system to sort marbles based on color. The project format has changed a number of times, including the materials (we used fischertechniks, I believe Vex is now standard), plus the many tweaks teachers make to fit their resources. But that's inconsequential.

What matters is how badly my partner and I failed, and why.

In the end, we never did get a decent performance. The criteria specified that all the marbles would be dropped into the machine at once, and then sorted by color into three categories. (Marbles came in blue, black, and clear. Extra credit was available if it could distinguish between dark blue and black marbles.) In the end, ours could distinguish between clear and opaque marbles, under the right conditions, if they were loaded one by one. On a project worth a huge percentage of the semester grade, we got around fifty percent.

And we had to fight for that. We came in early, and stayed late. Principles of Engineering was right before lunch, and I missed a few meals for that project. It inhabited my dreams (I know, I was keeping a journal for Psychology). I fantasized about tearing it apart and starting afresh, and over four years later I'm still thinking about it.

But that wouldn't have made a difference, because Nathan and I weren't using good engineering practice.

There's a programming proverb: "resist the urge to code." In engineering, this applies to both the software and the hardware. It strikes me as odd the Principles of Engineering curriculum didn't mention it. Maybe it did and the lesson just didn't stick. Regardless, we ignored any cautionary impulse, and began building with only an excuse for a plan. We drop the marbles into a hopper, they roll down a chute, a door lets one out, the photosensor tells us its color, put the bins on a track that moves back and forth, and another door opens to drop the marble into the appropriate bin. What could go wrong?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

I could go into many, many details, but (fortunately for you, readers) I've forgotten most of them. I still have my notebooks lying around somewhere, but our slack documentation would have gotten us fired from any worthwhile company. This itself was another bad practice, which hamstrung our ability to replicate more successful approaches and identify what wasn't working.

One of those things was our approach to the materials. I'd experienced fischertechniks in middle school at a PTLW-sponsored summer program, and really should have understood just how stubborn they are. Yet we blundered ahead as if they were modelling clay, and burnt through huge chunks of our limited time trying to make them bend to our will.

A particular instance that sticks out in my memory: the mess we made trying to build and secure one of the doors. What's worse, though, was trying to reconstruct it after taking it apart. In retrospect, the situation was ridiculous. The whole system was elevated for no good reason. We had to build ridiculous struts and cantilevers, when we could have just attached the motor cleanly if we'd had the sense to set the system on a lower platform.

Unnecessary elevation brings us to our next point: ignoring basic scientific principles.

For a system driven largely by gravity, you would think doing some physics would occur to us. Then again, I'd only had the briefest introduction.

In the final days of the project (when we'd already missed the deadline and were fighting for completion points) we had several recurring frustrations. First, our chute, hopper, and bin systems didn't work very well at containing the marbles. They had an annoying tendency to bounce right out of the marble sorter altogether. The reason for this was very simple: elevating the system gave the marbles too much potential energy.

Potential energy was also the root cause of our second problem. No matter how much time we spent tweaking, we never could figure out the precise time the doors needed to open and close. We'd run several tests with an individual marble, then find all our measurements useless when we dumped the whole load in.

We had some clue at the time that it was the marbles' collective weight pushing on the marble, which usually resulted in two or three getting through. With my current knowledge of physics, I realize it's an application of weight and Newton's Third Law.

Weight  = mass * gravitational acceleration

Force = mass * acceleration

In the first equation, mass refers to that of the marbles altogether. In the second, it's the mass of an individual marble. Stated symbolically:

m_load * accel_grav = mass_marble * accel_marble

For the non-STEM people out there, this means the accelerationspeed a marble goes through the gate is related to the number that have already gone through. Later marbles go through slower than earlier ones.

We spent hours trying to find the right gate time, instead of taking a more sophisticated approach--either varying the gate time, or redesigning the hopper and chute to eliminate the gravitational effect.

