"Do your own research"

     "Do your own research," they say when you ask for evidence or support for whatever conspiracy theory they're advocating. "I'm not going to do your homework for you," is another one they'll sometimes throw in. 

     This is an evasion tactic, of course. If they had good evidence and understood it well enough to be so confident in their conclusions, they'd be able to explain it to you. But it's not just about evasion; it's also about posturing, trying to imply that they're smarter and more informed than you and their time is too important to be wasted on imparting their vast knowledge to you. 

     As a general rule, if you make a claim then the onus is on you to provide support for the claim, so telling someone to "do their own research" when you tell them the latest conspiracy theory is just lazy bad form. But the reason this ploy resonates is that "do your own research" is generally good advice. The trouble is that the "research" they've done usually amounts to following whatever rabbit hole the YouTube algorithm generates for them, and those rabbit holes often lead to echo chambers.

     So what should it actually mean to do your own research? Broadly speaking, it means to gather evidence, evaluate its credibility and weighting, and attempt to synthesize it all into a coherent theory that allows you to make reliable inferences. The precise methods you use to gather primary evidence may vary from field to field, but in practice most of the evidence you gather will be the reports or testimony or work of other people, and so a good part of your task will be deciding how reliable these sources are.

     And here's where the "do your own research" crowd go horribly wrong, because the source whose credibility it's most important to evaluate is yourself. When they exhort you to do your own research, there's often the implication that it's lazy or stupid to trust the research of other people, as if your own research is inherently better or more reliable. But your opinions and beliefs are just as likely to be wrong as anyone else's, and you should not treat them as the answer key that everyone else's answer should match to be deemed reliable. 

     Here's an example I've used before. A doctor recommends surgery, and describes the procedure to you. Upon realizing that she's proposing cutting into you with a knife, you reject her expertise, because even you as a non-expert know that cutting people is bad. This is the wrong way to judge the doctor's expertise, because while it's true that any expert should know that cutting people is bad, the true expert may also know other things (such as how to stitch people back up, and how to cut them so as to make stitching the back up easier) that make it not so bad. 

     Instead, the better approach is to say, "Wait, you're going to cut me with a knife? Won't that hurt? Won't that put me at risk of bleeding to death?" and listen -- listen -- to understand the answer. Obviously if the doctor is surprised to learn that cutting people is generally bad, they're probably not a real doctor, but a real doctor is prepared to answer this sort of question honestly and reliably. You don't necessarily need to understand every detail of what they're telling you, but if you have a good basic lay-person's grasp of the vocabulary and subject matter, you should be able to tell when they're just making up stuff and bluffing. 

     The trouble is, not everyone has a good basic lay-person's grasp of the vocabulary and subject matter, and even if you do, interrogating an expert to decide if they really know what they're talking about takes a lot of effort and time you don't always have. This is why we have shortcuts: credentials and certifications. If someone has a PhD from an accredited university in the subject matter, or a license to practice the profession in question, it's reasonable to assume they are in fact qualified experts. It's not an absolute guarantee, of course, but in general it's reasonable to defer to their judgment in their particular field, and checking out their credentials usually enough to qualify as having "done your own research" before you adopt the results of their research.

     It's important to be clear here. You do have to trust your own research in one sense: whatever conclusion you adopt, whether it originates with you or some other source, it is inescapably the result of your decision. You're stuck with it; there's no "I was just following orders" absolution. You have a choice what conclusion to adopt, but you cannot choose not to choose; even suspending judgment is a choice (and often the right one). And more often than not, the wisest judgment is to adopt the conclusion of the experts.

About that vaccine video...

      A friend just sent me a video (which I will not share here) asking me for my synopsis of its content, and it occurs to me that many others may receive this video and be seeking answers to the same question, so I thought I'd do a post about it. The video is from someone examining the package of the new Astrazeneca vaccine, and calling our attention to certain words printed on the packaging they think we should be very alarmed about. 

     Now, the usual caveat should apply here: I AM NOT A TRAINED SCIENTIST. However, I've learned a lot of the very very basics from a lifetime of being a nerd very interested in science, and I have a strong background in general critical thinking and making sense of stuff, which I suspect is why I have friends who come to me to ask about this kind of thing. As well, my son us currently studying cell biology and it's been fascinating talking with him about how much more staggeringly complex and beautiful and interesting these things are than I ever imagined (and I've always imagined them to be pretty darned cool). What I'm offering here is not an expert explanation, because I'm not an expert. It is simply an educated lay-person's reading of the matter, intended as an alternative to the panicky less-educated lay-person's account given in the video. 

     I'm not sharing the video here for a couple of reasons, but mainly because I don't think it needs more bandwidth, and also because I suspect there are multiple similar videos and forwarded emails making the same claims. I will attempt to charitably present the concerns it raises, and then explain why they aren't nearly as problematic as it seems from the video.

     The first word the video attends to in the vaccine packaging is "ChAdOx1-S (recombinant)". The narrator seems to think "ChAdOx1-S" is just a meaningless serial number name of the vaccine itself, and focuses on the word "recombinant" as the frightening bit, which is in a way kind of amusing for reasons I'll get to in a moment. "Recombinant" means more or less what it sounds like: re-combining DNA from two or more different organisms. This is actually not a new process: it happens every time a baby is conceived or a flower is pollinated. Even asexually reproducing bacteria often absorb bits of genetic material from various sources, sometimes incorporating it into their own genome. And naturally-occuring retroviruses splice their own code into the genome of the cells they infect. 

     What is new is our ability to do this artificially in a test tube, which we've only been able to do for a few decades. And it's tremendously useful, first for research and later as we get better at it for practical and therapeutic applications. If you don't know exactly what a strip of DNA does, you can sometimes figure it out by snipping it out of a cell to see what happens when it's gone, and then splice it into a cell that normally doesn't have it to compare the results. And then when you understand things better, you can do stuff like take the gene that produces insulin and splice it into some E. coli to produce this important life-saving hormone in industrial quantities without having to harvest it from animals. 

