The Ethics Lesson

Sometimes my professionalism slips for a week or so, and instead of discussing the usual run-of-the-mill conversational bullshit, I throw my students a bone of contention to gnaw on. A couple of weeks ago it was some of Kholberg's classic moral dilemmas. I'd better quickly mention I teach young adults at university level. The first dilemma to go under the microscope of the young and hormonally disturbed mind was this one - concerning money and family indebtedness:

Ali is a fourteen-year-old boy who wants to go to a summer camp. His father promises he can go if he earns the money himself. So Ali works hard and saves 400 TL, enough for the camp. But just before camp starts, his father changes his mind. Some of Ali’s father’s friends have decided to go on a fishing trip, and Ali’s father doesn’t have enough money to go. So he tells Ali to give him the money he saved for camp. Ali still wants to go to camp, so he thinks of refusing to give his father the money.

      What should Ali do..? And why..?

Anyway, after giving the little darlings a couple of minutes to think it through, I asked them what they thought Ali should do. The answers were pretty much universal - a big fat "No teacher, Ali shouldn't give his money to his father." A few said they'd fork it over, but they didn't feel too happy about it. 'Grudgingly' was the adverb they were looking for I think.

Part of what I do is to keep conversations going, and just about the best way to do this is to piss people off. Well, erm okay, not piss them off so much as to try and get them to re-think what they've said. Luckily, this almost always boils down to the same thing. Gotta love my job in this respect, it's not often middle-aged leather-elbow-patchers like me get paid to mess with teenage heads.

I play the emotional blackmail card: "Oh c'mon... Think of all the stuff your fathers have done for you throughtout your childhoods - remember that time you were ill..? Who took you to the doc's..? Who paid for your medicine..? What about the clothes on your back, the food in your mouths, the birthday presents, the bicycles, the cars, the braces on your teeth..? Have you any idea how much your parents have spent, and sacrificed for you over the years..? Imagine your father's face, right now. Got it..? You can see it..? Okay, imagine his face looking sad.

Now, imagine his face looking happy - what's that worth..? Isn't it worth 400Tl..?"

You get the picture. They cave. They all mutter-mutter "You are right, we should give the money. Our parents' happiness is more important than a silly summer camp." I smile, and tell them they are good sons and daughters and that their parents would be proud of such good, self-sacrificing children. They smile back. Sighs of relief are sighed.

They think it's all over.

Then I ask in passing, "University yeah - quite expensive, isn't it..?" They all agree - sucking their teeth like car mechanics. "wooo - expensive teacher." "So," I ask, "How are you paying..? Books - Dormitory fees - everyday things..?" [They smell a rat at some point around here]. "Our parents pay for it teacher." "Ah," I say, "So, if they'd turned round about a year ago and sat you down and said, 'Hey kiddo, you know how you were wanting to go to university yeah..? Well, me and your mother got to talking the other day, and we've decided to spend the money we were going to send you to university with on a world cruise. Seeya.' - what would you have done..?" Type three conditionals - the bane of all English students.

"What..? Logical consequences..?"

So - Now that it's not just some random 'Ali goes to summer camp' situation, with no personal impact - everyone's suddenly falling over themselves with indignation. Of course they have a right to that money etc... Of course Mummies and Daddies are socially bound to spend every last penny on their education etc... They have no right to take away our futures... At this point, after letting them splutter themselves into heavy-breathing red-faced messes, I politely withdraw. It's interesting though that grattitude hardly ever enters the discussion. Only one in a hundred ever says anything like "I realise that my parents have a right to do whatever they want with their money, and I'm grateful they choose to spend it on me."The idea that they are indebted not entitled, is hard to face, at least in the culture here.

For my own opinion, I'm undecided. Bit of a cop-out I know. Ethics has always struck me as a very contingent thing. Dependent on the details of the system.

"Damn, my foot's getting cold."

The next situation illustrates this contingency very well. It's probably the most well-known of all of these types of things: the runaway trolley:

 [a] A trolley is moving, out of control down a track towards five people. You are standing beside the track, near a switch. If you push the switch, the trolley will change tracks toward only one person, who will be killed.

      What should you do..? Why..?

There's the fat guy on the bridge version too I know, but the above's enough for our purposes at the moment. I had one girl who came out with "I would do nothing - that way I haven't killed anyone. Whoever was the guy who let the trolley get out of control is responsible for the deaths of the five, but if I pull the lever and save them, I'm responsible for one death. I'm a murderer. Therefore, morally, I don't pull it. Okay, she gets points for thinking deeper than the average bear, and she's right to some some extent - but also wrong. Inaction is an action. She's still responsible. She killed five people.

Yes. Inaction is an action. So there. Say there's a button, and a bomb. [The button is one of those that springs back up after being pressed btw. It doesn't lock into an obvious down 'Hey I've been pressed dumbass' position] If you don't press the button, the bomb explodes in five minutes. If you press the button, no boom, and the door opens in five minutes instead. Press the button again, the countdown to boom resumes. Of course you press it. Easy - walk off whistling.

Now, how about before you come into the room, someone presses the button for you, and doesn't tell you..? Or perhaps just leaves a sign propped-up nearby saying "Y'know..? That button might have been pressed already..."

Told ya.

Sorry - tangent. Most of my students do a little counting on their fingers and pull the lever, sacrificing one, to save five. More life being better than less life overall in their book.

This whole "more life is better than less life" bit, to me, is important, not because I think it's right so much as recognise it as everyone's default position.

I'm not going to look at this very deeply - as you've probably done that already - only to note how easy it is to change peoples' answers. I say "Okay - that one guy is not just some random person - it's your friend, do you still pull the lever. No..? Hmm - but you said one life is better than five, didn't you..? Still no..? Okay - there aren't five guys on the other track - there's six, seven, eight, ten, twenty, a whole bunch of Nuns, a maternity hospital... How many lives is your friend's life worth..? Now it's not your friend, it's your brother, sister, mother, girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, child..."

Lots of fun. Now try pregnant wife and  vs. two brothers, one ex-girlfriend and two drinking buddies... Rinse and repeat. Turns out we don't value life so much as value relationships with the life in question.

Now for the last: One that got made into a film with Nick Fury. Unthinkable. You know the drill. (Only difference is that film had nukes, Kholberg's just has bog-standard bombs).

"This is gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me motherf**ker."

A terrorist has been caught. He has already placed some bombs and they will explode soon. Maybe hundreds of people will die. The terrorist won’t talk, and wants a lawyer – which will take too long. You are the chief of police - one of your colleagues wants to torture the terrorist to make him talk. Do you agree?

If you do, and the man still does not talk, would you torture the terrorist’s innocent wife - you arrested her too - if that is the only way to make the terrorist talk?

                  Why / Why not…

Pretty much everyone tortures the terrorist for real, then tries initially to con the terrorist into at least thinking his wife's being tortured. I say "he doesn't believe you" and "think of all those innocent lives - one of those bombs could be planted next to your little brother's school you know..." and sooner or later, the wife gets the chop.

Are they right..? What would you choose to do..? Remember - you're chief of police, you're setting a precedent. Don't discount the future.

Anyway, after all the torturing is over, the terrorist coughs and tells the students where the bombs are, they diffuse them and save the day. Pats on backs, and smiles all round. Then I ask them if it had been a football match - society-city vs. terror-united - what would they say the score was..? "Well," they say, "us 1, terrorists 0 of course, duh."

I hmm and hah a bit and say, "I think it's more like you guys 2, terrorists 1 - what do you think..?" Blank stares. "Okay - look at it this way - are you the same person you were this morning..? - I mean, before you became a great scary innocent-woman-torturing monster..?"

 Gets worse though, if you think about the precedent set. After this event, and its successful conclusion - saving the most amount of people-wise anyway - the police internalize the new rule "it's okay to torture people in extremis." Which is a slope so slippery you could ride a sled made of sandpaper down it. And then, when it gets out, how about  society's reaction to this new state of "having a police force which is known to torture people."

Afraid much..? The next door they knock on could be yours.

A hundred lives. Sounds like a lot. Is it worth society's peace of mind as a whole though..? Nebulous I know. A bit like the trolley scenario - juggling pregnant wives against brothers and drunken mates. But remember the conclusions of the trolley - it is not the number of people, but our relationship with those people that seems to matter.

Not "Raggedy Ann goes Waterboarding"

In a perfect society, the governed and those they govern, would be friends. Afterall, what basis would they have to not be..? People would do what was expected of them, when it was expected, and those expected duties and contributions would be created for the equal good of all.

The people would not fear the state, nor the state fear the people.

