Month: August 2021

How to change minds

PNRJ core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, politics, science and academia, tribal paradigm , , , , ,

Aug 29 JDN 2459456

Think for a moment about the last time you changed your mind on something important. If you can’t think of any examples, that’s not a good sign. Think harder; look back further. If you still can’t find any examples, you need to take a deep, hard look at yourself and how you are forming your beliefs. The path to wisdom is not found by starting with the right beliefs, but by starting with the wrong ones and recognizing them as wrong. No one was born getting everything right.

If you remember changing your mind about something, but don’t remember exactly when, that’s not a problem. Indeed, this is the typical case, and I’ll get to why in a moment. Try to remember as much as you can about the whole process, however long it took.

If you still can’t specifically remember changing your mind, try to imagine a situation in which you would change your mind—and if you can’t do that, you should be deeply ashamed and I have nothing further to say to you.

Thinking back to that time: Why did you change your mind?

It’s possible that it was something you did entirely on your own, through diligent research of primary sources or even your own mathematical proofs or experimental studies. This is occasionally something that happens; as an active researcher, it has definitely happened to me. But it’s clearly not the typical case of what changes people’s minds, and it’s quite likely that you have never experienced it yourself.

The far more common scenario—even for active researchers—is far more mundane: You changed your mind because someone convinced you. You encountered a persuasive argument, and it changed the way you think about things.

In fact, it probably wasn’t just one persuasive argument; it was probably many arguments, from multiple sources, over some span of time. It could be as little as minutes or hours; it could be as long as years.

Probably the first time someone tried to change your mind on that issue, they failed. The argument may even have degenerated into shouting and name-calling. You both went away thinking that the other side was composed of complete idiots or heartless monsters. And then, a little later, thinking back on the whole thing, you remembered one thing they said that was actually a pretty good point.

This happened again with someone else, and again with yet another person. And each time your mind changed just a little bit—you became less certain of some things, or incorporated some new information you didn’t know before. The towering edifice of your worldview would not be toppled by a single conversation—but a few bricks here and there did get taken out and replaced.

Or perhaps you weren’t even the target of the conversation; you simply overheard it. This seems especially common in the age of social media, where public and private spaces become blurred and two family members arguing about politics can blow up into a viral post that is viewed by millions. Perhaps you changed your mind not because of what was said to you, but because of what two other people said to one another; perhaps the one you thought was on your side just wasn’t making as many good arguments as the one on the other side.

Now, you may be thinking: Yes, people like me change our minds, because we are intelligent and reasonable. But those people, on the other side, aren’t like that. They are stubborn and foolish and dogmatic and stupid.

And you know what? You probably are an especially intelligent and reasonable person. If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance that you are at least above-average in your level of education, rationality, and open-mindedness.

But no matter what beliefs you hold, I guarantee you there is someone out there who shares many of them and is stubborn and foolish and dogmatic and stupid. And furthermore, there is probably someone out there who disagrees with many of your beliefs and is intelligent and open-minded and reasonable.

This is not to say that there’s no correlation between your level of reasonableness and what you actually believe. Obviously some beliefs are more rational than others, and rational people are more likely to hold those beliefs. (If this weren’t the case, we’d be doomed.) Other things equal, an atheist is more reasonable than a member of the Taliban; a social democrat is more reasonable than a neo-Nazi; a feminist is more reasonable than a misogynist; a member of the Human Rights Campaign is more reasonable than a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. But reasonable people can be wrong, and unreasonable people can be right.

You should be trying to seek out the most reasonable people who disagree with you. And you should be trying to present yourself as the most reasonable person who expresses your own beliefs.

This can be difficult—especially that first part, as the world (or at least the world spanned by Facebook and Twitter) seems to be filled with people who are astonishingly dogmatic and unreasonable. Often you won’t be able to find any reasonable disagreement. Often you will find yourself in threads full of rage, hatred and name-calling, and you will come away disheartened, frustrated, or even despairing for humanity. The whole process can feel utterly futile.

And yet, somehow, minds change.

Support for same-sex marriage in the US rose from 27% to 70% just since 1997.

