war

A guide to surviving the apocalypse

pnrj current events, ethics, futurism , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 21 JDN 2459820

Some have characterized the COVID pandemic as an apocalypse, though it clearly isn’t. But a real apocalypse is certainly possible, and its low probability is offset by its extreme importance. The destruction of human civilization would be quite literally the worst thing that ever happened, and if it led to outright human extinction or civilization was never rebuilt, it could prevent a future that would have trillions if not quadrillions of happy, prosperous people.

So let’s talk about things people like you and me could do to survive such a catastrophe, and hopefully work to rebuild civilization. I’ll try to inject a somewhat light-hearted tone into this otherwise extraordinarily dark topic; we’ll see how well it works. What specifically we would want—or be able—to do will depend on the specific scenario that causes the apocalypse, so I’ll address those specifics shortly. But first, let’s talk about general stuff that should be useful in most, if not all, apocalypse scenarios.

It turns out that these general pieces of advice are also pretty good advice for much smaller-scale disasters such as fires, tornados, or earthquakes—all of which are far more likely to occur. Your top priority is to provide for the following basic needs:

1. Water: You will need water to drink. You should have some kind of stockpile of clean water; bottled water is fine but overpriced, and you’d do just as well to bottle tap water (as long as you do it before the crisis occurs and the water system goes down). Better still would be to have water filtration and purification equipment so that you can simply gather whatever water is available and make it drinkable.

2. Food: You will need nutritious, non-perishable food. Canned vegetables and beans are ideal, but you can also get a lot of benefit from dry staples such as crackers. Processed foods and candy are not as nutritious, but they do tend to keep well, so they can do in a pinch. Avoid anything that spoils quickly or requires sophisticated cooking. In the event of a disaster, you will be able to make fire and possibly run a microwave on a solar panel or portable generator—but you can’t rely on the electrical or gas mains to stay operational, and even boiling will require precious water.

3. Shelter: Depending on the disaster, your home may or may not remain standing—and even if it is standing, it may not be fit for habitation. Consider backup options for shelter: Do you have a basement? Do you own any tents? Do you know people you could move in with, if their homes survive and yours doesn’t?

4. Defense: It actually makes sense to own a gun or two in the event of a crisis. (In general it’s actually a big risk, though, so keep that in mind: the person your gun is most likely to kill is you.) Just don’t go overboard and do what we all did in Oregon Trail, stocking plenty of bullets but not enough canned food. Ammo will be hard to replace, though; your best option may actually be a gauss rifle (yes, those are real, and yes, I want one), because all they need for ammo is ferromagnetic metal of the appropriate shape and size. Then, all you need is a solar panel to charge its battery and some machine tools to convert scrap metal into ammo.

5. Community: Humans are highly social creatures, and we survive much better in groups. Get to know your neighbors. Stay in touch with friends and family. Not only will this improve your life in general, it will also give you people to reach out to if you need help during the crisis and the government is indisposed (or toppled). Having a portable radio that runs on batteries, solar power, or hand-crank operation will also be highly valuable for staying in touch with people during a crisis. (Likewise flashlights!)

Now, on to the specific scenarios. I will consider the following potential causes of apocalypse: Alien Invasion, Artificial Intelligence Uprising, Climate Disaster, Conventional War, Gamma-Ray Burst, Meteor Impact, Plague, Nuclear War, and last (and, honestly, least), Zombies.

I will rate each apocalypse by its risk level, based on its probability of occurring within the next 100 years (roughly the time I think it will take us to meaningfully colonize space and thereby change the game):

Very High: 1% or more

High: 0.1% – 1%

Moderate: 0.01% – 0.1%

Low: 0.001% – 0.01%

Very Low: 0.0001% – 0.001%

Tiny: 0.00001% – 0.0001%

Miniscule: 0.00001% or less

I will also rate your relative safety in different possible locations you might find yourself during the crisis:

Very Safe: You will probably survive.

Safe: You will likely survive if you are careful.

Dicey: You may survive, you may not. Hard to say.

Dangerous: You will likely die unless you are very careful.

Very Dangerous: You will probably die.

Hopeless: You will definitely die.

I’ll rate the following locations for each, with some explanation: City, Suburb, Rural Area, Military Base, Underground Bunker, Ship at Sea. Certain patterns will emerge—but some results may surprise you. This may tell you where to go to have the best chance of survival in the event of a disaster (though I admit bunkers are often in short supply).

All right, here goes!

Alien Invasion

Risk: Low

There are probably sapient aliens somewhere in this vast universe, maybe even some with advanced technology. But they are very unlikely to be willing to expend the enormous resources to travel across the stars just to conquer us. Then again, hey, it could happen; maybe they’re imperialists, or they have watched our TV commercials and heard the siren song of oregano.

City: Dangerous

Population centers are likely to be primary targets for their invasion. They probably won’t want to exterminate us outright (why would they?), but they may want to take control of our cities, and are likely to kill a lot of people when they do.

Suburb: Dicey

Outside the city centers will be a bit safer, but hardly truly safe.

Rural Area: Dicey

Where humans are spread out, we’ll present less of a target. Then again, if you own an oregano farm….

Military Base: Very Dangerous

You might think that having all those planes and guns around would help, but these will surely be prime targets in an invasion. Since the aliens are likely to be far more technologically advanced, it’s unlikely our military forces could put up much resistance. Our bases would likely be wiped out almost immediately.

Underground Bunker: Safe

This is a good place to be. Orbital and aerial weapons won’t be very effective against underground targets, and even ground troops would have trouble finding and attacking an isolated bunker. Since they probably won’t want to exterminate us, hiding in your bunker until they establish a New World Order could work out for you.

Ship at Sea: Dicey

As long as it’s a civilian vessel, you should be okay. A naval vessel is just as dangerous as a base, if not more so; they would likely strike our entire fleets from orbit almost instantly. But the aliens are unlikely to have much reason to bother attacking a cruise ship or a yacht. Then again, if they do, you’re toast.

Artificial Intelligence Uprising

Risk: Very High

While it sounds very sci-fi, this is one of the most probable apocalypse scenarios, and we should be working to defend against it. There are dozens of ways that artificial intelligence could get out of control and cause tremendous damage, particularly if the AI got control of combat drones or naval vessels. This could mean a superintelligent AI beyond human comprehension, but it need not; it could in fact be a very stupid AI that was programmed to make profits for Hasbro and decided that melting people into plastic was the best way to do that.

City: Very Dangerous

Cities don’t just have lots of people; they also have lots of machines. If the AI can hack our networks, they may be able to hack into not just phones and laptops, but even cars, homes, and power plants. Depending on the AI’s goals (which are very hard to predict), cities could become disaster zones almost immediately, as thousands of cars shut down and crash and all the power plants get set to overload.

Suburb: Dangerous

Definitely safer than the city, but still, you’ve got plenty of technology around you for the AI to exploit.

Rural Area: Dicey

The further you are from other people and their technology, the safer you’ll be. Having bad wifi out in the boonies may actually save your life. Then again, even tractors have software updates now….

Military Base: Very Dangerous

The military is extremely high-tech and all network-linked. Unless they can successfully secure their systems against the AI very well, very fast, suddenly all the guided missiles and combat drones and sentry guns will be deployed in service of the robot revolution.

Underground Bunker: Safe

As long as your bunker is off the grid, you should be okay. The robots won’t have any weapons we don’t already have, and bunkers are built because they protect pretty well against most weapons.

Ship at Sea: Hopeless

You are surrounded by technology and you have nowhere to run. A military vessel is worse than a civilian ship, but either way, you’re pretty much doomed. The AI is going to take over the radio, the GPS system, maybe even the controls of the ship themselves. It could intentionally overload the engines, or drive you into rocks, or simply shut down everything and leave you to starve at sea. A sailing yacht with a hand-held compass and sextant should be relatively safe, if you manage to get your hands on one of those somehow.

Climate Disaster

Risk: Moderate

Let’s be clear here. Some kind of climate disaster is inevitable; indeed, it’s already in progress. But what I’m talking about is something really severe, something that puts all of human civilization in jeopardy. That, fortunately, is fairly unlikely—and even more so after the big bill that just passed!

City: Dicey

Buildings provide shelter from the elements, and cities will be the first places we defend. Dikes will be built around Manhattan like the ones around Amsterdam. You won’t need to worry about fires, snowstorms, or flooding very much. Still, a really severe crisis could cause all utility systems to break down, meaning you won’t have heating and cooling.

Suburb: Dicey

The suburbs will be about as safe as the cities, maybe a little worse because there isn’t as much shelter if you lose your home to a disaster event.

Rural Area: Dangerous

Remote areas are going to have it the worst. Especially if you’re near a coast that can flood or a forest that can burn, you’re exposed to the elements and there won’t be much infrastructure to protect you. Your best bet is to move in toward the city, where other people will try to help you against the coming storms.

Military Base: Very Safe

Military infrastructure will be prioritized in defense plans, and soldiers are already given lots of survival tools and training. If you can get yourself to a military base and they actually let you in, you really won’t have much to worry about.

Underground Bunker: Very Safe

Underground doesn’t have a lot of weather, it turns out. As long as your bunker is well sealed against flooding, earthquakes are really your only serious concern, and climate change isn’t going to affect those very much.

Ship at Sea: Safe

Increased frequency of hurricanes and other storms will make the sea more dangerous, but as long as you steer clear of storms as they come, you should be okay.

Conventional War

Risk: Moderate

Once again, I should clarify. Obviously there are going to be wars—there are wars going on this very minute. But a truly disastrous war, a World War 3 still fought with conventional weapons, is fairly unlikely. We can’t rule it out, but we don’t have to worry too much—or rather, it’s nukes we should worry about, as I’ll get to in a little bit. It’s unlikely that truly apocalyptic damage could be caused by conventional weapons alone.