Unlikely, I agree. But it is this idea of a people's 'friendship' with the state is worth exploring. And it's decline after the rise of the Western 'war on terror'.

In the trolley scenario my students were willing to sacrifice X amount of random people to save the life of someone they had a relationship with. We could write some asshole formula if you like: maybe -

Saved Person(s)(SvP)+Value of relationship(s)(VR)=Sacrificed Person(s)(SaP)

SvP+VR=SaP

Now - since both SvP and SaP are measured in people, we can kinda cancel them out. Let's say you save one friend at the expense of five strangers in the classic scenario.

1SvP+VR=5SaP => 1+VR=5 => VR=5-1 => VR=4

As I said - asshole formula, but still - the point is it seems, at least in the abstract, you can measure the value of a relationship in human lives.

Statistic time. Deaths due to terrorism. Probably to be taken with a pinch of salt, but who knows.

 To put this - '07 for example 13,000 - in perspective - let's compare other causes of death. (With equal amounts of salt too).

The point of this is not to emphasize the seemingly crazy high-level response of governments to the threat of terrorism in comparison to say, the level of response they display towards eh, alcohol or something - that's been done already (and incidently done wrongly because of catagory errors - deathrates due to the above are fairly steady-state, eg. it's vanishingly unlikely that one year everyone becomes outright alcoholics across the board causing deaths due to alcohol to rocket up, or everyone gets sad and commits suicide. However, with terrorism - just add nukes, or weaponized bird-fu or something and bingo megadeathkill deathrate fluctuation). Anyway. What I do want to draw your attention to is this.

Let's say that some perfect government, by implementing a series of controls upon the society it governs, totally abolishes deaths from terrorism (Let's ballpark this at 10,000 lives). Unfortunately it is in the nature of controls to be invasive, intrusive and lots of other in-somethings toward personal freedom and privacy - things detrimental to any relationship. So:

 SvP(10,000)+VR(-10,000)=SaP(0)

 ie. the cost of saving those lives is a loss of  'friendship' between the governed and the state - on a society-wide scale - every one of the governed individuals bears the full cost of negative VR due to the controls used to save those 10,000 random people who would have died had those controls not been implemented.

A cold-calculus I agree, but are those 10,000 worth it..? Or should a populace - both the governed and those who govern - agree that the value of their friendship - call it the social contract, the bill of rights, or simple fucking respect if you like - is worth the sacrifice maintaining it would incur..?

To me at least, the numeric value of the living is of lesser importance than the manner of their living.

Stuff That Makes Me Happy

A little bit of a materialist post. I know, I know, stuff doesn't make you happy etc. and money is the root of all evil blah-blah (spoilers - it's not actually, don't be so narrow) but sometimes stuff just gets under your skin and you find yourself staring at some inanimate object in either your hand or leaning against the wall or whatever and saying - "I love you, don't ever leave me, I couldn't live without you..."

Anyway - Beyond the usual human sources of happiness - the wife and kids - and the mundanities of housing and food on the table, I have three possessions that really just improve the fuck out of my life. To whit:

Number 1: The Kindle.

I've had my Kindle for just over a year now, being pleased to see that it's not exploded, cracked it's screen or otherwise renedered itself unoperational. Living in a non-English-speaking country as I do, one of my biggest niggles with my otherwise happy life here was either a lack of books, and/or the huge postage fees involved in getting them over the net. 

No more.

Now it's a just couple of presses on the keyboard, a small blow felt directly in the credit-card and *poof* I can has book.

I love you my Kindle, don't ever leave me. 

Number 2: The Bicycle.

Okay - that's not actually my bicycle - mine's got disc brakes and a bigger front cogset - cos my thighs are made of steel, and the average cogset is for people with legs like noodles, but you get the idea - it's big, sturdy, high-visibility and does just one thing really well - a trait I admire in objects - ie. gets me from A to B really quick in all traffic conditions. Plus, it costs nothing to fill it up, unless you count air and marmite sandwiches, doesn't need a garage, road tax, MOTs, insurance arggh - all those Goddamn things that piss you off about cars. Keeps me fit too, and allows me to wear skin-tight spandex with deniability. "Oh - well, you know, I don't wanna wear all this stupid gear, but erm, ah, it's hmm - aerodynamic..."

I love you my bicycle, don't ever leave.

Number 3: E-Cigarettes.

I'm sorry, despite all the 'wisdom' I've posted out on this blog I smoke. I smoke like an active volcano and have done for far too long. Sometimes, just to make myself crazy I tot up how much money I've spent on the damn things and it's like a new car or something, and not a crappy new car either, but a really jazzy one, one that comes with a turbo and a dishy blonde stuck in the passenger seat as standard. Sometimes I calculate how much space all those cigarette packes would have taken up, had I stored them in the house rather than chucking them in the bin. (I have too much free-time you may note here) anyway, I'd have had to have moved out, the house would have been full to the rafters. Past sins.

Didn't I ever just give up..? I hear you smug non-smokers out there ask. Well duh, yes of course. Multiple times even. Best I ever managed was 5 months. Okay, I felt better, lung capacity shot up etc. But I found the side-effects of not getting my daily influx of nicotine worse - I got stupid. Seriously, my usually turbo-charged brain, able to purr through byzantine curves of logic and inspiration suddenly started to chug. The IQ-blonde stepped out of my head to look for someone else's brain. The horror. So I quickly sparked up a ciggie and waved her back into the neural-car.

Newsflash non-smokers, you are dumber than you could be.

Anyway, long-story short, I gave up giving up, and looked for substitutions. Patches, no, unsocial and a bit, I dunno, foppish I suppose - for want of a better, and more offensive, word. Gum - ditto. I want that behavioural punctuation - the cigarrette-shaped full-stop after a good meal, that break on the balcony away from the kids, that something to do with my hands.

E-cigarettes. Not good for you but better than the tobacco version, by about 1000 times according to the net. It'll do.

I er. well, it's not love exactly, more like need. Don't ever leave, at least not until those clever scientists find something even less harmful.
 

Government for the Many, Anarchy for the Few.

I was talking to some guy in a bar the other day. A self-proclaimed Anarchist. I was drunk, so we had an argument. He told me that no such creature as government actually exists, and what we have in reality are scaled-up versions of the 'friendly' skills and commodity bartering systems of old - hierarchies arising spontaneously and organically within anarchic states, without the need for the artificial contrivances and paraphernalia of elections and politic structure.

In short, he said that governence is an illusion, unattainable in any perfect form, and as such only pursued by fools, and that an acceptance of our true 'anarchic' statehood is a more practical, realistic POV.

There are a few things wrong about assuming a social system can be scaled up without distortion - a system which works well in a community of a few hundred people may not work so well when applied to a society of a few million. There are reasons for this. Reasons perhaps most succinctly outlined by game theory.

You may be familliar with game theory in its most well known form of prisoner's dilemma - two suspects, held incommunicado in separate interrogation rooms, deciding whether or not to implicate the other - mutual co-operation (enabled by a faith in the good faith of the other) leading to freedom for both.

This is however, only the tip of the iceberg.

When applied to larger groupings of people, game theory - an attempt to outline the variables affecting co-operation, betrayal and recidivism; punishment and forgiveness and analysing the stability of different individual social strategies within a non-homogenous behavioural community - shows that unfortunately OG's assertion of a scalable 'gentlemen's agreement' system becoming a 'natural/anarchic' government, to be unrealistic.

There is a numerical limit, beyond which a group begins to factionate and schism. For humans, this number would seem to be around 150-200 people. This is extrapolated from brain capacity - of the neocortex, in comparison with average group/brain-size ratios in our fellow primates (Dunbar).

I do not claim it to be especially accurate purely from scientific grounds - rather I draw more confidence from historical observations of military units - the Roman century for example - why hundreds not thousands..? And more modern army units - the largest grouping being (before the command structure splinters into a complex hierarchy) the 'company' - consisting of a max. 250 men, composed from platoons. Also the observance of primitive communities - for example the Australian Walbiri and the Ammassalik of Greenland - all possessing an average of 148.4 people in their villages. (Maybe the 0.4 had a boating accident or something). Also observe the more modern 'primitives' - such as the Amish and the Hutterites. Their leaders observe that "keeping communities below 150 keeps management efficient - beyond that people become strangers to one another". ("The tipping point" - pg. 178)

ie: An anarchic government of gentlemen/gentlewomen does not scale up.

The basis of any co-operation is trust. And trust is not based on friendship so much as predictability. A predictable enemy - the devil you know - is easier to live with than a complete unknown. Anyone that went around trusting everyone on sight willy-nilly, would soon get burned.

