Month: July 2020

We must not tolerate this brazen authoritarianism

PNRJ Uncategorized

Jul 26 JDN 2459057

Imagine for a moment what this would feel like:

Your girlfriend, who works as an EMT, just got home and went to bed after a long shift. Suddenly you hear banging on your door. “Who is it?” you shout; no answer. “Who is it?” you ask again; still no answer. The banging continues.

You know there is a lot of crime in your neighborhood, so you bought a handgun to protect your family. Since it seems like someone is about to invade your home, now seems like the obvious time to use it. You get the gun, load it, and aim it at the doorway. You hesitate; are you really prepared to pull that trigger? You know that you could kill someone on the other side. But you need to protect your family. So you fire a few shots at the doorway, hoping it will be enough to scare them away.


The response is a hail of bullets from several different directions, several of which hit your girlfriend and kill her while she is asleep.


Then, the door breaks down and several police officers barge in, having never announced themselves as police officers. They arrest you. You learn later that they were serving a so-called “no knock warrant”, which was intended for someone who wasn’t even there. They were never supposed to be in your home in the first place. Your girlfriend is now dead. And then, to top it all off, they have the audacity to charge you with attempted murder of a police officer because you tried to defend your home.

Now imagine what this would feel like as well:

In the evening you joined a protest. It was a peaceful protest, and there were hardly even any police officers around. There was no rioting, no vandalism, no tear gas or rubber bullets; just people holding signs and chanting. It’s now about 2:00 AM, and the protest is ending for the night, so you begin walking home.

Suddenly a van pulls up next to you. It’s completely unmarked; it just looks like a rental car that anybody could have rented. The door slides open and men in tactical body armor leap out of it, pointing rifles at you. They demand that you get in the van with them, and since you think they’re likely to shoot you if you don’t, you comply.

They handcuff you, cover your eyes with your hat, and drive you somewhere. They unload you into a building, then frisk you, photograph you, and rummage through your belongings. Then, they put you into a cell. They have not identified themselves. They have not explained why they abducted you.

Only after they have put you into a cell do they identify themselves as federal agents and start reading you your Miranda rights. They still won’t tell you why you were arrested. They ask you to waive your right to counsel; when you refuse, they leave you there for an hour and a half and then release you. Only as you walk outside do you realize that you had been taken to a federal courthouse.

These stories did not happen in Zimbabwe or Congo or Nicaragua. They did not happen in Russia or China or Venezuela. They happened right here in the United States of America. The first one is the story of Kenneth Walker in Louisville, whose girlfriend Breonna Taylor was murdered by police who didn’t announce that they were police and were never supposed to be in his home. It wasn’t a completely random error; the intended target was someone Breonna Taylor knew. So yes, it was possible that the intended target—who did have a legitimate warrant out for his arrest—might have been present. But how does that justify not even announcing themselves as police?

The second is the story of Mark Pettibone in Portland, who was abducted by anonymous paramilitary forces in an unmarked van. The Department of Homeland Security (an Orwellian name for an agency if ever there were) released a report on the incidents of “violent anarchists” that justified their use of such extreme measures: Most of them are graffiti or vandalism. There are a few genuinely violent incidents in there: Some throwing rocks, some pointing laser pointers at police officers’ eyes, and at least one alleged pipe bomb; but in the whole report there is only one incident listed in which any police officers were injured.

This is authoritarianism. It is not like authoritarianism; it is not moving toward authoritarianism. It is authoritarianism. Secret police in unmarked vehicles abducting people off the street is simply something that should not be allowed to happen in a liberal democracy. Right now it is rare, and for this we should be grateful; but it should not be rare, it should be non-existent. And we should continue fighting until it is. This is not a utopian dream, like imagining that we could make rape or murder non-existent. This is a policy choice. No other First World country does this. (Indeed, are we even a First World country anymore? We were supposed to be the paragon of the First World, but I’m not so sure we even belong in the category anymore.) What we have made rare they have managed to avoid entirely.

