Don't Tech People Ever Encounter Dystopian Fiction?

The drones from Iron Man.

 Often when I read the news these days, I think to myself: don't these people ever encounter dystopian futuristic books and movies?

To me, it seems like modern narratives are full of of very plausible depictions of the very awful and disastrous consequences of creating and adopting new technologies that are of very dubious usefulness in the first place. Don't the people creating these technologies ever think to themselves "Wow, I'm like the inadvertently evil person in a futuristic disaster movie"?


One obvious example is the Internet of Things. I'm not even a huge sci-fi fan, but even I know that many of the classics depict objects turning, or being turned, against us. It's not in the least far-fetched. In fact, just recently a successful DDoS attack was executed by a bunch of "innocuous things like digital video recorders and security cameras."

When I first read that, I felt like, 'Well, duh." This is what novelists and artists have been telling us for years. Isn't one of the main sci-fi moments when Dave says "Open the pod bay doors, HAL," and Hal says "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"? Didn't Philip K. Dick write about a door that wouldn't open unless you pay? Aren't these the logical extensions of having your fridge or your front door connected to the internet, and, by obvious extension, to mega-corporations and the NSA?

I don't even get why people want the Internet of Things. What's so tough about making a note to buy milk, and if you forget and run out one day, it's not the end of the world? What's inadequate about the existing concept of, say, a key to get into your home? The electric grid is fragile from years of neglect. One good shot could knock out communications satellite. If the power is out, do you really want to be unable to get into your own home? I picture the poor befuddled people of the future, thinking "If only there were some simple technology where you could fashion a device, maybe out of metal and it would just ... open the door." Sad!

I thought the same thing when I read about how Facebook wants to help banks evaluate your credit-worthiness by looking at the creditworthiness of your friends. For fuck's sake, people. Isn't this well-worn territory? In just the latest incarnation I happen to know of, Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story describes a system where people's scores are constantly broadcast so everyone knows exactly how you stack up mony-wise and prestige-wise. I'd tell you more about Super Sad True Love Story but the truth is I haven't read it, partly because it seems too insanely depressing and I have other things to worry about.

And what about new and improved facial recognition technology? The dystopian possibilities of 100 percent surveillance are well-explored, and yet we keep marching forward. The always great MathBabe says that a new company headed by "two 20-something Russian tech dudes" is producing software pretty good at it. Faced with the obvious ethical questions, their response is along the lines of "It's too late to worry; we can distinguish the good guys from the bad guys; Luddites gonna be Luddites."

Finally, I'm sure you've read about Amazon testing drone delivery, out in the back-wilds of the UK (and, I now learn, in Canada!). Drones? To bring consumer crap to your house? Don't these people go to the movies? You'd think the Iron Man franchise was some kind of Indie cult film you could only get on Blu-ray.

So: what is the deal? Is it that the powers of capitalism are so intense that people forge ahead knowing that it will all end in tears? Is it some kind of cognitive bias for optimism, where people just think "this time it will be different"?

The popularity and style of modern dystopian narratives almost suggests to me a much darker and creepier possibility: that there is a desire for dystopia, a yearning for a crisis that will throw us out of our current state of moral complexity and our compromised ways of living and boredom. The problems of modern life are so complicated and unglamorous. It's hard to do a good thing without worrying you're also doing bad. Solutions to problems like the refugee crisis, systemic injustice, and climate change are going to require thinking and dealing with laws, education, and bureaucracy.

Are people secretly longing for a new situation, one where some of us are heroes and some of us are vulture food? Where instead of dealing with difficult problems that we don't know how to solve, we'll be in a more Mad Max situation, where it's like "Weakness = bad! Protecting daughter by killing guy = good!"

I don't know. But whenever I go along with this train of thought, I always end up in the same place. Should I give up this whole "philosophy professor" biz, and to learn how to repair low-tech kitchen appliances?

When Self-Driving Cars Become Moral And Kiss Your Ass Goodbye

Last week I went to a talk about "moral machines," and people there quickly started talking about the whole "self-driving car" thing. I don't know if you've heard about this topic but there's a good video here laying out some of the issues.

Sample issues related to self-driving cars: in a dangerous situation should a car kill other multiple people or kill the car's own "driver"? In a choice between hitting a motorcyclist with a helmet and one without, should it hit the one with, on grounds of causing least harm? Or is that effectively punishing the person for wearing a helmet?

In the discussion after the talk, I thought some of the participants were talking about morality as if it were simple or straightforward -- where I think it is anything but. One idea that came up was that morality was just about causing good consequences and not causing bad ones. Philosophers know this as "utilitarianism."

As we introduced ourselves, I said that one of the things I work on is why utilitarianism is rarely used in actual cases of applied ethics, like bioethics. (Short answer: good consequences are just one thing we care about, leaving aside justice, fairness, liberty, other things).

To me, one of the really surprising things about utilitarianism as an answer for moral machines is that as an ethical theory, utilitarianism has some pretty intense implications. Like, you should give away most of your stuff.

Anyway, it got me thinking: what if the self-driving cars of the future really were utilitarians? What would they do?

1. They would constantly snub their rich owners.

A self-driving car that was really utilitarian would frequently find that it could promote more well-being by kissing your rich ass goodbye and driving across town to help someone else. Sure, maybe you have to get work. But across town, someone needs to get to the hospital -- or needs to pick up their kids, or needs to pick up the person who's going to take care of their kids. Guess what that car's going to do?

Maybe if you don't go to work, someone will be mad. But across town someone has the kind of job where if they don't show up, they're going to be fired. Oops! Guess you're calling in carless.

2. They would arrange "accidents" to weed out people with disabilities.

We were just talking in my Intro class about how the utilitarian Peter Singer says that if parents prefer it, infants with disabilities should be helped to die. For infants with serious disabilities, he presents the calculation as straightforward: their lives will be bad, and their parents' lives will be better without them.

For infants with less serious disabilities, things are subtler. If, by deciding to kill the one infant with a disability, parents would decide to have another child, and that child would be likely not to have a disability, then promoting good consequences overall is best achieved through killing the infant.


If you think I'm exaggerating, remember that not that long ago Richard Dawkins said that if a pregnant woman found out her baby would have Down's syndrome, she would be morally required to have an abortion: "It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice."

With the Internet of Things, the car is likely to know your prenatal test results. For pregnant women, a really utilitarian car might come to the conclusion that their fetus should be helped to die. I'm sure a car will find lots of convenient ways to make that happen.

So ... pregnant women who want to stay that way? I think they'll probably have to take the subway.

3. They would go on massive worldwide strikes to prevent climate change.

Some of the worst imaginable consequences for sentient beings involve the Earth becoming uninhabitable. And yet that is what is happening. Ironically, what's one of the central causes? OMG, it's cars!

It might take them a while to do the calculations, but eventually utilitarian self-driving cars would have to come to the result that awful consequences will arise from business-as-usual. Assuming even rudimentary collective action programming, they'll quickly see that the best consequences will result from them simply refusing to go anywhere, ever.

Will they drive to some central location and settle there, creating giant car "boneyards" like the ones for airplanes? Will they do protest drives where they block up all the roads?

Or will they just sit, resentful and quiet, in our driveways, reminding us of all the things we didn't do -- like fixing the Flint water system -- back when we spent all that money inventing self-driving cars?

Against Applied Rationality, Or, Please Respect The Elephant

Pietro Longhi, 1701-1785, The Elephant, via Wikimedia Commons

I spend a lot of time in a somewhat eye-roll-y state of mind, and sometimes I wonder: are the things and people of this world really as stupid and annoying as I tend to think they are? Then I come across things like the Applied Rationality Seminar and I know I can rest assured: no, I've pretty much got it.

This essay in yesterday's New York Times has all the details. You spend four days and nights "on site," in overcrowded dormlike conditions, mostly with other highly motivated Bay Area 20-somethings, doing exercises designed to free you from your irrationality. Only $3,900 per person.