City: Dicey

Cities will often be where battles are fought, as they are strategically important. Expect bombing raids and perhaps infantry or tank battalions. Still, it’s actually pretty feasible to survive in a city that is under attack by conventional weapons; while lots of people certainly die, in most wars, most people actually don’t.

Suburb: Safe

Suburbs rarely make interesting military targets, so you’ll mainly have to worry about troops passing through on their way to cities.

Rural Area: Safe

For similar reasons to the suburbs, you should be relatively safe out in the boonies. You may encounter some scattered skirmishes, but you’re unlikely to face sustained attack.

Military Base: Dicey

Whether military bases are safe really depends on whether your side is winning or not. If they are, then you’re probably okay; that’s where all the soldiers and military equipment are, there to defend you. If they aren’t, then you’re in trouble; military bases make nice, juicy targets for attack.

Ship at Sea: Safe

There’s a reason it is big news every time a civilian cruise liner gets sunk in a war (does the Lusitania ring a bell?); it really doesn’t happen that much. Transport ships are at risk of submarine raids, and of course naval vessels will face constant threats; but cruise liners aren’t strategically important, so military forces have very little reason to target them.

Gamma-Ray Burst

Risk: Tiny

While gamma-ray bursts certainly happen all the time, so far they have all been extremely remote from Earth. It is currently estimated that they only happen a few times in any given galaxy every few million years. And each one is concentrated in a narrow beam, so even when they happen they only affect a few nearby stars. This is very good news, because if it happened… well, that’s pretty much it. We’d be doomed.

If a gamma-ray burst happened within a few light-years of us, and happened to be pointed at us, it would scour the Earth, boil the water, burn the atmosphere. Our entire planet would become a dead, molten rock—if, that is, it wasn’t so close that it blew the planet up completely. And the same is going to be true of Mars, Mercury, and every other planet in our solar system.

Underground Bunker: Very Dangerous

Your one meager hope of survival would be to be in an underground bunker at the moment the burst hit. Since most bursts give very little warning, you are unlikely to achieve this unless you, like, live in a bunker—which sounds pretty terrible. Moreover, your bunker needs to be a 100% closed system, and deep underground; the surface will be molten and the air will be burned away. There’s honestly a pretty narrow band of the Earth’s crust that’s deep enough to protect you but not already hot enough to doom you.

Anywhere Else: Hopeless

If you aren’t deep underground at the moment the burst hits us, that’s it; you’re dead. If you are on the side of the Earth facing the burst, you will die mercifully quickly, burned to a crisp instantly. If you are not, your death will be a bit slower, as the raging firestorm that engulfs the Earth, boils the oceans, and burns away the atmosphere will take some time to hit you. But your demise is equally inevitable.

Well, that was cheery. Remember, it’s really unlikely to happen! Moving on!

Meteor Impact

Risk: Tiny

Yes, “it has happened before, and it will happen again; the only question is when.” However, meteors with sufficient size to cause a global catastrophe only seem to hit the Earth about once every couple hundred million years. Moreover, right now the first time in human history where we might actually have a serious chance of detecting and deflecting an oncoming meteor—so even if one were on the way, we’d still have some hope of saving ourselves.

Underground Bunker: Dangerous

A meteor impact would be a lot like a gamma-ray burst, only much less so. (Almost anything is “much less so” than a gamma-ray burst, with the lone exception of a supernova, which is always “much more so”.) It would still boil a lot of ocean and start a massive firestorm, but it wouldn’t boil all the ocean, and the firestorm wouldn’t burn away all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Underground is clearly the safest place to be, preferably on the other side of the planet from the impact.

Anywhere Else: Very Dangerous

If you are above ground, it wouldn’t otherwise matter too much where you are, at least not in any way that’s easy to predict. Further from the impact is obviously better than closer, but the impact could be almost anywhere. After the initial destruction there would be a prolonged impact winter, which could cause famines and wars. Rural areas might be a bit safer than cities, but then again if you are in a remote area, you are less likely to get help if you need it.

Plague

Risk: Low

Obviously, the probability of a pandemic is 100%. You best start believing in pandemics; we’re in one. But pandemics aren’t apocalyptic plagues. To really jeopardize human civilization, there would have to be a superbug that spreads and mutates rapidly, has a high fatality rate, and remains highly resistant to treatment and vaccination. Fortunately, there aren’t a lot of bacteria or viruses like that; the last one we had was the Black Death, and humanity made it through that one. In fact, there is good reason to believe that with modern medical technology, even a pathogen like the Black Death wouldn’t be nearly as bad this time around.

City: Dangerous

Assuming the pathogen spreads from human to human, concentrations of humans are going to be the most dangerous places to be. Staying indoors and following whatever lockdown/mask/safety protocols that authorities recommend will surely help you; but if the plague gets bad enough, infrastructure could start falling apart and even those things will stop working.

Suburb: Safe

In a suburb, you are much more isolated from other people. You can stay in your home and be fairly safe from the plague, as long as you are careful.

Rural Area: Dangerous

The remoteness of a rural area means that you’d think you wouldn’t have to worry as much about human-to-human transmission. But as we’ve learned from COVID, rural areas are full of stubborn right-wing people who refuse to follow government safety protocols. There may not be many people around, but they probably will be taking stupid risks and spreading the disease all over the place. Moreover, if the disease can be carried by animals—as quite a few can—livestock will become an added danger.

Military Base: Safe

If there’s one place in the world where people follow government safety protocols, it’s a military base. Bases will have top-of-the-line equipment, skilled and disciplined personnel, and up-to-the-minute data on the spread of the pathogen.

Underground Bunker: Very Safe

The main thing you need to do is be away from other people for awhile, and a bunker is a great place to do that. As long as your bunker is well-stocked with food and water, you can ride out the plague and come back out once it dies down.

Ship at Sea: Dicey

This is an all-or-nothing proposition. If no one on the ship has the disease, you’re probably safe as long as you remain at sea, because very few pathogens can spread that far through the air. On the other hand, if someone on your ship does carry the disease, you’re basically doomed.

Nuclear War

Risk: Very High

Honestly, this is the one that terrifies me. I have no way of knowing that Vladmir Putin or Xi Jinping won’t wake up one morning any day now and give the order to launch a thousand nuclear missiles. (I honestly wasn’t even sure Trump wouldn’t, so it’s a damn good thing he’s out of office.) They have no reason to, but they’re psychopathic enough that I can’t be sure they won’t.

City: Dangerous

Obviously, most of those missiles are aimed at cities. And if you happen to be in the center of such a city, this is very bad for your health. However, nukes are not the automatic death machines that they are often portrayed to be; sure, right at the blast center you’re vaporized. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki both had lots of survivors, many of whom lived on for years or even decades afterward, even despite the radiation poisoning.

Suburb: Dangerous

Being away from a city center might provide some protection, but then again it might not; it really depends on how the nukes are targeted. It’s actually quite unlikely that Russia or China (or whoever) would deploy large megaton-yield missiles, as they are very expensive; so you could only have a few, making it easier to shoot them all down. The far more likely scenario is lots of kiloton-yield missiles, deployed in what is called a MIRV: multiple independent re-entry vehicle. One missile launches into space, then splits into many missiles, each of which can have a different target. It’s sort of like a cluster bomb, only the “little” clusters are each Hiroshima bombs. Those clusters might actually be spread over metropolitan areas relatively evenly, so being in a suburb might not save you. Or it might. Hard to say.

Rural Area: Dicey

If you are sufficiently remote from cities, the nukes probably won’t be aimed at you. And since most of the danger really happens right when the nuke hits, this is good news for you. You won’t have to worry about the blast or the radiation; your main concerns will be fallout and the resulting collapse of infrastructure. Nuclear winter could also be a risk, but recent studies suggest that’s relatively unlikely even in a full-scale nuclear exchange.

Military Base: Hopeless

The nukes are going to be targeted directly at military bases. Probably multiple nukes per base, in case some get shot down. Basically, if you are on a base at the time the missiles hit, you’re doomed. If you know the missiles are coming, your best bet would be to get as far from that base as you can, into as remote an area as you can. You’ll have a matter of minutes, so good luck.

Underground Bunker: Safe

There’s a reason we built a bunch of underground bunkers during the Cold War; they’re one of the few places you can go to really be safe from a nuclear attack. As long as your bunker is well-stocked and well-shielded, you can hide there and survive not only the initial attack, but the worst of the fallout as well.

Ship at Sea: Safe

Ships are small enough that they probably wouldn’t be targeted by nukes. Maybe if you’re on or near a major naval capital ship, like an aircraft carrier, you’d be in danger; someone might try to nuke that. (Even then, aircraft carriers are tough: Anything short of a direct hit might actually be survivable. In tests, carriers have remained afloat and largely functional even after a 100-kiloton nuclear bomb was detonated a mile away. They’re even radiation-shielded, because they have nuclear reactors.) But a civilian vessel or even a smaller naval vessel is unlikely to be targeted. Just stay miles away from any cities or any other ships, and you should be okay.

Zombies

Risk: Miniscule

Zombies per se—the literal undead—aren’t even real, so that’s just impossible. But something like zombies could maybe happen, in some very remote scenario in which some bizarre mutant strain of rabies or something spreads far and wide and causes people to go crazy and attack other people. Even then, if the infection is really only spread through bites, it’s not clear how it could ever reach a truly apocalyptic level; more likely, it would cause a lot of damage locally and then be rapidly contained, and we’d remember it like Pearl Harbor or 9/11: That terrible, terrible day when 5,000 people became zombies in Portland, and then they all died and it was over. An airborne or mosquito-borne virus would be much more dangerous, but then we’re really talking about a plague, not zombies. The ‘turns people into zombies’ part of the virus would be a lot less important than the ‘spreads through the air and kills you’ part.

