ethics

The trouble with Rationalism and Effective Altruism

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

Oct 11 JDN 2461325

I have discussed before the notion of a motte and bailey, in which uses ambiguity to present a view in two different forms: A motte, which is highly defensible but often banal or uncontroversial, and a bailey, which is highly interesting and radical but ultimately indefensible. Like the medieval strategy, you want to live in the bailey, but you can only defend the motte.

I think the “rationalist” and “effective altruism” communities suffer quite severely from this dynamic.

I use the scare quotes precisely because many so-called “rationalists” deeply fail to conform to the principles of rationalism, and many so-called “effective altruists” don’t seem particularly altruistic.

This saddens me greatly, because the core principles of rationalism and effective altruism are not simply correct: They are among the best ideas that have ever been formulated by human minds.

The core of rationalism is this:

Reason is the best source of knowledge and truth.

The core of effective altruism is this:

The best acts are those that do the most good for the least cost.

Both of these ideas seem beyond defensible—more like unassailable, perhaps even undeniable, as in literally impossible to coherently deny. They have the ring of not simply truth, but deep truth, perhaps even capital-T Truth, fundamental laws that have the power and certainty of logical or mathematical theorems.

Moreover, they are not banal or uncontroversial! It is quite bizarre that they are not; it speaks of deep irrationality within human brains and human societies that anyone would even try to deny these things. Yet the very existence of religion as we know it proves that rationalism is not uncontroversial, and many people still cling to moral systems that condemn people for harmless acts or create needless suffering.

This is the motte, and it is a fine motte indeed: Beautiful, imposing, perfectly-engineered, and utterly impregnable. The closest real-world equivalent is something like the walls of Troy, which were (as the story goes) invincible against conventional force and could only be defeated by deception. (Or perhaps if you consider all of Japan a fortress: Conquering that island nation from the outside required air power and nuclear weapons.)

I love this motte will all my heart, but I am deeply concerned about the bailey.

What is the bailey of rationalism and effective altruism?

First, let me address the parts that I am not too concerned about; I think many people go a bit too far with them, but I believe they are basically sound:

  • Bayesianism: The best way to reason about uncertainty is using Bayesian statistics.
  • Utilitarianism: Morality consists in doing the greatest good for the greatest number.
  • Expected utility: The best way to make decisions under uncertainty is to maximize expected utility.
  • Behavioral economics: Economic behavior is best understood by recognizing that human beings use heuristics and are subject to biases that prevent them from being fully rational.
  • Longtermism: One of our most important moral concerns is what kind of world we are making for future generations of humanity.

As I have stated them, I consider these views to be basically sound. Now, let me rephrase them in ways that they are often taken too far:

  • McNamara fallacy: Only what you can mathematically quantify matters, and if you are not explicitly computing a posterior distribution from a prior distribution and a likelihood, you are not making a rational judgment under uncertainty.
  • Act utilitarianism: Morality consists in taking each action in isolation and maximizing the utility it creates, without regard for the deep uncertainty and complex ramifications involved in doing so.
  • Shut up and multiply: Regardless of whether it violates common sense, rests upon flimsy assumptions, or involves deep uncertainty and unacceptable risk, the proper thing to do when making decisions is always to go with what you calculate yields the highest expected utility.
  • Fallacy fallacy: If your opponent is reasoning in a fallacious way, you are free to completely dismiss their beliefs.
  • Utopian longtermism: As long as you can convince yourself that what you are doing will provide some miniscule increase in the probability of a utopian future for our galaxy-colonizing descendants, you are free to ignore the consequences of your actions for people who are alive today.

These are already a big problem, especially the last one. I have seen far too many “rationalists” and “effective altruists” pivot away from projects that could have done enormous good today with a high degree of certainty (such as improving economic policy, or supporting environmental causes, or donating to medical research or malaria prevention) in favor of trying to advance AI (often in the name of “AI safety”, but for some reason never actually involving regulating anything) toward some pie-in-the-sky vision of a utopian future.

In particular, I am deeply concerned about people who attach huge payoffs to tiny probabilities, and then convince themselves that “expected utility” means they must care about those things more than anything else. This is essentially a secular version of Pascal’s Wager, and it can drive people to terrible, terrible things.

It is far better for you to do small good things that are certain. Yes, we should care about people thousands of years from now; but the truth is, we really have no idea what the future will be like thousands of years from now. So how about we do our best to help the people who are here, now?

If you don’t find this argument convincing, consider this:

Helping people now can push us toward a brighter future.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we are truly most concerned about what happens thousands of years from now when humans have colonized the galaxy. What sort of society would you want to be responsible for that colonization?

Would it be one where people used esoteric and highly-uncertain mathematical arguments to convince themselves that they should abuse and exploit other people in the name of some unprovable “greater good”?

Or would it be one where people helped each other, locally and globally, showed compassion for all living things, and sought to help everyone achieve their full potential?

I contend that spreading kindness and compassion might very well be the very best thing you could do to make humanity’s future brighter. It will not only increase the probability that humanity survives long enough to colonize the galaxy, but also increase the probability that the society which does so is a good society, made of people who are kind and compassionate.

Sure, it wouldn’t hurt to donate to, or work for, AI safety or advocacy for AI regulation. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do those things. But they are not the one most important thing—and indeed, anyone who tells you that something is the one most important thing is basically trying to hack your hedonic mind.

But there is more to the bailey here, and it gets worse.

The majority of people who identify as rationalists and/or effective altruists also seem to believe the following things:

  • Libertarianism: Government is always the problem, never the solution. We should always trust in free markets rather that democratic governments.
  • Prediction markets: Rather than trust experts or even admit that some things are fundamentally unpredictable, we should base our decisions on the results of prediction markets, and we should have prediction markets for virtually everything.
  • AI-doomism: The end of the world is nigh, and this is a terrible thing; any day now, artificial general intelligence will take over the world and wipe out humanity.
  • Singularitarianism: The end of the world as we know it is nigh, and this is a good thing; any day now, artificial general intelligence will take over the world and lead us into a glorious utopian future.

This excellent and eye-opening video on the conference Manifest does a nice job of expressing just how weird and dangerous the culture around these beliefs can become. (And while they are much rarer, there have absolutely been people who tried to adopt rationalist ideas and became literal cults.)

Of course AI-doomism and Singularitarianism are contradictory, but in an odd sort of way: Both sides agree that AGI is imminent and will change everything; they simply disagree about whether this will turn out very good or very bad. As a result, many people who seem to assign a higher-than-normal probability of AI doom also assign a higher-than-normal probability of Singularity. This is not incoherent (as long as all their probabilities add to 1, of course); it simply means that they assign a high probability to AGI being imminent and world-changing, and aren’t sure whether that will turn out good or bad.

(I was once cited as a “Singularitarian blogger”, for this post; I am deeply flattered to be thus cited, but I really don’t think of myself as a Singularitarian. There is a weak sense of Singularitarianism that I guess I agree with: Artificial intelligence will, sooner than most people think, effect radical changes upon human society, and this could be a very good thing if it is handled correctly. But I do not believe we are on the cusp of the Culture.)

The weirdest part, for me at least, is how libertarianism and AI-doomism collide: People will tell me that they believe that AI has a greater than 10%—some say 50% or even 90%—chance of imminently wiping out the human race, and yet they reject any attempt to ban or even significantly regulate AI.