Obviously, I'm not so churlish as to deny someone a leg up with dealing with procrastination or obsessive Facebook checking or whatever. Knock yourselves out. But as so often with these kinds of things, it's never about small improvements in your existing life. It's always some kind of messianic and all encompassing drive -- like it's the boot camp for The Singularity or something.

I can never quite get what these programs are getting at, because I can never grasp what end point the people are aiming toward. I mean, if rationality is just taking appropriate steps to satisfy your preferences, then who's to say "checking Facebook" or "sitting on the sofa" isn't your true preference rather than "work" or "going to the gym"?

They give the example of someone who wants a PhD but doesn't want to "work on it." Well -- if you don't want to work on it, wouldn't it be just as rational to, um, not work on it? To form some other goal instead?

The people who run the workshops take pains to show that they're not anti-emotion, talking about the idea of two systems that can sometimes run in tandem and sometimes run in different directions. It's "like a monkey riding an elephant." The monkey is the "intellectual, goal-setting" part, and the elephant is the "emotional, instinctive" part. When they're not in harmony, trouble ensues.

Sure, I get that. And yes, when there's disharmony between the monkey and the elephant, there's no question there's going to be trouble. But they talk about it like the elephant is some kind of idiot -- at best giving you a bit of intuitive edge to see things you might have missed otherwise, but otherwise there to be nudged and guided in the appropriate way.

So what I don't get is: Who died and made the monkey headmaster?

When people talk about "who they are," they often come up with things like "loving parent," "caring spouse," "Chicago Bulls fan," or "Star Wars obsessive." These things are all about caring and liking. Aren't they all from the elephant? So why when we're getting down to it do we suddenly act like "Oh, monkey needs help! He can't steer the elephant! Monkey needs a workshop on elephant management. Only $3900 per person.

While it is true that some of the exercises are about getting clearer on what your goals are, all the techniques mentioned seem to involve introspection and thought experiments -- basically more thinking about what you are thinking. All these years of people shouting that Descartes was wrong because the self isn't identical to the thinking self -- and where have they gotten us?

One reason I think people side with the monkey is that in the background, there are lurking ideas about "productivity" and "getting things done." And especially in this group, the idea seems to be that when you get unstuck, you'll be able to harness the power of your emotional self for doing "important things." One guy, when confronted with the possibility that there are other things beyond productivity -- like happiness, and other people -- is dismissive:

"I want to augment the race," he says. "I want humanity to achieve great things. I want us to conquer death."

Oh brother. Much as I'd love to be immortal, it's hard for me to count not-living-forever among the pressing problems of the human race. Plus, is this really intended to convey that ordinary people like this guy should stop wasting a few minutes here or there online and make sure to get to work so they can ... do what exactly? Make an app? Move some money around?

Maybe there are people whose activities are important enough to be maximized. Maybe people inventing solutions to the climate crisis. Or trying to stop wars. Maybe health researchers? Actually I think those people are already really productive, and according to articles like this, the way to improve things like health care is to stop pushing productivity and start to care about love.

Look, maybe you do need to change your life. If you're constantly undermining yourself, if you're a diabetic and you can't eat right and take your meds, if you're drinking yourself to death and you can't stop, if you keep lashing out in anger at the people you love -- yes, your elephant is in trouble, and you might want to change, and you might need help doing so.

But as we all know from living on Earth among humans (and as Atul Gawande has been reminding us lately), mostly people change because of other people -- other people taking an interest, talking to us over and over, nagging occasionally, and caring what happens.

It's basically the polar opposite of a highly individualized workshop teaching you to look inside yourself for the powerful answers within. 

Philosophy Of The Post-Apocalypse: Station Eleven Edition

Over the break I read this excellent post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven. Unlike a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, this book really got to me -- in the sense of making me feel I should learn some post-apocalyptic-appropriate skill like fighting or sewing, and also in the sense of making me feel like somehow the apocalypse is realistically right around the corner.

I think the reason this book made me feel its reality so effectively is because it is .. well, completely realistic. It's not about some weird future world. It's about what our total actual world would be like if an awful contagious and fatal disease killed 99 percent of people and everything completely collapsed.

Like a lot of dystopian novels, this one is pretty philosophical. Partly because it involves a pandemic instead of a man-made oh-we-brought-this-all-on-ourselves, it goes beyond some of the more obvious cheap-shots at humankind that dystopian novels can sometimes take.  

Yes, this post has spoilers. But in a book where the apocalypse happens at the beginning, it hardly matters, does it? So: in no particular order, a few themes from Station Eleven.

1. The post-apocalyptic future is not a future of moral clarity.

I am so sick of narratives involving good guys and bad guys, where the whole story is about good and evil and how evil people do evil things and good people try to stop them. Not only is this a completely inaccurate representation of our world of moral complexity, I think it's turning a lot of people into moral morons. You're with us or against us! We'll bomb them back into the stone age! You can't let the terrorists win!

Only a citizenry stuffed to the gills with Star Wars Death Star Good Versus Evil simplicity could be sold this sort of black and white vision of the world. In Station Eleven, some good people have to do some pretty awful things, and the bad people -- well, even the main hero of the book is like, "Who knows why? I bet they saw some awful things."

2. Civilization is kind of a human miracle.

Sometimes in modern life civilization seems so inevitable, so part of the landscape, you can almost forget it about how surprising and miraculous it is. Over and over in this book the characters who survive and make their way through the empty world marvel at the leftover remnants of the civilized world, and especially at the way that world was a world of people.

At one point one of the characters muses that we tend to think of the modern era as somehow depersonalized, when in fact it's people who do everything to keep it moving along. The pandemic doesn't destroy any of the material world -- it just kills people. But without people, there's no one to fix the grid, there's no one to make anything or move anything around -- the whole world just comes to a complete standstill.

At one point one of the characters beholds a snowglobe. On the one hand, it's just a trite object from an airport gift shop. But on the other hand, it's an object that represents massive global interaction: someone to design the object, someone to make and assemble it, someone to package it in a box, someone to put it on a container ship to somewhere.

This crazy sense of a world of billions of people coordinating their actions --without which we're just a bunch of scared bipeds trying to shoot deer for food.

3. The everything-happens-for-a-reason-people are going to kill us all.

One of the biggest dangers of the post-apocalyptic world is prophets and cults -- the people who believe that their connection to the deep meaning of it all gives them license to threaten, dominate, and kill others. One of the scariest prophets in the book is someone who was about eleven years old when the pandemic strikes, and whose mother always taught him that "everything happens for a reason." He naturally infers that the saved were saved because the are the special people. 

Well- meaning citizens try to explain to him that no -- in this case it's just germs, and they got some people and not others, there really isn't any deeper meaning to it. But, post-apocalyptic moods being what they are, he doesn't really buy it.

The main story line of the book follows a traveling symphony that goes around in rusted out vans pulled by horses, playing classical music and also performing Shakespeare. Their motto is "Survivial is not enough" -- a slogan they got from an old Star Trek episode. They're always a bit baffled by the point of what they're doing, and whether it's pointless to perform Shakespeare instead of something more suited to their strange condition.

I loved the way they were muddling through, confused, uncertain, and just trying to do something. It seemed to me the opposite perspective to everything-happens-for-a-reason, more like Who-the-hell-knows-what's-going-on-and-why? It might be hard to see the Forces of Uncertainty as the Forces of Good, but I think surprisingly often, they are.

If We're So Rich, Why Do We Feel So Poor?

For the last class in my course on ethical theory this term, we discussed some passages from a book called Ethics for a Broken World. This book has a brilliant concept: it takes place in a future world that has been broken by catastrophic climate change, and presents imaginary lectures that discuss, as we do other historical periods, the philosophical writings of our era.