Read that date again: 1997. Less than 25 years ago.

The proportion of new marriages which were interracial has risen from 3% in 1967 to 19% today. Given the racial demographics of the US, this is almost at the level of random assortment.

Ironically I think that the biggest reason people underestimate the effectiveness of rational argument is the availability heuristic: We can’t call to mind any cases where we changed someone’s mind completely. We’ve never observed a pi-radian turnaround in someone’s whole worldview, and thus, we conclude that nobody ever changes their mind about anything important.

But in fact most people change their minds slowly and gradually, and are embarrassed to admit they were wrong in public, so they change their minds in private. (One of the best single changes we could make toward improving human civilization would be to make it socially rewarded to publicly admit you were wrong. Even the scientific community doesn’t do this nearly as well as it should.) Often changing your mind doesn’t even really feel like changing your mind; you just experience a bit more doubt, learn a bit more, and repeat the process over and over again until, years later, you believe something different than you did before. You moved 0.1 or even 0.01 radians at a time, until at last you came all the way around.

It may be in fact that some people’s minds cannot be changed—either on particular issues, or even on any issue at all. But it is so very, very easy to jump to that conclusion after a few bad interactions, that I think we should intentionally overcompensate in the opposite direction: Only give up on someone after you have utterly overwhelming evidence that their mind cannot ever be changed in any way.

I can’t guarantee that this will work. Perhaps too many people are too far gone.

But I also don’t see any alternative. If the truth is to prevail, it will be by rational argument. This is the only method that systematically favors the truth. All other methods give equal or greater power to lies.

Capitalism can be fair

PNRJ core principles, ethics , , , , , ,

Aug 22 JDN 2459449

There are certainly extreme right-wing libertarians who seem to think that capitalism is inherently fair, or that “fairness” is meaningless and (some very carefully defined notion of) liberty is the only moral standard. I am not one of them. I agree that many of the actual practices of modern capitalism as we know it are unfair, particularly in the treatment of low-skill workers.

But lately I’ve been seeing a weirdly frequent left-wing take—Marxist take, really—that goes to the opposite extreme, saying that capitalism is inherently unfair, that the mere fact that capital owners ever get any profit on anything is proof that the system is exploitative and unjust and must be eliminated.

So I decided it would be worthwhile to provide a brief illustration of how, at least in the best circumstances, a capitalist system of labor can in fact be fair and just.

The argument that capitalism is inherently unjust seems to be based on the notion that profit means “workers are paid less than their labor is worth”. I think that the reason this argument is so insidious is that it’s true in one sense—but not true in another. Workers are indeed paid less than the total surplus of their actual output—but, crucially, they are not paid less than what the surplus of their output would have been had the capital owner not provided capital and coordination.

Suppose that we are making some sort of product. To make it more concrete, let’s say shirts. You can make a shirt by hand, but it’s a lot of work, and it takes a long time. Suppose that you, working on your own by hand, can make 1 shirt per day. You can sell each shirt for $10, so you get $10 per day.

Then, suppose that someone comes along who owns looms and sewing machines. They gather you and several other shirt-makers and offer to let you use their machines, in exchange for some of the revenue. With the aid of 9 other workers and the machines, you are able to make 30 shirts per day. You can still sell each shirt for $10, so now there is total revenue of $300.

Whether or not this is fair depends on precisely the bargain that was struck with the owner of the machines. Suppose that he asked for 40% of the revenue. Then the 10 workers including yourself would get (0.60)($300) = $180 to split, presumably evenly, and each get $18 per day. This seems fair; you’re clearly better off than you were making shirts by yourself. The capital owner then gets (0.40)($300) = $120, which is more than each of you, but not by a ridiculous amount; and he probably has costs to deal with in maintaining those machines.

But suppose instead the owner had demanded 80% of the revenue; then you would have to split (0.20)($300) = $60 between you, and each would only get $6 per day. The capital owner would then get (0.80)($300) = $240, 40 times as much as each of you.

