The Zen of Rhetoric: Avoid the Bias Card

    "According to a study in Respected Peer-Reviewed Journal, use of Type A widgets is effective in lowering the risk of Bad Stuff."
    "Respected Peer-Reviewed Journal? It's probably biased."

     Rhetoric is the art and skill of argumentation, analogous in some ways to martial arts in personal combat. Skill at rhetoric enables one to win arguments more often, and to defend one's positions more effectively, and we can think of winning an argument as being analogous to winning a fight (though I will argue later that this is the wrong way to look at it.) As with martial arts, there are some flashy moves that amateurs like to use, but in reality are almost never tactically sound. The accusation of bias is one of them.

     It's easy to see why this would be so tempting to use. It looks, at first glance, like a devastating offensive maneuver. With one simple claim, you seem to disarm your opponent completely, depriving her of all the evidence upon which her opinion rests. Bam! Game over! What choice does she have now, but to accept your position as correct?
     But in fact it's a clumsy and amateurish move that does more harm to your own credibility than that of the opponent. You cannot raise the issue of bias without calling your own objectivity into question. And when that happens, you're at a disadvantage, because you've already demonstrated an eagerness to discount unfavourable evidence the instant it looks like it might be unfavourable.
     Worse, you surrender any realistic hope of convincing your opponent when you play the bias card, because you undermine the very basis upon which convincing happens. If evidence and reason can be arbitrarily dismissed as "biased" because it supports one side or the other, then what reason is there for your opponent to accept any evidence or reason whatsoever? At best, the bias card is a scorched-earth defensive weapon; it allows you to avoid being convinced by your opponent, but that's all it does.

     However, I want to argue that it's even worse than that, because a true rhetorical warrior's objective is paradoxically not to win arguments, but to lose them, and by taking a step that makes it impossible to lose an argument, you make it impossible to succeed at rhetoric.
     The true rhetorical warrior is seeks not to convince his opponent, but rather, seeks to be convinced by her. True victory is to be persuaded, genuinely and honestly, to adopt a new opinion. It is no good conceding prematurely, pretending to be convinced by weak arguments or trickery. He must be sincerely convinced, satisfied by his opponent's logic and evidence, that he ought to adopt her claims. To that end, he presents his objections not in an attempt to refute her, but to help her understand the obstacles to convincing him in the hopes that she may overcome them.
     To be persuaded is a victory, because it enables one to improve one's understanding of the world by abandoning an understanding that is demonstrably flawed. "Winning" an argument, in contrast, profits one little, however gratifying it might be to one's vanity. The rhetorical warrior who understands this, then, would never try to play the bias card, because there is nothing to be gained by playing it.

The Morning People and the Night People

     The morning people and the night people never could see eye to eye. At last they decided to try to work out a compromise, so they each picked a representative and told them to work out a way that we could all live together in peace, and to be ready to implement it by noon the next day.
     The morning person got an early start, and began preparing a list of possible proposals, and at noon, when the night person was awake and ready to work, they began the negotiations.
     It did not go well. The morning person would propose a schedule with an early start to the day, which would invariably be rejected by the night person, who wouldn't even listen seriously to the morning person's arguments, which the night person thought were just rationalizations made up on the spot to justify the morning person's ridiculous proposal. After all, the night person assumed (as night people are wont to do) that the morning person was just a slightly-earlier-in-the-evening person, and didn't realize that the morning person had actually been up for many hours, thinking very carefully about her arguments.
      It was thus a very frustrating afternoon for the morning person. They haggled and haggled for hours, each arguing passionately for why it was healthier or more efficient or morally superior to get up or go to bed at this time or that time. At last, as the morning person was growing too sleepy to continue, they tentatively agreed to an imperfect compromise to submit as their solution, if they couldn't come up with something better by the deadline. They wrote down the provisional schedule, and the morning person went to bed.
     The night person, however, stayed up pondering. She considered all the arguments that the morning person had offered for an early start, and realized that most of them were actually valid, and she began to appreciate that morning people really do get up very early in the morning, not just a few minutes earlier than night people do. She regretted dismissing the morning person's arguments as mere rationalizations. But she also realized that her own arguments for sleeping in late and working after the sun set were equally sensible. Unfortunately, the compromise solution they had drawn up ignored all of these very good reason reasons, and gave only the worst of both worlds. It was a terrible approach, now that she thought about it.