And this is where an archy, with a convoluted judiciary system, wins out in the "large population co-operation between strangers" front. By routinely limiting the extremes of behaviour - rape, theft and murder for example - ritualising interactions between people and most importantly being seen to punish prohibitively those who trespass, they provide a proxy for prediction between erstwhile strangers and hence a basis for trust between those interacting with each other for the first time.

The function of a law, a rule or a moral is not to erradicate totally the behaviour against which it proscribes but rather to reduce the probability that the majority of that society faces of ever becoming a victim of that particular behaviour to such a low degree that it becomes more reasonable, from a cost/benefit basis, on the part of any given individual member of that society to forgo taking prohibitive precautions against such an occurence in their day to day lives.

What I want to express, but perhaps have not done so well enough is to highlight that as a member of a 'lawful', archic society I do not need to become expert in say some defensive/offensive discipline - such as fencing or shooting or a martial art - because the penalties I will incur in terms of the time invested and risk of injury involved in their pursuit are no longer outweighed by a reduction in the risk of injury and death from - I don't know - a duel for example, or a mugging.

In being a member of a society where such an option exists - ie. paying through taxation for a judiciary system and accepting the governmental veto on my expressing dissatisfaction through direct violence against another person or persons - I incur less penalty than would be entailed by having to aquire the skills and equipment necessary to maintain a reasonable degree of protection within an anarchic society without such an externalized system.

In short, Some kind of X+archy fosters co-operation in ways anarchies cannot. It also frees us all from having to become Jean Claude Van Damme in our spare time.

More free time coupled with less violent disruption = more work. Well, more something anyway.

On another tack - that of 'alpha personas' - anarchists are right to emphasize the natural arisal of leaders, but they are forgetting duration. With an anarchy leadership is faddish - a leader lasts only for as long as there is no other serious contender, or he retains the imagination of his group (think literally highschool popularity contests and playground bullies) the anarchist leader may be king for a day or king for a year - he has no way of knowing - producing 'slash and burn' crowd-pleaser strategies which though may ensure the alpha's continued leadership, will not necessarily benefit the group long term.

Even if the anarchic equivalent of a totalitarian despot arises and rules for his or her entire lifespan - that is still a very finite spell - not even the three-score and ten is guarrenteed - which though may be a long time in politics is a short time for anything else. The cathedral in my home town for example, took 400 years to complete back in the day. Anything is possible I suppose but I would bet most of this month's salary that the social attention-span of an anarchic body-politic would veto such an endevor.

However, with an 'archy', a leader - once come to power - usually has a certain period of power guarrenteed by an established social dictate - be it a lifetime or a four to eight year span, perhaps even a multi-generational lineage or at least an itterated political-party presence - which allows him or her to put, realistically, into effect plans which though not paying off in the short term, pay off big in the future.

ie. Anarchic leadership is short-sighted, and any autopoietic hierarchies thrown up, are mayfly in lifespan, subject to whim.

All of which puts me in the position of performing my own version of OG's 180° tyre swing in saying that rather than being 'unrealistic and ivory-towered', the pursuit of government, of archy, however flawed and cruel it may be or become, is the only realistic reaction to a species that cannot keep its collective legs together and the burgeoning populace this inevitably produces.

Let me repeat, a romantic adherence to the vice of anarchy, however soft or hard, applied now, to a population as big as the one present would only condemn humankind to the old cycles of growth and mutual culling at a hugely accelerated rate.

But then, romance has ever been cowled in blood.

See also: http://writeitorbust.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-archy-beats-anarchy.html

Mechanisms of Authority.

I just passed a happy half-hour on the motorway thinking about authority.

As far as I could decide, auothority at base starts with ownership. As defacto owners of our bodies, by means of direct control over it, we could be said to have authority over its behaviour, and the ends to which it is put. The caveat of ownership being a means of adequate defence. You do not truly own what you cannot defend and protect. A kid with a gold brick possesses it only at the retraint of those around them.

Anyway, we cede that authority over ourselves to others in a number of cases - which I've loosely grouped into 3 basic types: Impositonal assumption of authority, intrinsic and situational. The lines between them are a bit fuzzier in real life, but then, they always are.

Impositional: This is the most powerful, and also the most useless way to assume authority over others. Brute force. The classic "I have a gun/sword/kung-fu, do what I say, or I will feed you your own spleen." means of assuming control over others. Effective, because whilst you hold the gun, others have no choice but to obey, useless, because they will not respect your assumed authority, and attempt to wrest it from you.

Why..?

Because as a species we naturally form fixed heirarcies and, unless that heirarchy is based solely on brute force and no other criteria, are quick to notice cheaters. Grabbing an automatic weapon and taking over a post-office is not the same as working there for long enough to go up through the established (merit-based) heirarchy to the level of postmaster general, or whatever. The gun-gambit, to use a very English metaphor, is a form of queue-jumping, and as such... Frowned upon in polite society - perpetrators to be brought low for their temerity.

At a conceptual level however, this kind of authority ammounts to theft, those who impose it effectively 'steal' our bodies from us, stripping us of the defence that supports self-ownership.

A second version of brute force is disguised by monopoly. If I control a vital resource, you are obliged to do what I say in order to achieve it. The brute-force bit here is indirect, because my monopoly depends on my ability to protect it from those who would take it from me, and the ownership of that capacity (for violence) guarrentees my ownership of the resource, which I use to control you.

It doesn't really need to be said that authority at the governmental level is of this sort, the irony being that the thing governments monopolize is the capacity for organized violence itself.

Institutional/Situational: This the most common means of assuming authority over others, one operating within an already established heirarchy/social infrastructure. Example: Me. I'm a teacher. But the question is whether or not my students (or rather those who find themselves occupying the space commonly accepted as that of a student) obey me in the classroom because I am me in particular, or because I simply occupy the space in the classroom where a teacher (to whom students are expected to cede temporary authority over their behaviour) would be.

How much authority is ceded, and how unswervingly that authority is obeyed is governed by socially inculturated archetypes. Imagine a generalized 'teacher', you'll find you have a fairly distinct picture, both in physical appearance and demeanor, already in your head. Statistically, a student judges the 'teacheriness' of a new teacher within the first few initial seconds of meeting them, and sticks to that first impression quite rigidly throughout their time together, acting accordingly.

In my profession, the main requirement is being able to 'fit' myself into that archetype. Actually having a clue about what I'm teaching is a plus, but secondary, at least from an authority-POV.

It is this same authority mechanism that makes us unthinkingly obey Doctors when they say "take off your shirt please madam", priests when they tell us to do penance for our sins, and parking-attendants when they say "move your fucking car please sir."

This kind of authority is largely impersonal, lent almost entirely by the situation involved, and as such transient. The magic rubbing off as soon as that situation is no longer at hand. Put a teacher in an ambulance, and his authority is overruled. Take the priest from the church, and put him in burning building, and some hulking guy with a fire-axe will boss him about. Put a parking-attendant almost anywhere, and they'll be ignored. It is also dependent on accoutrements - the trappings of power - whether it be a cloak and sceptre, or a pipe and a pair of leather patches on the elbows of your tweed jacket. Remove those symbols of position, and authority wears off. Superman without his cape is just some fucking douche journo, ignored, at least until he falls back on impositional authority and punches some guy through a wall.

However, institutionalized authority does rub off on the person occupying that place, if they spend enough time there. Leading us to the last version of authority.

Intrinsic: This, being the opposite of impositional, is the hardest to achieve, but the most useful. This is the authority assumed by natural leaders. It is asserted by physical and vocal presence, and a personality of utmost confidence - one that is so used to being obeyed that it behaves as if that act of submission has already occurred. The person involved, if you like, carries and generates the situation in which it seems natural to those around them to cede authority without question. Appearance-wise they 'fit' enough of the key qualities general to many of the archetypes of institutionalised authority of the time, enough at least to automatically impress.

This form of authority is useful twice, once because it alows the assumption of authority in many/all situations and is thus 'portable', and twice because those ceding authority over themselves to the person in question do so willingly, unresentfully in the main, and for a much longer period.

The Inevitabilist goes to the Theatre

One sunny Tuesday afternoon the Inevitabilist was sitting at home when the telephone rang. It was Goldie. He liked her because she possessed the uncanny ability, when presented with three options, to always choose the one that was just right.