     So the ChAdOx1-S (recombinant) vaccine is, presumably, a vaccine made by recombining a sample of genetic material from the pandemic virus with some other genetic material that made up the precursor to the ChAdOx1-S vaccine. In other words, the vaccine is the result of a recombinant process, not something that will cause a recombination in your own cells. But if you thought that it was the latter, then the original vaccine is even scarier, because it turns out that "ChAdOx1-S" actually refers to Chimpanzee Adenovirus Vector 1, evoking a terrifying Island of Dr. Moreau scenario. So I find it hilarious that the person in the video missed this detail. But of course, it's not actual chimpanzee DNA; it refers to an adenovirus that infects chimpanzees. And humans and chimps being very very similar, viruses that infect chimps can often infect humans and vice versa.

     A vaccine is often just a de-activated version of a virus, something that resembles the actual virus enough that the immune system learns to recognize it as something to be destroyed, but isn't actually itself infectious. Think of a wanted poster: it has an image of the face of the bad guy, so you know what he looks like, but the wanted poster can't rob your stagecoach. But a wanted poster is more than just a photo: it also contains information that alerts you to why you should beware of the guy in the picture, whom you should call if you see him, maybe a reward or other motivation for doing so, and so on. 

     So it's not enough to just present some molecule to the immune system. You have to present it in a way that the immune system will recognize it as a pathogen and start producing antibodies against it. It's like you have to include all the "WANTED" text from the poster, except that with molecules we don't know how to generate all the relevant text from scratch. So a recombinant vaccine is sort of like taking a successful wanted poster you already have for some other virus, and cutting and pasting a photo of the new virus into it.

     That's what I think they've done with ChAdOx1-S (recombinant). They've taken a vaccine that seems to work for the chimp adenovirus, and spliced in some part to make it work for the new pandemic virus.

     The next bit the video gets very alarmed about is something called "MRC-5", which turns out to be a human cell line derived from fetal lung tissue. It sounds like the person in the video is deeply disturbed that aborted human fetal tissue is an ingredient of the vaccine you'd be injected with. It's not. Human cell cultures are a kind of lab rat: they test the vaccine on those cultures, to see how it affects human cells. They do not use it as an ingredient in actually making the vaccine itself.

     Now, you might have moral reservations about using a product that was tested on aborted fetal cells, but there's an important detail I need to point out here. Nobody is getting pregnant to produce fetuses for the purpose of harvesting tissue. These are fetuses who were going to be aborted for other reasons, possibly even naturally as a miscarriage. Using fetal tissue for medical research is no different, morally, from using the tissues of an accident victim. You can regard the abortion itself as an appalling tragedy, and so it might well be, but so is the death of any other organ donor; that doesn't make deriving some good out of their tragic sacrifice inherently immoral, especially if we are appropriately respectful and appreciative.

     (Also, it's interesting to note that the particular fetus MRC-5 is descended from died in 1966. Fetal cells are particularly useful for culturing because they're so early in the development process, and have so much more growth ahead of them. It's usually easier to make them immortal than it is to do so with cells of a mature adult. That said, the first human cell line to be immortalized came from Henrietta Lacks, a cancer patient who died in 1951. Cancer's weird that way.)

     Finally, the video emphasizes a passage in some of the research documents about the vaccine calling for AI resources to go through the high volume of expected ADR ("Adverse Drug Reaction") reports and make sure every detail is recorded and analyzed. Yeah, at first glance, this sounds scary, like they expect the vaccine to be horribly dangerous and hurt a whole lot of people. But here I want to repeat a theme I brought up here: if they know the vaccine is going to have a lot of ADRs, and they still intend to go ahead with it, what are we missing? Either we should assume they're diabolically evil or stupid, or maybe, just maybe, having a lot of ADR reports isn't quite the terror it seems.

     We already know that developing a vaccine is going to take (has taken) a long time, and a very large part of that is safety testing. They know that there are always risks with developing any new therapy. And they know they're going to get a lot of reports of adverse reactions. A report of an adverse reaction, however, is just that: a report. Many, probably most, of those reports will turn out to be something else. Someone gets a shot, and happens to get totally unrelated food poisoning the next day. Someone else has a heart attack. Someone else doesn't realize yet she's pregnant and reports some of her symptoms as a potential adverse reaction. When you're testing a drug, you want all of this data, whether or not it's actually related to the drug, so you can look through it all for patterns to figure out what, if anything, really is due to the drug and what isn't. And finding those patterns is an absolutely monumental task, which is why an AI system would be so incredibly useful in sifting through all the data.

     I am not saying that there is nothing to be wary of with the Astrazeneca vaccine, or indeed any of the new vaccines they're bringing out. There's a lot of pressure to get these vaccines in use very quickly, and it's not unreasonable to fear that corners might have been cut, or there just hasn't been enough time for unknown side effects to become apparent. Of course there are risks; the real question is, as always, are the risks of not being vaccinated greater or less than the risks of being vaccinated?

     What I am saying is that many of the fears people have of this new vaccine are unfounded and based on an extremely incomplete (even more incomplete than mine) understanding of what these words mean. When terrified people urge you to "do your own research", understand that research involves more than just googling; you need to know how to interpret the words you're looking up, and how they are actually used by the experts doing the work. 

     A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially when you think it's a lot. 

Some thoughts on lying, and why I (somewhat) trust the mainstream media

     I've written elsewhere that lying is the strategy of the stupid. That's not to say that everyone who ever lies is stupid, or that there can never be a time when lying can be done intelligently. Just that, as a general rule, it's better to tell the truth than to lie, and not just for moral reasons. I have two arguments here.