I believe that there is a less than 1% chance of AI wiping out the human race, and yet I believe that we urgently need severe regulations on AI that would substantially slow its development and limit its capabilities. (I think Dynomight makes the best argument for this risk being genuine, cutting through a lot of irrelevant nonsense. As it is, I actually think IQ-300 aliens would likely be better than AGI, because a species of genuinely-intelligent beings (as opposed to computer software that simulates but probably doesn’t actually exhibit intelligence) that is advanced enough to achieve interstellar travel is likely to be peaceful and cooperative enough that they would do us more good than harm. Also, Dynomight’s timeline of “the next few decades” is a lot more plausible than the panicky doomers who say “the next few years”.)

In part I want to regulate AI more because I can already see ways that AI is causing harm (this Jacobin article provides a nice summary), but even without those things, a 1% chance of total annihilation is well worth a great deal of regulation and slowed innovation. Indeed, let me get on record saying that reducing the chances of human annihilation by one percentage point would be well worth slowing economic and technological development by a century.

Libertarianism and prediction markets of course go quite well together, and indeed I rarely encounter one without the other. But this faith in the market is deeply misplaced—especially if we believe, as I do, in behavioral economics!—and in particular, prediction markets are in fact fundamentally flawed as a means of making decisions because of how they handle conditional probabilities. It’s actually kind of a corollary of Goodhart’s Law: Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, because rational agents try to game the system. Prediction markets can work very well if the outcome is totally beyond human control and wouldn’t totally render the outcome moot (e.g. an earthquake); but once human decisions can affect the result, the prediction market effectively becomes insider trading, and for really big things (like existential risk), the outcome itself could easily render the prediction market—or even money itself—utterly irrelevant.

We must defend the motte with all our might—but perhaps it’s best to abandon some of this bailey.

Yes, by all means, abandon religion, learn to think more rationally, support AI safety, and do what you can to do the most good for the least cost. Those things are good, and right, and important.

But if you find yourself thinking that you should sacrifice yourself, or abandon ordinary concepts of morality, in the name of some ultimate good that will save us from imminent destruction, you need to take a step back, and re-immerse yourself in the rest of society. You are not going to single-handedly save the world; nobody is. If the world is to be saved, we will all do it together.

Fish stories and inequality

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, inequality , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 4 JDN 2461318

Libertarians are fond of economic parables. There are a lot of variants of this particular floating about, including some that already take it in a convincingly left-wing direction, but the most famous is probably this one, from Paul Zane Pilzer:

In his book, Unlimited Wealth, Paul Zane Pilzer tells the story of ten people who live on an island. Their entire existence is made up of waking each morning, spending the day fishing, eating the two fish they each catch, and then going to bed. Their sustenance depends on the fish they catch, and they save nothing. If anything goes wrong with the plan (sickness, lack of fish to catch, etc.), there is no provision or store of food to take from.

Now, two of the ten people devise a plan to build a boat and net with the hope of catching more fish. After completing the project, they go out into the ocean and catch 20 fish in one day, equaling the output that it used to take all ten to accomplish prior.

The development leads those on the island to a fork in the road. Since two people can now produce the same amount of food that previously required all ten people, the other eight are able to work on other beneficial projects, such as farming or construction. Eventually, the island can progress to a point where it has raised its standard of living, is able to survive hard- ships, and can trade with other islands for goods and services.

On the other hand, the other eight people might become jealous of the two new “heroes”.

Income inequality has been created, with the two boaters possessing most of the fish. Out of their envy, they might devise a plan to levy an 80% “income” tax on the boaters, thus taking 16 of their 20 fish and redistributing it to the other residents.

If the island chooses to tax and redistribute, nobody wins. Each is no better off than before (they only receive their two fish per day), and the boaters lose their motivation to work as hard fishing and maintaining their equipment. The island will slowly drift into a society of subsistence living.

Just as those on the island benefitted from the invention of the boat and net, society benefits

from the opportunities that innovation and entrepreneurship provide, as well as the wealth it creates. The government can add value through things such as national defense, law enforce-ment, and fire protection, but left unchecked, it can overreach into the private sector leading to a hindrance in growth.

This story (or some variation on it) seems to convince a lot of people that redistribution of wealth is bad, which is interesting to me, because it’s really not a very convincing argument.

First of all, let’s consider the story on its own merits: Everything happens as stipulated, and there are now two entrepreneurs who are able to catch 20 fish per day while everyone else can only catch 2.

If there is no tax imposed, then how are the other people supposed to get any more fish than they did before? This new wealth is entirely owned by those two entrepreneurs. The only way that other people could specialize in new industries and make the island more productive would be by trading with those two entrepreneurs, who have every incentive to collude and ensure that the prices they demand for their extra fish are exceptionally high. (Also what if it was just one entrepreneur? Then he has a monopoly.)

Conversely, if the income tax is imposed and everyone gets two fish for free, what’s to stop them from specializing and doing other work, now that they have enough fish? The assumption seems to be that these people would only be motivated to do work other than subsistence fishing if they would otherwise starve, which seems like an obviously false understanding of human nature. As long as they would get some benefit from doing additional work—and remember, by assumption, they have skills that would allow them to be productive in farming, construction, etc.—they are likely to in fact do additional work.

Now, if the tax is indeed so high that the entrepreneurs are no better off than they were under subsistence fishing, then perhaps indeed they would stop producing such high output. But what if they were merely somewhat better off, rather than maximally better off? Say the tax is 40%, so they each keep 6 fish and then the other 8 people on the island each get 1 free fish and then have to fish for 1 on their own.

Yes, you can stipulate that they will refuse to be more productive if they are taxed at all, but is that really how this would work in reality? In fact, you could just as well instead stipulate that they are highly altruistic, or motivated by the intrinsic joy of discovery, and say that they would happily innovate even if they received no benefit at all.

Moreover, I think it’s important than in all of these stories, the inequality is very mild.

10% of the population making 10 times the income of the other 90% of the population is more equal than any society has ever been since the founding of civilization. (It’s probably less equal than most forager societies.) Even allegedly communist societies are not this equal.

In reality, we live in a society where there is one man—one man—who owns $900 billion. The median household wealth in America is about $200,000.

If we consider $200,000 equivalent to 2 fish, what would $900 billion be? 4.5 million fish.

Say those 2 fish weigh about 2 kg each, for a total of 4 kg. You could of course carry them in a single basket, and they would reasonably feed you and your family for a day.

Then those 4.5 million fish would weigh 9,000 tonnes, which would require 300 full-size shipping containers just to hold it all. They would provide enough food to feed an entire major city.

The US produces about 5 million tonnes of fish per year, which is about 13,000 tonnes per day—so this amount of fish would constitute the majority of all fish caught in America.

Do we still think it’s wrong to tax away some of that wealth to help everyone else?

Elon Musk is of course an extreme outlier, but we have plenty of inequality aside from him:

The top 0.1% of US households owns five times more wealth than the bottom 50%.

Indeed, the average wealth of the bottom 50% of households is only about $60,000, while the average wealth of the top 0.1% is over $398 million.

This means that if we were to take half—just half—of the wealth of the top 0.1%—just the top 0.1%—and spread it evenly to the bottom 50%, we would more than triple the wealth of the bottom 50%, giving each household an additional $199,000—an entire house in an affordable area. And the top 0.1% would still be left with an average wealth of nearly $200 million each.

This is why libertarians want to talk about imaginary islands with 10 people on them.

If there are only 10 people and the rich are only 10 times as rich as the poor, things don’t sound so unreasonable. Trying to reduce that inequality feels greedy, and any downsides become very salient.

