Personal reflection – Page 6 – Common Infirmities

The Emancipation Haggadah [reprinted from last year]

A few years ago, in anticipation of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and because I was blown away by reading a couple of Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies, I had the inspiration to try to integrate the American slave experience with the traditional haggadah. In particular, I put in lots of quotes from Douglass about the nature of slavery and freedom — the amazing physicality and emotional presence — to supplement the traditional text of “hard labour, clay and bricks, and all the work of the fields”. I’ve always thought the main purpose of the seder is to remind children (and adults) to think again about the difference between freedom and slavery, and for that we need text that makes it fresh and real. Douglass does that.

I combined this with other favourite passages and the portions of the traditional haggadah that I like to include in my seders. Of course, for those of us who are not keen on stories of wandering Arameans and such, it’s very convenient to have your own haggadah with your own selection of material, to spare the annoyance of announcing page numbers.

The result is here, for anyone who wants to have a look.

Four quadrants of moral law

I commented last week about the fascinating panel discussion at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies that brought together rabbis from three different denominations — Reform, Masorti, and Modern Orthodox. All were insightful and eloquent advocates for their version of Judaism, and they responded creatively to a wide variety of questions. (Michael Harris, the Orthodox rabbi, had the hardest job, since a significant portion of his movement rejects the very notion of sharing a platform with rabbis from other denominations. I asked him whether, given that, it might not be misleading for progressive Jews to pay attention to what any Orthdox rabbi says who is willing to participate in such a panel, since they are then, inevitably, outliers. He responded graciously that, in this respect, British Orthodoxy is not representative of the movement worldwide, and he hoped that this insularity would decline.)

Someone asked the panel whether they thought that moral principles and values change over time. Reform Rabbi Jonathan Romain said, of course they do, citing slavery and other examples; Rabbi Harris said no, the core moral laws are eternal and unchanging.

That’s the way their sort are expected to answer. But that got me to thinking: Don’t they have it backwards? Why is it that the people who declare that moral laws are external to human society and human choice tend to be the same ones who think that these laws were correctly formulated thousands of years ago? Consider two dimensions of beliefs about moral laws: X is the dimension of social construction, ranging from “Something humans make up completely arbitrarily”, to “law that we cannot influence, but can only know or not know”; Y is the dimension of permanence of our values, ranging from “constantly changing” to “fixed and unchanging”. It seems clear that all four quadrants are possible, but there is a rhetorical presumption in favour fo the main diagonal: upper right or lower left. Either socially constructed laws with mutable social values or external moral law with unchanging values.

Why is that? You wouldn’t expect someone to say, “I believe the laws governing the motions of falling bodies are facts external to human society. Therefore I object to any suggestion that we could improve upon Aristotle’s version.” Continue reading “Four quadrants of moral law”

How to stop immigrants from competing for our jobs…

… don’t let them go to school.

When the UK political establishment goes through one of its periods when everyone is competing to prove that they hate immigrants the most, it must be hard to be the putative anti-immigrant party trying to hold on to your market share. You need to do something outrageous to prove that you really really hate the immigrants more than anyone else. That’s the only way I can explain this proposal by the head of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage to ban immigrant children from state schools for five years. Not illegal immigrants, mind you. Legal immigrants. His idea seems to be that the hedge-fund managers will pay to send their child to Eton, and people like me will either stay away or move here without my family. We can provide the British people with services that they’re not willing to do themselves, or not willing to pay to train their own people to do, and pay taxes, but not receive any government services in return.

I’m not sure whether the core UKIP voters are going to be thrilled about them shifting the immigrant population to mainly unattached young men.

Counting to zero

I was amused by the comments made by right-wing American TV news personality Bill O’Reilly, who referred to his time in the Falklands “war zone” because he reported on an unruly protest in Buenos Aires after the war ended. He supported his position by quoting a NY Times report that referred to a police officer firing five shots, without mentioning that the shots were fired “over the heads of fleeing protestors”.

Rich Meislin, the Times reporter who wrote the article, said on Facebook that as far as he knew no demonstrators were shot or killed by police that night. On Monday, Mr. O’Reilly said he was just reading clips from the piece during the Media Buzz interview and that official reports on casualties there were difficult to obtain.

One could imagine that in a dispute over the exact number of protesters shot or killed you might say that the official reports were “difficult to obtain”. It seems like an odd defence when people are claiming that the exact number was zero, since, of course, in that case there would be no reports on casualties to obtain. “I do remember that there was tension between the authorities and the crowd,” [CBS correspondent Charles Gomez] said, but added that he “did not see any bloodshed.”