Seriously, why is this such a common trope? Why do people think that this could cause an apocalypse?

City: Safe

Yes, safe, dammit. Once you have learned that zombies are on the loose, stay locked in your home, wearing heavy clothing (to block bites; a dog suit is ideal, but a leather jacket or puffy coat would do) with a shotgun (or a gauss rifle, see above) at the ready, and you’ll probably be fine. Yes, this is the area of highest risk, due to the concentration of people who could potentially be infected with the zombie virus. But unless you are stupid—which people in these movies always seem to be—you really aren’t in all that much danger. Zombies can at most be as fast and strong as humans (often, they seem to be less!), so all you need to do is shoot them before they can bite you. And unlike fake movie zombies, anything genuinely possible will go down from any mortal wound, not just a perfect headshot—I assure you, humans, however crazed by infection they might be, can’t run at you if their hearts (or their legs) are gone. It might take a bit more damage to drop them than an ordinary person, if they aren’t slowed down by pain; but it wouldn’t require perfect marksmanship or any kind of special weaponry. Buckshot to the chest will work just fine.

Suburb: Safe

Similar to the city, only more so, because people there are more isolated.

Rural Area: Very Safe

And rural areas are even more isolated still—plus you have more guns than people, so you’ll have more guns than zombies.

Military Base: Very Safe

Even more guns, plus military training and a chain of command! The zombies don’t stand a chance. A military base would be a great place to be, and indeed that’s where the containment would begin, as troops march from the bases to the cities to clear out the zombies. Shaun of the Dead (of all things!) actually got this right: One local area gets pretty bad, but then the Army comes in and takes all the zombies out.

Underground Bunker: Very Safe

A bunker remains safe in the event of zombies, just as it is in most other scenarios.

Ship at Sea: Very Safe

As long as the infection hasn’t spread to the ship you are currently on and the zombies can’t swim, you are at literally zero risk.

Are people basically good?

pnrj core principles, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 20 JDN 2459659

I recently finished reading Human Kind by Rutger Bregman. His central thesis is a surprisingly controversial one, yet one I largely agree with: People are basically good. Most people, in most circumstances, try to do the right thing.

Neoclassical economists in particular seem utterly scandalized by any such suggestion. No, they insist, people are selfish! They’ll take any opportunity to exploit each other! On this, Bregman is right and the neoclassical economists are wrong.

One of the best parts of the book is Bregman’s tale of several shipwrecked Tongan boys who were stranded on the remote island of ‘Ata, sometimes called “the real Lord of the Flies“ but with an outcome quite radically different from that of the novel. There were of course conflicts during their long time stranded, but the boys resolved most of these conflicts peacefully, and by the time help came over a year later they were still healthy and harmonious. Bregman himself was involved in the investigative reporting about these events, and his tale of how he came to meet some of the (now elderly) survivors and tell their tale is both enlightening and heartwarming.

Bregman spends a lot of time (perhaps too much time) analyzing classic experiments meant to elucidate human nature. He does a good job of analyzing the Milgram experiment—it’s valid, but it says more about our willingness to serve a cause than our blind obedience to authority. He utterly demolishes the Zimbardo experiment; I knew it was bad, but I hadn’t even realized how utterly worthless that so-called “experiment” actually is. Zimbardo basically paid people to act like abusive prison guards—specifically instructing them how to act!—and then claimed that he had discovered something deep in human nature. Bregman calls it a “hoax”, which might be a bit too strong—but it’s about as accurate as calling it an “experiment”. I think it’s more like a form of performance art.

Bregman’s criticism of Steven Pinker I find much less convincing. He cites a few other studies that purported to show the following: (1) the archaeological record is unreliable in assessing death rates in prehistoric societies (fair enough, but what else do we have?), (2) the high death rates in prehistoric cultures could be from predators such as lions rather than other humans (maybe, but that still means civilization is providing vital security!), (3) the Long Peace could be a statistical artifact because data on wars is so sparse (I find this unlikely, but I admit the Russian invasion of Ukraine does support such a notion), or (4) the Long Peace is the result of nuclear weapons, globalized trade, and/or international institutions rather than a change in overall attitudes toward violence (perfectly reasonable, but I’m not even sure Pinker would disagree).

I appreciate that Bregman does not lend credence to the people who want to use absolute death counts instead of relative death rates, who apparently would rather live in a prehistoric village of 100 people that gets wiped out by a plague (or for that matter on a Mars colony of 100 people who all die of suffocation when the life support fails) rather than remain in a modern city of a million people that has a few dozen murders each year. Zero homicides is better than 40, right? Personally, I care most about the question “How likely am I to die at any given time?”; and for that, relative death rates are the only valid measure. I don’t even see why we should particularly care about homicide versus other causes of death—I don’t see being shot as particularly worse than dying of Alzheimer’s (indeed, quite the contrary, other than the fact that Alzheimer’s is largely limited to old age and shooting isn’t). But all right, if violence is the question, then go ahead and use homicides—but it certainly should be rates and not absolute numbers. A larger human population is not an inherently bad thing.

I even appreciate that Bregman offers a theory (not an especially convincing one, but not an utterly ridiculous one either) of how agriculture and civilization could emerge even if hunter-gatherer life was actually better. It basically involves agriculture being discovered by accident, and then people gradually transitioning to a sedentary mode of life and not realizing their mistake until generations had passed and all the old skills were lost. There are various holes one can poke in this theory (Were the skills really lost? Couldn’t they be recovered from others? Indeed, haven’t people done that, in living memory, by “going native”?), but it’s at least better than simply saying “civilization was a mistake”.

Yet Bregman’s own account, particularly his discussion of how early civilizations all seem to have been slave states, seems to better support what I think is becoming the historical consensus, which is that civilization emerged because a handful of psychopaths gathered armies to conquer and enslave everyone around them. This is bad news for anyone who holds to a naively Whiggish view of history as a continuous march of progress (which I have oft heard accused but rarely heard endorsed), but it’s equally bad news for anyone who believes that all human beings are basically good and we should—or even could—return to a state of blissful anarchism.

Indeed, this is where Bregman’s view and mine part ways. We both agree that most people are mostly good most of the time. He even acknowledges that about 2% of people are psychopaths, which is a very plausible figure. (The figures I find most credible are about 1% of women and about 4% of men, which averages out to 2.5%. The prevalence you get also depends on how severely lacking in empathy someone needs to be in order to qualify. I’ve seen figures as low as 1% and as high as 4%.) What he fails to see is how that 2% of people can have large effects on society, wildly disproportionate to their number.

Consider the few dozen murders that are committed in any given city of a million people each year. Who is committing those murders? By and large, psychopaths. That’s more true of premeditated murder than of crimes of passion, but even the latter are far more likely to be committed by psychopaths than the general population.

Or consider those early civilizations that were nearly all authoritarian slave-states. What kind of person tends to govern an authoritarian slave-state? A psychopath. Sure, probably not every Roman emperor was a psychopath—but I’m quite certain that Commodus and Caligula were, and I suspect that Augustus and several others were as well. And the ones who don’t seem like psychopaths (like Marcus Aurelius) still seem like narcissists. Indeed, I’m not sure it’s possible to be an authoritarian emperor and not be at least a narcissist; should an ordinary person somehow find themselves in the role, I think they’d immediately set out to delegate authority and improve civil liberties.

This suggests that civilization was not so much a mistake as it was a crime—civilization was inflicted upon us by psychopaths and their greed for wealth and power. Like I said, not great for a “march of progress” view of history. Yet a lot has changed in the last few thousand years, and life in the 21st century at least seems overall pretty good—and almost certainly better than life on the African savannah 50,000 years ago.

In essence, what I think happened was we invented a technology to turn the tables of civilization, use the same tools psychopaths had used to oppress us as a means to contain them. This technology was called democracy. The institutions of democracy allowed us to convert government from a means by which psychopaths oppress and extract wealth from the populace to a means by which the populace could prevent psychopaths from committing wanton acts of violence.

Is it perfect? Certainly not. Indeed, there are many governments today that much better fit the “psychopath oppressing people” model (e.g. Russia, China, North Korea), and even in First World democracies there are substantial abuses of power and violations of human rights. In fact, psychopaths are overrepresented among the police and also among politicians. Perhaps there are superior modes of governance yet to be found that would further reduce the power psychopaths have and thereby make life better for everyone else.

Yet it remains clear that democracy is better than anarchy. This is not so much because anarchy results in everyone behaving badly and causes immediate chaos (as many people seem to erroneously believe), but because it results in enough people behaving badly to be a problem—and because some of those people are psychopaths who will take advantage of power vacuum to seize control for themselves.

Yes, most people are basically good. But enough people aren’t that it’s a problem.

Bregman seems to think that simply outnumbering the psychopaths is enough to keep them under control, but history clearly shows that it isn’t. We need institutions of governance to protect us. And for the most part, First World democracies do a fairly good job of that.

Indeed, I think Bregman’s perspective may be a bit clouded by being Dutch, as the Netherlands has one of the highest rates of trust in the world. Nearly 90% of people in the Netherlands trust their neighbors. Even the US has high levels of trust by world standards, at about 84%; a more typical country is India or Mexico at 64%, and the least-trusting countries are places like Gabon with 31% or Benin with a dismal 23%. Trust in government varies widely, from an astonishing 94% in Norway (then again, have you seen Norway? Their government is doing a bang-up job!) to 79% in the Netherlands, to closer to 50% in most countries (in this the US is more typical), all the way down to 23% in Nigeria (which seems equally justified). Some mysteries remain, like why more people trust the government in Russia than in Namibia. (Maybe people in Namibia are just more willing to speak their minds? They’re certainly much freer to do so.)