But when you look at the actual inequality in our society, it is staggering. It is appalling. And there is simply no plausible way to justify this level of inequality, no matter what would happen to “productivity” or “growth” or “innovation” if we took efforts to reduce it—and, indeed, what they don’t want you to realize is that the evidence of such harmful effects is in fact quite weak, as the US had very high tax rates on the rich in the 1950s and had plenty of innovation and economic growth.

And what if the rich didn’t invent the technology at all?

What if they simply happened upon it, or inherited it from someone else? What if keeping the technology maintained is actually very cheap, and so requires no particular incentive? Should we then allow them to hoard all the wealth just because they happened to be the ones who ended up with the technology?

This is surely a far more accurate depiction of most rich people, who are not in fact brilliant scientists or inventors, and indeed most of whom inherited some significant proportion of their wealth.

In fact, I think inheritance is often under-estimated as a factor in wealth acquisition, because people tend to think of it as a matter of proportion.

Despite popular belief that he inherited his father’s emerald mines, Elon Musk received fairly little direct financial support from his parents, only on the order of about $100,000 (in today’s money) in loans. His wild success started with selling a tech startup for $330 million (a tech startup I’ve never heard of called Zip2, that I highly doubt was ever actually worth $330 million).

So, given that he has $900 billion today, that $100,000 sounds almost negligible, right? That’s only 0.0001% of his wealth, and he even paid it back later. So that makes him 99.9999% self-made, right?

But here’s the thing: Most people could not get $100,000 from their parents to start a tech company.

Indeed, most people could not get $100,000 from anywhere to start a tech company. So even if they have a brilliant idea for a tech company (and “online city guide software” doesn’t sound particularly brilliant to me?), and all the skills required to make it successful, they simply could never get it off the ground in the first place.

Also, I really don’t see how this tech company was particularly brilliant or innovative; it just seems like they were in the right place at the right time and had someone at the helm who is absolutely peerless at hype (that is Elon Musk’s skill: He is the greatest master of hype in the world), so they were able to convince some idiots at Compaq that their silly little tech startup, indistinguishable from hundreds of other silly little tech startups, was somehow worth $330 million.

This is not a story about Elon Musk being uniquely brilliant or hard-working. This is not some kind of deep innovation that our society needs and we must be very careful to avoid inhibiting in any way. I am quite confident that if Zip2 had never existed, or Compaq had never bought it, Elon Musk would not be as rich as he is today, but the rest of the world would have gone on basically the same. And while SpaceX and Tesla represent genuine innovation, it is not at all clear that their innovation had anything to do with Elon Musk in particular, nor that it would have been greatly reduced if we had somewhat higher tax rates on income and capital gains.

But sure, let’s let him keep his 300 shipping containers full of fish while other people starve. That’s “liberty”.

Hanlon’s Razor isn’t quite right

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 27 JDN 2461311

Hanlon’s Razor tells us:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

This is almost right. In fact, it is close enough to right to be useful at solving the problem it was meant to solve. However, I have a different maxim that I believe improves upon it:

Never attribute to coordinated conspiracy that which is adequately explained by uncoordinated malice and/or stupidity.

This is also related to another maxim I have read, Grey’s Law:

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

The problem that Hanlon’s Razor exists to solve, I believe, is the fact that many people are innately conspiracy-minded: Whenever something bad happens, they like to attribute it to the mysterious workings of some coordinated cabal of evildoers.

But this is in fact a very improbable explanation; our prior probability on it should be quite low. Not zero, as coordinated conspiracies do happen on occasion; but low, as they don’t happen very often—and the larger and longer the conspiracy required to explain the outcome, the lower we should the probability. (Three evil people coordinating for a few weeks happens all the time. Three thousand evil people coordinating for ten years is almost impossible.)

Yet malice is not actually all that improbable. About 1% of men are full-blown psychopaths and 10% have psychopathic tendencies, and about 8% of men are rapists. Since psychopaths seem to be overrepresented in positions of power, the prior probability that a given CEO or head of state is a psychopath is more like 5%. So when a corporation or a government does something horrific, yes, stupidity is very likely to be involved—but so is malice.

If we follow Hanlon’s Razor too closely, we begin to look for reasons why horrible things are not the true intentions of the people who do them, when sometimes the cruelty is the point. We come to imagine that our enemies are simply foolish and benighted, and if we simply told them the truth they would be enlightened.

This is in fact how I used to think. The last decade proved me wrong.

It seems deeply ironic; when I was a teenager, I thought the world’s conflicts were fundamentally complicated and required nuanced understanding of multiple perspectives in order to resolve. But everything that Donald Trump and the Republicans who have enabled him have done over the last ten years has shown me that this is simply not always true. My naivete of youth was in being too charitable.

Sometimes the other side is just evil. Sometimes they really are motivated by nothing but craven selfishness, misogyny, xenophobia, and racism. Sometimes our leaders really are willing to support a corrupt, incompetent, deceitful, malevolent, racist, misogynist, fascist, pedophile rapist. (Are they corrupt? Has he threatened them? Are they doing this because they still somehow think he’ll be good for the economy? Do they simply hate the same people he hates? Does it even matter anymore? Someone who supports a fascist because he was bribed or thinks it will be good for the economy is still supporting a fascist.)

While I cannot say all his millions of supporters are evil, their failure at this point seems to go beyond any ordinary stupidity. It requires either that they do not know how terrible he is—which would require such profound willfull ignorance or gullibility that it is almost unfathomable to me—or that they do not care—which would make them so totally callous or misguided that in fact I should probably simply call them evil after all. Fortunately they only comprise about 40% of Americans, roughly the proportion who think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old—and yes, the two beliefs are very strongly correlated. So maybe they really, truly are that ignorant and gullible. They have been convinced of absurdities and so will happily excuse atrocities. Perhaps there is still some way to reach them, but I do not know what it is, and I do not think we have time to find out.

Sometimes our enemies cannot be reasoned with, and must simply be defeated—hopefully at the ballot box, but if it comes to it, sometimes even on the battlefield. (To be clear: I am not suggesting a violent overthrow of Donald Trump. I want Democrats to win both houses of Congress and remove him from office. But if they try to remove him and he refuses to be removed, or if he refuses to cede power to whoever wins in 2028, then yes, it would then be time to solve this conflict with guns.)


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Heaven and Hell, or how to hack a hedonic mind

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

Sep 13 JDN 2461297

I am writing this on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, perhaps the most vivid moment in recent history in which religious beliefs directly caused horrific violence. Yes, there were political motivations for the attacks as well; but the way that the conspirators spoke of Islam and the afterlife and the fact that they were willing—eager, even—to sacrifice their own lives in the service of their cause shows that religion was also a very important motivating factor.

I’m not going to spend this post re-litigating the American and international response to the attacks, except to say what I already said over a decade ago: we sacrificed vital civil liberties for more or less nothing. (I would also like to note how prescient this line reads today, written in 2015: “If we’re worried about millions of people dying, it is far more likely that there would be a repeat of the 1918 influenza pandemic”)

Instead, I’d like to talk about how religion made 9/11 a rational behavior.

If you allow the premise that there is a Heaven in which we will receive eternal bliss if we do the right thing, and a Hell in which we will receive eternal suffering if we do the wrong thing, and then posit that the right thing God wants you to do is to crash an airplane into a skyscraper, it is rational for you to crash an airplane into a skyscraper.

If Heaven and Hell are at stake, any action can be made rational.

In order to avoid this conclusion, you either need to deny the rationality of religion itself, or you need to somehow ensure that whatever actions are prescribed by religion are good ones. But people don’t always agree on what actions are good—especially if they come from different religions—and if you already know which actions are good… what did you need religion for?