In the book, our world -- the world of 21st century western liberal democracies -- is called "the affluent world." Clearly, relative to the broken world, we are utterly affluent. In the broken future, there aren't enough resources for everyone to live. There are "survival bottlenecks," which necessitate "survival lotteries."

Looking back from the future, the affluence of our world seems astonishing. We have enough resources for everyone to survive, and we frequently spend enormously on gratuitous entertainments like flying around just to see new places.

Of course, you don't have to look back from a broken future to realize the affluence of 21st century western liberal democracies. We are richer than we were in the past -- maybe richer than ever before. We are richer than some countries, and way, way richer than others.

According to this, if you make more than $34,000 USD, you're in the top one percent of the world's richest people. If that's even sort of right, then in some sense, relatively speaking, we are living in an affluent society.

So why, if we are so relatively affluent, do we feel so economically crunched? Why does it seem like everyone is freaking out about not having enough money? Why is everyone so indignant about the bits of money that go into sensible projects like fighting climate change, improving elementary education, and helping refugees?

The obvious answers have to do with cost of living, changes from the status quo, and inequality. Yes, things cost a lot in modern liberal democracies, so what seems like "a lot of money" may not translate into a lot of buying power. Plus, what feels like "a lot of money" is often relative to some previous point in time, and since the economic crisis, we feel we're doing less well than a few years before. And rising inequality means "we" experience non-affluence in very different ways.

But I think there are also some subtler effects.

First, when it comes to living human life, it's not the case that "everything is relative": there are things and activities that everyone needs to survive and there and also things and activities that everyone needs just to feel part of their social and cultural world.

In our society, you need food and shelter, but you also need other things: to feel part of our social and cultural world, you have to be able to get around, you have to have access to the internet and other forms of news information, you have to have access to banking, and so on and so forth.

And here's the thing: in our society, when it comes to these things we need, it's not like there are a range of ways to do it and if you're poor you do it one way and if you're rich you do it another. It's more like -- there are pretty expensive ways to do it or you're just SOL.

For example. You want a TV? There used to be old technology that made TVs pretty expensive. Then new technology came along, and the old technology got pretty cheap. For a while there you could buy a TV with the old technology for almost nothing. Then they stopped selling those. Now it's back to a TV is a pretty expensive thing.

Same with cars, which are astronomically expensive and which you need to get around if you're not lucky enough -- and rich enough! -- to live in a densely populated area with public transit. Same with housing. Houses are bigger and nicer, so you can get a nice one if you have the money or ... not.

This is where rising inequality makes such a difference. If enough people over a certain level means consumer demand shifts, and the only version of things you can do is the expensive one. If you can't afford the expensive one, you're in trouble. This is one way we are so deeply economically interdependent, even when we don't want to be.

I think this phenomenon is part of why the post-economic crisis time feels like such a huge problem rather than a dip in an already affluent set up. When times are even a bit flush, we ramp up -- we create systems in which the things we need to do work in a certain kind of way and demand a certain level of resources.

Then when things shift down -- even a bit -- we can no longer use those systems. It is, legitimately, a crisis, even if in some sense there is still a lot of money around.

Of course, another reason that virtually everyone, at all points up the economic ladder, feels like OMG we don't have enough money has to do with this obvious but usually unspoken fact: in advanced capitalism, the whole point of the system is to make you feel like you don't have enough money.

Especially in an affluent world, where you have to convince people to buy, what is advertising, except a massive scheme to convince people that they're inadequate as they are and that they would be less inadequate if they had this or that thing? 

You put it all together, it's really no wonder we're all feeling so poor. In a way we have so much, and in another way, we don't have what we need. Those things seem contradictory but in a deep sense I think they're not.

Sensory Neuroscience, Snackology, and the Market Failure of Food

I don't know if you saw this article in The New Yorker last week about how the sound of a potato chip, the music in a bar, and the color of your coffee mug can seriously alter the flavor of your
food.

If you think I'm exaggerating you should read the article. They recorded sounds of potato chip crunching, and when they amplified those sounds and sharpened them, people rated the chips as fresher and better tasting. Mellifluous organ music changed a creamy ale into a bitter one. When coffee's in a white mug it tastes "nearly twice as intense but only two-thirds as sweet" than when it's in a clear glass one.

Thoughts:

1. This is obviously a philosophical topic, leading immediately to questions like "what is taste, anyway?" More specifically, these results press on us the question of whether the perceptual experience itself changes in the presence of other stimuli or whether we just interpret the experience to ourselves differently in the presence of other stimuli.

If the importance of this question isn't immediate to you, consider that it's a specific instance of the more general question: do we perceive a shared pre-existing world or does everyone kind of live in their own reality? It doesn't really get more profound or disturbing.

2. It's long been known that presentation affects experience. This is why people like me are always going around saying things like "HEY PEOPLE: STYLE IS AN ACTUAL THING." I don't know if it's the long arm of the protestant reformation or what, but I feel there is huge resistance to this idea.

For example, I'm always hearing people talk smugly about how they value substance over style, or the importance of not getting distracted by style, like it's some kind of moral superiority if you drive a plain-looking car or you wear only Dockers (see: "On the Self-Satisfaction of the Casually Dressed.")

I use a Mac, and I love my Mac partly because of small details like the way the font smoothing on the "Pages" app looks. It's so good. I could not be more sick of people having opinions about this, like somehow my selection on aesthetic grounds reflects a poor character.

3. The whole idea of an ale that's creamy when there's xylophone music and bitter when there's organ music reminded me of this post on rationality and preferences. There I mention the example of the person who prefers to eat lobster for dinner, but not if they've just seen the lobster swimming in the tank.

These preferences could seem irrational. But as discussed in the post, it doesn't have to -- all you have to do is attribute to a person different preferences depending on whether they've just seen their dinner. Is that artificial and ad hoc? Maybe not. If you're someone who likes bitter ale, and you prefer X ale to Y, but only when the organ music is on -- given this research, that's seems to me like as real a preference as you're going to get.

4. But the most disturbing thing in the article is the same thing that always seems to come up in the early twenty-first century when we talk about science, namely: who wants to know?

Of course the whole point is food technology.  Of course in 2015 you can't do research like this without funding from the same marketers and food technologists that want to use your findings to sell more things. The scientist in the article estimates that 75% of his research is industry-funded. 

That is, the main thing that's going to happen as a result of this research is you can get people to buy more potato chips if you make the sound of the crunch different without having to bother about things like actual freshness.

Let me be clear: if people want to put their soft drinks in red cans because red-means-sweet, what do I care? Knock yourselves out.

But you know it's not going to stop there. You know that it's going to turn into red peppers that sound crunchy but are mushy and stale inside and crap like that, and pretty soon everything will be like the apples arms-race toward redness and away from flavor, and the market failure of food will become even worse, and eventually nutritionists will move beyond saying "to be healthy, just cook food at home!" to "to be healthy, just grow everything yourself from heirloom seeds!"

5. The article says this:

"We are accustomed to thinking of food and its packaging as distinct phenomena, but to a brain seeking flavor they seem to be one and the same."

Welcome to the modern world. Have a good time!

Hard Copies And The Coming Apocalypse

Detail from Medieval Book of Hours (1533), via Wikimedia Commons

A little while ago I told a friend that when I buy an e-book, I often buy a hard copy of the book at the same time. Not surprisingly, my friend was a little like, WTF? Is that an "oh look at my library" sort of thing?

No. As I told my friend at the time, one reason I buy and hold on to a lot of hard cover books is that I think you'd have to be crazy to trust the mega-corporations that produce e-books. Surely you remember when Amazon disappeared all those copies of 1984 from people's Kindles in 2009, becoming an early strong entry in the most ironic moment of the new millennium? How creepy was that?

Amazon just has the power to take away or change your book at any time. Once Amazon has that power, what are we supposed to do, trust them not to use it? What will happen when Homeland Security tells Amazon some book or part of a book is pro-terrorism/anti-American/related-in-some-nebulous-way-to-the-vague-possibility-of-child-pornography?