In other words, Dutch people are basically good. Not that the Netherlands has no psychopaths; surely they have a few just like everyone else. But they have strong, effective democratic institutions that provide both liberty and security for the vast majority of the population. And with the psychopaths under control, everyone else can feel free to trust each other and cooperate, even in the absence of obvious government support. It’s precisely because the government of the Netherlands is so unusually effective that someone living there can come to believe that government is unnecessary.

In short, Bregman is right that we should have donation boxes—and a lot of people seem to miss that (especially economists!). But he seems to forget that we need to keep them locked.

Russia has invaded Ukraine.

pnrj core principles, current events, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 6 JDN 2459645

Russia has invaded Ukraine. No doubt you have heard it by now, as it’s all over the news now in dozens of outlets, from CNN to NBC to The Guardian to Al-Jazeera. And as well it should be, as this is the first time in history that a nuclear power has annexed another country. Yes, nuclear powers have fought wars before—the US just got out of one in Afghanistan as you may recall. They have even started wars and led invasions—the US did that in Iraq. And certainly, countries have been annexing and conquering other countries for millennia. But never before—never before, in human history—has a nuclear-armed state invaded another country simply to claim it as part of itself. (Trump said he thought the US should have done something like that, and the world was rightly horrified.)

Ukraine is not a nuclear power—not anymore. The Soviet Union built up a great deal of its nuclear production in Ukraine, and in 1991 when Ukraine became independent it still had a sizable nuclear arsenal. But starting in 1994 Ukraine began disarming that arsenal, and now it is gone. Now that Russia has invaded them, the government of Ukraine has begun publicly reconsidering their agreements to disarm their nuclear arsenal.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has just disproved the most optimistic models of international relations, which basically said that major power wars for territory were over at the end of WW2. Some thought it was nuclear weapons, others the United Nations, still others a general improvement in trade integration and living standards around the world. But they’ve all turned out to be wrong; maybe such wars are rarer, but they can clearly still happen, because one just did.

I would say that only two major theories of the Long Peace are still left standing in light of this invasion, and that is nuclear deterrence and the democratic peace. Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal and later got attacked—that’s consistent with nuclear deterrence. Russia under Putin is nearly as authoritarian as the Soviet Union, and Ukraine is a “hybrid regime” (let’s call it a solid D), so there’s no reason the democratic peace would stop this invasion. But any model which posits that trade or the UN prevent war is pretty much off the table now, as Ukraine had very extensive trade with both Russia and the EU and the UN has been utterly toothless so far. (Maybe we could say the UN prevents wars except those led by permanent Security Council members.)

Well, then, what if the nuclear deterrence theory is right? What would have happened if Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons? Would that have made this situation better, or worse? It could have made it better, if it acted as a deterrent against Russian aggression. But it could also have made it much, much worse, if it resulted in a nuclear exchange between Russia and Ukraine.

This is the problem with nukes. They are not a guarantee of safety. They are a guarantee of fat tails. To explain what I mean by that, let’s take a brief detour into statistics.

A fat-tailed distribution is one for which very extreme events have non-negligible probability. For some distributions, like a uniform distribution, events are clearly contained within a certain interval and nothing outside is even possible. For others, like a normal distribution or lognormal distribution, extreme events are theoretically possible, but so vanishingly improbable they aren’t worth worrying about. But for fat-tailed distributions like a Cauchy distribution or a Pareto distribution, extreme events are not so improbable. They may be unlikely, but they are not so unlikely they can simply be ignored. Indeed, they can actually dominate the average—most of what happens, happens in a handful of extreme events.

Deaths in war seem to be fat-tailed, even in conventional warfare. They seem to follow a Pareto distribution. There are lots of tiny skirmishes, relatively frequent regional conflicts, occasional major wars, and a handful of super-deadly global wars. This kind of pattern tends to emerge when a phenomenon is self-reinforcing by positive feedback—hence why we also see it in distributions of income and wildfire intensity.

Fat-tailed distributions typically (though not always—it’s easy to construct counterexamples, like the Cauchy distribution with low values truncated off) have another property as well, which is that minor events are common. More common, in fact, than they would be under a normal distribution. What seems to happen is that the probability mass moves away from the moderate outcomes and shifts to both the extreme outcomes and the minor ones.

Nuclear weapons fit this pattern perfectly. They may in fact reduce the probability of moderate, regional conflicts, in favor of increasing the probability of tiny skirmishes or peaceful negotiations. But they also increase the probability of utterly catastrophic outcomes—a full-scale nuclear war could kill billions of people. It probably wouldn’t wipe out all of humanity, and more recent analyses suggest that a catastrophic “nuclear winter” is unlikely. But even 2 billion people dead would be literally the worst thing that has ever happened, and nukes could make it happen in hours when such a death toll by conventional weapons would take years.

If we could somehow guarantee that such an outcome would never occur, then the lower rate of moderate conflicts nuclear weapons provide would justify their existence. But we can’t. It hasn’t happened yet, but it doesn’t have to happen often to be terrible. Really, just once would be bad enough.

Let us hope, then, that the democratic peace turns out to be the theory that’s right. Because a more democratic world would clearly be better—while a more nuclearized world could be better, but could also be much, much worse.

Where did all that money go?

pnrj ethics, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 26 JDN 2459484

Since 9/11, the US has spent a staggering $14 trillion on the military, averaging $700 billion per year. Some of this was the routine spending necessary to maintain a large standing army (though it is fair to ask whether we really need our standing army to be quite this large).

But a recent study by the Costs of War Project suggests that a disturbing amount of this money has gone to defense contractors: Somewhere between one-third and one-half, or in other words between $5 and $7 trillion.

This is revenue, not profit; presumably these defense contractors also incurred various costs in materials, labor, and logistics. But even as raw revenue that is an enormous amount of money. Apple, one of the largest corporations in the world, takes in on average about $300 billion per year. Over 20 years, that would be $6 trillion—so, our government has basically spent as much on defense contractors as the entire world spent on Apple products.

Of that $5 to $7 trillion, one-fourth to one-third went to just five corporations. That’s over $2 trillion just to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. We pay more each year to Lockheed Martin than we do to the State Department and USAID.

Looking at just profit, each of these corporations appears to make a gross profit margin of about 10%. So we’re looking at something like $200 billion over 20 years—$10 billion per year—just handed over to shareholders.

And what were we buying with this money? Mostly overengineered high-tech military equipment that does little or nothing to actually protect soldiers, win battles, or promote national security. (It certainly didn’t do much to stop the Taliban from retaking control as soon as we left Afghanistan!)

Eisenhower tried to warn us about the military-industrial complex, but we didn’t listen.

Even when the equipment they sell us actually does its job, it still raises some serious questions about whether these are things we ought to be privatizing. As I mentioned in a post on private prisons several years ago, there are really three types of privatization of government functions.

Type 1 is innocuous: There are certain products and services that privatized businesses already provide in the open market and the government also has use for. There’s no reason the government should hesitate to buy wrenches or toothbrushes or hire cleaners or roofers.

Type 3 is the worst: There have been attempts to privatize fundamental government services, such as prisons, police, and the military. This is inherently unjust and undemocratic and must never be allowed. The use of force must never be for profit.

But defense contractors lie in the middle area, type 2: contracting services to specific companies that involve government-specific features such as military weapons. It’s true, there’s not that much difference functionally between a civilian airliner and a bomber plane, so it makes at least some sense that Boeing would be best qualified to produce both. This is not an obviously nonsensical idea. But there are still some very important differences, and I am deeply uneasy with the very concept of private corporations manufacturing weapons.


It’s true, there are some weapons that private companies make for civilians, such as knives and handguns. I think it would be difficult to maintain a free society while banning all such production, and it is literally impossible to ban anything that could potentially be used as a weapon (Wrenches? Kitchen knives? Tree branches!?). But we strictly regulate such production for very good reasons—and we probably don’t go far enough, really.

Moreover, there’s a pretty clear difference in magnitude if not in kind between a corporation making knives or even handguns and a corporation making cruise missiles—let alone nuclear missiles. Even if there is a legitimate overlap in skills and technology between making military weapons and whatever other products a corporation might make for the private market, it might still ultimately be better to nationalize the production of military weapons.

And then there are corporations that essentially do nothing but make military weapons—and we’re back to Lockheed-Martin again. Boeing does in fact make most of the world’s civilian airliners, in addition to making some military aircraft and missiles. But Lockheed-Martin? They pretty much just make fighters and bombers. This isn’t a company with generalized aerospace manufacturing skills that we are calling upon to make fighters in a time of war. This is an entire private, for-profit corporation that exists for the sole purpose of making fighter planes.

I really can’t see much reason not to simply nationalize Lockheed-Martin. They should be a division of the US Air Force or something.

I guess, in theory, the possibility of competing between different military contractors could potentially keep costs down… but, uh, how’s that working out for you? The acquisition costs of the F-35 are expected to run over $400 billion—the cost of the whole program a whopping $1.5 trillion. That doesn’t exactly sound like we’ve been holding costs down through competition.

And there really is something deeply unseemly about the idea of making profits through war. There’s a reason we have that word “profiteering”. Yes, manufacturing weapons has costs, and you should of course pay your workers and material suppliers at fair rates. But do we really want corporations to be making billions of dollars in profits for making machines of death?