Is the idea perhaps that most people are too stupid to understand what is really good, and so instead we have to motivate them with lies? The people who are smart enough to understand ethics come up with the rules, and then they pass down these rules to the priests so that the priests can convince everyone else that following those rules leads to Heaven and breaking them leads to Hell? Is that why religious people seem so afraid of atheists undermining the authority of religion? You think most people can’t handle the truth? That if you stopped telling people that they are ruled by an almighty totalitarian who is willing and able to inflict eternal suffering on the disobedient, they wouldn’t understand why murder is wrong?

The better answer is to deny the rationality of religion itself.

This is the problem with Pascal’s Wager: If you are motivated by expected utility (which, most philosophers agree, is the rational way to behave), and you allow that there are outcomes which result in infinite utility, then only those outcomes matter, and you can be convinced to do literally anything in order to achieve those outcomes, as long as their probability of occurring is not exactly zero.

And if there are two different possible outcomes with infinite positive and negative utility attached (e.g. maybe Christianity is true, or maybe Islam is true)? Then your decision becomes undefined. Every possible action results in infinity minus infinity expected utility.

But it actually makes perfect sense that people would try to motivate you this way.

Given that you are a hedonic mind, that is, one which is motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and I want to give you some belief that will make you do whatever I want, how can I have the best possible chance to convince you to do whatever I want you to do?

The answer, of course, is to convince you that doing what I want will result in infinite positive utility—eternal bliss—while doing whatever I don’t want will result in infinite negative utility—eternal suffering. I should tell you that doing what I want sends you to Heaven and not doing what I want sends you to Hell.

If I can convince you of that, I can make you do whatever I want. Once you hold that belief, obeying my every command is the only rational action for you to take, for whatever harms it may cause, they could never be as bad as eternal suffering, and whatever benefits you must forgo to do them, they could never be as good as eternal bliss.

Heaven and Hell are an optimal hack for a hedonic mind.

They are like the sudo command in Linux: Promising Heaven and threatening Hell grants full root access and allows you to make any possible command with absolute authority. In Linux operating systems, you need to already have administrative privileges to use sudo; in religion, I suppose what you need is the spiritual authority of a religious leader (or enough charisma and skill at deception to found your own cult).

Or to make it a little more concrete: They are like a gun held to your head, a gun that is so powerful it can make you suffer for all eternity.

And hey, maybe you’ll get lucky, and what whoever is in control of your beliefs (your priest? your holy book? your church community as a whole?) will actually motivate you to do good things! Maybe it won’t be so bad to be a mindlessly obedient automaton as long as you are programmed for good!

But what if you don’t get lucky? What if the person holding an infinite gun to your head orders you to do something bad? You’ll do that instead. The moment you accepted the belief that certain actions result in infinite happiness or infinite suffering, you gave up all your rational autonomy. As long as that belief remains in your head, the only rational thing to do will always be whatever sends you to Heaven and keeps you from going to Hell.

This is what Voltaire was talking about when he said:
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

The answer, of course, is to never accept that belief.

There are various tricks you could use to do that: One would be to temporally discount the future so that bliss millennia from now means almost nothing to you. Another would be to assign some sort of arbitrary cap on how high or low the utility from a given outcome can be.

Alternatively, you could insist upon assigning a probability of zero to any belief that would result in infinite utility—just categorically say that you will never believe such a claim. This could actually be accomplished with a nice, smooth prior that is a normal distribution over outcomes, for while any particular positive utility has a positive probability, there is no probability of an infinite outcome. And the larger the utility that is promised, the lower the probability you’ll accept it—as I previously suggested as a reply to Pascal’s Wager (and Pascal’s Mugging).

In practice, I think people sort of do this.

I think that, deep in their minds, most people have some sort of “reasonableness checker” heuristic that tries to ensure that nobody is able to convince them to behave in horrible ways by making them adopt crazy beliefs. I believe that the reason most people do not commit atrocities is that they cannot really be convinced to believe absurdities—not completely. They can believe in believing them, but they can’t really believe them.

But then, there are the people who don’t have that heuristic, or for whom it has malfunctioned in some way, and those people actually believe the crazy beliefs they were told to believe. And those people can be motivated to commit atrocities—and so several of them did, 25 years ago.


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My own contribution to/dismissal of the God debate

PNRJ core principles, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , ,

Aug 30 JDN 2461283

News of my death has been greatly exaggerated. I don’t know if I’m ready to go back to weekly blogging, but I will at least try to write here occasionally again.

I value Scott Alexander’s contribution to/dismissal of the God debate (he insists it’s a dismissal, but it seems awfully long and carefully-argued for that), and I would like to add my own contribution/dismissal.

I used to be a fairly major voice for atheist apologetics in my community; I was the founder and, for four years, president of a chapter of the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Michigan, and I participated in several public debates.

One was at the University of Michigan with Frank Turek, and I think I’ll call it a draw; he was a very skilled debater and I was a bit underprepared for his full-on assault, but I still think I won on the substance. (His gotcha question was: “What is the ultimate foundation of morality?” as if this is something you can just answer with a single sound byte. I wrote an entire book about that. Large sections of it are published on this blog.)

I also did one at Rochester College which I thoroughly dominated (if I do say so myself). Along with the Christian head of the panel, there was a neopagan, and some sort of fuzzy-headed woo-type person whose views weren’t entirely clear, and there was a very clear hierarchy in which I won, the Christian fared decently well, and the other two failed catastrophically in defending any of their significant points.

During that time, I learned a lot about what is and isn’t happening in these God debates.

I now think public in-person debates are pretty much useless. It’s a performance. It’s theatre. The most-prepared person usually wins, and I’m pretty sure at Rochester they thought the Christian would be that, but it was actually me; I not only knew the Ontological Argument and Pascal’s Wager, I actually had prepared answers for them.

I think that written debate, via blogging or published articles, is still valuable. This is a much better format for clarifying thoughts and solidifying arguments, and it gives both the writer and the reader a chance to actually think about things rather than having to respond in the moment. But even this is limited, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.

Scott Alexander makes the very solid point that theism seems to be privileging a very specific hypothesis that the world is fine-tuned by some sort of inscrutable powerful being, which is the sort of hypothesis that could be used to explain literally anything, and thus ultimately explains nothing.

But I’ve got an even bigger point I’d like to make:

This whole debate is a motte and bailey.

For the uninitiated, a motte and bailey was a defensive strategy in Medieval times: You had a fortress called the motte which was small but highly defensible, and a wider open area called the bailey which was expansive and rich in resources but too large to readily defend. Your people would live on the bailey and reap its fruits most of the time, but when attacked, they would retreat to the motte to fend off attackers until the danger had passed.

In argumentation, a motte and bailey is when you have one view that you actually believe and care about and live your life according to, but can’t rationally defend easily (or perhaps at all)—the bailey—and another that you can rationally defend, but don’t actually care about—the motte.

In religion, the motte is what is called deism: The proposition that there could maybe exist some sort of powerful entity that created the universe, which might or might not have consciousness as we would understand it and might or might not have some sort of plan or intentions behind the way it designed and created the universe, and that it is reasonable to consider such a being with a sense of profound awe and mystery.