     And then, suddenly, it hit her. There was a way to design a schedule for living that would give both sides everything they wanted and more. Morning people would be able to make the most of their early-morning vigor and productivity, and night people would be able to maximize their own momentum, getting things done efficiently, and everyone would be able to achieve and share their greatest creativity, regardless of when they naturally went to bed. The idea she came up with was very simple, but very subtle, and would take a lot of work to get just right, or it wouldn't work at all. She picked up a pencil and a ream of paper, and dove in.
      It was 4:30 in the morning when she finished. She had checked and rechecked her work, and satisfied herself that it was as close to the ideal solution as any human mind could generate. Smiling wearily, she tore up the no longer needed compromise solution, wrote a quick note to explain what she had done, tidied up and went to bed.

    An hour later, the morning person finished brushing her teeth and scowled at the lazy night person, snoring loudly in a corner. She still resented not being taken seriously for most of the previous day's argument, and assumed (as morning people are wont to do) that the night person was really just a later-in-the-morning person, and had probably gone to bed only a few minutes later than she had herself. The morning person picked up the note on the table, and looked it over, unimpressed. A brand new schedule, slapped together hastily after she'd gone to bed? That can't be serious! And it's got some people sleeping through most of the day! Did the night person not pay any attention at all to her arguments for why it's better to get up early? And she'd even thrown away the compromise!
     Fortunately, the noon deadline was still several hours away. The morning person poured herself a cup of coffee and got to work, drafting up a proper schedule that would have people waking up and working when they were supposed to wake up and get to work, one that didn't cater to the lazy, shiftless people who spend all their time sleeping and leave everyone else to do all the work. She finished it at 11:30, with half an hour to spare thanks to her bright and early start, and put it into the envelope to be submitted, and looked again over at the night person, still sleeping in the corner. Shaking her head with contempt, she went off to submit the solution.

     And that is why we all have to be at school at 8:00 in the morning.

Too Short; Didn't Think

     I just visited a discussion forum, and saw a thread that was 15 pages long, but I only looked at the last posting to it and noticed that it was more than a whole screen of text. Since I hadn't read any of the prior posts, I had no idea what the context was, but why should I spend my valuable time reading?
     I also didn't pay any attention to simple clues about the discussion. Since I didn't skim any of the previous posts, I didn't noticed that there had been a lot of dialogue in the days leading up to that final posting, and that several days had passed since the final post, suggesting either that the final post had put to rest much of the argument, or that it was so stupid as to make everyone else give up and abandon the thread. If this had occurred to me, I might have resolved the question by noticing that the final post had a respectable number of up-votes from readers, suggesting that this one final post had probably been a satisfactory wrap up to the thread to that point.
     I just didn't want to read so much text. It would take too much of my time. It never crossed my mind that it must have taken the author at least as much time to write as it takes me to read. I just thought it was inconsiderate of the author to put a big pile of text on the screen and not just tell me in a simple sentence or two what it meant. Of course, since I hadn't read the entire thread, I had no way of knowing that the author and others had done just that, many times, in the previous posts, and that the short versions had been unsuccessful in persuading the other participants to the debate. I didn't realize that the big long post I saw was an attempt to explain in minute detail exactly why those shorter versions were to be accepted.
     It's possible that, had I read the entire thread, I would have understood these things. But that would have involved taking the time to read and think, and I've got better things to do. So I'll just helpfully post as a comment, "TL;DR". Everyone needs to know that I can't be bothered to read.

Externalities

     Last week, I spent several hours trying to help my mother perform what ought to be a fairly simple function: transferring files from a CD-ROM to her iPad. This turns out to be surprisingly difficult, thanks to the Digital Rights Management paradigm around which the iPad and, increasingly, computers generally are built. A device like an iPad is presumed to be tied to a particular computer, and so the songs and other things you've bought on your laptop are conveniently and automatically shared with your iPad. But to prevent piracy, there are barriers to sharing files with someone else's computer.

     So, all I wanted to do was use the CD drive on my laptop to move the files from the CD to my mother's iPad, but a dialogue box warned me that the syncing process would delete photos on my mother's device that weren't present on my laptop. We were eventually able to move the files over, but it took a long time and was ridiculously inconvenient.