    First, I want to suggest that intelligence generally is in some sense about truth. That is, if we define intelligence as an overall problem-solving ability based in the acquisition and application of information, the solutions that intelligence comes up with for problems will tend to be better when the information it uses is true. That's not to say that intelligent people are those who know the truth, or that they don't deal in  hypotheticals. Quite the contrary, because being able to entertain and explore counterfactuals is itself an important and useful way to discover more truths. Rather, I'm saying that the enterprise of intelligence is largely about evaluating what things are or are likely to be true, and making decisions or choices that take considerations of truth or falsehood into account. An intelligent solution to the problem "Should I bring an umbrella?" will be one that considers (among other things) the likelihood that "it will rain" is a true statement.

     Now, there is a difference between wanting to know the truth yourself and lying, which is wanting someone else to believe a falsehood, so it doesn't necessarily follow from any of this that smart people would not lie. I'm making a softer claim here, namely, that as intelligence consists in large part of habits of truth-seeking, there is necessarily going to be a certain amount of conflict between one's inner dialog of truth-speaking and an outward practice of lying. The habits interfere with each other, and while that doesn't mean an intelligent person cannot lie (after all, intelligence is about solving problems, including the problem of lying), it does mean it's more work.

     And that leads into my second argument: it really is more work. Any meaningful lie you might tell has some way it might be revealed as a lie. If I say that it is raining, and you look outside and see it's not, you know I'm an unreliable witness. But most lies are about things that are a little harder to disprove, and the best lies are the ones that go completely undetected as lies, which is more likely if they are nearly impossible to disprove.

     Recall that we're talking about intelligence as an overall problem-solving ability, and note that confirming a statement as true or disproving it as a lie is itself a problem calling for an exercise of that intelligence. When you craft a lie and decide whether or not to tell it, you will want to consider how easy it is to disprove it, but here you are limited by your own intelligence. Just because you think disproving your lie would be prohibitively difficult doesn't mean someone else might not find it trivially easy. 

     The problem is compounded for people who, in addition to not being particularly bright to begin with, wrongly think they are significantly smarter than average, because they will tend to believe that a difficult problem for them (unmasking a lie) would be downright impossible for lesser minds. But it's important to recognize that intelligence isn't a simple linear quantity, and smart people recognize that there's a lot even they don't know; some absolute moron might just happen to know the one crucial fact that shatters an otherwise impenetrable lie. An intelligent person knows that for every way they can imagine their lie being discovered, there are a thousand ways they haven't thought of.

     That's why I say that lying is the strategy of the stupid. The stupid tend to think that it's easy to lie, and of course superficially it is: all you have to do is say something that's not true. But that's the shortcut. Telling a robust, consistent lie that will withstand concerted and intelligent scrutiny? That is ferociously hard.

     And here it's important to point out that the same superficial shortcut applies to the business of rejecting a falsehood. It is also trivially easy to dismiss some claim as a lie or "fake news"; you don't need to consider a shred of evidence. Boom. "Liar!" and you're done. Of course, since you can do this equally well with any claim regardless of its truth or falsehood, it has zero probative value.

     So why do I tend to (somewhat) trust the mainstream media when they report that, for example, Covid-19 is a pandemic that's killed over a million people worldwide in the past year (1.49 million as of this writing)?

     It's not because I think media companies have our best interests at heart or that they somehow find the idea of lying morally repugnant and would never ever dream of doing such an evil thing. True, I tend to think that the majority of people employed in reporting and publishing the news, or in almost any industry, are probably decent human beings who aren't completely diabolical and might balk at the more obvious sins asked of them, but I'm well aware of how decent human beings can be gradually and subtly corrupted by an unjust system, so I have little doubt that mainstream news sources would lie like crazy if they thought it were in their interests to do so and they could get away with it. 

     But that's just it. It isn't in their interests to be caught flagrantly lying. There are, of course, powerful economic interests behind most every news outlet, and there's definitely a bias in what gets covered and what doesn't, and pretty strong spin in how any particular issue is reported, but when it comes to straight up lies? Those can and usually will be revealed somehow, especially given that there are multiple competing news outlets who would just love to discredit each other. If they could. 

     And some "news" outlets do take shortcuts discrediting their competitors, of course. They boast to their viewers that only they can be trusted, that their competitors are just full of lies. Such a lazy shortcut really just discredits them, because it is so lazy and so independent of the truth or falsehood of the claim. 

     I don't buy the claim that mainstream media is just full of lies, because the overall coherence of the stories is just too damned hard to fake. Yeah, there's going to be lots of stuff in the papers that's wrong, misreported or spun, and sometimes just plain lies. That's so with all sources of information (including and perhaps especially the ones decrying everyone else as "fake news"), and there's no getting around the hard work of evaluating and assessing and integrating all the data into a coherent world view. Just tossing the bulk of the data into the box marked "lies" is a lazy shortcut. 

I'm not going to explain why you should care about other people

     I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. So I'm not going to try. Instead, I'm going to ask why I should care that you don't care.

     You don't want to have to pay taxes to support someone whose interests you don't care about? Fine. Why should I care that you don't want to pay taxes? Explain it to me. I get that you don't like to pay taxes. I get that you feel you have some kind of moral right not to be taxed, but so what? Why should I care about what you think your rights are? Why should I care about your interests? 

     The fact is, though, I do care about your interests. I want you to be happy and prosperous, and with as much opportunity to pursue whatever it is that pleases you as possible, subject only to the limitation that I want this for everyone else, too. I'm not going to try to convince you that you should want these things, just that I do. And so given that, can you explain to me why I should care more about your desire not to pay taxes or your desire not to see same-sex couples on TV or whatever else you're all up in arms about than I should care about whatever someone else is all up in arms about?