The bailey is, well, actual religion: The claim that the creator of the universe wrote this specific book which told your ancestors to commit genocide and tells you to mutilate children’s penises and kill gay people and drink wine every seven days while pretending/convincing yourself that it’s actually the blood of said creator of the universe who is also somehow human and died (but not really!) and sacrificed himself (for a weekend) for our sins, including ones committed by people who lived thousands of years ago (who probably never even existed), sins so bad that they apparently make it totally okay for kids to die of cancer (even though the entire concept of sacrificing one person to atone for the sins of another is morally incoherent). This creator of the universe loves us and wants to make us live happily forever—but if we’re bad, he’ll instead make us suffer forever, because that’s what love means! (This is not abusive at all.) And we should definitely ask this creator to do stuff for us, and he totally will, as long as we are pious enough—and if he doesn’t, well, we must not have been pious enough. Also, you should believe with all your heart in this one very specific interpretation of this specific book, even though there are thousands of other interpretations and dozens of other books that other people believe just as firmly with just as little evidence.

(Because I mostly write for an American audience, I’m picking on Christianity in particular here, but rest assured: I can do the same thing for Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and plenty of other religions. They are all absurd, and most of them are evil.)

Deism is a rationally defensible proposition.

I disagree with it, but it is the sort of abstract, theoretical disagreement that has very few practical consequences, upon which reasonable people can in fact simply agree to disagree.

Religion is a blight upon human civilization.

It is a memeplex that defends itself by systematically undermining the human capacity for rational thought and critical analysis, frequently aligns itself with the most evil authoritarianism, and has held back scientific and moral progress since its emergence.

If you want to defend religion, it is simply not good enough to provide reasonable arguments for why maybe we might believe in an “ultimate mind” or a creator of the universe. You must defend hating gay people and mutilating children and supporting authoritarians and venerating a book that commands genocide. You must defend intercessory prayer and believing in Heaven and Hell.

If you wish to defend religion, you must defend what religious people actually do and believe, not what maybe some theoretical religious people could do and believe if they were vastly more kind and rational.

And if you are unprepared to do that, I have a very simple request:

Stop defending religion.

Nobody cares about your abstract, rarefied clockmaker God who designed Planck’s constant perfectly but is pitilessly indifferent to the suffering of children who die of cancer or drown in tsunamis. (I strongly suspect that you do not even actually care.)

People care about a personal God, a religious God, one that justifies them going to church on Sundays and praying to be healed and discriminating against gay people. They care about a God who will take them to Heaven if they are good but send them to Hell if they are bad. They care about the Bible, and they want it to be thought of as the best book ever even though it is in fact scientifically absurd and morally horrific—a good candidate for worst book ever, in fact, as even Mein Kampf does not include the line “save alive nothing that breathes”.

If you are truly motivated by reason and truth, you should hate those beliefs as passionately as I do, and want to resist them at every turn—and yet instead I see you making excuses for them, pretending that they are somehow compatible with modern science and modern ethics even though they plainly are not.

People are suffering and dying because of religion. Stop telling people it’s okay to believe in religion.

The most dangerous idea you’ve probably never heard of

PNRJ current events, ethics, futurism, public policy , , , , , , , ,

May 31 JDN 2461192

They call themselves effective accelerationists, co-opting the acronym EA from Effective Altruism despite being about as diametrically opposed as it is possible to be.

They rally behind the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which I admit makes a lot of good points and has a very seductive quality to it; but when you get to the end and reach the conclusions they draw from many reasonable-sounding premises, the result is absolute horror.

What do they want?

Totally unrestricted artificial intelligence produced as fast as possible.

Let’s be clear about this: They not only want to develop artificial intelligence (many people want that). They not only want to replace humanity with artificial intelligence (serious philosophers have suggested that this might be a long-term evolution for our civilization). They want to do it right now, without restrictions.

Their reasoning seems to go something like this:

  1. Artificial intelligence has tremendous potential.
  2. Improved computing has already been a tremendous boon to humanity, Applications of artificial intelligence to many fields such as scientific research and biotechnology could continue to be so.
  3. Free-market capitalism is the most efficient economic system yet devised.

Therefore,

  1. We should allow (or even incentivize) corporations to make artificial intelligence as powerful as possible as quickly as possible.

If we were to apply their same reasoning to other technologies, it would be obvious what’s wrong here. Consider the following argument:

  1. Nuclear energy is tremendously powerful and very environmentally-friendly.
  2. Cleaner, more powerful energy has been a boon to humanity, and would continue to be so if improved further.
  3. Free-market capitalism is the most efficient economic system yet devised.

Therefore,

  1. We should grant unrestricted access to nuclear material to anyone who is rich enough to afford it.

From three entirely reasonable premises (that honestly should be uncontroversial, even though they aren’t), we have made some kind of leap of logic to derive a conclusion that is utterly insane, and could literally result in the destruction of our entire civilization.

(And, if you’re not horrified enough yet, this isn’t even hypothetical after all: The US government is seriously considering giving weapons-grade plutonium to tech startups, apparently based on this exact reasoning.)

I agree that artificial intelligence has tremendous potential. That is why it must be kept on a tight leash.

In the near term, it is already poised to severely disrupt our economy and education system. But sufficiently-powerful AI genuinely could result in harms that could kill billions of people or even destroy human civilization. (I don’t think this will happen; but if the effective accelerationists have their way, that outcome becomes a lot more likely.)

Part of their argument seems to be that delaying new medical treatments and solutions to global problems will cost lives. This is true. But it’s far fewer lives than we would be putting at risk by pulling out all the stops and letting corporations do whatever they feel like doing.

I, too, want to see a glorious future where humanity transcends our current limits through biotechnology or cybernetics or truly-sentient artificial general intelligence. But the benefits of doing that a few years—or even decades, or even centuries—sooner are simply not worth the risk of destroying our entire civilization.

When dealing with a technology this powerful and a change this radical, the most important thing is to do it correctly—not to do it quickly. We need to make sure that the artificial intelligence we create is wise and benevolent so that its great power benefits humanity—and with this much at stake, it’s worth taking a long time to get it right if we have to.

A world run by copies of Lieutenant Commander Data would be a paradise. A world run by copies of Grok would be a hellscape. It’s worth spending some time to make sure we get the former and not the latter.

A tale of two corporations

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, inequality , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 10 JDN 246171

Consider two corporations.

Corporation A has net income equal to 2.9% of its total revenue, and pretax income equal to 4.1% of its total revenue. The cost of its goods sold accounts for 77% of its revenue, with most of the remainder going to wages.

This seems reasonable, right? It doesn’t seem like this corporation is being especially exploitative.

Corporation B has 2.1 million employees, and made net income of $21.8 billion, meaning that it could afford to pay every single employee an additional $10,000 and still be profitable. The median employee at this corporation makes approximately $16 per hour, meaning that this would an income increase of over 30%—an absolutely huge jump in income that would make a big difference in millions of lives. Yet instead they have chosen to buy back $30 billion in shares to raise their stock price even higher.

Corporation B seems like they are obviously exploiting their workers and favoring their shareholders, and directly contributing to the extreme inequality in our society.

But I have a bit of a surprise for you.

They are the same corporation. All of these facts are true of Walmart: Here is their income statement, here is their announced stock buyback, and here are estimates of their number of employees and median pay.

Walmart is not a particularly exceptional case. Similar stories hold for most major corporations: the profit margin doesn’t sound that high as a proportion of revenue, but it still amounts to an enormous sum of money that is being hoarded by shareholders instead of paid to workers.

Amazon’s net income of $90 billion on $742 billion in revenue gives it a profit margin of 12%, but would be enough to give all 1.6 million employees an additional $56,000—in many cases doubling their incomes.

United Health Group made $12 billion in profit on $447 billion in revenue, which is only 2.7%; and yet with 400,000 employees, they could still afford to give each one an extra $30,000. How many nurses would be very happy to see another $30,000?

