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.
Tuesday, 2 June 2020
Thursday, 21 May 2020
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.
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.
Sunday, 3 May 2020
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.
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.
Friday, 24 April 2020
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.
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.
Thursday, 2 April 2020
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:
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.
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.
Thursday, 21 November 2019
Writing
I started this blog for a couple of reasons. The main one, of course, was that I wanted to share my thoughts on things that interest me with anyone who cared to read what I had to say. But another was as a kind of writing workout, to address some of my weaknesses as a writer. For example, I tend to be more of an editor than a writer, meaning I will go back and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and polish, rather than actually finishing anything. So one of the exercises of this blog has been to just go ahead and post something for all to see, without waiting for it to be perfect (which it never ever will be).
My output here has dropped off somewhat, but for what I consider to be a good reason. I started writing a novel many years ago, and as it progressed, the urgency of finishing it has become greater and greater. I've had a good many ideas for blog posts, and my drafts folder still has about 40 titles in various stages of completion, but whenever I sit down to work on them, I realize I really should be finishing that novel instead. Now that I have finally finished the first draft, I can take a bit of a break from that urgency, and share some thoughts here again. In this post, the thoughts I'm going to share are about writing fiction.
I have found writing fiction to be immensely harder than writing the kinds of essays I've posted here, and for two main reasons.
First, it's just more work. When I'm writing an essay, I have to formulate a thesis, structure an argument, compose each sentence and each paragraph to flow from inference to inference so that the reader will be carried along towards the conclusions I've reached myself. In doing this, I need to choose which facts to include and which facts to ignore as irrelevant.
In fiction, I have to do all of this, plus I have to make up the facts. And that's not at all an easy thing to do. The novel I've been working on is in the fantasy genre (which is to say it's set in a world based on medieval Europe with some elements that could be described as magical), which you might think would make it easy since anything goes, but that's just not so. The facts have to fit together to create a coherent, believable world. The characters have to react to those facts in a way that properly advances the plot and develops the theme. All of this happens naturally in non-fiction, because we live in a world that already obeys natural law and there is a consistent reality that takes care of itself. In fiction you have to build it from scratch, and that's a lot of work.
Second, fiction is art, and I can't help but feel kind of self-conscious about putting out something to be admired for its aesthetic qualities. The essays I write here are about ideas, and I try to make my writing as transparent as possible, so that the ideas are front and center. I may occasionally include what I think are clever or elegant turns of phrase, but ultimately they're supposed to be there in support of the ideas, rather than to be admired in their own right.
I don't feel self-conscious about the ideas because ideas don't belong to me; they're not my creations. Sometimes, I might have thoughts that no one else seems to have thought of before (or at least which don't seem to be in wide circulation yet), but I never feel as if I have created them. It's more like I've discovered them, like I just happen to have been lucky enough to notice something that was there to be noticed by whoever happened to look in the right direction in the right light. I'm happy to share these things un-self-consciously, but fiction? In fiction I'm saying, "Here's a world and some characters and a sequence of events that I created and I think they're good enough for you to devote some attention to." And I feel really awkward about doing that.
I'm not finished with this blog, not by a long shot. I still have lots of things I'll be wanting to write about here, and insights from struggling with fiction just adds to that list.
My output here has dropped off somewhat, but for what I consider to be a good reason. I started writing a novel many years ago, and as it progressed, the urgency of finishing it has become greater and greater. I've had a good many ideas for blog posts, and my drafts folder still has about 40 titles in various stages of completion, but whenever I sit down to work on them, I realize I really should be finishing that novel instead. Now that I have finally finished the first draft, I can take a bit of a break from that urgency, and share some thoughts here again. In this post, the thoughts I'm going to share are about writing fiction.
I have found writing fiction to be immensely harder than writing the kinds of essays I've posted here, and for two main reasons.
First, it's just more work. When I'm writing an essay, I have to formulate a thesis, structure an argument, compose each sentence and each paragraph to flow from inference to inference so that the reader will be carried along towards the conclusions I've reached myself. In doing this, I need to choose which facts to include and which facts to ignore as irrelevant.