On the N-word

     Something that one often hears white people complain about is the apparent double standard over who can use the N-word. (I'm not going to spell that word out here, but to make sure that everyone knows what word I'm talking about, I'll say that it derives from "negro", the Spanish/Portuguese word for "black", and involves a lazy vowel shift from a long 'e' to a short 'i', and dropping the final vowel, leaving a lazy 'r' as the final syllable.") 

    The double standard they complain of is that Black people are allowed to use it, but white people aren't. And superficially, you can see why they'd think this was a double standard, and a racist one at that. After all, if the only discriminant on who can do something (whether it be using a word or a water fountain) is the colour of their skin, then gosh darnit that's RACIST! But maybe there's a better way to understand this.  

    Let's look at pronouns, particularly first and second person. These are words which literally change their meaning, depending on who is speaking. When I use the word "I", it actually denotes a different individual from when you use the word. It's the exact same word, but the meaning is different. And if I type the sentence "I am the author of A Blog Of Tom", the sentence is true when I say it but (probably) false when you utter it, unless either you're me or you happen to write your own blog which just happens to have the same title as this one. 

     No one has trouble with this concept, once they master English or any of the hundreds of other languages that have relative pronouns, or indeed words like "here" and "there" or "now" and "then" or "tomorrow" and "yesterday". These words mean different things depending on where or when they are used or who is using them. 

    Well, that's kind of how it is with the N-word. Think of it as a special kind of pronoun. When a Black person uses it, it can have a meaning roughly like "one of us", whereas when a non-Black person uses it, it cannot help but mean "one of them". Of course, unlike basic pronouns, this one has a whole lot of other connotations loaded into it. As "one of us", it is inclusive, hinting at shared understanding and experience; as "one of them" it is inherently exclusive, and implies a sense of disrespect, contempt if not outright hatred. 

    So the answer to the question about who can use the N-word is really this: anyone can. It's like I taught my son when he was very little about profanity: I don't care what words you use, so long as you use them appropriately and correctly. As a white person, I could use the N-word if I wanted to, if the meaning I was trying to express was "those contemptible people". But I don't feel that way, so it would be a lie for me to use the word. And if I tried to use it to express the sense "one of us", no one would read it that way, because as a white person I don't get to use the pronoun "us" to talk about a group I don't belong to.

Here and There

     I've seen this kind of post come across my feed fairly frequently, usually from friends I don't consider at all racist. Here's the most recent specimen, with the text below for the benefit of the search engines:

Welcome

You came here from there because

you didn't like there, and now you

want to change here to be like there.

We are not racist, phobic or anti

whatever-you-are, we simply like

here the way it is and most of us

actually came here because it is

not like there, wherever there was.

You are welcome here, but please

stop trying to make here like there.

If you want here to be like there you

should not have left there to come

here, and you are invited to leave

here and go back there at your

earliest convenience.

 

     So why do I object to this meme? Well, first of course there's the "We are not racist" line, which is kind of a red flag in itself, but that's kind of how this stuff works. You start out with what sounds like a perfectly reasonable position, but there's just enough ambiguity in the terms used that you find yourself agreeing wholeheartedly to one vague interpretation and subtly, perhaps even unconsciously, opening up to the more sinister implications. 

     Here's the benign reading: We don't want peaceful, tolerant, law-abiding, free and prosperous "here" to become violent, intolerant, lawless, war-torn and impoverished "there". And sure, nobody wants that. NOBODY wants that, including most especially the immigrants who choose to come to Canada (and the refugees who have less of a choice). After all, those who choose to come here pretty much unanimously choose Canada because we have a reputation for being peaceful, tolerant and all that other stuff.

     But notice how this plants an idea in your head: that immigrants do want to change "here" to be more like "there". Since no one who comes to live here actually wants us to become the kind of oppressive tyranny/anarchy that we associate with "there", what kinds of changes do they want?

     And here's where it gets offensive, because the kinds of changes to "here" that immigrants do make in their neighbourhoods are things like opening stores and restaurants that cater to their own cultural preferences in music, clothing, food and so on. They put up signage and converse in public in languages we don't understand. They practice strange religions and have strange customs. 

     Oh sure. This is all about culture, though, so it's not racist. We just want to protect our culture; we don't care if someone's skin colour isn't right, so long as they just assimilate in every other meaningful way. Ha ha. How ridiculous, how racist it would be to expect them to change their skin! No, of course, we don't want that! We're just being reasonable here.

     This is a use of "reasonable" that I've talked about before.  Here it's used to downplay the severity of a demand: a less extreme demand is more reasonable than a more extreme one. But that doesn't mean the demand is reasonable in the sense of being the result of reason.

     There is no reason in that sense about cultural preferences. Sure, we can argue about the relative benefits of various cultural practices, and even conclude that some should be avoided or even banned, but we already have a mechanism for that within the common law tradition. And that, ultimately, is what really makes "here" better than "there": our law gives us the freedom to embrace our own cultural preferences, to dress as we like, to speak the languages we prefer, and so on. Demanding that people conform to our cultural preferences is not reasonable in that sense because it is incoherent with the fundamental value of freedom that allows us to indulge our own cultural preferences. What makes Canada a good place to live is not that we have donuts and hockey, but that we can have whatever food or sport we want.

     And those who would demand that immigrants adopt our superficial cultural practices at the expense of that basic freedom? They're the ones who are making "here" more like "there".

A Defunding Thought

     The other day in the shower, I suddenly had what seemed like a crazy idea, but I can't quite dismiss it from my head.

     When someone runs afoul of the criminal law, their first point of contact with the system is almost always the police, and this is necessarily an adversarial, conflict-ridden situation. Why do we do it this way? Obviously if the police are at the scene while a violent conflict is underway and they break up the fight, they're in a position to apprehend the suspect and hold them pending a bail hearing, but as a general procedure, do we actually need to send police to arrest someone as the first step of a criminal case?

     What if, upon investigators deciding to charge someone, before issuing a warrant they were to forward a notice to a defence lawyer, who can approach the accused in a non-threatening context, inform them of their rights and obligations, and make arrangements to respond to the charges?