Our final problem was more technical than scientific, because we knew the principle at play here. How do you measure slight differences in pigment when the ambient light is so variable? The obvious answer is to fully enclose, to the greatest degree possible, the area where pigment measurements are taken. We did this, but only with considerable reluctance and didn't do a very good job of it, because we still had some trouble.

The already flawed design, which we waited too late to modify, had a lot to do with it. We didn't know about sunk costs--yet another reason engineers need to learn economics. We had this problem in the first place, because we didn't consider external factors in developing our design.

At the time, the marble sorter almost drove me to a mental breakdown. Failure after failure had me seriously doubting the validity of reason (the unstated assumption was that I was operating rationally). I think it should now be clear this was not the case. After five years, the lessons are sinking in, and I'm finally get some closure. If only the other two items on the list were so easy.

Thought on Debate

A single well-put question is often more powerful than pages of argument for or against a position.

Today, two friends of mine got into a heated argument (when the hard feelings from our last major fracas had barely begun to fade) over the term "meritocracy." One person expressed a sentiment favoring meritocracy over our current system. The other thought we already had meritocracy, especially in politics, in the form of popularity. They went back and forth on this for some time.

The entire matter could have been avoided if someone had just asked "what do you mean by merit?" Instead of arguing for or against, they could have properly defined their terms, and gone forward with a more civil discussion of whether we should value experience and skill, and how perceived value fits into the equation.

We often don't know what our opponent is thinking, which itself can be frightening to admit. Even when the difference is simply due to imprecisions of language, we can't be sure just what our opponent will throw at us. Primate brains don't like not knowing, especially when those same primate brains evolved in environments where losing arguments usually meant death or status loss.

Try to remember that your friends (probably) won't kill you if they win a minor debate. Instead, see if you can figure out what they're getting at. Both of you just might learn something new.

Learning to Apply Social Protocol

Living at home affords a few advantages one would not immediately think of. My parents have gone without me to the Mensa Halloween party while I was at Purdue. This was the first time I've attended since 2011.

There's a man, whose name I believe is David, who always attends. I don't know his story or what his connection is to Mensa, but he is developmentally or socially challenged. It's difficult to understand and talk with him, but he's quite friendly in his rough way. In the past, my conversations with him have been awkward and unproductive. Consequently, I try to avoid them, and have always felt bad about that, especially because he's very good at remembering names. Tonight, when he notice me, he waved and shouted to me, and I immediately waved and said hi back.

I suppose I should feel a stronger connection to him, because my social skills aren't very good, either. Usually, my reaction is delayed and often inappropriate. Many situations overwhelm me until a flow is established, and that's just what happened when our host first greeted us. It wasn't until afterwards that I realized how automatically and correctly I responded to David.

It's progress. And progress feels good.

Dreaming and Doing

This webcomic has been going around tumblr (and probably other places I don't frequent), and I think it has a pretty good message. One of my friends quite vocally disagreed, so I want to talk about dreaming and doing a bit more extensively.

First of all, we have to define out terms. Dreaming and doing are two different things, and dreamers and doers are two more different things. In this context, at least, dreaming is the act of thinking about what you would like to accomplish, and doing is act of making it happen. A dreamer is someone who spends more time or effort dreaming than doing; a doer, the reverse.

There's nothing wrong with dreaming. No, more than that. You should dream. Before you can lay down any concrete goals, you need abstract notions of what you want to do. In fact, I'd venture that a great deal of our Gen Y angst could be avoided if we were given the option to really look before we leap.

But dreaming is not an end in itself. It's not even a means to an end. If you want to achieve your dreams, you're going to have to invest a lot of doing in them.

(Well, let me qualify that. If you're happy to imagine what you could be doing, instead of actually doing it, then dreaming is an end in itself. I wonder how many people will admit to that being satisfactory?)

Dreaming has a role to play in achieving those dreams. You need a reminder of what you're working towards, and you need to figure out just what that is. But you also need to sit down and work.

Happy Sputnik Day, Everyone!

Humans Need Not Apply

If you're going to follow the post-scarcity series at all, you need to watch this video by CGP Grey