"Hey Mr. I, I'm bored stupid, y'wanna take me out to the theatre..?"
"Sure. One condition though."
"Okaay - what is it..?"
"Whichever one we go to, it's gotta have gravity..."
"You're never gonna let me live that one down are you. I said sorry about a million times already."
"Can't help it - we sat there for 14 billion years and nothing happened. My arse got so numb I forgot I had one."
"Gravitygravity I get it, no more minimalist art. Okay -
"And planets this time, gotta have planets."
- fuck, okay planets too - I'm checking the listings here. That leaves us with three."
"Fine, let's go check them out."
"What..? Now..? It's far too early, none of the plays are even scheduled to start till seven or so."
"Well, you know me, I like to know the initial conditions."
"Oof - can't you just get off the whole inevitabilist schtick for one fucking second..?"
"No."
"Jesus. You're about as spontaneous as a concrete beam you know that..?"
"It's my nature."

The two of them got out of the car and pushed open the gilt-framed doors of the first theatre. The receptionist agreed to let them tour the premises on the proviso they both signed the release forms, and called over the usher. The usher passed them each oxygen tanks and hard radiation suits. After instructing them in the basic safety protocols, he ushered them into the theatre.

Even with the masks on, it was hard to breathe. The air tasted of vinegar and the spotlights threw out such immense heat that the outer layers of their suits began to smolder. Beneath their boots the jagged terrain heaved as the magma underneath convusled to some unknown rhythm. They lasted about three minutes before they fled, noses streaming and sweat sluicing off their skins.

"Too hard" Said Goldie.
"Yeah, I'm guessing lichen at best, and even then only in the deeper crevices."
"Crick neck..?"
"Crick neck."

So they went to the next.

This time the usher passed them both aqualungs and flippers. Sunlight filtered down from the ornate ceiling, turning the water to gold. Green motes of dust-sized life hazed the tide. The water, warm nearer the top, cooled slowly, in steps almost, as they glided down to the sandy bottom of the theatre, weightless, turning fat lazy spirals in the deepening dark.

"So, whaddya think..?" Said the inevitabilist, dragging a towel through his hair.
"Too soft." Said Goldie.
"Dolphins can be fun you know - hoops and stuff."
"Hah, you're just testing me again you bastard. Can't have dolphins without an interim on land, even I know that. No land, easy life, no complex problems to solve - that place'll be just fish, fish and more fucking fish. Bor-ing..."
"You swear too much to ever be a real lady."
"And fuck you too." Goldie smiled, "C'mon - time's a wastin'."

The third theatre was vast, and they were told it had three salons, rather than just the one. The usher looked at them strangely when they asked if they had to wear any special equipment. Inside the theatre the air was cool, the spotlights were again huge, but dimmed - though they looked as if they could make things hot if need be. In the wings however there were titanic air-conditioning units, ready to pump out mini-ice-ages should events call for them. There was water, there were mountains. Trees to climb and grass to wade through. Animals in every shape and form rustled through the underbrush, whales and minnows flopped and tumbled in the waves.

"Just right." Said Goldie.
"Yeah - Diversity." Relipied the Inevitabilist. "Always a good sign. C'mon - Let's go for a drink in the bar and look at the programmes."
"k."

The bar was cool and pleasantly crowded. Goldie and the Inevitabilist took seats in a booth that had a good view of the room.

"Screwdriver please, amaretto if you goddit."
"I'll have a beer. No, just whatever comes without fruit stuck out of the top. Yeah, that'll be fine. Cold glass."


"That sea theatre reminded me of a funny story I heard yesterday. Y'wanna hear it..?" Said Goldie over the top of her cocktail glass.
"All ears."
"Did you know octopuses, -pi whatever, have elbows..?"
"Really..?"
"Yeah. Listen -

"A three-jointed human arm has only seven degrees of freedom, which are defined as the types of movements each joint can perform. Your shoulder and wrist each have three degrees of freedoms—each can tilt up and down, turn left and right, and can roll in a circular motion. Your elbow, however, only has one degree of freedom, which is tilting up and down.

Scientists consider each of an octopus' eight arms to possess a virtually infinite number of degrees of freedom, allowing them to bend and twist freely. But when it's time to eat, octopuses use their flexible muscles to form temporary, quasi-articulated joints that work similar to how human joints function.

Researchers recorded muscle activity in octopus limbs, and found that an arm generates two waves of muscle contractions that propagate toward each other. When the waves collide, they form a part-time joint.

This process occurs three times, forming a shoulder where the arm meets the body, a wrist where the suckers have grasped their food, and an "elbow" somewhere in between. The elbow typically exhibits the most movement during food retrieval.

The researchers say this is a remarkably simple and apparently optimal mechanism for adjusting the length of arm segments according to where the food item is grasped along the arm.

The similarity of structural features and control strategies between jointed vertebrate arms and flexible octopus limbs suggests that these configurations evolved separately in octopuses and vertebrates, a result scientists call an example of convergent evolution."

- so you see, they have elbows. Isn't that just like totally fucking amazing..?" Goldie said, eyes widening into great glittery pools of khôl.
The Inevitabilist waggled his head. "Not really, I keep tellling you there are optimal solutions to problems inherrent in the physical world, and that life will naturally arrive at them, from whatever direction. Eyes have been invented twice, and wings three times - they're inevitable, if there's light, if there's air. Just a matter of time."
"Yeah-yeah, so you've said. I get it I get it. But I still don't think that idea translates to human society." She let out her breath in an orangey-vodka tinted cloud, still thinking about octopi with elbows and wrists, suckered little fingers.

"You read that book I gave you..? Machiavelli..?"
"Sure, not exactly Mills and Boon."
"You remember when he wrote it..?"
"Uh - fifteen hundred and something I think."
"Yeah - 1513AD. What would you say if I said someone else wrote damn near the same book half the world away in India about 1800 years before he did..?"
"I'd say you were fucking shitting me."
"It's called the Arthashastra written by some guy to advise the Maharajas of the Maurya Empire."
"Okay, so I'm suitably amazed at the depth of your useless knowledge, but so what..?"
"What I mean is the Prince is still read and put into practice today, except by business execs rather than kings. And stuff like 'The Art of War' by some Chinese guy back in 6th century BC - still on the syllabus of military service examinations in many East Asian countries."
"And this is relevant because..."
"Because it means that some social situations demand the same answers, whenever these situations arise. These solutions are timeless - doesn't matter if it's cavemen or techno-fetishist geek droid soldiers. The underlying rules of obtaining power, keeping power, protecting power within a group of sentient beings with conflicting interests never changes. A bit like your octopus and its elbows. The same solutions arising time and time again throughout evolution, except this time throughout social history as well. The time, the people, not as important as you'd think, you know..?"
“Yeah, well those are just books, I mean maybe Machiavelli just like got that Indian guy’s book out of the library and totally ripped it off y’know – ever think of that..?”
“Okay. Not utterly impossible I suppose. Massively unlikely but still. Okay. Jesus.”
“Haha – I killed your theory.”
“Jesus.”
“Stop saying Jesus, it’s disrespectful.”
“No, I mean Jesus.”
“I said stop –
“No I mean Jesus for another example. ‘Turn the other cheek’ and all that jazz. Do you think Jesus and Von Neuman ever knew each other..?”
“Now you’re being ridiculous.”
“You ever heard of game theory..? Well, think about the old testament – ‘eye for an eye’ - vengeful God and all that..? And then Jesus saying ‘forgive those who fuck you over’ – at least once depending on your number of cheeks..?”
“Yes, yes, yes and yes, but again – so what..?”
“Well, it turns out that game theory, when run as a basis for computer models proves that the second best strategy for producing stable populations of co-operative agents is eye-for-an-eye, where an agent repays another agent’s trespasses with a trespass of its own… And the best strategy is turn-the-other-cheek, where an agent forgives another’s first trespass on the off-chance it was a mistake, and the pair resume mutual co-operation without falling into vendetta. And don’t tell me Jesus had a laptop stashed under his robe.”
"Well, he was supposed to be the son of God, that'd probably boost his IQ a bit -
"Hah - The point I'm trying to make is that there are underlying rules to any system, physical, social, doesn't matter, and that these rules were as good two thousand years ago as they are now, as good as they will be two thousand years hence."
"'Hence'..? Why are you coming over all shakespearean on me..?"
"Yeah-yeah, but you know what I'm saying right..?"
"All I know is I need another drink. Are we gonna look at these programmes or what Mr. Scintillating..?"
"Kinda, I'll do you a deal."
"Arrgh."
"You verry funnee. Anyway - You just show me the pictures of the cast and the set, and I'll tell you what's gonna happen in the play, okay..?"
"I love it when you come over all prophetic..."