Exxon Mobil’s $28 billion profit was made on $324 billion in revenue, a reasonable-sounding margin of 8.6%. Yet with only 58,000 employees, that’s $480,000 each.

McDonald’s made $8.5 billion on $26 billion in revenue, a margin of 33% (which is actually pretty high). Yet more than 1.8 million people work at McDonald’s including all its franchises, so it could really only afford to give each one an extra $4,700—which sounds small compared to these other figures, but for a minimum-wage employee ($7.25 per hour is about $14,500 per year), that’s still an extra 32%.

This is something I think we have failed to reckon with as a society.

Once a corporation becomes sufficiently large, it doesn’t need to have a big-sounding profit margin to nonetheless control staggering amounts of wealth and funnel it away from employees into the hands of shareholders. Especially with regard to Walmart and United Health Group, those margins honestly sound small as a proportion of revenue—and yet, they still amount to incredibly vast sums of wealth that are being hoarded away from thousands or millions of workers that desperately need help.

I don’t know exactly what to do about this. More progressive taxes, especially on capital income, might help, and would certainly raise much-needed revenue; but they don’t seem like enough on their own. I think we may need something more radical, like requiring employee ownership of a certain proportion of shares—essentially turning corporations into co-ops.

Another option would be simply not allowing corporations to ever get this big, and splitting them up if they already are. Perhaps being CEO of a corporation with billions of dollars in revenue really is just too much power for one person to have. But I am genuinely concerned that this could reduce economic efficiency and thereby lower the standard of living of everyone.

Some corporations actually seem to behave more fairly.

Car companies, for instance, don’t seem to hoard huge amounts.

Ford actually lost money last year, losing $6 billion on $189 billion in revenue (3.1%). With 168,000 employees, that’s $35,000 each—essentially they gave each employee a free car. And Ford employees do fine: Median annual compensation is $126,000.

General Motors made $2.4 billion in profit on $184 billion in revenue, a margin of only 1.3%. With 150,000 employees, it could give each one an extra $16,000. Given that most of its employees are well-paid (median employee salary is $99,000), I actually don’t begrudge them this. Accounting for the risk of bad years like Ford had, I think GM is being reasonable by not simply plowing that $2.4 billion back into their own employees.

Even Tesla isn’t really an exception to this pattern. Tesla made $3.8 billion on $98 billion in revenue, which is 3.9%. With 135,000 employees, this is $28,000 each—more than GM, but still not completely crazy. Median employee pay at Tesla is over $160,000, so these workers are doing well. What’s weird about Tesla, however, is that its revenue is half that of Ford or GM, yet its market capitalization is a staggering $1.5 trillionwhile Ford’s is only $46 billion and GM’s is only $71 billion. A P/E ratio of 20 is considered reasonable. Tesla’s is 365.)

But there are some corporations that don’t even sound reasonable.

Tech companies in particular tend to have very high profit margins.

Consider Apple; its net income of $122 billion on $451 billion in revenue gives it a net profit margin of 27%. It could give all 550,000 of the employees of not only Apple itself but also all its foreign suppliers a raise of $221,000. Some of these employees are sweatshop workers in China—they would be set for life on a sum like that.

Alphabet’s profit margins are even higher than that; its net income of $160 billion was on $422 billion in revenue, for a net profit margin of 37%. With 190,000 employees, that would be $840,000 each.

Yet Microsoft’s margins are even higher; its $125 billion net income was on only $318 billion in revenue, giving it a net profit margin of 39%. It has 228,000 employees, so it could give every single one an additional $540,000.

SpaceX isn’t publicly-traded, so they don’t have to disclose everything; but it is estimated that they made about $8 billion in profit on $16 billion in revenue—a staggering margin of 50%—and with only about 12,000 employees, it could give every single one an extra $660,000. In fact, Elon Musk himself owns enough stock that he could personally give every single SpaceX employee some $60 million in shares and still be a billionaire. That’s a life-changing sum for anyone who works for a living—neurosurgeons would be awed, and even NBA players would consider that a successful career unto itself. But Elon must see number go up!

This is why I’m still somewhat sympathetic to Marxism, despite not being a Marxist.

There really is something terrible going on here, with capital owners making absolutely obscene sums of money and using it to wield enormous power over our society, leaving their own workers to struggle even though they could easily give those employees enough additional pay to significantly change their lives—and if they all did so, even the capital owners wouldn’t be meaningfully worse off, because they already have more wealth than any human being could possibly need and the overall boost to the economy might even compensate them in the long run.

And turning corporations into co-ops (which is, arguably, seizing the means of production) could actually make a very big difference here, and both theory and empirical data suggests that it would greatly reduce inequality without greatly reducing economic efficiency.

But the labor theory of value is still garbage.

There are not 62 million rapists on that website

PNRJ current events, ethics, statistics , , , , , , ,

Apr 26 JDN 246157

This shocking story has been making the rounds: There is a website where men plan to drug and rape their wives. It’s being called the “rape academy”.

There is a factoid in the original reporting that has people especially shocked: The website that hosted this terrifying content had 62 million visitors in just one month!

A lot of people seem to be taking this to mean that there are 62 million rapists on that website—a number so huge that, since it’s just one site and there could be many more out there, would seem to imply that a large fraction of men—or even the majority of men—are in fact rapists.

But this is completely false.

That is not what that figure means, and it is an utterly preposterous claim to begin with.

I consider it deeply irresponsible journalism to report that 62 million figure without clarification.

The site that had 62 million visitors last month is a mainstream porn site. It seems to have very poor moderation policies, and as a result users were getting away with posting this “rape academy” content on it. But the number of users who actually participated in that content was not 62 million—it was not anywhere near 62 million. It was in fact only a few thousand. This is the difference between the population of a small town and the population of France.

The story here is not “there are a huge number of rapists out there and any man you know could be implicated”. The story here is mainstream porn sites are not properly moderating their content.

Of course it’s horrible that there are any rapists in the world. But that has always been true, probably will always be true, and ultimately all we can do is try to find ways to reduce those numbers while knowing that they will never actually reach zero.

Yet the public reaction to this story seems to have completely misunderstood this.

I am particularly disturbed by Greta Christina’s response (and she is someone that I greatly respect, and whose blog I follow quite carefully):

And every time I passed a man, I thought, “Are you one of them? There were 62 million visits to the rape academy site, in one month alone. Were you one of them? Are you, not just a rapist, but a calculating, plan-ahead rapist who conspires with other men on how to commit rape?”

[…]

Comment policy: Do not try to console or reassure me. Right now that feels like gaslighting. And if I hear one whiff of “Not all men,” I will block you so hard and so fast you’ll hear the explosion on the other side of the world.

She has swallowed this false narrative that it’s 62 million rapists, and categorically refuses to be corrected on that. In fact, she says that any attempt to do so feels like gaslighting.

In fact, since there were only 1,000 participants in the “rape academy”, the probability that any man Greta Christina has ever encountered was one of them is negligible. The probability that she encountered a man who had visited that porn site is considerably higher—but that’s a very different thing entirely.

Say what you will about porn sites; there is a lot of legitimate criticism to be had there. I consider myself a sex-positive feminist, and yet I still have a lot of concerns about how the porn industry is run. But millions of men consuming perfectly legal sexual content is a completely different thing from millions of men committing premeditated rape.

Moreover, Christina is far from alone in this. I have seen a huge amount of discourse on this where someone tries to correct the obviously preposterous figure, and then a bunch of people attack them for it, saying things like:

“If you are arguing statistics, you are part of the problem.”