Or perhaps instead of a revenue-sharing agreement, the owner offers to pay you a wage. If that wage is $18 per day, it seems fair. If it is $6 per day, it seems obviously unfair.

If this owner is the only employer, then he is competing only with working alone. So we would expect him to offer a wage of $10 per day, or maybe slightly more since working with the machines may be harder or more unpleasant than working by hand.

But if there are many employers, then he is now competing with those employers as well. If he offers $10, someone else might offer $12, and a third might offer $15. Competition should drive the system toward an equilibrium where workers are getting paid their marginal value product—in other words, the wage for one hour of work should equal the additional value added by one more hour of work.

In the case that seems fair, where workers are getting more money than they would have on their own, are they getting paid “less than the value of their labor”? In one sense, yes; the total surplus is not going all to the workers, but is being shared with the owner of the machines. But the more important sense is whether they’d be better off quitting and working on their own—and they obviously would not be.

What value does the capital owner provide? Well, the capital, of course. It’s their property and they are letting other people use it. Also, they incur costs to maintain it.

Of course, it matters how the capital owner obtained that capital. If they are an inventor who made it themselves, it seems obviously just that they should own it. If they inherited it or got lucky on the stock market, it isn’t something they deserve in a deep sense, but it’s reasonable to say they are entitled to it. But if the only reason they have the capital is by theft, fraud, or exploitation, then obviously they don’t deserve it. In practice, there are very few of the first category, a huge number of the second, and all too many of the third. Yet this is not inherent to the capitalist work arrangement. Many capital owners don’t deserve what they own; but those who do have a right to make a profit letting other people use their property.

There are of course many additional complexities that arise in the real world, in terms of market power, bargaining, asymmetric information, externalities, and so on. I freely admit that in practice, capitalism is often unfair. But I think it’s worth pointing out that the mere existence of profit from capital ownership is not inherently unjust, and in fact by organizing our economy around it we have managed to achieve unprecedented prosperity.

Why are borders so strict?

PNRJ personal, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

Aug 15 JDN 2459442

Most of us don’t cross borders all that often, and when we do it’s generally only for brief visits; so we don’t often experience just how absurdly difficult it is to move to another country. I have received a crash course in the subject for the past couple of months, in trying to arrange my move to Edinburgh.

Certain portions of the move would be inherently difficult: Moving a literal ton of stuff across an entire ocean is no mean feat, and really the impressive thing is that our civilization has reached the point where we can do it so quickly and reliably. (I do mean a literal ton: We estimated we have about 350 cubic feet and 2300 pounds of items, or 10 cubic meters and 1040 kilograms.)

But most of the real headaches have been the results of institutional policies.

First of all, there’s the fact that the university gave me so little notice. This is not entirely their fault; my understanding is that the position opened up during the spring, and they scrambled to fill it as fast as they could for the fall. Still, this has made everything that much more difficult.

More importantly, there is the matter of moving across borders.

In order to get visas to live in the UK, my fiance and I had to complete an application documenting basically our whole lives (I had to track down three parking tickets and a speeding ticket from as far back as 2011), maintain bank balances of a sufficient amount for at least 30 days (evidently poor people need not apply), and pay exorbitant fees (over $5000 in all for the two of us, which, gratefully, the university is supposed to reimburse me for). We had to upload not only our passports, but also financial documents as well as housing records to prove our relationship (in lieu of a marriage license, since we had to delay the wedding to this year due to the pandemic). But this was not enough; we had to pay even more fees to get expedited processing, and then travel to a US government office in the LA area to get our fingerprints done, and then mail our passports to another office in New York for further processing. We started this process the first week of August; we still haven’t heard back on our final approval.

Then there is the matter of moving our cat, Tootsie. UK regulations for importing a cat require an ISO-compliant microchip and certain vaccinations; this is perfectly reasonable. But they also require that you bring the cat with you when you move (within at most 5 days of your arrival), or else the cat will be legally considered livestock and subject to a tariff of over $1000.