While arrest warrants are a necessary part of law enforcement, “no-knock” warrants are inherently authoritarian. Police should be required to identify themselves: Not simply that they are law enforcement, but what agency they work for, their own names and badge numbers, and the reason they are conducting the arrest. A “no-knock” warrant would already be unjust even applied in the best of circumstances (capturing an organized crime boss, perhaps); but typically they are used for drug raids (is criminalizing drugs is even right in the first place?), and in this case the person they wanted wasn’t even there.

Pettibone was at least promptly released. Walker will grieve the loss of his girlfriend for the rest of his life. Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove, the officers who shot Breonna Taylor, have still not been charged.

I wish that I could blame Trump for all of this and promise that it will go away when he loses the election in November (as statistical forecasts strongly predict he will). But while Trump and those who enable him have clearly accelerated and exacerbated this problem, the roots run much deeper.

For many people, particularly Black people, the United States is a de facto police state, and more or less always has been. (In fact, in most ways it’s probably better than it used to be—which isn’t to say that it is remotely acceptable right now, but to point out just how horrific it once was.) Harassment and abuse by police are commonplace, and death at the hands of police is a constant fear. Many of us are blissfully unaware of this, because we live in places where it doesn’t happen. This violence is highly concentrated: Major US cities vary in their races of police homicide by nearly a full order of magnitude.

The power of our government is unmatched. We have the third-largest standing army (after China and India, each of which has four times our population), the fourth-largest police force (in addition to China and India, add Russia to the list—though their population is less than half ours), and the largest incarcerated population in the world. Our military spending is higher than the next ten countries combined. Our intelligence services are not simply the largest in the world; the CIA alone accounts for nearly two-thirds of all worldwide intelligence spending. And while by the CIA is by far the largest, the US has over a dozen other intelligence agencies. When this power is abused—as it all too often is—the whole world feels the pain. We cannot afford to tolerate such abuses. We must stamp them out while we still can.

Getting Trump out won’t fix this. We must get him out, for a hundred thousand reasons, but that will not be nearly enough. Like hairline fractures in a steel beam that become wide gashes when the bridge is loaded, there are deep, structural flaws in our society and our system of government that are now becoming visible under the strain of crisis. I for one believe that these flaws can still be mended. But the longer we wait, the closer we come to a total collapse.

The Race to the Bottom is not inevitable

PNRJ development economics, ethics, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 19 JDN 2459050

The race to the bottom is a common result of competition, between firms, between states, or even between countries. One firm finds a way to cut corners and reduce costs, then lowers their price to undercut others; then soon every firm is cutting those same corners. Or one country decides to weaken their regulations in order to attraction more business; then soon every other country has to weaken their regulations as well.

Let’s first consider individual firms. Suppose that you run a business, and you are an upstanding, ethical person. You want to treat your employees, your customers, and your community well. You have high labor standards, you exceed the requirements of environmental regulations, and you make a high-quality product at a reasonable price for a moderate profit.

Then, a competitor appears. The owner of this company is not so ethical. They exploit their workers, perhaps even stealing their wages. They flaunt environmental regulations. They make shoddy products. All of this allows them to make their products for a lower price than yours.

Suppose that most customers can’t tell the difference between your product and theirs. What will happen? They will stop buying yours, because it’s more expensive. What do you do then?

You could simply go out of business. But that doesn’t really solve anything. Probably you’ll be forced to lower your standards. You’ll treat your workers worse, pollute more, reduce product quality. You may not do so as much as the other company, but you’ll have to do it some in order to get the price down low enough to still compete. And your profits will be lower than theirs as a result.

Far better would be for the government to step in and punish that other business for breaking the rules—or if what they’re doing is technically legal, change the rules so that it’s not anymore. Then you could continue to produce high-quality products with fair labor standards and good environmental sustainability.

But there are some problems with this. First, consider this from the point of view of a regulator, who is being lobbied by both companies. Your company asks for higher standards to improve product quality while protecting workers and the environment. But theirs claims that these higher standards will push them out of business. Who will they believe?