Seriously? Trying to get accurate figures on the prevalence of rape makes you complicit in rape? Is that what you really meant to say? Shouldn’t getting accurate figures in fact be part of the solution?

The criminology statistics on this are very clear:

The vast majority of men are not rapists.

The reason that a large fraction of women are victims of rape (the best estimates are about 20%, though you’ll often hear higher figures from less credible sources) is that rapists generally rape multiple times before they are caught. That’s a big problem! It says something very bad about how our criminal justice system operates. But it absolutely, categorically, does not mean that 20% of men are rapists.

And yes, basically all women feel vulnerable to rape and try to protect themselves from it. So in that sense, all women are affected. But it doesn’t take all men to make all women feel threatened.

In fact, the best estimates we have suggest that about 8% of men have ever committed rape. That’s honestly higher than I would have expected (my guess would have been 5%). But it still implies that over 90% of men are not rapists.

(Since the world population is over 8 billion, half of people are male, and most people are adults, the 8% figure does mean that there are in fact about 300 million rapists in the world—but there’s absolutely no way that one-fifth of all rapists in the world are on a single website coordinating their activities!)

I don’t think this is really that hard to understand; it’s the same pattern as other crimes.

What proportion of people have been victims of theft? Probably the majority, depending on the seriousness of the theft.

And basically everyone feels a need to protect themselves against theft, locking their homes and cars, keeping a close eye on their valuables, avoiding dark alleys at night, and so on.

But what proportion of people are thieves? Maybe most people have shoplifted at some point, but in terms of real, serious theft, like stealing a car or breaking into a home? Only a tiny fraction. The reason that so many people have been victimized and everyone needs to be careful is that thieves do it many times before they are stopped.

In fact, it’s fair to say that this is more true of theft than it is of rape— much less than 8% of people are car thieves or burglars, and most rapes are committed by men known to the victim, which is surely not true of serious theft. But still, over 90% of men are not rapists.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that all other men are off the hook.

I actually really like this chart (which unfortunately I was unable to find in higher resolution, because Threads wouldn’t cooperate and I couldn’t find it anywhere else):

I have some quibbles with the categorization, to be sure: Why does “men who think predation is an unfortunate fact of life” make you worse than “well-meaning men who underestimate the issue”? Surely in some sense it is true that predation is an unfortunate fact of life: We’re never going to get that number to zero, no matter what we do. We can hopefully make it smaller, but a world with zero rapes implies some kind of global totalitarian police state (and frankly an especially benevolent and competent one at that). But maybe the intent here is that these men think there is nothing we can do to reduce rape at all, which does sound bad.

Also, what exactly does “enjoy/consume/encourage predation” mean? “enjoy/consume” seems like it could apply to rape fantasy content, which isn’t illegal—and is actually extremely popular among both men and women. I guess if we mean men who consume and enjoy actual rape content (like the “rape academy”); that sounds really bad, but it also can’t be all that many men.

But in general, I think this is a much more accurate view than either the one which says that most men aren’t rapists and therefore don’t need to do anything differently, or the view that most men are rapists and need to be taught or convinced to stop being rapists. Most men aren’t rapists, but there’s still more that they could be doing to help.

If I had to put figures on these, my guesses would be about this:

  • Heroic men who would intervene: 10-20%
  • Well-meaning men who underestimate the issue: 25-35%
  • Men who think there is nothing we can do about rape: 10-20%
  • Men who think certain women deserve it: 15-25%
  • Men who passively consume rape content: 5-10%
  • Textbook predators we’re all aware of: 5-10%
  • Monsters so cruel we can’t even fathom them: 1-2%

This still means that the chart is skewed; the worst categories should be much smaller than the best ones.

I might even add a better category, men who have intervened, which would surely be much smaller than the category of men who would intervene—because, contrary to the apparent belief of most feminists, most men really don’t get a lot of opportunities to intervene to stop rape. Rape happens in private, and generally rapists don’t advertise that they are planning on it or even that they have done it. Out of all the men I know in my life, only a handful of them would I reasonably suspect of committing rape at some point in their lives, and I have neither confessions nor compelling evidence to support the accusation for any of them. All I can say is they seem like the sort of man who would be willing to commit rape. (One of them I’m firmly convinced is a full-blown psychopath.) So while I absolutely would intervene to stop them if I had the opportunity to do so, I simply haven’t ever had that opportunity.

Actually I think men are even less aware of which men are dangerous than women, because women seem to have whisper networks that share this kind of information, but they rarely think to include any men in those networks. Maybe they don’t trust us enough? But I don’t understand how I’m expected to intervene when nobody has even told me who I should be intervening against.

It’s also quite likely—in fact, I dare say, nearly certain—that my own social networks are not representative of male social networks. Maybe more conventionally masculine cishet men who hang out in clubs and bars have more opportunities to intervene against rapists. It’s probably the case that most men have more experience of other men bragging about their sexual exploits in ways that may suggest predation (I have almost never experienced this, in fact).

So here’s my updated chart (which I also added more colors to, to make it clearer):

This still means that there is a lot we could do to make things better—especially about the “men who think some women deserve it” and “well-meaning men who underestimate the issue” categories, which are (in my estimation) the largest. But it’s a far cry from “any man you meet could be one of them” or “just teach men not to rape”.

And it’s never a good sign when trying to correct egregious misunderstandings is characterized as “gaslighting”.

Wonderful news from Hungary

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 19 JDN 246150

Hungary’s recent election results were just about as good as they could possibly have been. Victor Orban was not only defeated, but crushed; Magyar’s party didn’t just win, they won a supermajority. They now have the power to implement sweeping reforms that could prevent authoritarians like Orban from ever taking power in Hungary again.

Already Magyar has suspended Hungarian state media broadcasts and released $90 billion in EU aid for Ukraine that Hungary had been holding up. These are immediate, concrete results from just his first few days in office.

I have two goals for this post:

First, I just want to celebrate.

This is a huge victory for democracy, not just in Hungary, but across Europe and indeed around the world. It brings hope in a time when we needed it most. It proves to the world that authoritarians can be toppled, and democracy can be restored—sometimes even without bloodshed.

There is a light at the end of this tunnel. We must keep pressing forward.

Second, I want to use it as a model.

I think the biggest thing that this event teaches us is that democracy and nonviolence can succeed. This is something we should already have recognized from the empirical evidence, but rarely do we see such a clear, unambiguous example of a triumphant victory by nonviolent, democratic means alone.

Hungarians protested, and lobbied, and voted, and they did so in a united voice against Orban’s tyranny. But there was very little violence—and most of what there was, was instigated by the government against peaceful protesters. (Remember, nonviolence doesn’t mean nobody gets hurt.)

And once he took power, Magyar already began the process of reform. It will no doubt be a long and difficult process, and may take years to complete. Orban and his party are defeated, but not destroyed, and they will continue to mount resistance. But Magyar did not wait. He did not try to reconcile or compromise. He immediately set out to make things better.

This is what the Democrats must do when they win the midterm elections this year. They must not be timid and careful, not taking any bold moves to avoid upsetting “moderates”. (Anyone who still thinks Trump belongs anywhere near public office at this point is not and never was a moderate. At best, they might be a low-information voter who literally doesn’t know what’s going on.) They must act swiftly and decisively to repair the damage Trump has done and fix our system so that no similar maniac can do such damage again in the future. This is exactly what Biden failed to do when he took office in 2020. (Yes, I know that Congress and the Supreme Court fought him on a lot of things. But there was definitely still more that he could have done and didn’t, and people are suffering now because of it.)