But if nationalizing defense contractors or making them into nonprofit institutions seems too radical, I think there’s one very basic law we ought to make: No corporation with government contracts may engage in any form of lobbying. That’s such an obvious conflict of interest, such a clear opening for regulatory capture, that there’s really no excuse for it. If there must be shareholders profiting from war, at the very least they should have absolutely no say in whether we go to war or not.

And yet, we do allow defense contractors to spend on lobbying—and spend they do, tens of millions of dollars every year. Does all this lobbying affect our military budget or our willingness to go to war?

They must think so.

Unending nightmares

pnrj current events, ethics, market failure, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 19 JDN 2459477

We are living in a time of unending nightmares.

As I write this, we have just passed the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Yet only in the past month were US troops finally withdrawn from Afghanistan—and that withdrawal was immediately followed by a total collapse of the Afghan government and a reinstatement of the Taliban. The United States had been at war for nearly 20 years, spending trillions of dollars and causing thousands of deaths—and seems to have accomplished precisely nothing.

Some left-wing circles have been saying that the Taliban offered surrender all the way back in 2001; this is not accurate. Alternet even refers to it as an “unconditional surrender” which is utter nonsense. No one in their right mind—not even the most die-hard imperialist—would ever refuse an unconditional surrender, and the US most certainly did nothing of the sort.)

The Taliban did offer a peace deal in 2001, which would have involved giving the US control of Kandahar and turning Osama bin Laden over to a neutral country (not to the US or any US ally). It would also have granted amnesty to a number of high-level Taliban leaders, which was a major sticking point for the US. In hindsight, should they have taken the deal? Obviously. But I don’t think that was nearly so clear at the time—nor would it have been particularly palatable to most of the American public to leave Osama bin Laden under house arrest in some neutral country (which they never specified by the way; somewhere without US extradition, presumably?) and grant amnesty to the top leaders of the Taliban.

Thus, even after the 20-year nightmare of the war that refused to end, we are still back to the nightmare we were in before—Afghanistan ruled by fanatics who will oppress millions.

Yet somehow this isn’t even the worst unending nightmare, for after a year and a half we are still in the throes of a global pandemic which has now caused over 4.6 million deaths. We are still wearing masks wherever we go—at least, those of us who are complying with the rules. We have gotten vaccinated already, but likely will need booster shots—at least, those of us who believe in vaccines.

The most disturbing part of it all is how many people still aren’t willing to follow the most basic demands of public health agencies.

In case you thought this was just an American phenomenon: Just a few days ago I looked out the window of my apartment to see a protest in front of the Scottish Parliament complaining about vaccine and mask mandates, with signs declaring it all a hoax. (Yes, my current temporary apartment overlooks the Scottish Parliament.)

Some of those signs displayed a perplexing innumeracy. One sign claimed that the vaccines must be stopped because they had killed 1,400 people in the UK. This is not actually true; while there have been 1,400 people in the UK who died after receiving a vaccine, 48 million people in the UK have gotten the vaccine, and many of them were old and/or sick, so, purely by statistics, we’d expect some of them to die shortly afterward. Less than 100 of these deaths are in any way attributable to the vaccine. But suppose for a moment that we took the figure at face value, and assumed, quite implausibly, that everyone who died shortly after getting the vaccine was in fact killed by the vaccine. This 1,400 figure needs to be compared against the 156,000 UK deaths attributable to COVID itself. Since 7 million people in the UK have tested positive for the virus, this is a fatality rate of over 2%. Even if we suppose that literally everyone in the UK who hasn’t been vaccinated in fact had the virus, that would still only be 20 million (the UK population of 68 million – the 48 million vaccinated) people, so the death rate for COVID itself would still be at least 0.8%—a staggeringly high fatality rate for a pandemic airborne virus. Meanwhile, even on this ridiculous overestimate of the deaths caused by the vaccine, the fatality rate for vaccination would be at most 0.003%. Thus, even by the anti-vaxers’ own claims, the vaccine is nearly 300 times safer than catching the virus. If we use the official estimates of a 1.9% COVID fatality rate and 100 deaths caused by the vaccines, the vaccines are in fact over 9000 times safer.

Yet it does seem to be worse in the United States, as while 22% of Americans described themselves as opposed to vaccination in general, only about 2% of Britons said the same.

But this did not translate to such a large difference in actual vaccination: While 70% of people in the UK have received the vaccine, 64% of people in the US have. Both of these figures are tantalizingly close to, yet clearly below, the at least 84% necessary to achieve herd immunity. (Actually some early estimates thought 60-70% might be enough—but epidemiologists no longer believe this, and some think that even 90% wouldn’t be enough.)

Indeed, the predominant tone I get from trying to keep up on the current news in epidemiology is fatalism: It’s too late, we’ve already failed to contain the virus, we won’t reach herd immunity, we won’t ever eradicate it. At this point they now all seem to think that COVID is going to become the new influenza, always with us, a major cause of death that somehow recedes into the background and seems normal to us—but COVID, unlike influenza, may stick around all year long. The one glimmer of hope is that influenza itself was severely hampered by the anti-pandemic procedures, and influenza cases and deaths are indeed down in both the US and UK (though not zero, nor as drastically reduced as many have reported).

The contrast between terrorism and pandemics is a sobering one, as pandemics kill far more people, yet somehow don’t provoke anywhere near as committed a response.

9/11 was a massive outlier in terrorism, at 3,000 deaths on a single day; otherwise the average annual death rate by terrorism is about 20,000 worldwide, mostly committed by Islamist groups. Yet the threat is not actually to Americans in particular; annual deaths due to terrorism in the US are less than 100—and most of these by right-wing domestic terrorists, not international Islamists.

Meanwhile, in an ordinary year, influenza would kill 50,000 Americans and somewhere between 300,000 and 700,000 people worldwide. COVID in the past year and a half has killed over 650,000 Americans and 4.6 million people worldwide—annualize that and it would be 400,000 per year in the US and 3 million per year worldwide.

Yet in response to terrorism we as a country were prepared to spend $2.3 trillion dollars, lose nearly 4,000 US and allied troops, and kill nearly 50,000 civilians—not even counting the over 60,000 enemy soldiers killed. It’s not even clear that this accomplished anything as far as reducing terrorism—by some estimates it actually made it worse.

Were we prepared to respond so aggressively to pandemics? Certainly not to influenza; we somehow treat all those deaths are normal or inevitable. In response to COVID we did spend a great deal of money, even more than the wars in fact—a total of nearly $6 trillion. This was a very pleasant surprise to me (it’s the first time in my lifetime I’ve witnessed a serious, not watered-down Keynesian fiscal stimulus in the United States). And we imposed lockdowns—but these were all-too quickly removed, despite the pleading of public health officials. It seems to be that our governments tried to impose an aggressive response, but then too many of the citizens pushed back against it, unwilling to give up their “freedom” (read: convenience) in the name of public safety.

For the wars, all most of us had to do was pay some taxes and sit back and watch; but for the pandemic we were actually expected to stay home, wear masks, and get shots? Forget it.

Politics was clearly a very big factor here: In the US, the COVID death rate map and the 2020 election map look almost equivalent: By and large, people who voted for Biden have been wearing masks and getting vaccinated, while people who voted for Trump have not.

But pandemic response is precisely the sort of thing you can’t do halfway. If one area is containing a virus and another isn’t, the virus will still remain uncontained. (As some have remarked, it’s rather like having a “peeing section” of a swimming pool. Much worse, actually, as urine contains relatively few bacteria—but not zero—and is quickly diluted by the huge quantities of water in a swimming pool.)

Indeed, that seems to be what has happened, and why we can’t seem to return to normal life despite months of isolation. Since enough people are refusing to make any effort to contain the virus, the virus remains uncontained, and the only way to protect ourselves from it is to continue keeping restrictions in place indefinitely.

Had we simply kept the original lockdowns in place awhile longer and then made sure everyone got the vaccine—preferably by paying them for doing it, rather than punishing them for not—we might have been able to actually contain the virus and then bring things back to normal.

But as it is, this is what I think is going to happen: At some point, we’re just going to give up. We’ll see that the virus isn’t getting any more contained than it ever was, and we’ll be so tired of living in isolation that we’ll finally just give up on doing it anymore and take our chances. Some of us will continue to get our annual vaccines, but some won’t. Some of us will continue to wear masks, but most won’t. The virus will become a part of our lives, just as influenza did, and we’ll convince ourselves that millions of deaths is no big deal.

And then the nightmare will truly never end.

Reasons to like Joe Biden

pnrj current events, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 6 JDN 2459099

Maybe it’s because I follow too many radical leftists on social media (this is at least a biased sample, no doubt), but I’ve seen an awful lot of posts basically making this argument: “Joe Biden is terrible, but we have to elect him, because Donald Trump is worse.”

And make no mistake: Whatever else you think about this election, the fact that Donald Trump is a fascist and Joe Biden is not is indeed a fully sufficient reason to vote for Biden. You shouldn’t need any more than that.

But in fact Joe Biden is not terrible. Yes, there are some things worth criticizing about his record and his platform—particularly with regard to civil liberties and war (both of those links are to my own posts making such criticisms of the Obama administration). I don’t want to sweep these significant flaws under the rug.

Yet, there are also a great many things that are good about Biden and his platform, and it’s worthwhile to talk about them. You shouldn’t feel like you are holding your nose and voting for the lesser of two evils; Biden is going to make a very good President.

First and foremost, there is his plan to invest in clean energy and combat climate change. For the first time in decades, we have a Presidential candidate who is explicitly pro-nuclear and has a detailed, realistic plan for achieving net-zero carbon emissions within a generation. We should have done this 30 years ago; but far better to start now than to wait even longer.