Salon 1:

"Hmm. Okay. A weary and defeated people in the midst of severe economic crisis, looking for any kind of solution, any way to restore some kind of national pride, looking for scapegoats toward whom to shift the blame. I'm thinkng - huge power vaccuum. Guy with moustache and an eye for symbolistic art. Dinky uniforms. Eagles. A hearkening back to earlier, more heroic ancestors. Probably some kind of exceptional gene-stock forefather myth thang going on. "Pure race brought low by injudicious interbreeding" blurb maybe -


- huge expansionist drive. State takes over the economy. Everybody gets crappy jobs. Hard times, low pay, sacrifice. Severe work ethic requires propping up by propaganda. Deification of traits necessary to support wobbley economy embodied as inherrent in the ethnic group in power, demonization in contrast of any ethnic group conflicting with the still flakey control of the dictatorship...


...This one's gonna end in tears. I'm seeing genocide at least, world-wide dominance of the ruthlessly expansionist regime at most, if they aren't stopped early enough. Am I right..?"

"Scarily."
"Next plz."

Salon 2:

"Okay, let's see... A restless people under the rule of an imperial power, one -
"Look, no offence, this is all very entertaining and everything, but any grade-school kid with an interest in history could do what your doing right now."
"Um."
"I mean, blah blah, unrest, blah blah, civil disobedience, blah blah happy ending. What's your point..? Bad shit happens and someone always steps out of the crowd and saves the day - Hitler picks up a fucked-over post-WWI Germany and turns it into a juggernaut, India gets sucked dry by the Brits and up pops Ghandi and saves the day - and so it goes. What's that got to do with you claiming to know the future..? All this shit happened in the past, of course it's fucking obvious now... That doesn't mean it was obvious then. Things get all fucked up, and someone special comes along and unfucks them."
"Yeah, okay, you got me. Okay, question for you now."
"Shoot. I'm feeling fucking smart right now."
"Why Hitler..? Why Ghandi..? - I mean they both saved their countries, however temporarily on Hitler's part - but why wasn't Hitler like Ghandi, and why wasn't Ghandi like Hitler..?"
"Er. I dunno. Hitler wasn't Indian for a start."
"Exactly."
"I always worry when you agree with me."
"What I mean is we live under the illusion that just *anybody* can stand up out of the crowd and suddenly the world spins around their little finger. But, it's not true. Do you know how many others there were, pre-Ghandi who tried and failed to do what he did..?"
"No."
"Of course you don't cos no-one ever talks about them. "Did you hear about that guy who totally didn't succeed in freeing India..?" Never comes up in conversation. No-one makes movies about the losers, not unless they lost in an utterly heroic fashion."
"You've seen 300 Spartans once too often."
"THIS IS SPAR-[spit]-TA!!!!"
"Euww - a bit of your phlem went in my drink..! Get me another one right now."
"In a minute. Look - the Indian independence rumblings started in 1857, nearly 60 years before Ghandi ever set foot in India. The independence movement had any number of leaders, the first being the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II - a fucking emperor for God's sake."
"You swear too much to ever be a real gentleman."
"Screw you too. Anyway, the emperor and all his cronies totally fucked the situation up, made it worse in fact - the Brits abolished the East India company and replaced it with direct rule. And after that there were at least five or six other leaders between them and the arrival of Ghandi."
"Still lacking a point to all this."
"All these guys - heroic, charismatic, full up to the gills with convictions etc. etc. and none of them could fix India."
"Well, they weren't Ghandi. Duh."
"No. That's not it - the trouble was that none of them could fit into the Ghandi-shaped hole in the universe."
"What, you're saying that the man doesn't matter..?"
"Yeah, that's kinda what I'm saying. From my perspective the situation in India 'waited' for 60 years, until the right-shaped man fell into the right place, and if Ghandi hadn't come along in 1915, it would have gone right on waiting, for as long as the situation persisted."
"Whooo - straight over my head. Maybe I won't have that other drink."
"Okay look. You remember those toys you had when you were a kid - the ones where you have to put the right shapes in the right holes..? Course you do. Imagine the world is a really big one of those - some of the holes are pretty simple, and they get filled real quick. Some of the holes are really complicated. Thing is though, the world's in no hurry, and there are tonnes and tonnes of shapes knocking about. Millions, billions of them. All the world does is sit there and shake the box patiently, and wait for each hole to be filled. And when the world is fucked up, all it does is shake harder."
"Fuck, I must be drunk. That kinda makes sense."
"Study the situation hard enough, and you'll find the man or woman to fill it. Or wait long enough, and the situation will manufacture that person for you."
"Now I've completely lost you. People make their own decisions, they have free-will and stuff... Don't they..?"
"You've heard of something called the Stanford Prison experiment..? and Stockholme syndrome..?"
"Yeah, I remember you talking about that stuff before. Cut to the chase."
"Okay, basically, they make me think we're led into becoming who we are not so much through any personal aesthetic, but by the situations we find ourselves in, and the social expectations of the circles we move in. You with me..?"
"Let's just say I am, but after all the evolutionary crap we've been through to develop these huge and, I dunno, 'unique', brains of ours why would we suddenly chuck it all in for group-think..? What's so fatal about striking out alone..?"
"It's all about Hydra and Hercules."
"Er... Okay, I'm getting the many heads vs. one vibe here - but didn't Hercules win..?"
"Sure, but why was the Hydra so feared that they had to send Hercules after it in the first place..?"
"Erm, because the Hydra had killed a fucking huge bunch of people beforehand..?"
"Bingo. The Hydra lost one battle out of a gazillion, and Hercules had help anyway. Some chariot guy with a torch - Iolaus. Plus, he was the son of Jupiter."
"Okay, I'm starting to get your drift now. Let me do the next bit. You're trying to say that from an evolutionary POV. It's always better to be part of the Hydra, than to go it alone. That way, the only thing that can beat you is a real out of context problem - hah - gotcha now - "son of Jupiter" - a fucking huge meteorite or something - a real planet killer."
"Go on."
"Okay. So if you say Hydra represents the majority, no, hang on, represents whatever part of society that is winning all the battles, it's better to join 'em, rather than fight them - that way your kids get to live, especially if you haven't had them yet. And for humans, it's not enough to just say 'Gee okay, I'm gonna join you guys', you've gotta work out how they got to win all those battles in the first place - because it's indicative of them being, I dunno, somehow 'fitter' within the socio-political/physical enviroment or something. But that's still not enough, you've gotta do more - you've gotta become them."
"Because..."
"Goddamn you - because the situation has already dictated what strategies will succeed the best, not them in particular. Fuck. I'm convinced - I'm a believer. I mean - basically you're saying that we're like psychic chameleons or something, except we end up believing we were always the same colour we find ourselves to be, even if we only turned that colour like, five minutes ago..?"
"Yes - right on the money. But you're forgetting something. Ghandi - and people like him - the real paradigm changers - don't they seem different..? Truely unique..?"
"Er. I've a feeling you want me to say "Oh yeah" and then you'll turn out to have an ace up your sleeve..."
"Hah. You know me too well. But yeah. Y'see, Ghandi didn't just drop out of the sky and land in India with a solution he made up on the spot. He'd already been molded by his experiences in South-Africa."

"Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (also known as Mahatma Gandhi), had been a prominent leader of the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, and had been a vocal opponent of basic discrimination and abusive labour treatment as well as suppressive police control such as the Rowlatt Acts. During these protests, Gandhi had perfected the concept of satyagraha, which had been inspired by the philosophy of Baba Ram Singh (famous for leading the Kuka Movement in the Punjab in 1872). The end of the protests in South Africa saw oppressive legislation repealed and the release of political prisoners by General Jan Smuts, head of the South African Government of the time."

"What I mean is, he wasn't a man alone, he was just another head of a successful hydra that grew in another country. His only difference - He moved."
"Whoo."

The two sat back, and slugged back what was left of their drinks contemplatively.

"Anyway - What's the last play..?" The Inevitabilist asked.
"Ooh - this one you won't get so easy - it's set in the future, so your fucking history books won't be any help to ya."
"Whatever - just show me the pic and I'll tell you exactly what the aliens are going to look like...

Salon 3:

...Okay they'll -
Goldie held up her hand. "No, don't fucking tell me - they'll be so like us it'll be scary... Right..?"
"Someone give the girl a gold star."
"Suddenly I'm bored by the whole idea of the theatre."
"Me too, seen it all before. Hmm... We could go back to my place and I'll put on my bear suit..?"
"Thought you'd never ask."