In fact, it may be worse than that: Suppose we’ve already settled into an equilibrium where all the firms have low standards. In that case, all the lobbyists will be saying that regulations need to be kept weak, lest the whole industry fail.

But in fact there’s no reason to think that stricter regulations would actually destroy the whole industry. Firm owners are used to thinking in terms of fixed competitors: They act in response to what competitors do. And in many cases it’s actually true that if just one firm tried to raise their standards, they would be outcompeted and go out of business. This does not mean that if all firms were forced to raise their standards, the industry would collapse. In fact, it’s much more likely that stricter regulations would only moderately reduce output and profits, if imposed consistently across the whole industry.

To see why, let’s consider a very simple model, a Bertrand competition game. There are two firms, A and B. Each can either use process H, producing a product of high quality with high labor standards and good sustainability, or use process L, producing a product of low quality with low labor standards and poor sustainability. Process H costs $100 per unit, process L costs $50 per unit. Customers can’t tell the difference, so they will buy whichever product is offered at the lowest price. Let’s say you are in charge of firm A. You choose which process to use, and set your price. At the same time, firm B chooses a process and sets their price.

Suppose choose to use process H. The lowest possible price you could charge to still make a profit would be a price of $101 (ignoring cents; let’s say customers also ignore them, which might be true!).

But firm B could choose process L, and then set a price of $100. They can charge just one dollar less than you charge for their product, but their cost is only $50, so now they are making a large profit—and you get nothing.

So you are forced to lower your standards, in order to match their price. You could try to undercut them at a price of $100, but in the long run that’s a bad idea, since eventually you’ll both be driven to charging a price of 51 and making only a very small profit. And there’s a way to stop them from undercutting you, which is to offer a price-matching guarantee; you can tell your customers that if they see a lower price from firm B than what you’re offering, you’ll match it for them. Then firm B has no incentive to try to undercut you, and you can maintain a stable equilibrium at a price of $100. You have been forced to used process L even though you know it is worse, because any attempt to unilaterally deviate from that industry norm would result in your company going bankrupt.

But now suppose the government comes in and mandates that all firms use process H, and they really enforce this rule so that no firm wants to try to break it. Then you’d want to raise the price, but you wouldn’t necessarily have to raise it all that much. Even $101 would be enough to ensure some profit, and you could even maintain your current profits by raising the price up to $150. In reality the result would probably be somewhere in between those two, depending on the elasticity of demand; so perhaps you end up charging $125 and make half the profit you did before.

Even though the new regulation raised costs all the way up to the current price, they did not result in collapsing the industry; because the rule was enforced uniformly, all firms were able to raise their standards and also raise their prices. This is what we should typically expect to happen; so any time someone claims that a new regulation will “destroy the industry” we should be very skeptical of that claim. (It’s not impossible; for instance, a regulation mandating that all fast food workers be paid $200 per hour would surely collapse the fast food industry. But it’s very unlikely that anyone would seriously propose a regulation like that.)

So as long as you have a strong government in place, you can escape the race to the bottom. But then we must consider international competition: What if other countries have weaker regulations, and so firms want to move their production to those other countries?

Well, a small country may actually be forced to lower their standards in order to compete. I’m not sure there’s much that Taiwan or Singapore could do to enforce higher labor standards. If Taiwan decided to tighten all their labor regulations, firms might just move their production to Indonesia or Vietnam. Then again, monthly incomes in Taiwan, once adjusted for currency exchange rates, are considerably higher than those in Vietnam. Indeed, wages in Taiwan aren’t much lower than wages in the US. So apparently Taiwan has some power to control their own labor standards—perhaps due to their highly educated population and strong industrial infrastructure.

However, a large country like the US or China absolutely has more power than that. If the US wants to enforce stricter labor standards, they can simply impose tariffs on countries that don’t. Actually there are many free-trade rules in place precisely to reduce that power, because it can be easily abused in the service of protectionism.