This would be inconvenient enough, but then there is the fact that current regulations do not allow cats to be transported into the UK in the cabin of an aircraft. If they are to be flown in, they must be brought in the cargo hold. Since we did not want to subject our cat to several hours alone in a cargo hold on a transatlantic flight, we will instead be flying to Amsterdam, because the Netherlands has more lenient regulations. But then of course we still need to get her to Edinburgh; our current plan involves taking a ferry from Amsterdam to Newcastle and then a train from there to Edinburgh. In all the whole process will take at least a day longer (and cost a few hundred dollars more) than it would have without the utterly pointless rule forbidding cats from flying into the UK in the cabin.

All of this for, and I really cannot emphasize this enough, a routine move between two NATO allied First World countries.

The alliance between the US and the UK is one of the most tightly-knit in the world, and dates back generations. Our trade networks are thoroughly interconnected, and we even share most of our media and culture back and forth. There’s honestly no particular reason we couldn’t simply be the same country. (Indeed the one thing we did fight with them about in the last 250 years was over precisely that.)

There is probably less difference culturally and economically between New York and London than there is between New York and rural Texas or between London and rural Scotland. Yet a move within each country requires basically none of this extra hassle and paperwork—you basically just physically move yourself, register your car, maybe a few other minor things. You certainly don’t need to get a passport, apply for a visa, or pay exorbitant fees.

What purpose does all of this extra regulation serve? Are we safer, or richer, or healthier, because we make it so difficult to move across borders?

I can understand the need to hve some sort of security at border crossings: We want to make sure people aren’t smuggling contraband or planning acts of terrorism. (There is, by the way, a series of questions on the UK visa application asking things like this:”Have you ever committed terrorism?” “Have you ever been implicated in genocide?” One wonders if anyone has ever answered “yes”.) It even makes sense to have some kind of registration process and background check for people who plan to move permanently. But what we actually do goes far, far beyond these sensible requirements; the goal seems to be to ensure that only the finest upstanding citizens may be allowed to move to a country, while anyone who is born on the opposite side of that line need not meet any standard whatsoever in order to remain.

In my view, the most sensible standard would be this: You should only exclude someone from entering your country for actions that you’d be willing to imprison them for if they were already there. Clearly, smuggling and terrorism qualify. Indeed, any felony would do. But would you lock someone in prison for not having enough money in their bank account? Or for failing to disclose a parking ticket from ten years ago? Or for filling out paperwork incorrectly? Yet visas are denied for this sort of reason all the time.

I think most economists would agree with me: The free movement of people across borders is one of the most vital principles of free trade—and the one that the world has least lived up to so far.

Yet it seems we are in the minority. Most people seem to think it’s perfectly sensible to have completely different rules for moving from Detroit to Toledo than from Detroit to Windsor.

The reason for this is apparent enough: Once again, the tribal paradigm looms large. Human beings divide themselves into groups, and form their identities around those groups. Those inside the group are good, while those outside are bad. Actions which benefit our own group are right, while actions which benefit other groups are wrong. The group you belong to is an inherent part of who you are, and can never be changed.

We have defined these groups in many different ways throughout human history, and our scale of group identification has gradually expanded over time. First, it was families and tribes. For centuries, it was feudal kingdoms. Now, it is nation-states. Perhaps, someday, it will enlarge to encompass all of humanity.

But until that day comes, people are going to make it as hard as possible to cross from one group to another.

Locked donation boxes and moral variation

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, tribal paradigm , , , , ,

Aug 8 JDN 2459435

I haven’t been able to find the quote, but I think it was Kahneman who once remarked: “Putting locks on donation boxes shows that you have the correct view of human nature.”

I consider this a deep insight. Allow me to explain.

Some people think that human beings are basically good. Rousseau is commonly associated with this view, a notion that, left to our own devices, human beings would naturally gravitate toward an anarchic but peaceful society.

The question for people who think this needs to be: Why haven’t we? If your answer is “government holds us back”, you still need to explain why we have government. Government was not imposed upon us from On High in time immemorial. We were fairly anarchic (though not especially peaceful) in hunter-gatherer tribes for nearly 200,000 years before we established governments. How did that happen?