Conceptual Symbionts, Memes and Football

As you might have guessed by now - I hate the word 'memes' - it kicks up all sorts of images and associations with organicity that it shouldn't, so I came up with something better/less confusing/other. Ta-Da:

Conceptual symbionts.

My new and exciting bit of jargon. These little beasties are classified (a) by having no direct physical components, (b) by being a collection of ideas, or closer to the mark by being a sequence of ideas which both lead to and re-inforce eachother, and finally (c) once adopted, become indespensible on a global scale, at least for a period of time.

It must also be noticed that the initial idea in the sequence is one that is already implicit within whatever system it arises from.

I've searched around for a good illustration and come up with football. Not, alas, the American kind, because I don't know enough about it and lack the will to bother aquiring such knowledge, but the British kind. "Soccer". Blasphemy.

Back in the old days football was played very differently. Okay, so there was still the goalie, and 10 other guys dressed in shorts, and a ball, but the way the game was played. Basically, one guy would get the ball and, avoiding countless tackles by the opposing team, dribble it all the way to within shooting range. Then shoot. GOAL !!! Yay, everyone shout hip-hip-hooray.

Passing was very infrequent, done only under extreme duress, and usually backwards to another player who would attempt once again to get into the penalty box all on his lonesome. Basically, though all the players of any given team were nominally on the same side, they didn't really play together. "Team" was spelt with eleven "I"s.

I don't know who 'invented' the "passing game", I'm pretty dumb concerning football history - I blame growing up in a town where the home team was so pathetic no-one except the real anoraks ever supported them - but I think it was the continental teams when leagues started opening up internationally.

Basically three-men cells would run up the pitch and through strategic passing, circumvent any tackles coming their way, get within range and either blast one in directly, or again, lure the goalie into coming out early and pass around him.

They began to win every damn game, flattening the British teams completely. Outrage, this was our damn game..! How dare they, those foreign upstarts, who did they think they were..!



Of course, next season, many of the English teams were playing a passing game, at least the successful teams anyway. The one's that didn't, got relegated, and sank out of sight. After a while, the only teams left, were the ones which passed.

And this encapsulates the idea of a conceptual symbiont:

The first idea: "Pass the ball before you absolutely have to."
leads to: "Have someone ready to recieve it running nearby. Don't run up alone."
leads to: "Have that player run in a strict formation, so you will always already know roughly where to pass the ball, whenever pasing becomes necessary."
leads to, "Have two players in formation, in case one avenue of passing becomes obstructed."

Each idea leads from, supporting and extending, the former.

Then of course, the ideas begin to gloabally expand their effects, because they allow for specialisation. Whereas before each player had to be: A good runner, a good dribbler, a good tackler, a good striker - now with a three man group you could have one great striker, and two (or more) great dribblers to support him - laying the ball off to him after they had brought it to within range.

Midfielders to pick up loose balls, and double as striker-support, defenders to put down attacks - multiple, clearly defined roles, allowing for mutually supportive specialists.

All stemming from a simple initial idea of "pass the damn ball genius."

This is what I mean when I say "Conceptual Symbiont."

Anyway, since we've already got the football, we may as well run with it. Just imagine the football has a religious symbol on it.

Team size. In football, a team's limited to 11, plus a few subs. In life however, you can field as many players as you can get onto the pitch. There's more to it than that though - it's no good having more players if no-one knows which side they're playing for, or in which direction they should be kicking the ball.

The monkeysphere. I know I go on about this a lot, but it is absolutely foundational to any social theory. A.B.S.O. F.U.C.K.I.N.G. L.U.T.E.L.Y.

We're so blasé about meeting strangers these days. We see a dozen a day, and talk to/interact with a couple of them in the course of work/socializing whatever. We think nothing of it.

The only real predator of man left on the planet is man. So why aren't we scared of these everyday strangers..? I mean, imagine there was no law, no over-reaching systems of mutual co-operation - everything you owned, you made; everything you ate, you grew or raised; your water, you lugged up from the well yourself, from the river. The house you live in, the clothes you wear - all of them came from your hands. You do not need anything from another. And they, if they exist (you haven't seen them) shouldn't really need you for anything either. So why would they approach you..? Simple curiousity..? Imagine there's a mountain range between you and some guy you've only ever heard rumours about anyway, would simple curiousity be enough to get you to cross them..?

The only reasons for utterly self-sufficient groups, living in adequately-resourced areas isolate from each other, with no previous history of interaction, to visit one another, are bad ones.

Let me illustrate the situation:

Welcome to blob-land. I want you to imagine a bunch of blobs. They have two states: Sedentary and passive, mobile and aggresive. During their lifetimes, these blobs grow slowly, absorbing nutrients from the area where they lay until one of two things happens:

*Their size goes over a certain value, let's say around 250-300 units.
*They exhaust the nutrients of their locale.

In the first instance, the bloated mother blob splits, and calves off a new blob which promptly switches into mobile-aggressive mode and disappears over the horizon. This new blob doesn't stop until it finds somewhere with enough nutrients to support its growth, where it settles into sedentary mode. If there are no such places left unnoccupied it will attack and either displace another blob, or assimilate it utterly, unless driven off.

In the second case, the whole blob, whatever it's current size, switches into mobile aggressive mode and goes off on the hunt for somewhere new to live.

I think this, barring a little inter-group female raiding/exchange, adequately describes the general state of primitive mankind.

[Remember Game-theory 101..? Remember the initial winning strategy at low pop. density..? "Always default". ie, always attack, and always attack first. And remember, "Always default" is also responsible for keeping the pop. density low, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.]

Now, we forgot football. Incorporating the above, I want you to imagine that the players in each team are not individuals, but blobs - groups of people about 150-200 - in size. For example - this is a mid-fielder - Hobbes.

He's quite a big lad, isn't he..?

But how is this Hobbesian game played..? Despite the general 'team'ness, there is no team. A player gets the ball, and is tackled. But the player, and the tackler, are largely on their own. It's one-on-one. In fact, the whole global game, despite there being 22 players on the pitch, is only ever one-on-one. In any tackle event, the other 20 players might as well not exist. No-one on either side will help their player/tackler because the target is 'the ball' and personal glory, not so much the overall outcome of the game - and under these conditions - a far better strategy is to wait until either the ball spins free, or to tackle whoever gets the ball, while they are tired from the recent conflict.

Now let's chuck one of the Hobbesian teams off the pitch, and install a passing-game playing continental. The players of this team have decided to sacrifice the personal glory of scoring an individual goal, to the more global joint-glory of 'winning the game'.

Which team wins..? Not a hard calculation. The continentals are playing eleven men against a team of one.

In summary - any conceptual symbiont that increases group cohesion or facillitates trust between unrelated groups - enabling the 'passing game' to be played - will tend to spread via proxy of those who believe. And as a species, we may have undergone coevolution with this emergent function - evolving more developed neurophysiologic 'organs' of belief, and boosting the ability of these beliefs, once formed, toward expression in the kind of consistant behaviour so crucial to mutual trust.

No God Required - Religions Spread Anyway.

One of life's great mysteries to me was how social systems spread from one grouping to another, in particularly ones, like religion, which seem both to do harm as well as good.

In the following post I hope to show how I think it works.

To start off with, here's a poll I conducted a couple of months ago on a philosophy site.

Okaaaay, so not exactly a humongous sample but the best I can do... So - to sum up the results:

Religions have benefit, but also have negative effects.
The benefits are mainly applied within the religion's host society.
The negative effects mainly effect other societies, outside of the host society.

No real shocks there.

Let's draw some pictures.

Okay, so this is some region of the planet [a bit of Spain actually] occupied by six distinct groups. At the moment, all of them are irreligious. The blue circle around the green group signifies their sphere of influence. The greens interact with the two groups on either side.

Now, let's say the greenies become religious. And add some arbitrary units of advantage/disadvantage. Let's take the values from the poll above.

ie. Benefit to believer group of adopting religion = 6
General negative effect of adopting religion = 7

This looks crazy - the net effect of adopting a religion to the host society is a detriment: -1.

However, there is a catch - and it depends on one crucial point. The benefits are applied only within the believer group, whereas the negative effects are applied within the entire sphere of influence.

So - The new situation looks like this:

So, though the effect to the religious group is detrimental, it is offset by the benefit, whereas the groups the believers influence only recieve the negative effect.

ie: Believer group net: -1
Irreligious within range net: -7

Which puts the believer group 6 points ahead overall.

Let's move on, and assume one irreligious group converts, and one does not.

Okay, so the righthand group that didn't convert gets another -7 from the initial religious group without any benefit.