Perhaps these rules go too far; while I agree with the concern about protectionism, I definitely think we should be doing more to enforce penalties for forced labor, for instance. But this is not the result of too little international governance—if anything it is the result of too much. Our free trade agreements are astonishingly binding, even on the most powerful countries (China has successfully sued the United States under WTO rules!). I wish only that our human rights charters were anywhere near as well enforced.

This means that the race to the bottom is not the inevitable result of competition between firms or even between countries. When it occurs, it is the result of particular policy regimes nationally or internationally. We can make better rules.

The first step may be to stop listening to the people who say that any change will “destroy the industry” because they are unable (or unwilling?) to understand how uniformly-imposed rules differ from unilateral deviations from industry norms.

Reflections on the Chinese Room

PNRJ cognitive science , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 12 JDN 2459044

Perhaps the most famous thought experiment in the philosophy of mind, John Searle’s Chinese Room is the sort of argument that basically every expert knows is wrong, yet can’t quite explain what is wrong with it. Here’s a brief summary of the argument; for more detail you can consult Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I am locked in a room. The only way to communicate with me is via a slot in the door, through which papers can be passed.

Someone on the other side of the door is passing me papers with Chinese writing on them. I do not speak any Chinese. Fortunately, there is a series of file cabinets in the room, containing instruction manuals which explain (in English) what an appropriate response in Chinese would be to any given input of Chinese characters. These instructions are simply conditionals like “After receiving input A B C, output X.”

I can follow these instructions and thereby ‘hold a conversation’ in Chinese with the person outside, despite never understanding Chinese.

This room is like a Turing Test. A computer is fed symbols and has instructions telling it to output symbols; it may ‘hold a conversation’, but it will never really understand language.

First, let me note that if this argument were right, it would pretty much doom the entire project of cognitive science. Searle seems to think that calling consciousness a “biological function” as opposed to a “computation” can somehow solve this problem; but this is not how functions work. We don’t say that a crane ‘isn’t really lifting’ because it’s not made of flesh and bone. We don’t say that an airplane ‘isn’t really flying’ because it doesn’t flap its wings like a bird. He often compares to digestion, which is unambiguously a biological function; but if you make a machine that processes food chemically in the same way as digestion, that is basically a digestion machine. (In fact there is a machine called a digester that basically does that.) If Searle is right that no amount of computation could ever get you to consciousness, then we basically have no idea how anything would ever get us to consciousness.

Second, I’m guessing that the argument sounds fairly compelling, especially if you’re not very familiar with the literature. Searle chose his examples very carefully to create a powerfully seductive analogy that tilts our intuitions in a particular direction.

There are various replies that have been made to the Chinese Room. Some have pointed out that the fact that I don’t understand Chinese doesn’t mean that the system doesn’t understand Chinese (the “Systems Reply”). Others have pointed out that in the real world, conscious beings interact with their environment; they don’t just passively respond to inputs (the “Robot Reply”).

Searle has his own counter-reply to these arguments: He insists that if instead of having all those instruction manuals, I memorized all the rules, and then went out in the world and interacted with Chinese speakers, it would still be the case that I didn’t actually understand Chinese. This seems quite dubious to me: For one thing, how is that different from what we would actually observe in someone who does understand Chinese? For another, once you’re interacting with people in the real world, they can do things like point to an object and say the word for it; in such interactions, wouldn’t you eventually learn to genuinely understand the language?

But I’d like to take a somewhat different approach, and instead attack the analogy directly. The argument I’m making here is very much in the spirit of Churchland’s Luminous Room reply, but a little more concrete.

I want you to stop and think about just how big those file cabinets would have to be.

For a proper Turing Test, you can’t have a pre-defined list of allowed topics and canned responses. You’re allowed to talk about anything and everything. There are thousands of symbols in Chinese. There’s no specified limit to how long the test needs to go, or how long each sentence can be.

After each 10-character sequence, the person in the room has to somehow sort through all those file cabinets and find the right set of instructions—not simply to find the correct response to that particular 10-character sequence, but to that sequence in the context of every other sequence that has occurred so far. “What do you think about that?” is a question that one answers very differently depending on what was discussed previously.