And if your answer to that is “a small number of tyrannical psychopaths forced government on everyone else”, you may not be wrong about that—but it already breaks your original theory, because we’ve just shown that human society cannot maintain a peaceful anarchy indefinitely.

Other people think that human beings are basically evil. Hobbes is most commonly associated with this view, that humans are innately greedy, violent, and selfish, and only by the overwhelming force of a government can civilization be maintained.

This view more accurately predicts the level of violence and death that generally accompanies anarchy, and can at least explain why we’d want to establish government—but it still has trouble explaining how we would establish government. It’s not as if we’re ruled by a single ubermensch with superpowers, or an army of robots created by a mad scientist in a secret undergroud laboratory. Running a government involves cooperation on an absolutely massive scale—thousands or even millions of unrelated, largely anonymous individuals—and this cooperation is not maintained entirely by force: Yes, there is some force involved, but most of what a government does most of the time is mediated by norms and customs, and if a government did ever try to organize itself entirely by force—not paying any of the workers, not relying on any notion of patriotism or civic duty—it would immediately and catastrophically collapse.

What is the right answer? Humans aren’t basically good or basically evil. Humans are basically varied.

I would even go so far as to say that most human beings are basically good. They follow a moral code, they care about other people, they work hard to support others, they try not to break the rules. Nobody is perfect, and we all make various mistakes. We disagree about what is right and wrong, and sometimes we even engage in actions that we ourselves would recognize as morally wrong. But most people, most of the time, try to do the right thing.

But some people are better than others. There are great humanitarians, and then there are ordinary folks. There are people who are kind and compassionate, and people who are selfish jerks.

And at the very opposite extreme from the great humanitarians is the roughly 1% of people who are outright psychopaths. About 5-10% of people have significant psychopathic traits, but about 1% are really full-blown psychopaths.

I believe it is fair to say that psychopaths are in fact basically evil. They are incapable of empathy or compassion. Morality is meaningless to them—they literally cannot distinguish moral rules from other rules. Other people’s suffering—even their very lives—means nothing to them except insofar as it is instrumentally useful. To a psychopath, other people are nothing more than tools, resources to be exploited—or obstacles to be removed.

Some philosophers have argued that this means that psychopaths are incapable of moral responsibility. I think this is wrong. I think it relies on a naive, pre-scientific notion of what “moral responsibility” is supposed to mean—one that was inevitably going to be destroyed once we had a greater understanding of the brain. Do psychopaths understand the consequences of their actions? Yes. Do rewards motivate psychopaths to behave better? Yes. Does the threat of punishment motivate them? Not really, but it was never that effective on anyone else, either. What kind of “moral responsibility” are we still missing? And how would our optimal action change if we decided that they do or don’t have moral responsibility? Would you still imprison them for crimes either way? Maybe it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s really a blegg.

Psychopaths are a small portion of our population, but are responsible for a large proportion of violent crimes. They are also overrepresented in top government positions as well as police officers, and it’s pretty safe to say that nearly every murderous dictator was a psychopath of one shade or another.

The vast majority of people are not psychopaths, and most people don’t even have any significant psychopathic traits. Yet psychopaths have an enormously disproportionate impact on society—nearly all of it harmful. If psychopaths did not exist, Rousseau might be right after all; we wouldn’t need government. If most people were psychopaths, Hobbes would be right; we’d long for the stability and security of government, but we could never actually cooperate enough to create it.

This brings me back to the matter of locked donation boxes.

Having a donation box is only worthwhile if most people are basically good: Asking people to give money freely in order to achieve some good only makes any sense if people are capable of altruism, empathy, cooperation. And it can’t be just a few, because you’d never raise enough money to be useful that way. It doesn’t have to be everyone, or maybe even a majority; but it has to be a large fraction. 90% is more than enough.

But locking things is only worthwhile if some people are basically evil: For a lock to make sense, there must be at least a few people who would be willing to break in and steal the money, even if it was earmarked for a very worthy cause. It doesn’t take a huge fraction of people, but it must be more than a negligible one. 1% to 10% is just about the right sort of range.

Hence, locked donation boxes are a phenomenon that would only exist in a world where most people are basically good—but some people are basically evil.