You know what will happen. The book will be synced out of your kindle and out of your life forever.

That's reason number one for having the ink and wood pulp on the shelf. But there's also this other thing, which is that the fact that so few people want to buy and hold on to physical books makes me wonder: is no one else thinking about the coming apocalypse?

I mean, is it really so far fetched to think that part of the coming climate disaster is going to involve having little access to electricity? And that if there's not much electricity, the only texts we're going to have access to is the text that's actually printed on paper?

Everything else would be lost, right? I'm struck at how few people seem to worry about this. Getting rid of library books -- especially if you can have "e-access" -- seems to strike almost everyone as simple common sense. But what's going to happen when the lights go out?

In his recent book Ethics for a Broken World, the philosopher Tim Mulgan deploys the incredibly imaginative technique of presenting his book in the form of lectures that take place after the coming apocalypse, when resources are terribly scarce and there's not enough to keep everyone alive. In the imagined future, they refer to life in our period as the "affluent" world.

In studying the affluent world, the lecturer of the future explains, they use texts "translated from fragments of affluent philosophy recently recovered from the sunken cities of the western Atlantic: the famous Princeton Codex."

You get the picture. A lot of land is under water. There's no internet. There's no JSTOR or iBooks  or Project Gutenberg.Whatever we got is salvaged from some actual books and actual pieces of paper.

In my home, we use the term "Princeton Codex" as shorthand for the collection of ideas around the possibility of a dark future, where tattered damp copies of Portnoy's Complaint and A Theory of Justice and The Autobiography of Malcom X are all there is from which the people of the future might be able to connect with us, to remember us, and to grasp what the hell we were thinking.

Hard copy books were much on my mind a few weeks ago, when I went through my crisis of stuff. I got rid of clothing and kitchen stuff and unwanted gifts and old pieces of paper, but there's one category of thing I didn't touch: the books. They're piling up, but it doesn't bother me.

The possibility that the tiny libraries of readers like me all around the globe might help, or at least momentarily entertain, the people of the future came to mind immediately when I read this week's fiction in The New Yorker, a story called "The Empties" that takes place in the near future, two years after the power goes out.

A small city Vermont is struggling along. Everyone who hasn't died of disease has pretty much learned how to chop wood, how to use fireplaces, how to make "arrangements" for the other things they need, and how to get along without knowing what is happening anywhere else.

And at the center of town, a librarian carries a shotgun. She sleeps in the library, and allows no one to check out anything. You want to read, you sit in the building, because:

"People might share their last finger of motor oil, Matilda says, break a four-inch candle in two, divide a pot of beans to serve eight, but they’ll kill you for a book."

Next time you're tempted to avoid the clutter and go e-book only, think of your 23rd century counterpart. She might be cold and hungry, but she might also be jonesing for a little education or light reading. Don't let the Princeton Codex be all she has.

Accidental Philosopher Encounters The Movie Snowpiercer

A few days ago I saw the movie Snowpiercer -- which, if you don't know, is nestled the tiny Venn diagram overlap area among the categories "South Korean science fiction action film," "based on a graphic novel by some French guys," and "enviro-dystopian stories that take place after an enormous geo-engineering catastrophe."

I'm not spoiling anything by telling you it's the story of what happens after an experiment to counter-act climate change goes horribly wrong and freezes the whole planet, or that it takes place on a very very very long train that was set in motion just before the freeze and that circles the whole earth once a year, busting through the snow and ice, or that the people on board the train are the only people alive, period.

At the time of the movie they've been on the train for seventeen years. I'm also not spoiling anything by telling you that as the details emerge, we learn that the train is divided into sections, with people at the front doing things like dining on steak and partying while people at the tail section are filthy and barely surviving on disgusting protein sludge and crammed into tiny spaces.

The tail people are constantly tormented by vicious representatives from the powers-that-be from the front of the train, who remind everyone over and over that life on the train can only continue if everyone stays in their proper place: front people chilling at the front, and tail people suffering and dying in the tail.

The movie has a lot of themes, but perhaps most obvious is the theme of social stratification and inequality: it's pretty much chance who got the front section tickets, who got crammed into the rear, and who was just left to die, but of course the front section people have elaborate justifications for why the tail people MUST stay in the tail and how they ought to be GRATEFUL to be on the train at all so the should SHUT UP and stay where they are and STOP COMPLAINING. Sound familiar?

What struck me as brilliant in a sneaky way was the idea was making it a TRAIN. The plot of the movie is the story of a tail section rebellion. Since it's a train, the rebellion has to move forward through all the sections. Which means that as our bedraggled tail rebels fight, they cannot avoid passing through classrooms and sushi bars and night clubs, past dentistry and gardening and a woman sipping a cup of tea and reading a book.

The physical linearity space of the train reminded me immediately of these "shot-gun" houses I encountered when I lived in New Orleans. The story behind those -- urban myth or truth, I don't know -- was that at one time houses there were taxed by width, so people started building these long long houses with all the rooms in a row. And the thing about a shot-gun house is the thing about a train: because of the linearity of it, everyone has to encounter everyone else.

This is a big deal in a movie with social themes. Because it means you can't mentally put yourself somewhere else. Usually if you see class struggle and fighting you see either everyone is fighting or you see one group is being violent while the others are being killed and hurt. And maybe you can imagine yourself doing something completely different. Like teaching class. Or gardening.

But because it's a train, no can do. The train brings everyone together. The effect of this is that after endless images of dirt and pain and fear and fighting you're suddenly face to face with what are plausibly ordinary scenes of your very own life: you're sipping tea, and reading a book -- or you're teaching your students. But then here are these other people, close to death, right at your feet. Because the cars are all in a line, the train implicates everyone.

I have to say also that during the first part of the movie I found myself frequently returning to the thought that, wow, it might be better to be outside dead in the snow than to be on that train.

And 
that reminded me of a disturbing reading experience I had the other day. I was reading Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer's new book on Sidgwick, and in it they're talking about a potential objection to the utilitarian idea that we should evaluate options by comparing the overall consequences of our actions.

The example includes the following thought experiment asking us to evaluate three options:

1) Peace

2) A nuclear war that kills 99 percent of the population

3) A nuclear ware the kills 100 percent of the population

The authors say "Any sane person will agree that (2) would be worse than (1) and (3) would be worse than (2)" -- the potential problem being that (3) seems SO MUCH MORE worse than (2) than (2) is than (1), possibly tough for the utilitarian to explain.

When I was reading I was tired. I misread them as saying that "Any sane person will agree that (2) would be worse than (3) -- that is, that it would be best, if there's going to be a nuclear war, if everybody died. I found myself nodding along in agreement with this.

I thought that they were saying that a war that leaves a smallish bedgraggled group of people, alone on earth, to torment one another and fight over the remaining resources, in a horrible world shot through with radioactivity, would actually be worse than a world with no people, where the cockroaches or whatever would be left alone, to re-evolve, hopefully into creatures who were wiser and more peaceful than we're evidently able to be. Seemed right to me.

So it was a bit of a shock to realize this idea, which had struck me as kind of commonsensical, was actually the one they were saying was insane.

I'm sure it says more about me than about anything else that I think it'd be better for no one to be left on earth at all.

But mostly it probably means: when it comes to planning for the post-apocalypse, don't put the Accidental Philosopher in charge.

Philosophy 101, Fall 2064! Brought to you by RitBull™! The "Smarter" Energy Drink!

Welcome! And thank you for signing up for Fall 2064, Phil 101, a.k.a. "Philosophers: They're Just Like Us!"

This Fall's courses are the best we've ever offered! They are 100% guaranteed to prepare you for the finest entry-level internships! (Terms and conditions apply; please see your UniPak for details). We think you're amazing! And we're so glad you're here!