     Okay, I understand intellectual property law, and the rationale for copyright, and why it's important to provide a means for creators to earn a living from their works. I get that, I really do. I don't agree with the calculations of how much the music and film industries lose to piracy every year, which are absurdly inflated and self-serving, but I'm sympathetic to the plight of the starving artist. I really am. 

     But really, is copyright law the best we can come up with? Are these barriers to copying really justified? Because those barriers impose costs on people, and not just the people who ought to be paying. 

     If you've taken economics, you're probably familiar with the term "externality", which just refers to any cost (or benefit) that doesn't show up on the balance sheet of the economic actor in question. The classic textbook example of an externality is the pollution from a factory. The factory owner's costs of production are the cost of the land and the factory itself, the raw materials used, the machinery, and the labour to run it, but the cost of pollution (quantifiable as reduced property values, additional health care costs, diminished agricultural yields, etc.) is imposed on someone else. 

     Factories may be necessary, but the exclusion of externalities from their accounting greatly distorts the appraisal of their economic value. You can't argue that a factory is efficient because it's profitable if it's being subsidized by everyone who has to put up with the pollution it emits; you have to take into account all the costs (and benefits; there are positive externalities as well) of an activity before you can trust in the validity of the Invisible Hand's market results.

     Now, I'm not arguing here that intellectual property rights should be abolished. (I feel sure there must be a better solution, but at the moment I'm at a loss to provide one.) But I am arguing that the copyright as it is currently applied imposes significant externalities on people who aren't pirating anything. The files on that CD-ROM my mother wanted to look at were sent to her by their creators for her to review; there was no violation of copyright at all involved. And yet, to protect the rights of a relatively small subset of copyright holders (i.e. those represented by traditional publishing and media companies), the iPad was built to make it difficult to transfer any files outside of the commercial paradigm. 

     The inconvenience of copying perfectly legitimate files is only one of the costs we pay to protect the interests of copyright holders. There are countless others, from the trivial (why can't I skip past watching that same FBI anti-piracy warning on a DVD? How many person-seconds has that wasted?) to the absurd (why can't I watch the original WKRP in Cincinnati episodes with the original music? Is anyone seriously going to use that show to listen to snippets of popular songs without paying for them?) to the genuine stifling of creative contributions to the world's cultures (Was anyone going to read The Wind Done Gone and decide they didn't need to read Gone With The Wind or see the movie now that they knew how it ended?)

     All of these costs are imposed upon you and me and the rest of the world. There may be good reasons for imposing them, but we still end up paying them, and paying them involuntarily. That basic fact undermines the media industries' attempts to claim the moral high ground. They are trying very hard to make us all accept the idea that unauthorized copying of things is stealing, and there's some moral validity to that. But I just had three hours of my time "stolen" trying to copy something the owner actually wanted me to copy. If the recording industry wants people to recognize and sympathize with their losses to unauthorized copying, this is probably the wrong way to go about it.

The Good News about Bad News

     Marshall McLuhan famously remarked that while we don't know who discovered water, it probably wasn't the fish. I want to say something about the good news that we don't notice in the background of horrible events such as the shooting in Aurora last week, because we are so deeply immersed in the good news that we don't even recognize it as significant.
     The good news is that these shootings are news at all. We are shocked and horrified and saddened by these events, and rightly so, for they are shocking and horrifying and sad, but we are also shocked because they are, for the most part, unusual. True, they happen much more often than we'd like; every few months some pathetic loser thinks he can bring meaning to his life through some spectacular orgy of violence. But that's not really so often, when you think about it on a global scale. It's rare enough that it makes the news if it happens anywhere in the developed world.

     Think what things were like a thousand years ago. Whole villages were massacred in Viking raids, but the news spread slowly, and even if there had been a global satellite network to share information instantly around the world, it wouldn't have been broadcast anyway, because no one cared. It wasn't news, anymore than a fatal car accident in Toronto attracts the attention of strangers in Buenos Aires; they have their own fatal car accidents to be worried about. "A village 20 miles away was slaughtered in a raid? Oh, yeah, that happened to my cousin six years ago." And compared to the level of violence that was commonplace in those days, for 12 people to die in one incident would have been quite unremarkable, except perhaps to those who actually knew any of the victims.