And this is in fact the world in which we live. It is a world where the Holocaust could happen but then be followed by the founding of the United Nations, a world where nuclear weapons would be invented and used to devastate cities, but then be followed by an era of nearly unprecedented peace. It is a world where governments are necessary to reign in violence, but also a world where governments can function (reasonably well) even in countries with hundreds of millions of people. It is a world with crushing poverty and people who work tirelessly to end it. It is a world where Exxon and BP despoil the planet for riches while WWF and Greenpeace fight back. It is a world where religions unite millions of people under a banner of peace and justice, and then go on crusadees to murder thousands of other people who united under a different banner of peace and justice. It is a world of richness, complexity, uncertainty, conflict—variance.

It is not clear how much of this moral variance is innate versus acquired. If we somehow rewound the film of history and started it again with a few minor changes, it is not clear how many of us would end up the same and how many would be far better or far worse than we are. Maybe psychopaths were born the way they are, or maybe they were made that way by culture or trauma or lead poisoning. Maybe with the right upbringing or brain damage, we, too, could be axe murderers. Yet the fact remains—there are axe murderers, but we, and most people, are not like them.

So, are people good, or evil? Was Rousseau right, or Hobbes? Yes. Both. Neither. There is no one human nature; there are many human natures. We are capable of great good and great evil.

When we plan how to run a society, we must make it work the best we can with that in mind: We can assume that most people will be good most of the time—but we know that some people won’t, and we’d better be prepared for them as well.

Set out your donation boxes with confidence. But make sure they are locked.

Love the disabled, hate the disability

PNRJ core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, personal , , , , , , , ,

Aug 1 JDN 2459428

There is a common phrase Christians like to say: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” This seems to be honored more in the breach than the observance, and many of the things that most Christians consider “sins” are utterly harmless or even good; but the principle is actually quite sound. You can disagree with someone or even believe that what they are doing is wrong while still respecting them as a human being. Indeed, my attitude toward religion is very much “Love the believer, hate the belief.” (Though somehow they don’t seem to like that one so much….)

Yet while ethically this is often the correct attitude, psychologically it can be very difficult for people to maintain. The Halo Effect is a powerful bias, and most people recoil instinctively from saying anything good about someone bad or anything bad about someone good. This can make it uncomfortable to simply state objective facts like “Hitler was a charismatic leader” or “Stalin was a competent administrator”—how dare you say something good about someone so evil? Yet in fact Hitler and Stalin could never have accomplished so much evil if they didn’t have these positive attributes—if we want to understand how such atrocities can occur and prevent them in the future, we need to recognize that evil people can also be charismatic and competent.

Halo Effect also makes it difficult for people to understand the complexities of historical figures who have facets of both great good and great evil: Thomas Jefferson led the charge on inventing modern democracy—but he also owned and raped slaves. Lately it seems like the left wants to deny the former and the right wants to deny the latter; but both are historical truths that important to know.

Halo Effect is the best explanation I have for why so many disability activists want to deny that disabilities are inherently bad. They can’t keep in their head the basic principle of “Love the disabled, hate the disability.”

There is a large community of deaf people who say that being deaf isn’t bad. There are even some blind people who say that being blind isn’t bad—though they’re considerably rarer.

Is music valuable? Is art valuable? Is the world better off because Mozart’s symphonies and the Mona Lisa exist? Yes. It follows that being unable to experience these things is bad. Therefore blindness and deafness are bad. QED.


No human being is made better of by not being able to do something. More capability is better than less capability. More freedom is better than less freedom. Less pain is better than more pain.

(Actually there are a few exceptions to “less pain is better than more pain”: People with CIPA are incapable of feeling pain even when injured, which is very dangerous.)

From this, it follows immediately that disabilities are bad and we should be trying to fix them.

And frankly this seems so utterly obvious to me that it’s hard for me to understand why anyone could possibly disagree. Maybe people who are blind or deaf simply don’t know what they’re missing? Even that isn’t a complete explanation, because I don’t know what it would be like to experience four dimensions or see ultraviolet—yet I still think that I’d be better off if I could. If there were people who had these experiences telling me how great they are, I’d be certain of it.