Then there is Biden’s plan for affordable housing. He wants to copy California’s Homeowner Bill of Rights at the federal level, fight redlining, expand Section 8, and nationalize the credit rating system. Above all, he wants to create a new First Down Payment Tax Credit that will provide first-time home buyers with $15,000 toward a down payment on a home. That is how you increase homeownership. The primary reason why people rent instead of owning is that they can’t afford the down payment.

Biden is also serious about LGBT rights, and wants to pass the Equality Act, which would finally make all discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity illegal at the federal level. He has plans to extend and aggressively enforce federal rules protecting people with disabilities. His plans for advancing racial equality seem to be thoroughly baked into all of his proposals, from small business funding to housing reform—likely part of why he’s so popular among Black voters.

His plan for education reform includes measures to equalize funding between rich and poor districts and between White and non-White districts.

Biden’s healthcare plan isn’t quite Medicare For All, but it’s actually remarkably close to that. He wants to provide a public healthcare option available to everyone, and also lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 instead of 65. This means that anyone who wants Medicare will be able to buy into it, and also sets a precedent of lowering the eligibility age—remember, all we really need to do to get Medicare For All is lower that age to 18. Moreover, it avoids forcing people off private insurance that they like, which is the main reason why Medicare For All still does not have majority support.

While many on the left have complained that Biden believes in “tough on crime”, his plan for criminal justice reform actually strikes a very good balance between maintaining low crime rates and reducing incarceration and police brutality. The focus is on crime prevention instead of punishment, and it includes the elimination of all federal use of privatized prisons.

Most people would give lip service to being against domestic violence, but Biden has a detailed plan for actually protecting survivors and punishing abusers—including ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment and ending the rape kit backlog. The latter is an utter no-brainer. If we need to, we can pull the money from just about any other form of law enforcement (okay, I guess not homicide); those rape kits need to be tested and those rapists need to be charged.

Biden also has a sensible plan for gun control, which is consistent with the Second Amendment and Supreme Court precedent but still could provide substantial protections by reinstating the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring universal background checks, and adding other sensible restrictions on who can be licensed to own firearms. It won’t do much about handguns or crimes of passion, but it should at least reduce mass shootings.

Biden doesn’t want to implement free four-year college—then again, neither do I—but he does have a plan for free community college and vocational schooling.

He also has a very ambitious plan for campaign finance reform, including a Constitutional Amendment that would ban all private campaign donations. Honestly if anything the plan sounds too ambitious; I doubt we can really implement all of these things any time soon. But if even half of them get through, our democracy will be in much better shape.

His immigration policy, while far from truly open borders, would reverse Trump’s appalling child-separation policy, expand access to asylum, eliminate long-term detention in favor of a probation system, and streamline the path to citizenship.

Biden’s platform is the first one I’ve seen that gives detailed plans for foreign aid and international development projects; he is particularly focused on Latin America.

I’ve seen many on the left complain that Biden was partly responsible for the current bankruptcy system that makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loans; well, his current platform includes a series of reforms developed by Elizabeth Warren designed to reverse that.

I do think Biden is too hawkish on war and not serious enough about protecting civil liberties—and I said the same thing about Obama years ago. But Biden isn’t just better than Trump (almost anyone would be better than Trump); he’s actually a genuinely good candidate with a strong, progressive platform.

You should already have been voting for Biden anyway. But hopefully now you can actually do it with some enthusiasm.

Moral disagreement is not bad faith

pnrj cognitive science, core principles, current events, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 7 JDN 2459008

One of the most dangerous moves to make in an argument is to accuse your opponent of bad faith. It’s a powerful, and therefore tempting, maneuver: If they don’t even really believe what they are saying, then you can safely ignore basically whatever comes out of their mouth. And part of why this is so tempting is that it is in fact occasionally true—people do sometimes misrepresent their true beliefs in various ways for various reasons. On the Internet especially, sometimes people are just trolling.

But unless you have really compelling evidence that someone is arguing in bad faith, you should assume good faith. You should assume that whatever they are asserting is what they actually believe. For if you assume bad faith and are wrong, you have just cut off any hope of civil discourse between the two of you. You have made it utterly impossible for either side to learn anything or change their mind in any way. If you assume good faith and are wrong, you may have been overly charitable; but in the end you are the one that is more likely to persuade any bystanders, not the one who was arguing in bad faith.

Furthermore, it is important to really make an effort to understand your opponent’s position as they understand it before attempting to respond to it. Far too many times, I have seen someone accused of bad faith by an opponent who simply did not understand their worldview—and did not even seem willing to try to understand their worldview.

In this post, I’m going to point out some particularly egregious examples of this phenomenon that I’ve found, all statements made by left-wing people in response to right-wing people. Why am I focusing on these? Well, for one thing, it’s as important to challenge bad arguments on your own side as it is to do so on the other side. I also think I’m more likely to be persuasive to a left-wing audience. I could find right-wing examples easily enough, but I think it would be less useful: It would be too tempting to think that this is something only the other side does.

Example 1: “Republicans Have Stopped Pretending to Care About Life”

The phrase “pro-life” means thinking that abortion is wrong. That’s all it means. It’s jargon at this point. The phrase has taken on this meaning independent of its constituent parts, just as a red herring need not be either red or a fish.

Stop accusing people of not being “truly pro-life” because they don’t adopt some other beliefs that are not related to abortion. Even if those would be advancing life in some sense (most people probably think that most things they think are good advance life in some sense!), they aren’t relevant to the concept of being “pro-life”. Moreover, being “pro-life” in the traditional conservative sense isn’t even about minimizing the harm of abortion or the abortion rate. It’s about emphasizing the moral wrongness of abortion itself, and often even criminalizing it.


I don’t think this is really so hard to understand. If someone truly, genuinely believes that abortion is murdering a child, it’s quite clear why they won’t be convinced by attempts at minimizing harm or trying to reduce the abortion rate via contraception or other social policy. Many policies are aimed at “reducing the demand for abortion”; would you want to “reduce the demand for murder”? No, you’d want murderers to be locked up. You wouldn’t care what their reasons were, and you wouldn’t be interested in using social policies to address those reasons. It’s not even hard to understand why this would be such an important issue to them, overriding almost anything else: If you thought that millions of people were murdering children you would consider that an extremely important issue too.

If you want to convince people to support Roe v. Wade, you’re going to have to change their actual belief that abortion is murder. You may even be able to convince them that they don’t really think abortion is murder—many conservatives support the death penalty for murder, but very few do so for abortion. But they clearly do think that abortion is a grave moral wrong, and you can’t simply end-run around that by calling them hypocrites because they don’t care about whatever other issue you think they should care about.

Example 2: “Stop pretending to care about human life if you support wars in the Middle East”

I had some trouble finding the exact wording of the meme I originally saw with this sentiment, but the gist of it was basically that if you support bombing Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and/or Syria, you have lost all legitimacy to claiming that you care about human life.

Say what you will about these wars (though to be honest I think what the US has done in Libya and Syria has done more good than harm), but simply supporting a war does not automatically undermine all your moral legitimacy. The kind of radical pacifism that requires us to never kill anyone ever is utterly unrealistic; the question is and has always been “Which people is it okay to kill, when and how and why?” Some wars are justified; we have to accept that.

It would be different if these were wars of genocidal extermination; I can see a case for saying that anyone who supported the Holocaust or the Rwandan Genocide has lost all moral legitimacy. But even then it isn’t really accurate to say that those people don’t care about human life; it’s much more accurate to say that they have assigned the group of people they want to kill to a subhuman status. Maybe you would actually get more traction by saying “They are human beings too!” rather than by accusing people of not believing in the value of human life.

And clearly these are not wars of extermination—if the US military wanted to exterminate an entire nation of people, they could do so much more efficiently than by using targeted airstrikes and conventional warfare. Remember: They have nuclear weapons. Even if you think that they wouldn’t use nukes because of fear of retaliation (Would Russia or China really retaliate using their own nukes if the US nuked Afghanistan or Iran?), it’s clear that they could have done a lot more to kill a lot more innocent people if that were actually their goal. It’s one thing to say they don’t take enough care not to kill innocent civilians—I agree with that. It’s quite another to say that they actively try to kill innocent civilians—that’s clearly not what is happening.

Example 3: “Stop pretending to be Christian if you won’t help the poor.”

This one I find a good deal more tempting: In the Bible, Jesus does spend an awful lot more words on helping the poor than he does on, well, almost anything else; and he doesn’t even once mention abortion or homosexuality. (The rest of the Bible does at least mention homosexuality, but it really doesn’t have any clear mentions of abortion.) So it really is tempting to say that anyone who doesn’t make helping the poor their number one priority can’t really be a Christian.

But the world is more complicated than that. People can truly and deeply believe some aspects of a religion while utterly rejecting others. They can do this more or less arbitrarily, in a way that may not even be logically coherent. They may even honestly believe that every single word of the Bible to be the absolute perfect truth of an absolute perfect God, and yet there are still passages you could point them to that they would have to admit they don’t believe in. (There are literally hundreds of explicit contradictions in the Bible. Many are minor—though still undermine any claim to absolute perfect truth—but some are really quite substantial. Does God forgive and forget, or does he visit revenge upon generations to come? That’s kind of a big deal! And should we be answering fools or not?) In some sense they don’t really believe that every word is true, then; but they do seem to believe in believing it.

Yes, it’s true; people can worship a penniless son of a carpenter who preached peace and charity and at the same time support cutting social welfare programs and bombing the Middle East. Such a worldview may not be entirely self-consistent; it’s certainly not the worldview that Jesus himself espoused. But it nevertheless is quite sincerely believed by many millions of people.