     Even a hundred years ago, violence was far more common than it is today. Less than that, even; I happened to catch a snippet of an old Flintstones episode where Fred was trying to bully Barney into going along with some scheme or other, menacing him with a fist. I was actually a little shocked; our cultural sensitivities towards casual violence have changed so much.
     We no longer accept violence as an appropriate way to resolve our differences. Well, that's not completely true; we still glorify it in TV and movies, and people talk about how they'd love to punch or shoot some person or other, but for the most part, we reject it as a dispute resolution mechanism. If you have a problem with someone today, you are expected to talk it out, resolve it peacefully, and if that fails, sue. In the past, however, violence was viewed as a perfectly natural and even appropriate way of getting what you wanted. Not getting enough from farming, fishing and hunting? Well, raid a neighbouring village or tribe.

     To be sure, there are still lots of people who resort to violence. But the spectacular shootings that make the news every so often have a different kind of motive. These are not people robbing banks or trains, trying to take economic resources by force. These are typically dissatisfied and unfulfilled losers looking for fame and notoriety. They want to be able to think of themselves as important and powerful, and I suppose they want our help and that of the press to reinforce that. But the point here is that shocking acts of violence get them that attention, and why? Because violence is no longer commonplace; it is rare enough today that it actually does shock us.
     That is the good news. This kind of violence happens in part because other kinds of violence don't happen so much anymore. In a way, it's a symptom of success. Human society may always have some level of violence, and if we're getting to the point where some of that violence is due to the very fact that we find violence unusual, I think that in the big picture, that's something to be thankful for.

     But it can be better. I think that if we were to recognize violence not as something evil, scary and mysterious, but perfectly mundane and distasteful, we could remove some of the reason for this kind of shooting. Decent people will handle feces if they must (changing diapers, cleaning up after a pet, maintenance of plumbing, etc.) but there's nothing mysterious or heroic about it, and we all try to avoid it as much as possible. Someone who runs into a movie theatre and flings poo at the audience is not viewed with awe as a supervillain, but with contempt. If we could somehow replace our fear of violence with contempt, then maybe these attention-cravers will find a more constructive way to get their fifteen minutes.

Homophobia: My Excuse

     It's very fashionable to condemn homophobia these days, but I don't think anyone has ever clearly articulated the very good reasons why some of us are terrified by homosexuality. Not all of us, of course, but not all of us have as much to lose.

     It's all very well for ordinary people to be tolerant. They have nothing to fear at all. They can just live and let live, because whether or not someone is gay really doesn't affect how they can get along. It's none of their business.

     But me, I'm a very handsome man. I'm unspeakably charming, witty and just generally attractive beyond all description. So naturally, if homosexuality is to be openly accepted, I'm going to have men hitting on me all the time. ALL THE TIME. You just don't know what it's like, if you're not as stunning as I am, and you probably aren't.

     This is more than a mere inconvenience. If it were simply a matter of saying "No, thank you," and being done with it, then I'd be fine with it, as simply part of the cost of being so fabulous. We all have our burdens to bear, after all. But as we know from movies and novels, it's never simply a matter of just saying no and being done with it. No, as a general rule, we know that once a man sets his sights on a woman (or a man, I assume, though I haven't seen a lot of movies where a man chases a man romantically), he just has to be persistent, and in the end the girl will realize she's in love with him, and they'll live happily ever after. As the cliché goes, her lips may say no, but her eyes say yes. Eventually, anyway. Right?
     Oh, sure. I'm heterosexual, not sexually interested in men at all. The idea of being intimate with a man in that way, well, it even kind of creeps me out a little, no offense intended. But if you pay attention to the movies, that's not really much of a factor. The woman often starts out even being actively disgusted by the man, but over time she is no match for his relentless, determined pursuit. And in fact, it even helps if he's kind of unpleasant in a way, if his charm is unconventional and hard to perceive. It's just a matter of time before she discovers that he's the man she's always wanted, even if she never thought she wanted a man at all. And so, well, I think I don't want a man, and I'm even pretty sure of it, but I don't think there's a defence against romantic persistence. Not in any of the movies or novels I've seen, anyway. Eventually he'll win me over in spite of myself, and I really don't want that to happen.