Humans have a separate system for unconsciously apprehending the numbers of items under about four, called subitizing, that is distinct from the conscious process of counting. The idea of “counting” one or two items seems ridiculous, and counting zero items exaggerates the comic effect. I was reminded of a scene in the second volume Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, The Restaurant at the end of the Universe. Ford Prefect and his friends have accidentally stowed away on a space ship programmed to crash into the local sun (as part of the light show for a rock concert). Zaphod Beeblebrox yells “Ford, how many escape capsules are there?”

“None,” said Ford.

Zaphod gibbered.

“Did you count them?” he yelled.

“Twice,” said Ford.

Update: In another interview O’Reilly continued to conflate the Falklands War with the unruly demonstration in Buenos Aires:

“A lot of people died,” said O’Reilly, nodding his head. “You bet.”

“On both sides, both the British and the Argentines,” Browne said, appearing to reference the broader war rather than the protests.

“Nine hundred deaths on the Island,” O’Reilly said. “And we don’t know how many in Buenos Aires.”

We don’t know how many. The number is generally reckoned to be around… zero.

What does an anti-vaccine activist want?

With the swelling of interest in the anti-vaccine movement, inspired by the recent California measles outbreak, I’ve seen a number of opinions published similar to this one from Ian Steadman in the New Statesman

Then there’s also this to think about: if somebody’s distrust of scientific and/or political authority is so great, for whatever reason – maybe they’ve been scared by sensationalist stories in the media, or maybe they sincerely believe the government has no moral right to dictate health choices to citizens – that they’re willing to significantly increase their child’s risk of catching a (possibly fatal) illness, then calling them names and telling them scientists and politicians disagree with them is probably futile. Arguing that “the science is settled” with someone whose stance is predicated on the belief that the standards of proof used by scientists are flawed is definitely futile.

The article is excellent, but I don’t entirely agree with this sentiment. Living in Berkeley and Oxford, I have encountered some vaccine refuseniks, and it’s not clear to me that they have anything as definable as a belief about “the standards of proof used by scientists”. Rather, I think that they have a desperate need to feel special, protected not by mass vaccination — and definitely not by anything as infra dig as “herd immunity” — but by their special virtue, which may be Christian purity or organic health-food purity. Continue reading “What does an anti-vaccine activist want?”

Divorce or start a world war?

I recently read Christopher Clark’s celebrated book on the initiation of the First World War, The Sleepwalkers. There was a lot in it that was new to me. I’ve never seen an account — even a German account — that portrayed Germany as such a passive, almost innocent and peace-seeking, participant in the events of 1914. Although Clark disclaims an attention to fix blame, I felt very clearly that his account put the blame on French and Russian scheming, with Serbians playing a devious supporting role, and the Austro-Hungarians hapless bunglers.

I was struck by his portrayal of the alliance system as reasonably haphazard and fluid, kind of a square dance where nations just stayed with the partners they happened to be with when the music stopped. In particular, the alliance between Russia and the UK seemed to reflect a common pathology in personal relations:

In the light of continuing Russian pressure on Persia and other peripheral imperial territories, there had been talk of abandoning the Anglo-Russian Convention in favour of a more open-ended policy that would not necessarily exclude a rapprochement of some kind with Germany. This never became Foreign Office policy, but the news that Russian mobilization had just triggered German counter-measures at least temporarily foregrounded the Russian aspect of the growing crisis. British policy-makers had no particular interest in or sympathy for Serbia. This was a war from the east, sparked by concerns remote from the official mind of Whitehall.

We’ve all known couples like this. They’ve been together for years, comfortable but never quite committed. Then a crisis comes, and they have to decide: Do we get married or split up. And often they marry, because splitting just seems too frightening. It usually doesn’t end well.

Towers of Power

In the week after the September 11 attacks, my Berkeley colleague George Lakoff got rounded up in a dragnet of conservative outrage for a heartfelt reckoning with the meaning of towers and the violent destruction thereof. Whether or not you agree with his points — which were mostly anodyne applications of his general theory that all abstract thought is at base metaphorical, but which seemed to offend people mainly for the brief mention of one very traditional metaphor, the tower as phallus — it was almost a prototype for what people think a public intellectual should be doing: bringing the fruits of his technical research to bear in making sense of confusing events, and public responses.

Anyway, I’ve just been visiting Washington DC for the first time since I was a young child, and I was struck by the differing levels of security at the two monuments to great American presidents that stand on opposite ends of the reflecting pool. The towering Washington monument has airport+ level security: Metal detectors, no large bags, no food or drink. The squat Lincoln memorial has no security at all — not even the health-and-safety guardians whom one would expect at any modest monument — with people walking freely in or out. It doesn’t seem wrong. Somehow it feels intuitively obvious that a tower would attract political violence in a way that a squat temple would not.