It may still be useful to understand the Bible in order to persuade Christians to help the poor more. There are certainly plenty of passages you can point them to where Jesus talks about how important it is to help the poor. Likewise, Jesus doesn’t seem to much like the rich, so it is fair to ask: How Christian is it for Republicans to keep cutting taxes on the rich? (I literally laughed out loud when I first saw this meme: “Celebrate Holy Week By Flogging a Banker: It’s What Jesus Would Have Done!“) But you should not accuse people of “pretending to be Christian”. They really do strongly identify themselves as Christian, and would sooner give up almost anything else about their identity. If you accuse them of pretending, all that will do is shut down the conversation.

Now, after all that, let me give one last example that doesn’t fit the trend, one example where I really do think the other side is acting in bad faith.


Example 4: “#AllLivesMatter is a lie. You don’t actually think all lives matter.”

I think this one is actually true. If you truly believed that all lives matter, you wouldn’t post the hashtag #AllLivesMatter in response to #BlackLivesMatter protests against police brutality.

First of all, you’d probably be supporting those protests. But even if you didn’t for some reason, that isn’t how you would use the hashtag. As a genuine expression of caring, the hashtag #AllLivesMatter would only really make sense for something like Oxfam or UNICEF: Here are these human lives that are in danger and we haven’t been paying enough attention to them, and here, you can follow my hashtag and give some money to help them because all lives matter. If it were really about all lives mattering, then you’d see the hashtag pop up after a tsunami in Southeast Asia or a famine in central Africa. (For awhile I tried actually using it that way; I quickly found that it was overwhelmed by the bad faith usage and decided to give up.)

No, this hashtag really seems to be trying to use a genuinely reasonable moral norm—all lives matter—as a weapon against a political movement. We don’t see #AllLivesMatter popping up asking people to help save some lives—it’s always as a way of shouting down other people who want to save some lives. It’s a glib response that lets you turn away and ignore their pleas, without ever actually addressing the substance of what they are saying. If you really believed that all lives matter, you would not be so glib; you would want to understand how so many people are suffering and want to do something to help them. Even if you ultimately disagreed with what they were saying, you would respect them enough to listen.

The counterpart #BlueLivesMatter isn’t in bad faith, but it is disturbing in a different way: What are ‘blue lives’? People aren’t born police officers. They volunteer for that job. They can quit if want. No one can quit being Black. Working as a police officer isn’t even especially dangerous! But it’s not a bad faith argument: These people really do believe that the lives of police officers are worth more—apparently much more—than the lives of Black civilians.

I do admit, the phrasing “#BlackLivesMatter” is a bit awkward, and could be read to suggest that other lives don’t matter, but it takes about 2 minutes of talking to someone (or reading a blog by someone) who supports those protests to gather that this is not their actual view. Perhaps they should have used #BlackLivesMatterToo, but when your misconception is that easily rectified the responsibility to avoid it falls on you. (Then again, some people do seem to stoke this misconception: I was quite annoyed when a question was asked at a Democratic debate: “Do Black Lives Matter, or Do All Lives Matter?” The correct answer of course is “All lives matter, which is why I support the Black Lives Matter movement.”)

So, yes, bad faith arguments do exist, and sometimes we need to point them out. But I implore you, consider that a last resort, a nuclear option you’ll only deploy when all other avenues have been exhausted. Once you accuse someone of bad faith, you have shut down the conversation completely—preventing you, them, and anyone else who was listening from having any chance of learning or changing their mind.

What we can be thankful for

pnrj current events, futurism , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 24 JDN 2458812

Thanksgiving is upon us, yet as more and more evidence is revealed implicating President Trump in grievous crimes, as US carbon emissions that had been declining are now trending upward again, as our air quality deteriorates for the first time in decades, it may be hard to see what we should be thankful for.

But these are exceptions to a broader trend: The world is getting better, in almost every way, remarkably quickly. Homicide rates in the US are lower than they’ve been since the 1960s. Worldwide, the homicide rate has fallen 20% since 1990.

While world carbon emissions are still increasing, on a per capita basis they are actually starting to decline, and on an efficiency basis (kilograms of carbon-equivalent per dollar of GDP) they are at their lowest ever. This trend is likely to continue: The price of solar power has rapidly declined to the point where it is now the cheapest form of electric power.
The number—not just proportion, absolute number—of people in extreme poverty has declined by almost two-thirds within my own lifetime. The proportion is the lowest it has ever been in human history. World life expectancy is at its highest ever. Death rates from infectious disease fell by over 85% over the 20th century, and are now at their lowest ever.

I wouldn’t usually cite Reason as a source, but they’re right on this one: Defeat appears imminent for all four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Pestilence, Famine, War, and even Death are all on the decline. We have a great deal to be grateful for: We are living in a golden age.

This is not to say that we should let ourselves become complacent and stop trying to make the world better: On the contrary, it proves that the world can be made better, which gives us every reason to redouble our efforts to do so.

How much should we value statistical lives?

pnrj core principles, current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , , , ,

June 9 JDN 2458644

The very concept of putting a dollar value on a human life offends most people. I understand why: It suggests that human lives are fungible, and also seems to imply that killing people is just fine as long as it produces sufficient profit.

In next week’s post I’ll try to assuage some of those fears: Saying that a life is worth say $5 million doesn’t actually mean that it’s justifiable to kill someone as long as it pays you $5 million.

But for now let me say that we really have no choice but to do this. There are a huge number of interventions we could make in the world that all have the same basic form: They could save lives, but they cost money. We need to be able to say when we are justified in spending more money to save more lives, and when we are not.

No, it simply won’t do to say that “money is no object”. Because money isn’t just money—money is human happiness. A willingness to spend unlimited amounts to save even a single life, if it could be coherently implemented at all, would result in, if not complete chaos or deadlock, a joyless, empty world where we all live to be 100 by being contained in protective foam and fed by machines. It may be uncomfortable to ask a question like “How many people should we be willing to let die to let ourselves have Disneyland?”; but if that answer were zero, we should not have Disneyland. The same is true for almost everything in our lives: From automobiles to chocolate, almost any product you buy, any service you consume, has resulted in some person’s death at some point.

And there is an even more urgent reason, in fact: There are many things we are currently not doing that could save many lives for very little money. Targeted foreign aid or donations to top charities could save lives for as little as $1000 each. Foreign aid is so cost-effective that even if the only thing foreign aid had ever accomplished was curing smallpox, it would be twice as cost-effective as the UK National Health Service (which is one of the best healthcare systems in the world). Tighter environmental regulations save an additional life for about $200,000 in compliance cost, which is less than we would have spent in health care costs; the Clean Air Act added about $12 trillion to the US economy over the last 30 years.

Reduced military spending could literally pay us money to save people’s lives—based on the cost of the Afghanistan War, we are currently paying as much as $1 million per person to kill people that we really have very little reason to kill.

Most of the lives we could save are statistical lives: We can’t point to a particular individual who will or will not die because of the decision, but we can do the math and say approximately how many people will or will not die. We know that approximately 11,000 people will die each year if we loosen regulations on mercury pollution; we can’t say who they are, but they’re out there. Human beings have a lot of trouble thinking this way; it’s just not how our brains evolved to work. But when we’re talking about policy on a national or global scale, it’s quite simply the only way to do things. Anything else is talking nonsense.

Standard estimates of the value of a statistical life range from about $4 million to $9 million. These estimates are based on how much people are willing to pay for reductions in risk. So for instance if people would pay $100 to reduce their chances of dying by 0.01%, we divide the former by the latter to say that a life is worth about $1 million.

It’s a weird question: You clearly can’t just multiply like that. How much would you be willing to accept for a 100% chance of death? Presumably there isn’t really such an amount, because you would be dead. So your willingness-to-accept is undefined. And there’s no particular reason for it to be linear below that: Since marginal utility of wealth is decreasing, the amount you would demand for a 50% chance of death is a lot more than 50 times as much as what you would demand for a 1% chance of death.
Say for instance that utility of wealth is logarithmic. Say your currently lifetime wealth is $1 million, and your current utility is about 70 QALY. Then if we measure wealth in thousands of dollars, we have W = 1000 and U = 10 ln W.

How much would you be willing to accept for a 1% chance of death? Your utility when dead is presumably zero, so we are asking for an amount m such that 0.99 U(W+m) = U(W). 0.99 (10 ln (W+m)) = 10 ln (W) means (W+m)^0.99 = W, so m = W^(1/0.99) – W. We started with W = 1000, so m = 72. You would be willing to accept $72,000 for a 1% chance of death. So we would estimate the value of a statistical life at $7.2 million.

How much for a 0.0001% chance of death? W^(1/0.999999)-W = 0.0069. So you would demand $6.90 for such a risk, and we’d estimate your value of a statistical life at $6.9 million. Pretty close, though not the same.

But how much would you be willing to accept for a 50% chance of death? W^(1/0.5) – W = 999,000. That is, $999 million. So if we multiplied that out, we’d say that your value of a statistical life has now risen to a staggering (and ridiculous) $2 billion.

Mathematically, the estimates are more consistent if we use small probabilities—but all this assumes that people actually know their own utility of wealth and calculate it correctly, which is a very unreasonable assumption.

The much bigger problem with this method is that human beings are terrible at dealing with small probabilities. When asked how much they’d be willing to pay to reduce their chances of dying by 0.01%, most people probably have absolutely no idea and may literally just say a random number.

We need to rethink our entire approach for judging such numbers. Honestly we shouldn’t be trying to put a dollar value on a human life; we should be asking about the dollar cost of saving a human life. We should be asking what else we could do with that money. Indeed, for the time being, I think the best thing to do is actually to compare lives to lives: How many lives could we save for this amount of money?