     So you see, the reason I'm so frightened of homosexuality is because, like many homophobes,  I'm such a delightfully attractive and wonderful human being. And we let you know we're homophobes because otherwise you'd have no way whatsoever of knowing how intensely desirable we are.

Streaking and Peeking: A Paradox of Privacy

     Here's something that always used to puzzle me. If I get a ladder and climb up to peer in your second-floor bedroom window to watch you changing your clothes, I commit an offense against you. Yet if I'm walking down the sidewalk, and you appear there nude, you commit a offense against me. In each case, the same thing happens: I see you naked. Yet in the first instance, I'm the bad guy, and in the second, you are.

     I don't deny the moral intuitions here. I do feel that intruding on someone's privacy is wrong, and so peering through someone's bedroom window ought to be condemned. I am less comfortable treating public nudity as a criminal offence, but there is some logic to things. In our culture, at least, there is embarrassment all around when one person sees another person nude in all but a few contexts. The difference between these two cases is whose wilful act instigates the embarrassing incident.

     But I think it's worth paying some attention to how privacy seems to work in things like this, and why we are usually embarrassed when it's violated. Rationally speaking, there really ought not to be anything embarrassing about using a toilet. It's not as if it's a secret; as the title of the book says, everybody poops. Similarly, everyone has a nude body under their clothes. Almost everyone has some kind of sexuality, as well. So the privacy interest can't really be about preventing other people from knowing these shocking truths. And yet, it would undeniably be a violation of my privacy for you to walk into my bathroom while I'm taking a perfectly ordinary shower. And likely you would feel embarrassed as well, inadvertently walking in like that.
     It seems to me that the realm of privacy is not exactly one of secrecy as such, but of polite ignorance, so to speak. You know I poop, and I know you poop. But unless we are very intimate with each other, it's very awkward for both of us to have concrete images of each other engaged in that perfectly normal biological exercise. We don't need to know the details, and it's unseemly and undignified to be interested in them. That's why I'd be embarrassed to walk in on you in the bathroom. I don't wish to appear as if I am interested in such things.

     I found myself reflecting on this while reading the Supreme Court's decision in R. v. Butler. In that case, the Court articulated that the test for obscenity is "concerned not with what Canadians would not tolerate being exposed to themselves, but what they would not tolerate other Canadians being exposed to."


     Ah, so close, I thought! There's one little distinction that I feel they missed. Is it that I wouldn't tolerate someone else being exposed to something, or is it that I wouldn't tolerate knowing that someone else is exposed to it? I don't have a problem with you going to the bathroom; I just don't want to know the details. I would prefer to remain politely ignorant of it, because it is none of my business, and ought not to be made such. Likewise, I don't really care what your sexual fetishes are or what kind of pornography you may be interested in, but I'd really rather not know what turns you on (unless we're very intimate). 
     And so here's the paradox. If we treat obscenity as something we won't tolerate other people being exposed to, then it becomes the state's business to inquire into what they're being exposed to. But the thing that makes me object to what other people look at is precisely that I don't think it's my business and I don't want to know. So investigating and prosecuting obscenity simply exacerbates the problem for me. There's no dignified way for me (whether directly myself or collectively through the state) to concern myself with your private matters. I feel that to intrude on your privacy through obscenity legislation is just as degrading to me as it would be were I to be caught hiding a closed-circuit camera in your bedroom.


     So, I feel ashamed for the moralizing prudes who go on crusades against pornography. I felt ashamed for, well, pretty much the whole of the U.S. Congress when they became so profoundly interested in President Clinton's privately sleazy behaviour. I feel ashamed for those who are expressing outrage that a Manitoba Queen's Bench Justice has a sex life. And I feel ashamed when I see gossip magazines in the checkout line, boasting about the intimate details of celebrity's lives revealed within. These are things are none of our business, and not only should we not be interested in them; we should be studiously, politely ignorant of them when they are revealed to us.


     Last week, an image was being circulated on Facebook, ostensibly by some honourable fellow who had rebuffed some woman's indiscreet advances to him while her brave husband was off at war. "Make her famous" said the caption. And some people joined in, in righteous indignation, forwarded it to help the shameless disloyal slut get her richly deserved public embarrassment. Yet I felt immediately ashamed for those forwarding it, not because it turned out to be a hoax, but because they were showing a disgraceful and inappropriate interest in someone else's private life, just as if they'd climbed up a ladder to peer in a window.