The key issue here is combinatoric explosion. Suppose we’re dealing with 100 statements, each 10 characters long, from a vocabulary of 10,000 characters. This means that there are ((10,000)^10)^100 = 10^4000 possible conversations. That’s a ludicrously huge number. It’s bigger than a googol. Even if each atom could store one instruction, there aren’t enough atoms in the known universe. After a few dozen sentences, simply finding the correct file cabinet would be worse than finding a needle in a haystack; it would be finding a hydrogen atom in the whole galaxy.

Even if you assume a shorter memory (which I don’t think is fair; human beings can absolutely remember 100 statements back), say only 10 statements, things aren’t much better: ((10,000)^10)^10 is 10^400, which is still more atoms than there are in the known universe.

In fact, even if I assume no memory at all, just a simple Markov chain that responds only to your previous statement (which can be easily tripped up by asking the same question in a few different contexts), that would still be 10,000^10 = 10^40 sequences, which is at least a quintillion times the total data storage of every computer currently on Earth.

And I’m supposed to imagine that this can be done by hand, in real time, in order to carry out a conversation?

Note that I am not simply saying that a person in a room is too slow for the Chinese Room to work. You can use an exaflop quantum supercomputer if you like; it’s still utterly impossible to store and sort through all possible conversations.

This means that, whatever is actually going on inside the head of a real human being, it is nothing like a series of instructions that say “After receiving input A B C, output X.” A human mind cannot even fathom the total set of possible conversations, much less have a cached response to every possible sequence. This means that rules that simple cannot possibly mimic consciousness. This doesn’t mean consciousness isn’t computational; it means you’re doing the wrong kind of computations.

I’m sure Searle’s response would be to say that this is a difference only of degree, not of kind. But is it, really? Sometimes a sufficiently large difference of degree might as well be a difference of kind. (Indeed, perhaps all differences of kind are really very large differences of degree. Remember, there is a continuous series of common ancestors that links you and I to bananas.)

Moreover, Searle has claimed that his point was about semantics rather than consciousness: In an exchange with Daniel Dennett he wrote “Rather he [Dennett] misstates my position as being about consciousness rather than about semantics.” Yet semantics is exactly how we would solve this problem of combinatoric explosion.

Suppose that instead of simply having a list of symbol sequences, the file cabinets contained detailed English-to-Chinese dictionaries and grammars. After reading and memorizing those, then conversing for awhile with the Chinese speaker outside the room, who would deny that the person in the room understands Chinese? Indeed what other way is there to understand Chinese, if not reading dictionaries and talking to Chinese speakers?

Now imagine somehow converting those dictionaries and grammars into a form that a computer could directly apply. I don’t simply mean digitizing the dictionary; of course that’s easy, and it’s been done. I don’t even mean writing a program that translates automatically between English and Chinese; people are currently working on this sort of thing, and while still pretty poor, it’s getting better all the time.

No, I mean somehow coding the software so that the computer can respond to sentences in Chinese with appropriate responses in Chinese. I mean having some kind of mapping within the software of how different concepts relate to one another, with categorizations and associations built in.

I mean something like a searchable cross-referenced database, so that when asked the question, “What’s your favorite farm animal?” despite never having encountered this sentence before, the computer can go through a list of farm animals and choose one to designate as its ‘favorite’, and then store that somewhere so that later on when it is again asked it will give the same answer. And then why asked “Why do you like goats?” the computer can go through the properties of goats, choose some to be the ‘reason’ why it ‘likes’ them, and then adjust its future responses accordingly. If it decides that the reason is “horns are cute”, then when you mention some other horned animal, it updates to increase its probability of considering that animal “cute”.