Thus, if we’re considering starting a war that will cost $1 trillion, we need to ask ourselves: How many innocent people would die if we don’t do that? How many will die if we do? And what else could we do with a trillion dollars? If the war is against Nazi Germany, okay, sure; we’re talking about killing millions to save tens of millions. But if it’s against ISIS, or Iran, those numbers don’t come out so great.

If we have a choice between two policies, each of which will cost $10 billion, and one of them will save 1,000 lives while the other will save 100,000, the obvious answer is to pick the second one. Yet this is exactly the world we live in, and we’re not doing that. We are throwing money at military spending and tax cuts (things that many not save any lives at all) and denying it from climate change adaptation, foreign aid, and poverty relief.

Instead of asking whether a given intervention is cost-effective based upon some notion of a dollar value of a human life, we should be asking what the current cost of saving a human life is, and we should devote all available resources into whatever means saves the most lives for the least money. Most likely that means some sort of foreign aid, public health intervention, or poverty relief in Third World countries. It clearly does not mean cutting taxes on billionaires or starting another war in the Middle East.

Pinker Propositions

pnrj cognitive science, core principles, current events, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 19 2458623

What do the following statements have in common?

1. “Capitalist countries have less poverty than Communist countries.”

2. “Black men in the US commit homicide at a higher rate than White men.”

3. “On average, in the US, Asian people score highest on IQ tests, White and Hispanic people score near the middle, and Black people score the lowest.”

4. “Men on average perform better at visual tasks, and women on average perform better on verbal tasks.”

5. “In the United States, White men are no more likely to be mass shooters than other men.”

6. “The genetic heritability of intelligence is about 60%.”

7. “The plurality of recent terrorist attacks in the US have been committed by Muslims.”

8. “The period of US military hegemony since 1945 has been the most peaceful period in human history.”

These statements have two things in common:

1. All of these statements are objectively true facts that can be verified by rich and reliable empirical data which is publicly available and uncontroversially accepted by social scientists.

2. If spoken publicly among left-wing social justice activists, all of these statements will draw resistance, defensiveness, and often outright hostility. Anyone making these statements is likely to be accused of racism, sexism, imperialism, and so on.

I call such propositions Pinker Propositions, after an excellent talk by Steven Pinker illustrating several of the above statements (which was then taken wildly out of context by social justice activists on social media).

The usual reaction to these statements suggests that people think they imply harmful far-right policy conclusions. This inference is utterly wrong: A nuanced understanding of each of these propositions does not in any way lead to far-right policy conclusions—in fact, some rather strongly support left-wing policy conclusions.

1. Capitalist countries have less poverty than Communist countries, because Communist countries are nearly always corrupt and authoritarian. Social democratic countries have the lowest poverty and the highest overall happiness (#ScandinaviaIsBetter).

2. Black men commit more homicide than White men because of poverty, discrimination, mass incarceration, and gang violence. Black men are also greatly overrepresented among victims of homicide, as most homicide is intra-racial. Homicide rates often vary across ethnic and socioeconomic groups, and these rates vary over time as a result of cultural and political changes.

3. IQ tests are a highly imperfect measure of intelligence, and the genetics of intelligence cut across our socially-constructed concept of race. There is far more within-group variation in IQ than between-group variation. Intelligence is not fixed at birth but is affected by nutrition, upbringing, exposure to toxins, and education—all of which statistically put Black people at a disadvantage. Nor does intelligence remain constant within populations: The Flynn Effect is the well-documented increase in intelligence which has occurred in almost every country over the past century. Far from justifying discrimination, these provide very strong reasons to improve opportunities for Black children. The lead and mercury in Flint’s water suppressed the brain development of thousands of Black children—that’s going to lower average IQ scores. But that says nothing about supposed “inherent racial differences” and everything about the catastrophic damage of environmental racism.

4. To be quite honest, I never even understood why this one shocks—or even surprises—people. It’s not even saying that men are “smarter” than women—overall IQ is almost identical. It’s just saying that men are more visual and women are more verbal. And this, I think, is actually quite obvious. I think the clearest evidence of this—the “interocular trauma” that will convince you the effect is real and worth talking about—is pornography. Visual porn is overwhelmingly consumed by men, even when it was designed for women (e.g. Playgirl—a majority of its readers are gay men, even though there are ten times as many straight women in the world as there are gay men). Conversely, erotic novels are overwhelmingly consumed by women. I think a lot of anti-porn feminism can actually be explained by this effect: Feminists (who are usually women, for obvious reasons) can say they are against “porn” when what they are really against is visual porn, because visual porn is consumed by men; then the kind of porn that they like (erotic literature) doesn’t count as “real porn”. And honestly they’re mostly against the current structure of the live-action visual porn industry, which is totally reasonable—but it’s a far cry from being against porn in general. I have some serious issues with how our farming system is currently set up, but I’m not against farming.

5. This one is interesting, because it’s a lack of a race difference, which normally is what the left wing always wants to hear. The difference of course is that this alleged difference would make White men look bad, and that’s apparently seen as a desirable goal for social justice. But the data just doesn’t bear it out: While indeed most mass shooters are White men, that’s because most Americans are White, which is a totally uninteresting reason. There’s no clear evidence of any racial disparity in mass shootings—though the gender disparity is absolutely overwhelming: It’s almost always men.

6. Heritability is a subtle concept; it doesn’t mean what most people seem to think it means. It doesn’t mean that 60% of your intelligence is due to your your genes. Indeed, I’m not even sure what that sentence would actually mean; it’s like saying that 60% of the flavor of a cake is due to the eggs. What this heritability figure actually means that when you compare across individuals in a population, and carefully control for environmental influences, you find that about 60% of the variance in IQ scores is explained by genetic factors. But this is within a particular population—here, US adults—and is absolutely dependent on all sorts of other variables. The more flexible one’s environment becomes, the more people self-select into their preferred environment, and the more heritable traits become. As a result, IQ actually becomes more heritable as children become adults, called the Wilson Effect.

7. This one might actually have some contradiction with left-wing policy. The disproportionate participation of Muslims in terrorism—controlling for just about anything you like, income, education, age etc.—really does suggest that, at least at this point in history, there is some real ideological link between Islam and terrorism. But the fact remains that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists and do not support terrorism, and antagonizing all the people of an entire religion is fundamentally unjust as well as likely to backfire in various ways. We should instead be trying to encourage the spread of more tolerant forms of Islam, and maintaining the strict boundaries of secularism to prevent the encroach of any religion on our system of government.

8. The fact that US military hegemony does seem to be a cause of global peace doesn’t imply that every single military intervention by the US is justified. In fact, it doesn’t even necessarily imply that any such interventions are justified—though I think one would be hard-pressed to say that the NATO intervention in the Kosovo War or the defense of Kuwait in the Gulf War was unjustified. It merely points out that having a hegemon is clearly preferable to having a multipolar world where many countries jockey for military supremacy. The Pax Romana was a time of peace but also authoritarianism; the Pax Americana is better, but that doesn’t prevent us from criticizing the real harms—including major war crimes—committed by the United States.

So it is entirely possible to know and understand these facts without adopting far-right political views.

Yet Pinker’s point—and mine—is that by suppressing these true facts, by responding with hostility or even ostracism to anyone who states them, we are actually adding fuel to the far-right fire. Instead of presenting the nuanced truth and explaining why it doesn’t imply such radical policies, we attack the messenger; and this leads people to conclude three things:

1. The left wing is willing to lie and suppress the truth in order to achieve political goals (they’re doing it right now).

2. These statements actually do imply right-wing conclusions (else why suppress them?).

3. Since these statements are true, that must mean the right-wing conclusions are actually correct.

Now (especially if you are someone who identifies unironically as “woke”), you might be thinking something like this: “Anyone who can be turned away from social justice so easily was never a real ally in the first place!”

This is a fundamentally and dangerously wrongheaded view. No one—not me, not you, not anyone—was born believing in social justice. You did not emerge from your mother’s womb ranting against colonalist imperialism. You had to learn what you now know. You came to believe what you now believe, after once believing something else that you now think is wrong. This is true of absolutely everyone everywhere. Indeed, the better you are, the more true it is; good people learn from their mistakes and grow in their knowledge.

This means that anyone who is now an ally of social justice once was not. And that, in turn, suggests that many people who are currently not allies could become so, under the right circumstances. They would probably not shift all at once—as I didn’t, and I doubt you did either—but if we are welcoming and open and honest with them, we can gradually tilt them toward greater and greater levels of support.

But if we reject them immediately for being impure, they never get the chance to learn, and we never get the chance to sway them. People who are currently uncertain of their political beliefs will become our enemies because we made them our enemies. We declared that if they would not immediately commit to everything we believe, then they may as well oppose us. They, quite reasonably unwilling to commit to a detailed political agenda they didn’t understand, decided that it would be easiest to simply oppose us.

And we don’t have to win over every person on every single issue. We merely need to win over a large enough critical mass on each issue to shift policies and cultural norms. Building a wider tent is not compromising on your principles; on the contrary, it’s how you actually win and make those principles a reality.

There will always be those we cannot convince, of course. And I admit, there is something deeply irrational about going from “those leftists attacked Charles Murray” to “I think I’ll start waving a swastika”. But humans aren’t always rational; we know this. You can lament this, complain about it, yell at people for being so irrational all you like—it won’t actually make people any more rational. Humans are tribal; we think in terms of teams. We need to make our team as large and welcoming as possible, and suppressing Pinker Propositions is not the way to do that.