Don’t get me wrong: A lot of ableist discrimination does exist, and much of it seems to come from the same psychological attitude: Since being disabled is bad, they think that disabled people must be bad and we shouldn’t do anything to make them better off because they are bad. Stated outright this sounds ludicrous; but most people who think this way don’t consciously reflect on it. They just have a general sense of badness related to disability which then rubs off on their attitudes toward disabled people as well.

Yet it makes hardly any more sense to go the other way: Disabled people are human beings of value, they are good; therefore their disabilities are good? Therefore this thing that harms and limits them is good?

It’s certainly true that most disabilities would be more manageable with better accommodations, and many of those accommodations would be astonishingly easy and cheap to implement. It’s terrible that we often fail to do this. Yet the fact remains: The best-case scenario would be not needing accommodations because we can simply cure the disability.

It never ceases to baffle me that disability activists will say things like this:

“A wheelchair user isn’t disabled because of the impairment that interferes with her ability to walk, but because society refuses to make spaces wheelchair-accessible.”

No, the problem is pretty clearly the fact that she can’t walk. There are various ways that we could make society more accessible to people in wheelchairs—and we should do those things—but there are inherently certain things you simply cannot do if you can’t walk, and that has nothing to do with anything society does. You would be better off if society were more accommodating, but you’d be better off still if you could simply walk again.

Perhaps my perspective on this is skewed, because my major disability—chronic migraine—involves agonizing, debilitating chronic pain. Perhaps people whose disabilities don’t cause them continual agony can convince themselves that there’s nothing wrong with them. But it seems pretty obvious to me that I would be better off without migraines.

Indeed, it’s utterly alien to my experience to hear people say things like this: “We’re not suffering. We’re just living our lives in a different way.” I’m definitely suffering, thank you very much. Maybe not everyone with disabilities is suffering—but a lot of us definitely are. Every single day I have to maintain specific habits and avoid triggers, and I still get severe headaches twice a week. I had a particularly nasty one just this morning.

There are some more ambiguous cases, to be sure: Neurodivergences like autism and ADHD that exist on a spectrum, where the most extreme forms are utterly debilitating but the mildest forms are simply ordinary variation. It can be difficult to draw the line at when we should be willing to treat and when we shouldn’t; but this isn’t fundamentally different from the sort of question psychiatrists deal with all the time, regarding the difference between normal sadness and nervousness versus pathological depression and anxiety disorders.

Of course there is natural variation in almost all human traits, and one can have less of something good without it being pathological. Some things we call disabilities could just be considered below-average capabilities within ordinary variation. Yet even then, if we could make everyone healthier, stronger, faster, tougher, and smarter than they currently are, I have trouble seeing why we wouldn’t want to do that. I don’t even see any particular reason to think that the current human average—or even the current human maximum—is in any way optimal. Better is better. If we have the option to become transhuman gods, why wouldn’t we?

Another way to see this is to think about how utterly insane it would be to actively try to create disabilities. If there’s nothing wrong with being deaf, why not intentionally deafen yourself? If being bound to a wheelchair is not a bad thing, why not go get your legs paralyzed? If being blind isn’t so bad, why not stare into a welding torth? In these cases you’d even have consented—which is absolutely not the case for an innate disability. I never consented to these migraines and never would have.

I respect individual autonomy, so I would never force someone to get treatment for their disability. I even recognize that society can pressure people to do things they wouldn’t want to, and so maybe occasionally people really are better off being unable to do something so that nobody can pressure them into it. But it still seems utterly baffling to me that there are people who argue that we’d be better off not even having the option to make our bodies work better.

I think this is actually a major reason why disability activism hasn’t been more effective; the most vocal activists are the ones saying ridiculous things like “the problem isn’t my disability, it’s your lack of accommodations” or “there’s nothing wrong with being unable to hear”. If there is anything you’d be able to do if your disability didn’t exist that you can’t do even with accommodations, that isn’t true—and there basically always is.