      * * *

     "Excuse me, Mr. Doe?"

     "Who are you? A cop?"

     "Not at all. I'm a lawyer. Actually, I'm your lawyer for now, unless you already have or decide to hire a different one."

     "Don't need one, and I'm not gonna pay you."

     "You're not expected to pay me. This is one of the things that whole 'defund the police' business is paying for. My job is to advise you of your legal rights and obligations, and to help you through the process. And the first step in that is to inform you that a prosecutor has elected to charge you in connection with an assault alleged to have happened last Friday night outside Roe's Pub."

     "That bastard. He started it."

     "We can talk about the facts and your defense later in my office. Right now, I need you to know that there will be legal proceedings against you, and you are ordered by the court to attend on this date. You should know that if you don't show up, they'll charge you with failure to appear as well. I will be there in any event, and do my best to defend you, but I will not lie for you. And you should know that if you are convicted, the police will be coming for you."

     "They'll have to find me first."

     "Well, I found you."

     "Yeah, but I wasn't hiding."

     "You want to go into hiding for the rest of your life? Look, right now you're merely an accused, presumed innocent until proven guilty. If you don't help me defend you, it's very likely you will be proven guilty, especially if you are guilty of simply failing to show up when commanded to do so. And once you've been convicted, you will be officially a fugitive, and actual arrest warrants will be issued. Moreover, depending on the seriousness of the crime, they may implement other enforcement measures: forfeiting your Basic Income, seizing property. They'll be going to great lengths to make it more costly for you to break the law than to obey it."

     "Hmmm."

     "I know. It's a big decision. As your lawyer, I can only advise you as to what your legal options are, and legally you have no choice but to appear. I can ask the court to reschedule your appearance if this date is impossible for you, but they won't allow it if they think you're just avoiding it."

     "Okay. I'll be there."

     "Great! Now, is there a good time for you in the next week for us to talk about the case?"

     * * *

     Obviously this approach wouldn't be practical in all cases. There are going to be times when someone is apprehended in the middle of a violent crime and needs to be subdued and isolated to protect others. And this model doesn't fully address what I think are serious problems with the basic idea of incarceral justice in the first place. And there are a host of practical complications and considerations that I haven't thought of here (and a bunch of others I've deliberately not included in my example narrative). But it seems to me that the current approach of leading off with coercive force by the police, is a really bad default position to take.

All Mammals Breathe Air!

A: "Cats breathe air."
B: "ALL mammals breathe air!"

     B's statement is true, but unhelpful. It is best understood as a snarky way of saying, "I already know that." The snark is understandable if we assume that A's intention is to inform B of something new, because it's kind of insulting to be presumed not to already know that cats breathe air. Everyone knows that!
     Yes, everyone knows that. And everyone knows that everyone knows that, so it's equally insulting to presume that A doesn't already know that B knows cats breathe air.  So when someone tells you that cats breathe air, they're probably not informing you, but reminding you, calling your attention to one particular piece of common knowledge because it is immediately relevant to the situation at hand. It's one thing to know, in the abstract, that all mammals are air-breathers, but if you've forgotten to punch some holes in that cardboard box before packing Mr. Fluffy into it for a trip to the vet, it's not clear that you've fully grasped the implications of that knowledge.
     Or maybe B is misreading A's statement to mean that only cats breathe air. This is even worse; B is not just assuming that A condescendingly underestimates B's grasp of common knowledge, but that A is shockingly wrong about the common knowledge itself. One would have to be quite perversely deluded indeed to believe that dogs and deer and humans and horses don't need to breathe air, and yet B is presuming that A is just that stupid.

     In both cases, B is essentially attacking a straw man, creating a weak effigy of A's statement to attack rather than making a good faith effort to understand what A actually means. By making the argument about a perceived insult to B's intelligence, B is trying to avoid engaging with the initial statement, which is irrefutably true and actually reinforced by restating the general claim about all mammals. But not all mammals are about to be transported to the vet in a sealed cardboard box; the fact that cats, and this cat in particular, need air is the point that B is obtusely sidestepping, with potentially disastrous consequences for Mr. Fluffy.


   

Why the Conspirators in Paranoid Conspiracy Theories Are So Stupid

     First of all, not all conspiracy theories are stupid. There are actual conspiracies in the world, and therefor there can be legitimate theories about those conspiracies. What I'm talking about here are what we used to call paranoid conspiracy theories, and the reason I'm emphasizing the word "paranoid" is because the paranoid theorist really does think they're out to get him. More specifically, they think that all the evidence against their theory is deliberately concocted as a part of the conspiracy's coverup, an attempt to lead the theorist (and everyone else) astray. To the non-paranoid, a random fact is just a random fact, to be assessed and interpreted impersonally, but the paranoid sees it all as either proof of the conspiracy against them or part of the conspiracy against them.

     So that's the kind of conspiracy theory I'm talking about, the ones that involve vast powerful organizations coordinating some kind of plot that they are able somehow to conceal from everyone but our clever conspiracy theorist, who has somehow seen through the illusions to crack the case. And it's these theories that I claim are pretty much always involve a conspiracy that is remarkably stupid, or at the very least commits some remarkably stupid mistake in execution. Here are just a few examples:

The moon landings were faked to show up the Soviets!
     It's often been pointed out how ridiculously difficult it would be to successfully carry out a faked moon landing. There were about a hundred thousand people involved in the project, and keeping a secret among that many people is just preposterously difficult. But if you really did have the technical and organizational capacity to pull off this kind of massive undertaking, isn't it just a little weird that you'd make the kind of dumb mistakes that some guy can pick out from his couch? Wouldn't you think a professional moon-hoaxing organization would think to include fake stars in the background or to make a flag that didn't ripple in the windless lunar vacuum? Nope. They get tripped up by amateur mistakes that our sharp-eyed conspiracy theorist with no particular training just happens to be smart enough to notice as unusual.