I mean something like a program that is programmed to follow conversational conventions, so when you ask it its name, will not only tell you something; it will ask you your name in return, and stores that information for later. And then it will map the sound of your name to known patterns of ethnic naming conventions, and so when you say your name is “Ling-Ling Xu” it asks “Is your family Chinese?” And then when you say “yes” it asks “What part of China are they from?” and then when you say “Shanghai” it asks “Did you grow up there?” and so on. It’s not that it has some kind of rule that says “Respond to ‘Shanghai’ with ‘Did you grow up there?’”; on the contrary, later in the conversation you may say “Shanghai” and get a different response because it was in a different context. In fact, if you were to keep spamming “Shanghai” over and over again, it would sound confused: “Why do you keep saying ‘Shanghai’? I don’t understand.”

In other words, I mean semantics. I mean something approaching how human beings actually seem to organize the meanings of words in their brains. Words map to other words and contexts, and some very fundamental words (like “pain” or “red”) map directly to sensory experiences. If you are asked to define what a word means, you generally either use a lot of other words, or you point to a thing and say “It means that.” Why can’t a robot do the same thing?

I really cannot emphasize enough how radically different that process would be from simply having rules like “After receiving input A B C, output X.” I think part of why Searle’s argument is so seductive is that most people don’t have a keen grasp of computer science, and so the difference between a task that is O(N^2) like what I just outlined above doesn’t sound that different to them compared to a task that is O(10^(10^N)) like the simple input-output rules Searle describes. With a fast enough computer it wouldn’t matter, right? Well, if by “fast enough” you mean “faster than could possibly be built in our known universe”, I guess so. But O(N^2) tasks with N in the thousands are done by your computer all the time; no O(10^(10^N)) task will ever be accomplished for such an N within the Milky Way in the next ten billion years.

I suppose you could still insist that this robot, despite having the same conceptual mappings between words as we do, and acquiring new knowledge in the same way we do, and interacting in the world in the same way we do, and carrying on conversations of arbitrary length on arbitrary topics in ways indistinguishable from the way we do, still nevertheless “is not really conscious”. I don’t know how I would conclusively prove you wrong.

But I have two things to say about that: One, how do I know you aren’t such a machine? This is the problem of zombies. Two, is that really how you would react, if you met such a machine? When you see Lieutenant Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, is your thought “Oh, he’s just a calculating engine that makes a very convincing simulation of human behavior”? I don’t think it is. I think the natural, intuitive response is actually to assume that anything behaving that much like us is in fact a conscious being.

And that’s all the Chinese Room was anyway: Intuition. Searle never actually proved that the person in the room, or the person-room system, or the person-room-environment system, doesn’t actually understand Chinese. He just feels that way, and expects us to feel that way as well. But I contend that if you ever did actually meet a machine that really, truly passed the strictest form of a Turing Test, your intuition would say something quite different: You would assume that machine was as conscious as you and I.

A better kind of patriotism

PNRJ core principles, current events, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 5 JDN 2459037

Yesterday was the Fourth of July, but a lot of us haven’t felt much like celebrating. When things are this bad—pandemic, economic crisis, corrupt government, police brutality, riots, and so on—it can be hard to find much pride in our country.

Perhaps this is why Republicans tend to describe themselves as more patriotic than Democrats. Republicans have always held our country to a far lower standard (indeed, do they hold it to any standard at all!?) and so they can be proud of it even in its darkest times.

Indeed, in some sense national pride in general is a weird concept: We weren’t even alive when our nation was founded, and even today there are hundreds of millions of people in our nation, so most of what it does has nothing to do with us. But human beings are tribal: We feel a deep need to align ourselves with groups larger than ourselves. In the current era, nations fill much of that role (though certainly not all of it, as we form many other types of groups as well). We identify so strongly with our nation that our pride or shame in it becomes pride or shame in ourselves.

As the toppling of statues extends beyond Confederate leaders (obviously those statues should come down! Would Great Britain put up statues of Napoleon?) and Christopher Columbus (who was recognized as a monster in his own time!) to more ambiguous cases like Ulysses Grant, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, or even utterly nonsensical ones like Matthias Baldwin, one does begin to get the sense that the left wing doesn’t just hate racism; some of them really do seem to hate America.