     Decorum, people, decorum.

Open Letter to Losers, or People Who Fear They May Be Losers

     It's happened twice in recent weeks, but it's not really anything new. We hear in the news of some shocking act of violence or depravity, and as the facts emerge we learn that the culprit had Tweeted or posted on Facebook about how soon everyone would be talking about them, or some other such nonsense. It's a little hard for me to fathom, but there are apparently people out there who think that being famous would be some kind of a good thing. Not being famous myself, and thus not having been able to compare fame to non-fame first hand, I may not be an authority, but I can't say I've ever really seen the appeal of fame for its own sake.
     But you may differ. Maybe you do want to be famous. Maybe you want strangers to know your name, to pay attention to you, to turn some portion of their consciousness and memory into a monument to you. In other words, you care what these people think. And so maybe you think they will be impressed if you carry out some notorious crime.

     Well, actually, no. First of all, no one will be impressed if you don't get away with it. And getting away with serious crimes, at least, crimes serious enough to make you famous, is considerably harder than you may think. Take armed robbery, for example. If all you're looking for is fame, this'll likely get you into the headlines for a while, but don't get into it for the money. You see, if you want the money, you have to get away with it, and it takes either a whole lot of brains or a whole lot of luck to do that.

      Now, you may think you're smart enough. But here's a handy test: Can you think of other, easier and safer ways to make more money and fame? If your answer is no, then sorry, you're not smart enough to plan an execute a successful armed robbery.

     Okay, so maybe you think you're lucky enough. But there's also a handy test for that. Have you been lucky enough to possess all the fame and wealth you want? No? Then you're not lucky enough to get away with it. (Also, if you think you can rely on being due for some luck, then you're definitely not smart enough to get away with it.)

     So if that's your plan, to go do an armed robbery or some other wanton act of violence to get famous, well, you're gonna fail. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, you'll get caught because you did something stupid. Chances are, it'll be something you thought was clever and would help you escape, like putting your mother's license plate on your truck to outwit those poor befuddled police. And then, yeah, you'll be famous for a while. You'll make the news.
     But people won't be impressed. They'll be gaping in awe at how incredibly stupid you were. Or they'll be morally outraged at your senseless acts of violence. In any event, they will not be thinking very highly of you.

     Okay, okay, maybe you don't care what they think, so long as it's about you in some way. Maybe you don't mind if they're thinking your an evil monster, if they're hating you and wishing you dead, just so long as they're acknowledging you exist somehow. Maybe you're just so desperate for attention that you're willing to be an object of hatred, if only they'd just please please please pay some attention to you. In other words, maybe you're just that much of a loser.
     Well, that's a harsh word. Unfortunately, it's kind of apt. I don't mean you're a loser just because you want people to pay attention. Everyone needs a little attention once in a while. But someone so desperate for acknowledgment that they're willing to debase themselves with depraved acts of violence and cruelty, just to get people to look at them? That is a loser. Your value as a human being is worth more than that, and throwing it away for fifteen minutes of fame is to lose. And doing something stupid to be famous doesn't make you stop being a loser. It just advertises to the world that you are, in fact, a loser and now you're just famous for being a loser.

     See, here's the other thing. That fifteen minutes of fame? That's pretty much all you're getting. Sure, you may dominate a few news cycles. You may try to milk it for more at your trial. But we're going to get bored of you, and forget, and move on to other things more worthy of our immediate or lasting attention. The families of your victims will remember you, vaguely, with anger and resentment, but mainly they'll remember the loved ones you took from them. Maybe they'll harbour a lasting hatred, but that's just the hatred of a few individuals, and that's not fame. You can get the lasting contempt of a few individuals much more cheaply than spending your life in prison.

     But the masses? Here's how we'll think of you, a few weeks after you fade from the media spotlight. We won't. Once in a while, someone might mention your crime ("Remember a couple of years ago, when that guy shot those people?"), probably without mentioning or even remembering your name. Chances are he'll confuse it with some other crime. ("No, no no, he was that cannibal guy! No, the other one, the guy they caught barking like a dog.")  But as a person, you will be mostly forgotten within your own lifetime. 25 years from now, your parole board will probably never have heard of you before reading the file, but don't think that means they'll let you out.

    Want to be known? Know yourself, and be worth knowing.