9/11 was an inside job, a controlled demolition to mobilize public support to invade Iraq!
     This conspiracy would be pretty stupid on several levels, not least of which is that if you want to engineer an invasion of Iraq, you don't have to blow up any buildings; all you have to do is make up some story about WMDs. Telling one simple lie is way cheaper and easier than orchestrating a hugely destructive hoax. But hey, let's say that some nefarious conspiracy staged it for some other reason, like to collect on insurance. That conspiracy would still have to be fantastically stupid to make the kinds of mistakes that the conspiracy theorists point to as their evidence of the conspiracy. If some amateur can notice that jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel beams, then presumably the conspirators would also have considered this and chosen something more plausible -- unless, of course, the amateur is just wrong in thinking that steel beams need to be liquified before they'll fail. (A stick of butter right out of the fridge can support considerably more weight than one at room temperature, though both remain solid.)

Big Pharma is concealing the cure to cancer, because it's more profitable to sell treatments than cures!
     There are thousands and thousands of very smart people all over the world working to find cures for cancer, and most of them have loved ones who have died or will die of cancer. Can you imagine just how astoundingly powerful a conspiracy would have to be to get all of these people to cooperate with a coverup? Now, if you had that kind of power and influence, why on earth would you need to even pretend you were selling cancer treatments in the first place, since you could almost certainly do much better for yourself by using that power more directly. It's like Dr. Evil demanding One MILLION dollars; you've got this super futuristic orbital base and a global empire of henchmen, and you're using it to chase a mere million dollars?

Sandy Hook was faked to stir up support for gun control!
     Right. This dreadfully evil cabal intent upon taking away your guns so they can impose martial law and do away with all liberty, hires a bunch of "crisis actors" and coordinates a fake shooting only to be discovered by a sharp-eyed patriot who recognizes the same crisis actors being used for something else. But somehow the cabal isn't quite smart enough to realize they could achieve the same goal with less risk of being caught if they just, you know, manipulated some loser into shooting up a school for real. Or maybe they wouldn't do that because they're not actually so evil after all. Or something.

     I could go on, because there's a whole lot of goofy conspiracy theories out there, but there should be a pretty clear pattern by now: superhumanly competent and powerful and organized conspiracies doing incredibly sophisticated things, but also making really obviously stupid mistakes. The point here isn't that smart people don't make stupid mistakes sometimes, but usually the mistakes they make take some kind of digging to identify, and only really seem stupid in retrospect. Industrial disasters get investigated in great detail by experts who usually have to work very hard to uncover some sequence of subtle but critical failures that all combined to produce a Chernobyl or a Hindenburg. It's usually not some one dumb screwup.

     So why is it that these conspiracies always seem to be simultaneously superhuman in capacity, and embarrassingly stupid at the same time?

     It's because ultimately, the thing that makes a conspiracy theory take root is that it strokes the ego of the conspiracy theorist; it makes them feel smarter than everyone else. The theorist is the one person, or one of the privileged few, smart enough to have seen through the lies of the conspirators, which have fooled everyone else. And so there is a hard limit on how smart the conspirators can be: they must be just not quite as clever as the conspiracy theorist who has unmasked them.
     Notably, the actual organizational details of what the conspirators are actually doing are always glossed over or treated in the abstract. The 9/11 Truther doesn't provide an org chart of who acquired the explosives and who installed them and how they were concealed and how the planes were coordinated; they just say it was done. So they don't really need to conceive of all of the details of the plan, and in this respect there's always a Dunning-Kruger level of incompetence. The theorist has absolutely no idea just how much would be involved in trying to fake a moon landing or conceal a cancer cure, and has no idea even of how little they know about the problems involved. These things are literally easier said than done, and all the theorist has to do is say them.
     Similarly, the clues noticed by the theorist that let them unravel the whole conspiracy are always just simple enough to be detected by the theorist's own expertise/talent, which by the conceits of the theory are necessarily superior to everyone else's. So the Apollo skeptic assumes they know enough about the moon and cameras and optics to be able to accurately predict whether stars should be visible, and that the supposed experts staging the faked moon landings wouldn't know this stuff better. The 9/11 Truther assumes they know enough about demolition to spot the mistakes made by the conspiracy's demolition experts. And so on.
   
     And that's why it's so hard to defeat conspiracy theories with facts and logic, because they're ultimately not about facts and logic. They're about feeling superior, special, enlightened.

Some Scary Thoughts About Viruses

     There was no vaccine for chickenpox when I was a kid in the 1970's, and it was considered inevitable and indeed preferable to catch it as a kid, since it tends to be more serious to catch it as an adult. I remember it as both a novelty and an inconvenience; sure, I itched a bit, but no big deal, and I knew it would go away soon enough. Most people my age have a chickenpox scar or two, but it was really no big deal.
     And that's to be expected in a virus that's been circulating in the human population since forever. There's a principle in evolutionary biology: parasites tend to evolve towards becoming symbiotes over time. That's because parasites eventually need to spread their offspring to new hosts, and if you kill off your host too quickly, you may find it harder to find new hosts to infect (unless you evolve some kind of complex life cycle that involves infecting the animal that eats your current host.) Chickenpox doesn't significantly impact the survivability of the average human child who catches it, so it has plenty of opportunity to infect lots of other human children.
     But humans have immune systems, and quickly fight off chickenpox within a week or so, and in the process learn to recognize the zoster virus so you're typically immune to it for the rest of your life. And this is a bit of a problem for zoster, because if it spreads rapidly through a small group of hunter-gatherers, and then everyone is immune, the virus has no new hosts to infect.
     Zoster has a clever solution, which I learned about last year. See, you don't actually get rid of the virus entirely. Some of them find their way into the nervous system and hide out there for a few decades, and then make their way back down to the skin and appear as a new disease: shingles. This means that the virus has a whole new crop of young people to infect, who were born after the last outbreak ended. And so the virus persists well into the future.