It’s similar to the issue of why terrorists always like to hijack airplanes. There are more people on a big train than on any airplane, but still terror attacks on trains are rare, despite the vastly tighter security at airports.

What people don’t know about the NHS

… is that it is incredibly cheap. I was speaking recently with a British colleague, who asked how I liked being back in the UK after a year on sabbatical. I mentioned that there are things I really appreciate about living in California, but one of the things I like best about the UK is the NHS. Even without any significant health problems in the family, the incomparable irrationality of the US healthcare system (though even calling it a “system” seems overly generous) is palpably unnerving, at the very least since you’re occasionally confronted with the question of whether this or that problem is significant enough to go to the hospital for, and then you have to consider whether it’s worth entering into a multiyear negotiation over fictional bills for thousands of dollars.

Anyway, I remarked that I wish the UK would just raise its health spending to the European average, that it would be far and away the best in the world, as opposed to limping along as it does now, being the best for equality, but clearly overstretched, and not quite matching the top national healthcare systems. I thought this was simply a platitude, but he seemed genuinely surprised by the claim. On further questioning, he said that he would have thought the NHS was relatively expensive compared with healthcare in western Europe generally.

In fact, UK health expenditures are low, not just compared with the wealthy countries of western and northern Europe, but with respect to the EU generally — including the relatively poor countries of eastern Europe. They would have to spend an additional 6 billion pounds — about a 5% increase — to match the EU average. In 2011 the UK was below average healthcare spending for the OECD, and was still only average after removing the exceptionally high spending USA. (The US, despite the notoriously expensive private healthcare system of which its right-thinking populace is so proud, has considerably more public healthcare expenditure per capita than the UK, on top of the private system. And life expectancy is still several years shorter.)

I wonder if the public would demand more spending on the NHS, rather than accepting the government line about necessary efficiencies and the magic of privatisation, if they knew how efficient the NHS already is, and how little they are spending on healthcare compared with their European neighbours, not to mention the profligate Americans and Canadians.

Wi-fi jumprope

At a recent committee meeting, where the provision of wireless internet access in our college library was discussed, someone raised the question “What does ‘wifi’ mean, anyway?” As it happens, I’d looked into that about a decade ago, when I was brought up short by a bizarre comment in an article the East Bay Express (a generally excellent free weekly in the Berkeley-Oakland area):

In the East Bay, cities such as Concord, Hayward, San Pablo, and Walnut Creek are launching or planning on launching citywide wi-fi, which is short for wireless fidelity.

I’d been a fairly early adopter of wireless internet, having installed it at home in 2003, before it was available in many public places (though I’d first encountered it at the University of Copenhagen, when I attended a conference there in January 2003; at that time my Apple laptop didn’t have any built-in wireless connectivity) but I’d never paid much attention to the term “wifi”, which seemed silly to me. I assumed it was a meaningless back-formation from “hi-fi” — odd in a way, since that term itself was so outdated, and even in my childhood I knew it mainly as a joke, as in the Peanuts strip (which itself was more than a decade old at that point) where Lucy boasts to Charlie Brown that she has a “hi-fi jumprope” — which turned out to be true. But I found it hilarious that some journalists completed the cycle, assuming that if “hi-fi” was short for “high fidelity” and “wi-fi” is analogous to “hi-fi”, then “wi-fi” stands for “wireless fidelity”.

Default settings, encryption, and privacy

One essay that powerfully shaped my intellect in my impressionable youth was Douglas Hofstadter’s Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness, that appeared in the November 1982 issue of Scientific American (back when Scientific American was good), and Hofstadter’s associated satire A Person Paper on Purity in Language. Hofstadter’s point is that we are constantly filling in unknown facts about the world with default assumptions that we can’t recognise unless they happen to collide with facts that are discovered later. He illustrates this with the riddle, popular among feminists in the 1970s, that begins with the story of a man driving in a car with his young son. The car runs off the road and hits a tree, and the man is killed instantly. The boy is brought to the hospital, prepped for surgery, and then the surgeon takes one look at him and says “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” As Hofstadter tells it, when this story was told at a party, people were able to conceive of explanations involving metempsychosis quicker than they could come to the notion that the surgeon was a woman. It’s not that they considered it impossible for a woman to be a surgeon. It’s just that you can’t think of a human being without a sex, so it gets filled in with the default sex “male”. (The joke wouldn’t really work today, I imagine. Not only are there so many women surgeons that it’s hard to have a very strong default assumption, but the boy could have two fathers. On the other hand, a “nurse” has a very strong female default, so much so that a male nurse is frequently called a “male nurse”, to avoid confusion.)

Continue reading “Default settings, encryption, and privacy”