Ideally, in fact, they would impeach and remove Trump before 2028. (And if it’s not too much trouble, try him at the Hague for all the children he starved?) But if they don’t manage to do that, at the very least, they must ensure that they continue to have such a strong campaign for Congress and the President in 2028 that they take both of those branches of government—and then, they need to pack the Supreme Court in order to secure the third. This damage will not be undone until Republicans are completely removed from the seats of national power, and stay removed for at least a decade.

Of course, in order for that to happen, the Democrats are going to need to win a lot of elections. And that isn’t just on them—it’s also on us. They need to run better candidates, we need to vote for those candidates, and we need to hold those candidates accountable for taking the bold measures necessary to repair America after this disaster. They need to stop taking their own electoral victories for granted: Yes, Clinton and Biden absolutely deserved to win all three elections. But they only actually won one of them, and that is what matters. The Democratic Party should be looking long and hard at what went wrong in 2016 and 2024, and learning from those mistakes.

I’m not even saying the Democrats are perfect; they are not. (Neither is Magyar.) But we need a powerful party to defeat the Republicans and restore American democracy, and only the Democrats are currently in a position to fulfill that role. After the Republicans are totally destroyed and only a distant, unsettling memory like the Nazis, then you can start voting for the Greens or the Libertarians.

And since “Magyar” basically just means “Hungarian”, maybe we should run a Presidential candidate named something like John T. American, just in case.

Inerrancy is an absurdly strong claim

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 12 JDN 246143

I’ve had a really hard time writing a post this week. Between my late father’s birthday coming up soon (April 15) and the fact that a man with full authority over a full-scale nuclear arsenal threatened to destroy an entire civilization—a literal imminent threat of genocide—and the people with the power to remove him did absolutely nothing, the world just feels like a nightmare I’ve been trying to wake up from.

And yes, it matters that he has authority over nukes. If you’re in a fistfight and the other guy says, “I’ll kill you!” that’s very different than if he draws a handgun and says the same thing. The President of the United States should essentially be treated as always brandishing a deadly weapon, and it is his responsibility to have the decorum to not make statements that can be read as imminent threats.

This means that trying to be topical about current events is just too painful and disorienting for me to write anything that feels useful to say. (I mostly feel like screaming.)

So, perhaps ironically, I’m going to write a post that’s completely un-topical, that could honestly have been written any time between roughly 300 AD and the present, and—much to my chagrin—will probably still be relevant in 3000 AD if humanity survives that long.

It concerns the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy.

Simply put, inerrancy is the belief that divine scriptures (especially the Bible or Qur’an) are without error: That is, that literally every proposition contained therein is absolutely and completely true.


This is not by any means a rare or fringe belief. 55% of Christians in the United States report that they believe in Biblical inerrancy. I was not able to obtain a similar figure for Muslims, but I can tell you that a majority of US Muslims and over 90% of African Muslims believe in the even stronger claim of Qur’anic literalism.

We can set aside the question of copyediting. I don’t care about typos or grammar mistakes. Translation errors are somewhat more serious—as they can affect real doctrines—but I’m willing to set those aside as well. We can say that we are talking about the original texts in their original languages, and idealized so that they do not contain any errors of grammar or typography.

This is already asking a lot, but I am prepared to concede it.

Even so, inerrancy is an absurdly strong claim that no rational person should ever take seriously.

The claim is that this entire text—hundreds of pages by dozens of authors over hundreds of years—is entirely true, without a single false assertion anywhere within it.

I want to be absolutely clear about this: I do not believe that about any text I have ever encountered.

I do not believe that The Origin of Species is inerrant. I do not believe that calculus textbooks are inerrant. I do not believe that Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity is inerrant.

I can’t point you to any specific errors in these books right now (especially since we haven’t even specified a calculus textbook), but if someone did point me to an error, I would not be the least bit surprised. Even if I combed through the entire text multiple times and didn’t spot any errors, I would still be doubtful that I hadn’t missed one somewhere.

Honestly, I find it improbable that any nonfiction work by human beings of significant length and complexity is completely without errors. (Okay, a 5-page book on counting for kindergartners might actually be inerrant. Maybe.)

Let me try putting it this way. What is the probability that any given proposition stated by a given source is correct? For a very reliable source, it could be 99%, or 99.9%, or even 99.99%. Perhaps you literally trust some sources so much that they must assert 10,000propositions before they get one wrong. (I’m not sure there’s anyone I trust this much—I certainly do not trust myself this much—but I’ll allow it for the sake of argument.)

There are 30,000 verses in the Bible. Many of these verses assert multiple propositions.

Even if each and every proposition is 99.99% reliable, the probability that all of 30,000 distinct propositions is correct is less than 5%. Even if you trust the Bible that much, you should still be 95% certain that it got something wrong somewhere.

In fact, it’s much worse than that, as we know for a fact that there are explicit contradictions between different parts of the Bible. The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible counts over 500 explicit contradictions, some relatively trivial (did Enoch die?) but others absolutely core to Christian theology (do Heaven and Hell exist?). If even one of those holds up—and as far as I can tell, most of them hold up, maybe even all of them (though I wouldn’t be surprised if some don’t; are you getting it yet?)—then the Bible is not inerrant. Indeed, just counting contradictions, if 500 of 30,000 propositions are contradictions, then the accuracy of each proposition can’t be more than 99%.

We don’t even need the extensive empirical evidence that refutes the creation stories in the Bible to know that those stories are wrong. The creation stories themselves contradict each other in vital ways.

We don’t need to consider the vanishingly small prior probability that a human being can rise from the dead to take issue with the resurrection story. Simon and Peter can’t both simultaneously have known in advance that Jesus would resurrect and not known that until it happened. Jesus can’t have been crucified to death both before and after Passover.

Some of these kinds of contradictions are exactly the sort of thing you would expect to slip into a historical account that was delivered by oral tradition over multiple generations. (They do not, for instance, give me reason to doubt that there was in fact a historical figure named Yeshua of Nazareth who gathered a group of apostles and was crucified to death by the Roman state. The vast majority of historians agree that this man did, in fact, exist.)

But they are exactly what you are not allowed to have in a book that is inerrant!

A book that is literally without error, without flaw, should not contain even one single contradiction, no matter how trivial—and come on, whether or not Heaven and Hell exist is not trivial!

Inerrancy is not simply saying “the Bible is basically true” or “the Bible is a reliable source” or even “Christian theology is true.”

I believe that The Origin of Species is basically true, and a reliable source, and that Darwinian evolutionary theory is true. But I absolutely do not believe that The Origin of Species is inerrant.

I believe that most calculus textbooks are basically true, and are reliable sources, and that the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is true. But I absolutely do not believe that any calculus textbook is inerrant.

Inerrancy isn’t even simply saying that “the Bible was written by God”! It’s very clear that the Bible is not simply dictated verbatim from On High; there was some kind of human process involved in its creation, and even if you believe that the Council of Nicaea was right about all their choices of the canon, you should still recognize that there is plenty of room for errors to have crept in during this long, convoluted, and controversial human process.

(For the Qur’an, we actually have mostly the original text by the original author—but even then, you should still be doubtful that any document with thousands of claims could be absolutely, 100% true.)

So, please, Christians, Muslims, and everyone else, I am literally begging you:

Please, give up on inerrancy. Admit that your book could be mistaken.

I’m not asking you to give up on your religion. You can keep your theology. You can still mostly believe in the book. But please, recognize how incredibly unreasonable you are being by asserting that it is impossible that anything in the book could ever be wrong.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that your book could be mistaken.