     The virus that causes Covid-19, named SARS-cov-2, had been circulating among some population of bats for a long time, but it only entered the human population about five months ago. That means we have no idea whatsoever what its long term effects are. Most people only suffer a minor cold-like infection and get over it -- we think. Many people have had it and recovered -- we think. But we just don't know what's going to happen one or ten or thirty years after exposure. The initial infection with HIV is very much like coming down with the flu, and clears up after a week or so and is forgotten, but then can take ten years or more before it damages the immune system enough to develop into AIDS. For all we know, people who've "recovered" from Covid-19 might suddenly start dropping dead of mysterious blood clots, six months after getting the all clear. There have, after all, been reports of higher rates of strokes and heart attacks, and strange blood concentrations in the toes of young people; the virus does seem to be having some kind of effect besides just causing respiratory problems.

     For that matter, maybe they develop superhuman endurance and a ravenous hunger for human brains, and this is the start of the zombie apocalypse for real.

     Now, I don't think that's likely at all. I'm not a biologist or a physician or an epidemiologist, but I suspect that we probably won't see too much in the way of unexpected long-term effects from the virus. But the point is that we just don't know right now.
     If we assume that Covid-19 is just a really, really bad cold that kills 1-2% of the people who catch it, then you can sort of make the argument that once we've had enough people get sick and recover, the health care system can handle anyone who gets infected later when we ease all the mask wearing and social distancing rules. We haven't reached the point where that's a good idea yet, but you can make the argument.
     But I argue that since we do not know what else this virus may do in the long run, we should therefore be a little more cautious about opening everything up than we would be if we knew this was just a very bad cold. Spreading out the infections over a longer time is better than having them all at once, even if everyone is eventually infected, but it's still better yet never to be infected at all, especially with such a new and poorly-understood virus. So I urge patience. Let's beat this thing.

Exit Strategy: Take the Money and Run

     The oil industry has been a big deal here in Alberta for decades; our two NHL teams are the Oilers and the Flames, and while the latter started out as the Atlanta Flames (named for the burning of Atlanta during the Civil War), they kept the nickname when they moved to Calgary because it was evocative of the flare stacks you see at oil refineries. And our provincial government has long been increasingly friendly to oil interests, to the point where it's fair to say they govern for their exclusive benefit.
     For example, for many years the provincial Conservative Party had set the royalty rates on oil and gas at below the market value recommended by independent economists. They also were very lax about enforcing rules on setting aside money to clean up abandoned oil wells, so it's been a common practice for wells to be operated by small throwaway corporations who conveniently go bankrupt before having to properly rehabilitate spent well sites. Alberta has thousands of orphan wells, with an estimated cleanup cost in the tens of billions, according to this CBC story.

    The corruption and entitlement of the Conservative Dynasty reached a peak in 2015, when there was just enough anger among the electorate (and division among conservative factions) to allow the New Democratic Party to form a government. They had a steep learning curve, but they were doing a pretty good job starting to repair the damage. But the old Progressive Conservative party and the Wild Rose Party merged to form the United Conservative Party and, with a very well-funded campaign vilifying the NDP, managed to retake a majority in the provincial legislature.

    I had thought, at the time, that their long term game plan would stay the same: pander to the oil companies for as long as they can, and if worse comes to worst and their opponents get elected, blame all of the long-term damage from their own policies on the four years of their opponents trying to fix that damage, and get re-elected to continue oil service.
    But lately that has shifted in a very sinister way. The very first thing the UCP did when they won the provincial election last year was announce a major business tax cut, ostensibly to help create jobs.  (It did not have that effect. Husky Oil, one of the bigger beneficiaries of the reduced taxes, announced layoffs shortly afterwards.) And the UCP has been making truly devastating cuts to education and health care (yes, even health care, in the middle of a pandemic). And just last week, a government pension fund lost $4 billion on an unusually risky investment.

    I don't think this is business as usual. I think what's happening is that the oil companies are recognizing that oil isn't coming back. Investment in and demand for sustainable alternative sources of energy continues to grow, while fossil fuels are becoming at the very least unfashionable. And the pandemic is, among other things, getting people talking about how blue the skies are and how maybe we don't need to fly or drive everywhere quite so much. This will pass, and -$35 a barrel oil futures are almost certainly an anomaly, but the future just doesn't look all that rosy for the oil industry, and they know it.
     So what would you do, if you realized that your long term prospects for extracting wealth from the ground were effectively at an end? The sensible-self-interested strategy would be to liquidate all the assets you could from your oil-production business and get the hell out. Abandon your spent wells and leave someone else to pay for cleaning them up, but on a much bigger scale.

     How big a scale? How about a whole province? For decades, it was worthwhile to keep Alberta functioning as an advanced oil-extraction support system. They needed smart engineers and geologists and technicians, and so it was worth it to spend money on education, and on a robust health care system to support the work force. But now, with the future of oil in doubt, investing in all these other things doesn't really benefit the oil interests. That's why the UCP is making such drastic cuts to everything, while dumping as much money into "supporting" the oil industry as possible. But those subsidies aren't going to attract new investment in developing Alberta's oil resources. It's part of the process of draining as much value out of the asset as possible while they still can, that asset being the provincial government itself. It's time for them to take the money and run.

     It's not that Premier Jason Kenny and his cabinet are unaware that their policies will leave Alberta in a desperate mess when their term is over and they face another election. It's that they don't care. They may still have enough financial backing from the oil industry to hang on for another election, but even if they don't, they know they're in the endgame already. If they lose the next election, then the mess they've made will be someone else's problem. That was the plan all along.