The converted left also gets another -7, (but this time from the cost of adopting religion, rather than the penalty of living close to the initial religious group), and +6 religion benefit.

The initial group gets another -7, +6, as normal.

middle net 6-7+6-7 = -2
left net -7+6-7= -8
right net -7-7 = -14

ie. overall: middle's doing best by miles, left's doing so-so, but right is looking pretty screwed.

Also note the lower groups, now under the sphere of religious influence, starting to take a penalty.

Let's move on again.

Here we start to see another differential - because the two intitial religious groups' spheres of influence overlap, their bonus for being religious also extends to each other, as well as themselves - giving them a double dose.

Now the positive/negative for adopting religion changes to +12, -7, ie. finally, a net positive effect.

Notice that the two lower groups have also converted. And that the lowest group gets a double whammy of -7-7 = -14.

Let's move on one final time.

Now we see a mutally supportive network of religious groups beginning to arise, that will only develop further as more nodes enter the net, and add their bonuses to the total, as their spheres of influence widen to overlap further.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but for what it's worth my conclusion is much like the ones I've already drawn on the other threads:

Religion, once 'discovered', inevitably will spread, regardless of whether or not God actually exists.

Why Archy beats Anarchy

The function of a law, a rule or a moral is not to erradicate totally the behaviour against which it proscribes but rather to reduce the probability that the majority of society faces of becoming a victim of that particular behaviour to such a low degree that it becomes more reasonable, from a cost/benefit basis, on the part of any given individual member of that society to forgo taking prohibitive precautions against such an occurence in their day to day lives.

Boy, that was a long sentence.

What I want to express, but perhaps have not done so well enough is to highlight that as a member of a 'lawful' society I do not need to become expert in say some defensive/offensive discipline - such as fencing or shooting or a martial art - because the penalties I will incur in terms of the time invested and risk of injury involved in their pursuit is no longer outweighed by a reducement of the risk of injury and death from - I don't know - a duel for example, or a mugging.

In being a member of a society where such an option exists - ie. paying through taxation for a judiciary system and accepting the governmental veto on my expressing dissatisfaction through direct violence against another person or persons - I incur less penalty than would be entailed by having to aquire the skills and equipment necessary to maintain a reasonable degree of protection within a society without such an externalized system.

However, in realising that no level of judical control - at least a level that would be acceptable in a 'free' society - will ever totally erradicate the threat of violence, loss or injury, and by refusing to take direct responsibility for either their own [absolute] protection or that of others, any individual member of that society must accept their complicity in the effective sponsoring of 'sacrificial offerings' in the form of the people who actually do roll snake-eyes and become the latest statistic on the evening news, if that sacrifice could have been prevented by the acceptance of stricter curtailments on individual freedom by the members of that body politic or a society-wide [and equally shouldered] investment in self-defence.

Those statistics on the news, the lost boys, the chalk outlines on the street, the wounded hookers - they are the price of conscience we [willingly or unwittingly] pay to maintain a both balance of personal freedom from governmental scrutiny and intervention in our private and public lives, and the luxury of non-acceptance for our own welfare.

We forget this at the peril of totalitarianism.

Laws and moral-codes can also be seen to operate as markers dilineating the topography of benefits incurred either by the individual(s) at the expense of a wider group loss, or benefit to the group en toto - embodied within its given form of governence - at the expense of the individual(s) subject to it.

It doesn't have to be a zero sum game - ideally, a good law should aim to keep the expression of a particular human behaviour set within a range such that it benefits both the individual and the social system playing host to that individual.

If that is impossible it should aim at least attempt to curtail the extremity of its expression to a limit where the expense incurred either to the social system or individuals effected by such behaviour (but not benefitting from it), is tolerable, preferably negligible.

For example "the holding, expression, and discussion of different beliefs and ideas amongst individuals."

This carries an attendant behavioural range: One end of this range being freedom of speech, and debate, at the other is repression, violence, murder, vendetta and war.

The laws affixed to this range should aim to keep a given society tolerant enough to stimulate productivity both technologic and spiritual - whilst acting as a buffer against the social-cohesion destroying consequences of fanatacism.

...Continued...

Black swan

Notes on the Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb:

Pg.36. Non-scalable and Scalable situations. ie: Mediocristan/guassian vs. Extremistan/Mandelbrot

Comparing situations in which the average value is largely unaffected by the addition of a new individual value (physically contrained sets like height or weight, or systems where something is constructed from scratch in each transaction) with situations that are unconstrained - such as personal wealth, or booksales - where there tend to be either absolute losers with zero sales or insignificant property, and true giants like Harry Potter or Bill gates - where the addition of a single extra individual (a black swan) can totally upset the previous average value.

Pg 40: The Turkey lesson about corroborative past - 1000 days of feeding, and on the 1001st day, a twisted neck.

Pg 54: The error of confirmation: "No evidence of X" is not the same as "Evidence of no X"

Pg 59: Switching things round:
"There are no black swans." -->
"All swans are white" ==>
"Anything not white cannot be a swan"

According to (faulty) confirmative logic, that which confirms the second - the sighting of a red mini for example, also confirms the former, that all swans are white.

Pg 68: Cost benefit + information:

*Information is costly to obtain, costly to store and costly to manipulate and retrieve.

To reduce these costs we use patterns and rules to compress/reduce the amount of information needed to re-create the object/event/uncompressed information

However - in so summarizing - we also add more 'order' to the world as we percieve it than there really is - and hence are prone to underestimating the degree of randominity extant in the real world.

Pg. 71 - this error of derived rules - the narrative falacy (drawing of 'story'-like conections between things perhaps not truly connected) and the ludic falacy (using a simulation or 'game'like abstract representation of a real-life situation to draw conclusions, predictions and rules concerning that real life situation - and placing too much faith in them) also effects memory - creating a palimpsest - as you remember not the actual event first recorded, but your memory of remembering of that event, and then the memory of the memory of remembering that event. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, sometimes the details get fuzzy, and sometimes parts of that attendent fuzz get interpreted as something else entirely.

Pg. 76: Narrative fallacy:

"Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife."
"Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife to get her inheritence."

The second intuitively seems more likely, though it is in fact not.

Pg. 80: The power of emotional connection - "One death is a tragedy - a million is a statistic." Stalin. That which cannot be easily and vividly imagined, effects us but slightly.

Pg 100: The problem of silent evidence, and the self-sampling assumption. ie: of course all gamblers have beginner's luck - otherwise they wouldn't have become gamblers. Those that prayed but drowned anyway, did not survive to tell the story of how their praying saved their lives.

Pg.107: That which does not kill you makes you weaker. The idea that people are somehow hardened through sub-lethal physical hardship and adversity - which 'weeds out' the weak from the strong - is fallicious because it neglects to state that the surviving 'strong' are also weakened by their trial. The progeny of those so selected perhaps, but again how much strength is derived from nurture, and how much from nurture. How much genetic, how much epigenetic..?

Pg 112: Visable effect. "Look at what I did for you." is more easily marketed than "Look at what I avoided for you." ie: A catastrophe visibly combatted is much more media-friendly than a catastrophe so well prevented that even its threat never broke the surface tension of public perception. (eg. the politician who has saved the most lives is actually the man who exposed the safety records of car manufacturers and made seatbelts maditory, but who even knows his name..?)

Pg. 139: People's evaluations of [the certainty of] their own knowledge is frequently exaggerated. Usually by a factor of twenty. A 2% estimate of error in some area of knowledge is in reality around 40 - 45%. A better education usually increases the error margin, rather than closes it. ie: a graduate is only slightly more knowledgable than X, but is many times more confident in that knowledge.

Pg. 146: Experts and and empty suits: Techné = craft. [know-how] Epistémé = knowledge. [know-what] Imagine you will have an operation - do you want 'know-how' in the form of a surgeon..? Or 'Know-what' in the form of a popular science writer..?

Expert professions: livestock judges, astronomers, test pilots, chess masters, physicists, accountants, pure mathematicians, insurance analysts (as long as dealing with constrained "mediocristan" subjects). The subject matter does not 'move' - chess is chess today, and chess tomorrow, the mechanics of flying does not radically change from day to day, today's cow is tomorrow's cow. ie: the black swan liability is low.

Non-Experts 'professions': stockbrokers, pyschiatrists, psychologists, court judges, councilors, intelligence analysts, financial advisors. High variability linked with overconfident evaluations and high margins of error... Empty suits and empty words, however convincing they may be.

Pg. 151 & 153: Accuracy of prediction. Study reveals that a PHD makes no difference in accuracy. However - a big reputation makes people worse at prediction than those who have none. Famous people also make bad predictors.