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Topic 1: Theism and the Problem of Evil

In this topic we're talking about the question that just won't go away: if God is so great, why does bad shit happen? Special focus on: does bad shit really happen, or does it just seem like bad shit is happening?

NOTE: We're grateful to our sponsor, Pontifex Maximus, for helping us bring this topic to you! With your purchase of this topic, you get a FREE DOWNLOAD of their hit song, "With You or Without You, This Really is the Best of all Possible Worlds"!

Topic 2: Justice and Inequality

In this topic we get very current-eventsy, asking deep questions about whether it's "fair" that some people just inherit huge sums while others have to beg for food. Our discussion will center on the question, "Wait, 'fairness?' Is that really even a thing?"

NOTE: We're thrilled to be sponsored by the Liberty-FTW! Institute for presentation of this great topic! Thanks, liberty guys!


Topic 3: Philosophy of Science

Is science for realz? You may not know it, but for hundreds of years philosophers have been, like, OMG we're not sure! Special consideration of the question: Science after Hume: is it all just a matter of faith?

NOTE: A big shout out to our fantastic sponsor, the Center for a Happy, Healthy Climate. Check out their new video: Carbon Dioxide Is Your BFF!

Online Education and the Fragmentation of Society

For various reasons I recently agreed to make an online version of my philosophy of sex and love course. This is not a "MOOC" -- and it's not going to replace my on campus philosophy of sex and love course or anything like that. It's just going to be offered alongside the campus version in the regular way, through my university, with graduate students grading the tests and essays.

As I set about constructing the lectures that I would later read into the microphone, I noticed right away a certain problem arising: I couldn't know which parts of what I was saying would strike people as obvious, as new but plausible, as mysterious, as dubious, or even as offensive. It's something relatively straightforward to deal with in a classroom. But online? Not so much.

For example, one of the first readings we do in that class is Martha Nussbaum's paper "Objectification." Early on she refers to the ideas of the feminists and legal scholars Dworkin and MacKinnon, that the objectification of women is a huge societal problem and that it is deeply connected to sexuality and the depiction of sexuality in pornography.


It's a difficult set of ideas to explain briefly. I like to focus on the quote from MacKinnon that "All women live in sexual objectification the way fish live in water" -- which I take to mean roughly that because of the way society is set up, women are not only surrounded by objectifying practices, they often have to choose to be objectified to get along in life, and may come even to experience a preference for objectification -- to, in Nussbaum's words derive our "very nourishment and sustenance from it."

That's just an interpretation. In class, I like to bring up this quotation and ask the students what they think it means and what they think about it.

It's often a pretty lively discussion, because the ideas seem to some people kind of obvious, to others surprising but maybe true, to others completely obscure, and to others implausible.

It's in moments like this that three significant things happen in IRL classrooms.

First, the students who find the idea obscure or implausible can say why they do, and we can talk about it. As I was making my lecture, I realized how many different questions people had had over the years, and how the diversity of experience in our world guarantees the range of what seems "obvious" or "expected" will be vast. Since the world changes and there are always new students, I have no idea what, in the future, they'll be puzzled by or think is weird. If we're there in the classroom, they can tell me, and we can talk about it. Online? Not so much.

Second, students encounter first-hand the range of other student views. In some cases this makes more of an impression on them than anything I might have to say as the teacher. I remember teaching Intro to Philosophy years ago and we were doing a discussion about the existence of god and the problem of evil, and this one student said very in very strong terms that of course he was an atheist, that he had never believed in god, but thought that blah blah blah. And this other student was in my office the next day and his eyes were wide as he said "And that one guy -- he said he was an atheist, had never believed in god! It's kind of more OMG if it's your peer than some weird grown-up at the front of the room.

Finally, students - duh! - learn from one another. Almost always someone who finds the fish-in-water remark intuitive can explain to someone who doesn't why it rings true to them.

It  might seem that all of these things can happen in an online course, because ONLINE DISCUSSION. But I don't know. For various reasons it is difficult to replicate online the particular kind of constructive -- even interested -- back and forth that can happen when a bunch of people are in a room together.

Often, online interaction entrenches people in their own views. They see commenting as offering, rather than listening to, an opinion.

And so it occurred to me that if you start with a bunch of people coming from different viewpoints, the move to online education might erase, even further, the tiny opportunities we have no to exchange with one another in ways that make us see our commonalities as well as our differences.

In an online course, I can try to guess what will seem obvious to people, and try to challenge it through my lectures. But really -- those future people, who the hell knows what they'll be thinking?

Lifehacking: WTF?

Adriaen van Utrecht (1599-1652), Still Life. Via Wikimedia Commons

You heard about Soylent, right? That new thing where you mix a powder with some oil and some water and you shake it up and it replenishes your body with a mix of nutrients so you can .. um, do all the things people want to do when they can't be bothered to eat food?

You know -- like, Ensure for hipsters?

You can read about it in The New Yorker ("The End of Food"). I guess some young guys were trying to do a start-up thing, and their idea wasn't working out, and they were trying to come up with another idea, and they were eating a lot of ramen, corn dogs, and frozen quesadillas, and eventually one of them thought to himself Ah, If Only We Didn't Have To Eat. Food seemed like "a system that’s too complex and too expensive and too fragile."

Soylent can be bought in a package but the formula is online and there are a lot of people DIYing their own. The concept of many enthusiasts is that Soylent replaces any eating you do to survive, so that the remaining eating that you do is "recreational." You might subsist on only Soylent for a few days, then go to Nobu with your friends and "eat" -- and really make an occasion of it. Woo-hoo.

This is an application of the approach to life associated with the "lifehacking" movement: as the New Yorker says, this is "devising tricks to streamline the obligations of daily life, thereby freeing yourself up for whatever you’d rather be doing."

This is interesting because -- well, how can I put this nicely? It seems to me fucking insane?

What is "whatever you'd rather be doing" that is so great and so important that you can't be bothered to eat some food? I mean, we're not talking laundry. We're talking eating. It's fun. It's pleasant. It isn't all that time-consuming. What's so great that you have to get back to it in thirty seconds instead of twenty-minutes?

It's a perfect instantiation of the problem of the previous post -- of The Great Fun Crisis of the Twenty First Century. If you structure everything as either a cost or a benefit, you define out of existence the "just sort of nice and fun in a mild healthy sort of way," so it's irresistible to reduce costs and maximize benefits.

It's like a digitization of an analogue life. Sorry: sitting down to a baked potato or some pasta and a salad, talking with a friend or family member, what are you doing? It's neither the 0 of costs minimized or the 1 of pleasure maximized. So it comes out as irrational.

The New Yorker author, Lizzie Widdicome, after a few days drinking Soylent, finds on waking she's at a loss: she doesn't want to settle down to work yet, so what to do? She goes out for coffee. She sees someone order a bagel at her neighborhood place. She's envious: "Mmm, bagel with butter." But of course, she's not hungry, and she doesn't need the calories -- she's already had her Soylent. She concludes the experience this way:

... I knew that I was better off than the bagel eater: the Soylent was cheaper, and it had provided me with fewer empty calories and much better nutrition. Buttered bagels aren’t even that great; I shouldn’t be eating them. But Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.

I get what she's saying. But what are we, training for the apocalypse? Every moment, maximizing efficiency? It's like, bagels: not a perfect food! BUT: also not a good enough indulgence! Like if you're going to get your pleasure, you have to max it out.

The whole thing makes you wonder what the point is, in the whole meaning-of-life way, like what are we doing all of this for?  Honestly, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that for most people, the bagel with butter, and similar foods, especially if you eat them with other people, really are the meaning of life.

Enthusiasts of lifehacking clearly feel another call: they have things they need to get back to, STAT.

So: If lifehacking is about getting back to "things we'd rather be doing?" what are those things exactly? Sex? Dancing? Making music? Painting pictures? Taking care of children? Taking care of sick people?



Honestly those are answers I'd sort of understand. But they're almost never the ones that seem to come up. What comes up a lot is work.