More on the Coerciveness of the Law

     A friend asked me for my thoughts on this article, and I wrote a reply and posted it with a vague sense of deja vu. Turns out what I was typing to them was almost exactly the same argument I offered in this blog post.

     But on rereading it and thinking about it, I realize there's a bit more I wanted to say about Professor Carter's argument, because there's something a bit misleading about it. Indeed, I think it's dead wrong on one level. Here's the passage I mean:

On the first day of law school, I tell my Contracts students never to argue for invoking the power of law except in a cause for which they are willing to kill. They are suitably astonished, and often annoyed. But I point out that even a breach of contract requires a judicial remedy; and if the breacher will not pay damages, the sheriff will sequester his house and goods; and if he resists the forced sale of his property, the sheriff might have to shoot him.

     To begin with, I agree with Professor Carter about the seriousness of invoking the power of law. Every law is by definition a constraint upon someone's freedom, and we should be very reluctant to impose such constraints without good reason. As I've written many times before in this blog, the only reason that justifies such limits on freedom is that, on the balance, the law should make us more free than we would be without it; we invest some freedom here to enjoy greater freedoms elsewhere.
     And Professor Carter is correct that enforcement of the law, even in a civil contract dispute, may ultimately end up involving violence. I could quibble that the sheriff, behaving lawfully, would not shoot the breacher for non-violent resistance, but the sad fact is that sheriffs and police officers also behave unlawfully sometimes, and use unwarranted force. And so there is always the possibility that invoking the power of the law could result in an escalation to violence.

     But that is where I think his argument is dead wrong, because the risk of escalation to violence is not some special danger peculiar to law, but an inherent feature of human conflict. It's always possible that the person you're dealing with -- or an ally acting on your behalf -- might get violent, and so the caution that one should only invoke the power of law when willing to kill is misplaced. If you're in a contract dispute with the kind of person who is likely to violently resist lawful execution of a lawful judgment, then you're also dealing with someone who is likely to violently resist any other attempts you might make to vindicate your rights, whether or not you invoke the power of the law.

     Let me back up a bit, though, because I want to make a distinction between Law and the law, and it's analogous to the difference between Science and the science. It always annoys me a bit when someone says "Science says Bigfoot doesn't exist" or "According to science, global warming is real," not because of whether I agree or not with the claim itself, but because Science doesn't say any such thing. Science isn't some authoritative canon of facts; it is a process for evaluating whether or not any particular theory about the world is consistent with the world.
     But saying "According to the science, Bigfoot doesn't exist" is fine, because "the science" reads as shorthand for "the results of the science we have done on this particular question so far", a tacit acknowledgment that while the science we have done so far leads to the current conclusion, there may be other science yet to do that supersedes it. 

     Like Science, Law is not some canonical body of obligations, but rather a process. Specifically, Law is a process of dispute resolution, where the parties to a dispute present their evidence and arguments to a disinterested decision-maker, who considers their arguments and decides by applying generally accepted principles. These generally accepted principles, by the way, are often called the law, and I want to suggest here that this is just like the science, in that the current consensus on what rights and obligations exist is a result of the law-ful process we've done on the issue so far, not necessarily the final definitive pronouncement of Law Itself. Since Law is fundamentally a dispute resolution method, and there can be disputes about what the law should be, that can change. Statutes are struck down as unconstitutional, old precedents are overturned as values and understandings change. This is all part of how Law works. Law does nothing more and nothing less than resolve disputes.
     (It's worth noting that in the ordinary course of things, Law also prevents disputes, because most of the time people have a pretty good idea of how a court will decide, and act accordingly. So, for example, people who might otherwise be tempted to breach a contractual promise choose not to, because they know they'll almost certainly lose if it goes to trial.)

     All right, so maybe capital L-Law isn't coercive or violent, but what about the law, the various rules that may be in force at any given time? What about Professor Carter's example of the potentially violent consequences of enforcing a civil judgment? Or more to the point, what about the outright threat of imprisonment or even capital punishment that is supposed to deter people from defying the criminal law? How is that not a coercive use of violence?

     At first glance, it certainly looks like one: "Don't do that, or we'll lock you up." And indeed, it's very useful for certain people to think of it that way, to see imprisonment as a consequence of criminal activity. And that "or else!" formula is exactly what coercion is all about, so it's quite naturally to think of the law as coercive. But it's a mistake to attribute that coercion to the law, because coercion is a background fact about nature, quite independent of the existence of Law. Laws can only constrain options, not create them (except by pruning away other options that interfere with their practical exercise).
     Law does not empower the state to use violence against you. In lawless states, they have no trouble at all using violence. Rather, in rule-of-law countries, Law generally prohibits the state from punishing you, except when certain narrowly defined conditions are met. (Usually, those conditions include the requirement that the state prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you are guilty of some transgression.)
     So again, even in criminal matters, Law is simply a process of dispute resolution. The prosecutor wants the accused to be locked up, and the accused wants to be set free. Both parties are given the opportunity to present their evidence and argument, and the court decides. If there's no dispute, there's no trial; either the prosecutor declines to bring charges (and the court isn't involved at all), or the accused pleads guilty, and the court's involvement is mostly ceremonial, giving a formal assent to the joint sentencing submission. (Mostly. Sometimes the judge wants to impose a harsher sentence than the prosecutor recommends. But in such cases, the judge can be thought of as trying to consider the interests of people not present but who could could be expected to dispute the sentence. Again, no dispute, no need to involve the court.)

     I argue, then, that Law is not itself coercive at all, because all the coercion that exists is independent of law. All Law does is decide when coercion should be allowed, ideally with an eye to minimizing the total amount of coercion and maximizing freedom. The natural world is one in which we humans can and do coerce each other in many ways, and prohibiting the state from any coercion means permitting individuals and groups to engage in coercion with impunity. It's a difficult balance, to be sure, and doomed to imperfection. But the perfect is, after all, the enemy of the good.