Pg. 159: Points of reference: A subconscious tendency to use (random) numbers as seed crystals around which to build belief. A study showed that people shown a (random) number were influenced by it in later tasks involved in estimation - a high number produced higher estimations than a lower number for example.

People find it almost impossible to evaluate something in isolation without some [arbitrary] point to work from.

cf: James No2's lack of absolute originality - everything is related to past matters. What goes before sets the stage for what comes after.

Pg. 171/2/3: Limitations on forecasting essentially historical events - Soft historical studies/social science - are too based in the narrative fallacy to be dependable as anything but fiction. Popper.

"Fundamentally unpredictable" to know the future is to make the future into the present. To correctly predict the future you must also predict accurately the technology of the future. If you can do that, then simply by idea difusion, you will probably be able to create the technology of the future today.

The law of iterated expectations - "If I expect to expect something at a later date, then I already expect that something in the present."

Predictions of the future are really merely re-runs of today and yesterday, perhaps with a few extra bells and whistles. ie: predict tomorrow with reasonable certainty, but not next week.

Pg. 178: problems with prediction from incomplete information. Billiard balls.

Two balls colliding - easy. Three, possible with precise knowledge of initial states... Nine - you need to take into account the gravitational effects of anyone near the table... Fifty-six impacts - you need to exactly know the states of every single elementary particle in the universe.

Billiard balls are easy - they have no personal needs, drivers or desires. predicting collisions between people however...

... And yet that is what social scientists and economists believe they can [reliably/accurately] do. To give themselves a leg to stand on they assume that everyone acts "rationally" (acting toward their best interests in all futures) and "coherrently" (adherring faithfully to habits and predilictions).

The chief fallacy of this is two-fold - it assumes everyone within a given sample has equal knowledge and the ability to put it into practice, and that all habits/predilictions are strongly held.

Given that people frequently make irrational and inconsistant choices - the general theories of economic optimization fail. There can be no "general theory" from which to make [long-range] predictions concerning any topic in which people are a variable - the branching error margins for their decisions/actions become exponential.

Pg. 195: Prediction errors and motivation [aka anticipated utility/affective forecasting]. It is thought a certain degree of prediction bias is innate and serves as a cue toward [beneficial/aversive] action. We overestimate, sometimes drastically, the impact of future events, both good and bad, on our lives. That new car becomes less a vehicle than a key to heaven; that impending redundancy becomes not so much a hiccup but an all consuming tidal wave.

Without such a fanfare and hullabaloo however - would we ever get up off the sofa..?

Pg. 196: Forward is easy, backward is hard. An ice cube is melting. Predicting the shape of the puddle it will make is difficult, but not entirely impossible, if you measure sufficiently well the starting conditions. But now, given a random puddle of water, try to reconstruct exactly what made it...

Helenus, of the iliad (son of priam and hecuba captured and made to tell the acheans how to capture troy) was a seer who predicted backward - seeing the past from its barest remnants.

Pg. 198: The death of determinism. Is everything determined..? Is randomness truly random or deterministic chaos...?

Random has no predictable properties, not even a predictable unpredictability. Chaos however, conceals a predictable order beneath a superficial surface of fake 'random'. It has predictable elements - but they are [very very] hard to know.

It doesn't matter. For any practical purpose, both are the same. Randomness is incomplete information. Opacity. And induction the fallacy of believing facet of life X. is non-random from insufficient observation.

Pg. 205: Barbell strategy in investment - hyper-conservatism and hyper-aggression. Because risk assessments are always error-prone the best way to invest is in the same way as you would gamble so as to invite good fortune and minimize losses. ie, bet big on sure things, but also bet a little at huge odds just on the off-chance. "Medium sized" bets are the worst - they are lauded as 'safe' but for relatively little return in reality risk huge losses should you invest heavily.

ie: two horses: Mr. Racecourse-Rocket and Mr. No-Hoper. MRR always always places in every race he ever enters. Lousy odds, but a big enough bet each way will always pay for your dinner, if maybe not dessert. MNH however wins a race maybe once in a blue moon, (if there's always an eclipse at the same time) at truly stupendous odds (he's the google of racehorses) - put a fiver on him every week, okay, you'll bleed out slow, but if he ever comes in, you can retire.

ie: invest at both ends of the spectrum, at something like 85% / 15% split - but never in the middle.

(This btw. is also why casinos limit single bets to sizes that won't ever bankrupt them - because the combined losses of the many always more than cover the lucky high-rolling few on any given day).

Pg. 216: Sherwin Rosen - the economics of superstars. The differential in earnings between X and Y in extremistan professions - TV celebrity, sports and films etc is increasing. But this does not mean that X is hugely better than Y at their profession, only that these professions instigate a 'tournament' effect - the winner only has to win by even the merest of margins to scoop the whole pot.

Of course, they can also win by pure luck. And once the initial event has occurred, social coherence/adherence effects re-inforce the outcome as people gravitate toward the winner - heaping upon him or her the adulation and material prizes which may indeed make that person win yet again.

ie: two books in the same catagory - horror say - one's a Stephen King, one's a Mr. Nobody. All other things being equal enough people would instinctively buy the former over the latter to make sure that Mr. Nobody stayed Mr. Nobody, however good Mr. Nobody might really be.

Pg. 218/219 Merton's ideas of "preferential attachment" (herding in choices / preferences) and cumulative advantage (the first million is the hardest - success attracts greater successes etc.) leads to Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noting the link between the globalization of culture and the increased concentration of success. ie - the tournament effect above doesn't really depend on the actual number of players, it still tends to funnel success toward an ever smaller proportion of the population - given that that population is sufficiently well linked together both in comms hardware/software and through shared cultural reference points. MTV say, or concepts of female beauty - Whatever the credo, a punter is still a punter.

In general - the big get bigger, and the small either get smaller or stay the same. ie: We feel - like female birds at a lek - more comfortable with choices that already have been agreed with. (Which also explains the sudden attractiveness you gain from having a girlfriend :) ).

Zipf's law. Linguistics - the idea that the more you use a word, the less effortful it will be to use again. ie: we tend to fish out words from our private lexus with an ease and regularity dependent upon the frequency of their past use. (on the part of the individual and within his/her linguistic enviroment - leading to local dialects appearing quickly if isolated sufficiently)

eg - in English there are roughly 60,000 main words, of which only a few hundred constitute the bulk of written English and even fewer in casual conversation.

Pg. 227: Michael Marmot - Whitehall studies - shows, even adjusting for disease, a higher social status positively effects longevity. eg: an Oscar is worth an extra five years of life to an actor.

People who live in societies with relatively flat social gradients live longer en toto than the populaces of steeply-graded societies. Being a loser kills.

Pg. 233. The Guassian lie: The precipitous fall off slopes of the bell curve - as you move away from the 'norm' - produce probabilities so unfeasibly low that black swans seem completely out of the picture in any sane world. Trouble is, it is massively sensitive to errors in the measurement of sigma (standard deviation) to the point where a very small miscalculation can result in gross (a factor of a trillion for example at 20-21 sigma) underestimation of risks - if a guassian curve is applied to a scaleable situation - such as the stock-market - and used as a reliable predictor of risk... everyone, sooner or later, is totally fucked.

A Mediocristan (guassian) plot has an inconstant (exponential for example) decline as you move away from the centre in either direction, and an extremistan (Mandelbrotian) plot - follows a constant decrease as you move away. Anticipating risks with much greater levels of probability.

The key is to correctly apply the right curve to the right situation, rather than a one-size fits all approach.

Pg. 244: How do you tell where you are..? If you are dealing with yes/no questions, in which magnitudes do not matter or are non-existant (dead/not dead - pregnant/not pregnant - have a something/Don't have a something) then you are in mediocristan. If the magnitude does matter (how much money - how many hits) then you're in extremistan.

Pg. 250: Guassian Assumptions:

One: coin flips have no memory. They are isolate in time and space. You never 'get better' at flipping coins, a head today does not influence the likelihood of another tomorrow.

See - "preferential attachment" and "cumulative advantage" both mean real-world events do not obey Gaussian assumption. Suddenly forty heads in a row becomes more likely than a completely random mix.

Two: Random walks without wild leaps. A Guassian world view has steps of equal (value one) length. The real world has indeterminite step lengths (usually value one) and contains the possibility of a wild leap in times of acute stress.

Pg. 290: Popper. [paraphrase] "Philosophy collapses into empty sophistry without being based around problems that lie outside the strict philosophical domain."

...Continued...