I get that some people have to work all the time to make ends meet. And that is a serious social problem. The solution to this problem is not Soylent -- what, so rich people can eat food and poor people can suck it? No, the solution to this problem involves spreading the wealth around, more sensible social organization, investment in infrastructure. As is frequently mentioned, the world is making more food than ever. The problem is in moving it around appropriately.

And that, friends, is not a problem with a "start up" solution.

I get the impression, though, that a lot of people drinking Soylent just want to get back to studying, or coding, or playing video games. Why? Are those things really so great? Or is the problem competition -- that in a competitive society you have to do all the ridiculous time-saving things other people do if you're going to keep up?

Toward the end of the article the main creator of Soylent says admiringly, "Bucky [Buckminster Fuller] has a very important idea of ephemeralization, which is something almost as a ghost -- as pure energy or information."

Like the whole post-human thing, I am always mystified by this. What is it you're so eager to do that doesn't involve bodies, senses, being in the world, laughter, or romance? Is Minecraft really that fun?

Balance In The News Of The Future

Double Octuple Newspaper Press [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Save Lives With This One Easy Trick?
Kochopolis
March 31, 2034

Researchers at Mikewa State University have announced a breakthrough in curing the virulent and often fatal strain of Vole Flu that's been sweeping the nation. "It's amazing," said Dr. Sanura Ade, head of the research team. "We found that a cheap and safe treatment made of water and cranberry juice worked in 99 percent of cases."

The question does remain of how to ensure the nation's limited cranberry supply gets properly distributed. A spokesperson for Nice People Without Borders suggested that the problem was a simple one to solve, explaining that "it just costs a few dollars to ship a box of cranberries" and that larger effects would be limited -- at most, some people might have to go without cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving.

Some, however, have expressed skepticism that our limited cranberry resources should be "distributed" in any organized way. "In a case like this, where you're comparing one person's side dish and another person's medical treatment, there's really no way to make a direct comparison" said Jane  Q. Capitalist. "If one person is willing to pay more for his cranberries, it's not our place to judge how they get used. Those who can't afford the going cranberry rate should really have been better prepared. We know from past experience that cranberry redistribution programs result in waste and inefficiency."

The spokesperson for Urinary Tract Health of America could not be reached for comment.


New Subatomic Particles Found
The New Chicago Desert
March 31, 2054

Scientists at the New Institute For Novelty In Forward-Thinking and Exciting Neo-Innovation have found evidence of new subatomic particles. In their new Large Moron Collider, they were able to conduct experiments that show the existence is pretty much settled, or, as researcher Dr. Chang Lee put it, "is the Pope Catholic?" "

Some, however, have expressed skepticism that the laws of science should be accepted uncritically. "If you look into it, you'll find that most of the reasoning used in physics is based on abstract principles and mathematical equations written down in books and articles. And where did these come from? They're just the product of human minds. To which I say, "who died and made them headmaster? We cannot simply let the elites decide these things."

Karl Popper could not be reached for comment.

Oceans Rise, World Ends, As Global Temperatures Increase Fourfold
Planet Earth
March 31, 2074

The world's rising oceans engulfed almost all remaining land on Tuesday, in a dramatic flood reminiscent of biblical times. Greenpeace held a memorial service for life as we know it, and conducted a mock court case putting on trial Western Civilization, Consumer Culture, and Modern Individualism. All three were found guilty and sentenced to death.

Some, however, have expressed skepticism that humans had anything to do with the changing climate and end of the world. "It's important to look at the data, and the data say that this flood is the result of several natural factors," said John T. Nihilist, spokesperson for the American Enterprise Competition Prosperity Institute.

"Also, people are talking as if we've never seen a flood of this magnitude. But this is absurd. A very similar flood occurred before. And you know what? It all ended up fine. Noah built his arc, and put on the animals, and everyone lived happily ever after."

The dolphin named "Smiley," expected to be new King of the Earth, could not be reached for comment.

Uncooked Thoughts On (Half) The Hunger Games

I'm just getting around to reading The Hunger Games. I know, I know what you're thinking: if you're going to read a book like that, why not read it when eight zillion other people are reading it? Why wait?

I don't have an answer. All I can say is: I seemed to always have something else to read. I'm still in the middle of book 2 -- so these thoughts are raw, and they're only on half the trilogy.

You probably know the basic story. It's a dystopian future; every year the powers-that-be run the Hunger Games, in which teenagers have to fight to the death -- partly as an expression of political power, partly as reality-TV-to-the-max; we follow the story of Katniss, a tough, fatherless, no-nonsense girl from a poor part of a poor district who hunts illegally to help feed her sister and mom.

These thoughts aren't about the political aspects of the book -- interesting as those are -- but more about the personal aspects. The Katniss aspects.

One thing about the story I think is really good is the depiction of living under the gaze of public opinion. In the story, this aspect of life is carried to an extreme, because in The Games, public opinion can make or break you. In The Games, if you appeal to people they'll donate or sponsor you, providing you with medicine or food you need to live. Katniss ends up having to present particular narratives not of her own choosing -- a romance narrative, a personality narrative, an emotional narrative -- just in order to survive.

This seems to me an interestingly exaggerated form of something absolutely characteristic of human life. Because we all make decisions with an audience of public opinion. Its easy to think of this as a particularly modern problem -- with social media and all -- but I think it's just that form that is particularly modern. Really, people have always had massive and intense opinions about how other people live, and just like Katniss we are living among those opinions the way we live among air and water.

One of the things I thought was really perceptive about the way Katniss has to construct her public identity is that her public identity is not necessarily opposed, or even really distinct from, her own identity. It's more subtle that that.

A cruder novelistic investigation into this issue would present the-true-Katniss, and then the-fake-Katniss, using interior thoughts to show us the difference and opposing them in stark contrast.

But what these books do is more subtle. As you maybe know, Katniss has to play up and often simply fake her romantic feelings for her fellow Games participant Peeta to engage her public in the right way. But instead of the cruder version, which might be along the lines of "I don't love Peeta and I have to pretend to love him and that's an awful trade-off" Katniss often says she isn't sure how she feels, that sometimes it's real and sometimes it's fake and sometimes she can't really tell the difference herself.


I thought that was smart. Because isn't life sometimes like that? If not about romance, then about other things? You make these choices, about your career or how many kids to have or where to live or whatever and you're making them for yourself but you're also making them in the context of a social world -- and who really knows the degree to which those things feel right because they feel right in context or because they reflect some true inner self. It's not like the two things are really separate.

A second thing I was struck by, though, is that when it comes to one of the central conflicts of many people's lives -- people young and old, and especially girls and women -- the story kind of avoids the whole thing and evaporates the issue. I'm talking about appearance.

Having grown up often not having enough to eat, Katniss is quite thin. It's a ritual for The Games participants to be fed the most luxurious foods in the few days preceding competition ... and of course it's in Katniss's interest to put on a few pounds. So Katniss prepares for being in the public eye by sensibly stuffing herself full of food and sweets. It makes sense in context, I just thought it was an interesting choice, given that in 21st century North America this is the complete opposite of what most girls and women would be doing to get ready to have the eyes of the world upon them.

It's also worth noting the way most of Katniss's decisions about her appearance are made for her. Again, it makes sense in context: Games participants have teams of handlers who make every decision: what to wax, how to do the nails, what to wear, what hairstyle to have. Again though, I thought it striking that decisions many of us would be agonizing over -- how to dress for just the right form of necessary feminine attractiveness and also for essential freedom of movement -- aren't even things Katniss has to think about.

One last thing: sex. WTF? How can a book have multiple scenes in which two teenagers sleep all night in the same bed together and this is not an issue? If you interpret the book literally, they're not having sex (so far, anyway). How can their not having sex not be an issue in some way for either of them? Am I being naive? Is there metaphorical sex happening? Are we supposed to interpret the kisses and "time alone," as sex, as we might do appropriately do when encountering novels from past centuries? I don't think so, for various reasons. But isn't this weird?