Don’t get me wrong: The list of America’s sins is long and weighty. From the very beginning the United States was built by forcing out Native populations and importing African slaves. The persistent inequality between racial groups today suggests that reparations for these crimes may still be necessary.

But I think it is a mistake to look at a statue of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson and see only a slaveowner. They were slaveowners, certainly—and we shouldn’t sweep that under the rug. Perhaps it is wrong to idolize anyone, because our heroes never live up to our expectations and great men are almost always bad men. Even Martin Luther King was a sexual predator and Mahatma Gandhi abused his wife. Then again, people seem to need heroes: Without something to aspire to, some sense of pride in who they are, people rapidly become directionless or even hopeless.

While there is much to be appalled by in Washington or Jefferson, there is also much to admire. Indeed, specifically what we are celebrating on Independence Day strikes me as something particularly noteworthy, something truly worthy of the phrase “American exceptionalism”.

For most of human history, every major nation formed organically. Many were ruled by hereditary dynasties that extended to time immemorial. Others were aware that they had experienced coups and revolutions, but all of these were about the interests of one king (or prince, or duke) versus another. The Greek philosophers had debated what the best sort of government would be, but never could agree on anything; insofar as they did agree, they seemed to prefer benevolent autocracy. Even where democracies existed, they too had formed organically, and in practice rarely had suffrage beyond upper-class men. Nations had laws, but these laws were subordinate to the men who made and enforced them; one king’s sacred duty was another’s heinous crime.

Then came the Founding Fathers. After fighting their way out of the grip of the British Empire, they could easily have formed their own new monarchy and declared their own King George—and there were many who wanted to do this. They could have kept things running basically the same way they always had.

But they didn’t. Instead, they gathered together a group of experts and leaders from the revolution, all to ask the question: “What is the best way to run a country?” Of course there were many different ideas about the answer. A long series of impassioned arguments and bitter conflicts ensued. Different sides cited historians and philosophers back and forth at each other, often using the same source to entirely opposite conclusions. Great compromises were made that neither side was happy with (like the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Connecticut Compromise).

When all the dust cleared and all the signatures were collected, the result was a document that all involved knew was imperfect and incomplete—but nevertheless represented a remarkable leap forward for the very concept of what it means to govern a nation. However painfully and awkwardly, they came to some kind of agreement as to what was the best way to run a country—and then they made that country.

It’s difficult to overstate what a watershed moment this was in human history. With a few exceptions—mostly small communities—every other government on earth had been created to serve the interests of its rulers, with barely even a passing thought toward what would be ethical or in the best interests of the citizens. Of course some self-interest crept in even to the US Constitution, and in some ways we’ve been trying to fix that ever since. But even asking what sort of government would be best for the people was something deeply radical.

Today the hypocrisy of a slaveowner writing “all men are created equal” is jarring to us; but at the time the shock was not that he would own slaves, but that he would even give lip service to universal human equality. It seems bizarre to us that someone could announce “inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and then only grant voting rights to landowning White men—but to his contemporaries, the odd thing was citing philosophers (specifically John Locke) in your plan for a new government.

Indeed, perhaps the most radical thing of all about the Constitution of the United States is that they knew it was imperfect. The Founding Fathers built into the very text of the document a procedure for amending and improving it. And since then we have amended it 27 times (though to be fair the first 10 were more like “You know what? We should actually state clearly that people have free speech rather than assuming courts will automatically protect that.”)

Every nation has a founding myth that lionizes its founders. And certainly many, if not most, Americans believe a version of this myth that is as much fable as fact. But even the historical truth with all of its hypocrises has plenty to be proud of.

Though we may not have had any control over how our nation was founded, we do have a role in deciding its future. If we feel nothing but pride in our nation, we will not do enough to mend and rectify its flaws. If we feel nothing but shame in our nation, we will not do enough to preserve and improve its strengths.

Thus, this Independence Day, I remind you to be ambivalent: There is much to be ashamed of, but also much to be proud of.