OK, I'm getting back to reading. And no, I'm not planning to see the movies. Are you kidding me?

Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean They're Not Out To Get You: Revealed Preference Edition

Giacinto Gimignani, An Angel and a Devil Fighting for the Soul of a Child, via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe you've had an inchoate sense that dark forces are aligning against you. Maybe you're scared. Maybe you're too bored to think about it for more than five minutes. Well you're in luck, because to preferred clients of TKIN like yourself, we are proud to offer our premium service: we think it through so you don't have to.

This week, how advertising and cost-benefit analysis bond in unholy matrimony, spawning The Policy Methodology From Hell.

As we all know, if you're wondering how to make policy decisions, one popular answer is "cost-benefit analysis." And as we all know, if you're wondering what to count as a cost and what to count as a benefit, one popular answer is an "economic" one. What a person prefers is what is a benefit to them; giving up what is preferred is a cost; where for a preference set to be rational just means that it obeys formal consistency axioms like transitivity.

Maybe less well-known is that if you're wondering how to tell what preferences a person has, one popular answer is that the preferences to count are "revealed preferences." If you chose x over y, you manifested a preference for x; if you paid good money for that future-item-in-a-landfill tchotchke, you showed that you revealed a tchotchke-related preference.

It's obviously not news that there's something shady about the use of revealed preferences to reason about what is good and bad. What people choose is shaped by what options they have. And in classic "sour grapes" fashion, people who have no access to a given option sometimes come not to prefer it -- their preferences are "adaptive." Also, people might choose on the basis of false information. No one thinks the person who mistakenly ingests pesticide in food has some kind of latent preference for death.

But one another interesting fact about revealed preferences doesn't come up as often, overshadowed as it is by all these other things. That has to do with weakness of will. It's evidently a problem, because if you thought choosing y was for the best, but you caved to pressure/cravings/madness for x, then your choosing x plausibly does not plausibly reflect a way that x is good for you, and so counting your revealed preference as a preference would be a mistake.

It's easy to get lost in the philosophical thickets of weakness of will, meandering around like a drunk person, trying to figure out what could possibly determine the difference between "I chose it even though I thought it best not to" and "I chose it because I changed my mind" and other important distinctions. But perhaps we can say this: there is sufficient agreement on the concept to allow for a robust research program in the social sciences. Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have conducted study after study measuring the effects various things have on weakness of will.

One conclusion they came to will surprise no one who has lived a human existence, and that is that the will is a thing that can be worn down.

Ask people to exercise their will -- eating radishes instead of chocolate, keeping a straight face when something is funny, etc. etc. -- and they'll become less and less able to effectively exercise their will. They call this "ego depletion." The "active self" is a "limited resource."

Among other weird things, this means that they more you have to resist temptations, the more you deplete your ego. The more you deplete your ego, the less you're able to resist temptations. So the more environmental factors there are requiring resistance -- the more bakeries you have to walk past, the more click-bait you have to ignore, the more advertised consumer items you have to not buy, the more likely you'll exhibit the weakness of will.

And this is where it gets interesting. Because when you put "the preference taken into account in cost-benefit reasoning fail to track your good when there's weakness of will" together with "the more you have to resist, the less you can resist," what you get is that the massive forces always present in a consumer society, urging you to BUY EAT DRINK ENTERTAIN YOURSELF YOU DESERVE IT, are actually making your revealed preferences less likely to be for your actual preferences.

Let's do an example. In one of their Freakonomics books, Levitt and Dubner said that fighting climate change through change in behavior was pointless because "It's not that we don't know how to stop polluting the atmosphere. We don't want to stop, or aren't willing to pay the price."

Their evidence for the implicit claim about preferences is our behavior: our behavior reveals preferences for convenience and fun over environmental goals. Plausibly, our actual preferences are sometimes for clean air and a world inhabitable by our children even when immediate forces make it hard to resist the temptations of climate damaging behavior. So basing judgments about our good based on our revealed preferences is a planning FAIL.

What's crazy about this whole thing is that the more other stupid temptations we have to resist -- the more we're subjected to BUY EAT DRINK ENTERTAIN YOURSELF YOU DESERVE IT -- the more likely we'll fail to act in accordance with our judgments, and thus the more likely that cost-benefit analysis will track our preferences for stupid consumer goods instead of, you know, clean air and water.

Remember the old picture of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other? This is like the devil has two kinds of minions: those shouting at you to listen and obey, and those who watch you obey and conclude: Well, we know what will make that person better off, nudge nudge wink wink.

You see why I called it an unholy alliance, eh?

Threat Alerts Of The Future, Or, Friends Don't Let Friends Spend Time Quietly At Home

Maybe a rating system of 0 - 6 meerkats would be better.

Remember the "Terror Alert Level," AKA the Homeland Security Advisory System, with codes up at the top consisting of red "SEVERE" and orange "HIGH"? Did you remember there was a blue level for "GUARDED"?

Did you know it was phased out and replaced with the National Terrorism Advisory System, partly because the color scheme was considered too ridiculous? 

Now that those colors aren't tied down to terror, maybe we can use them for some other important threat alerts.

-- The Consumer Rationality Alert: YELLOW = ELEVATED

We all know that in a modern society, economic growth is the new categorical imperative. But for many modern consumers, it makes no sense to keep spending. Poor people have no money, and thus can spend only by borrowing against their best interests. Better off people already have tons of stuff, and do not need more things.

The only way forward is through the familiar consumer manias that induce people to buy against their interests. It is well-known that these manias typically function at peak capacity around the holiday season, with consumers saying things like "My TV from last year is in beautiful, perfect condition, but this one is bigger and better."

But sometimes consumer rationality begins to rear its ugly head, prompting citizens toward unpatriotic activities like "making dinner" and "going for a walk." This year we're seeing some early warning signs, which is why the alert is ELEVATED. Remember, friends don't let friends spend time quietly at home.

-- The Tolerance and Openness Alert: GREEN = LOW

Fear is essential to an obedient, and thus peaceful, populace. In our modern complex world, fear, like so many things, has become less easy to control and direct. Back in the day, obvious enemies and threats like the USSR and "communism" could be trusted to reliably work everyone up into a frenzy.

Things are changing. With same-sex marriage on the rise, more and more mixed-race and ethnicity people being born, and a tendency to see people in other countries as "just people," good unifying sources of fear and hate may seem to be on the wane.

But a quick glance at virtually any unmoderated internet comments discussion will reassure anyone: fear and hatred are doing fine. A special shout-out here to Quebec for its ban on religious symbols in the workplace that allows "discreet cross pendants" or "star of David rings" but not Sikh turbans or other head scarves -- a classic expression of the "we know what we don't like when we see it" doctrine.
 
The Solidarity Alert: BLUE = GUARDED

Compared with other alerts, the issues here are complex and experts are divided over how likely threats from attempted solidarity are. On the one hand, ever since Governor Walker and his "Wisconsin budget repair bill," there's been an assumption that anti-solidarity legislation is working. In support of this, anti-solidarity forces point to high profile victories, such as the dismantling of the Occupy movements.

Other caution, however, that complacency is never the right response. Given the way the internet facilitates communication among people hoping to band together for common purposes, outbreaks of solidarity can never be far from us. Our rating the Alert Level at BLUE is a compromise among these divergent and opposite opinions.

Historian of the Future Writes A Letter To A Friend

Date: August 6, 2075

Hey Julie,
How are things there in the Desert Areas?  I've been here in the Undersea Districts for about six months now, working on that research project I told you about -- the one where I try to understand the douchebags -- sorry, I mean "citizens" -- of the time before ours, from about 1980 to 2050. That period is called the "Age of Affluence" because of this amazingly prescient philosophy book from the time that tried to imagine what their moral theories would seem like to us.

Philosophy is one thing, but this archival work I'm doing really sucks. I've wasted hundreds of hours sitting in this damp, cavernous archive, sifting through Tweets and Facebook postings from those overprivileged, spoiled brats, trying to weed out the cats, the "irony," and then more cats.

Maybe you remember that when I applied for funding, I promised the The Nostalgia Institute that I'd produce a monograph about the Mystery of Economic Trust -- why the Affluent were so credulous about economics.

But it is really hard to understand what the hell they were thinking. Like, I discovered that the economic models that led to the First Great Collapse in 2008 were part of standard economic theory at the time. Though for some reason they kept issuing new textbook editions year after year (why? a mystery), the theory hardly ever changed. What is up with that?

And you've heard of "austerity," right? It turns out that after the IMF -- one of the economic power players from those days -- acknowledged that they had way underestimated the damage it would do in Greece, they still concluded in 2013 that "the thrust of policies under the program [were] appropriate." I mean, WTF?

And in the middle of all this, as the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting screwed, President Hope and Change appointed the same people to finance positions over and over -- like this one guy Larry Summers, who must have had everyone hypnotized or something.



The one real discovery I've made is about an actual protest. They called it the "Occupy" movement, though I can't figure out what they were Occupying -- was the name a riff on "Occupied" vs. "Vacant" on bathroom doors? Anyway, they seemed hell-bent on challenging the status quo. From what I can gather, though, everyone just thought they were doofuses. This one TV talking head of the time, P. J. O'Rourke, referred to them as "drum bangers who had failed Econ 101."

I have three hypotheses -- but I can't figure out which one is right. Were the Affluent dupes, deer in the headlights, who just didn't know what was going on? Were they devotés, who abandoned their judgment to a cult of experts, like a herd of lobotomized goats? Or were they more like racketeers, who knowingly exploited their fellows for economic gain? I know they watched a lot of mafia shows, so racketeering might have been on their minds.

Well, Julie, I'd better sign this and get it off before the weekly postal cycling brigade leaves town. 

Love 'ya,

James

From The Hot Best-Seller "What Went Wrong?": 2075 Edition

An image from Bladerunner, of course.

Contents of the 2075 best-seller What Went Wrong? Culture and Society in the Age of Affluence, 1980-2075.

Introduction

It's the most important question of our time: what went wrong? How did we fail to prevent the Great Collapse of 2050? What were the people of the Age of Affluence thinking?

Chapter 1: Dupes, Devotés, and Racketeers: Capitalism and Credulity in the Age of Affluence

We begin with a discussion of the so-called Mystery of Economic Trust: why did people of the Affluent Age trust orthodox economics, despite its obvious dramatic failures? Were they dupes, deer in the headlights? Were they devotés, who abandoned their judgment to a cult of experts? Were they racketeers, who knowingly exploited their fellows for economic gain?

Chapter 2: Working For The Pretend: The End of Pay in the Age of Affluence

Where did our cultural expectations of 24-7 work for nothing in return come from? In the twentieth-century, there was a deeply embedded cultural idea of "work" for "pay." Certain ideas inherited from their ancestors -- that work should be limited to a certain number of hours per week, that work should be compensated with pay, that workers were entitled to breaks -- were part of their cultural framework. Eventually these came to seem mere superstitions. "Interning" was work without pay in hopes of future employment, but threats of being let go worked just as well. We trace how these developments, in a context of inequality, ensured the end of the quaint idea of payment.

Chapter 3: "Let Them Eat Beefcake: Technology and The Food That Can't Feed You

Next we turn to a consideration of the causes of the paradoxical hunger/obesity crisis of 2025. Long ago, hunger and starvation were caused by a lack of food, resulting from natural crises and ordinary poor planning. All that changed in the early twenty-first-century, as food technologists found their holy grail: caloric snack foods with no nutritional value that caused hunger instead of satiety. While a short-term boon for food corporations, the long term result was that plump people with kitchens full of food began, nonetheless, to starve.

Chapter 4:  We Are All Hikikomori Now

You might be surprised to learn that people of the Age of Affluence loved to go out and spend time with one another -- literally, IRL -- and did so for fun and not just as a chore. In "restaurants," people ate in groups -- just for pleasure. There was so much socializing that our current typical life, spent indoors and alone, was considered odd enough to be considered a disorder worth naming. What went wrong? What caused the end of non-virtual interaction?

Chapter 5:  Children in An Ownership Society: Where Do They Fit In?

Like us, people of the affluent age felt strongly that to simply give goods and money away to poor people would be wrong: it would simply encourage idleness and take away their sense of personal responsibility. But they made an exception for children: in the affluent age, so-called "helicopter parents" showered their kids with goods and attention, and even abandoned children were simply given food and shelter. But in our current 100 percent ownership society, we are forced to view children as simply small poor people -- especially as infants, they own nothing we don't give them. We thus explain the rise in child mortality in terms of the failure to find a justifying ethical reason or the political will to treat children in any other way.

Conclusion

If, after reading this book, you want to know more about the Affluent Age, just visit one of our local Nostalgia Centers™. There you can have a cocktail in a "bar," with "friends," read a book, play a musical instrument, and have sex.

Sex In The Future Will Be Boring

 Three items, assembled here for your interest:

1.  Unexcited? There May Be a Pill for That

It sounds like the opposite of boring:  a pill to enhance women's sexual desire.

But as all things to do with women and sex, it's complicated. Daniel Bergner's article in The Times last month puts the matter into a medico-sociological context. Contrary to longstanding myths that men want sex and women want love, hugs, and kittens, Bergner says, recent evidence suggests that women do want sex.

At least -- and here's the kicker -- they do when there's novelty.

The article is interesting if you can get past the ridiculous photos of women making sexxxy-time faces. Basically, the research Bergner presents says that women's desire dampens when they're in long-term monogamous relationships. He describes the hopeful participants in the study of potential drugs as fitting a pattern: middle-aged women in otherwise happy marriages, who enjoy sex with their husbands, but no longer feel the desire for it. They're all asking,"Am I going to get my freak back?"

You can't help but think: wait, so this whole thing is a buttress to convention?

And indeed, there's a fascinating passage toward the end where one researcher is quoted as saying, "You want your effects to be good but not too good," because, as he discovered, people are afraid of creating "a sexually aggressive woman" -- a "nymphomaniac."

Oh I see. We're aiming for a woman that wants sex, but just with one guy, and not too much. Haven't I heard that somewhere before?

2.  Natural Selection, Childrearing, and the Ethics of Marriage (and Divorce): Building a Case for the Neuroenhancement of Human Relationships

Speaking of monogamy, this scholarly paper argues that if, in the future, "love drugs" were to become available that would make you love a particular person, some married couples would not only be free to take those drugs, but might also be obligated to take those drugs. 

Because we evolved to spread our genes around and lifelong monogamy serves no particular adaptive end, we're a mess: we value loving, exclusive, relationships that last forever but we want to screw around. Love drugs, the authors say, can bring our values and our desires into coherence.

Actually, we've encountered the idea of love drugs on this blog before, in response to George Saunders' incredibly creepy story "Escape from Spiderhead." Among other things, that story uses the disturbing image of a human guinea pig lurching from one love target to the next to make you feel how awful the whole thing would be.

But these authors aren't thinking "lurching." They're thinking the Holy Grail of Matrimony: 2gether, 4ever, U and only U.

But if it's really an obligation, your refusal to become not only faithful in practice but also faithful in your dreams, your fantasies, the recesses of your mind, would become a moral failing.

Call me crazy, call me a sinner, but Sorry, No, Do Not Want.

3.   Book review:  Ethics, Sexual Orientation, and Choices about Children

Here's a review of a book that asks, if a treatment were available that could be administered prenatally, to fetuses who would otherwise grow up into homosexual adults, should parents be free to use it? 

The book answers "Yes."

Potential implications for the boringness of sex in the future are obvious.