In fiction, I have to do all of this, plus I have to make up the facts. And that's not at all an easy thing to do. The novel I've been working on is in the fantasy genre (which is to say it's set in a world based on medieval Europe with some elements that could be described as magical), which you might think would make it easy since anything goes, but that's just not so. The facts have to fit together to create a coherent, believable world. The characters have to react to those facts in a way that properly advances the plot and develops the theme. All of this happens naturally in non-fiction, because we live in a world that already obeys natural law and there is a consistent reality that takes care of itself. In fiction you have to build it from scratch, and that's a lot of work.
Second, fiction is art, and I can't help but feel kind of self-conscious about putting out something to be admired for its aesthetic qualities. The essays I write here are about ideas, and I try to make my writing as transparent as possible, so that the ideas are front and center. I may occasionally include what I think are clever or elegant turns of phrase, but ultimately they're supposed to be there in support of the ideas, rather than to be admired in their own right.
I don't feel self-conscious about the ideas because ideas don't belong to me; they're not my creations. Sometimes, I might have thoughts that no one else seems to have thought of before (or at least which don't seem to be in wide circulation yet), but I never feel as if I have created them. It's more like I've discovered them, like I just happen to have been lucky enough to notice something that was there to be noticed by whoever happened to look in the right direction in the right light. I'm happy to share these things un-self-consciously, but fiction? In fiction I'm saying, "Here's a world and some characters and a sequence of events that I created and I think they're good enough for you to devote some attention to." And I feel really awkward about doing that.
I'm not finished with this blog, not by a long shot. I still have lots of things I'll be wanting to write about here, and insights from struggling with fiction just adds to that list.
Saturday, 14 September 2019
Moral Inversion
I am not sure what to make of this strange pattern I've noticed recently. Not that it's a new pattern, just that I've become more aware of it.
Example One: A friend was complaining about the previous provincial government, and claimed they were trying to turn Alberta into a communist state. I asked him to elaborate, and he said something about the old communist slogan, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." Not that the NDP government ever cited that slogan, mind you. Just that he seemed to think they adhered to that as an ideal, and so that made them communist and therefore bad.
Example Two: In another conversation with a complete stranger online who expressed the opinion that racists and fascists deserved to die, when I said I didn't care what they deserved and the reason to oppose them is to protect their victims, not to mete out just deserts to people we think deserve punishment, he said, and I quote "You're not a good person, don't act like it."
I can sort of understand at least some of the genesis of the first example. Communism does not exactly have a great historical track record in practice when it comes to things like human rights and morality, so it's not wrong to be suspicious of it. But that slogan? There's nothing inherently communistic about it. It's the kind of bland platitude that almost any political movement could at least pretend to espouse, with roughly similar amounts of fudging and equivocation. Capitalism, for example, ideally has everyone contributing what they can (according to their ability) to receive in trade the ability to meet their needs. We can certainly disagree about the best way to attain these goals, but who could seriously object to a principle of people contributing what they can and getting what they need? So what disturbs me about the first example is that a general goal that would seem to be uncontroversially good is rejected as bad because of its association with an arguably bad political ideology. It's as if my friend thinks that, to be good champions of freedom, we have a moral duty to deny people what they need, and encourage people to contribute less.
The second example is even more bizarre, and seems to come from a different pathology, one I've referred to before in this blog. Charitably, I think my interlocutor might have been saying that I shouldn't falsely put on the façade of a good person when in fact I'm not. But I can't imagine how one would go about trying to be a good person without trying to act like one. And so the admonishment that I shouldn't act like a good person seemed to be just plain perverse.
I realize this isn't entirely a new thing. People have been disparaging virtuous behaviour in various ways forever. But somehow the tone seems a little different from the old "goody two-shoes" insult I remember from my youth. That was more about the belief that being "good" was unrealistic, that being a grownup meant having a more nuanced and pragmatic approach than just naively following The Rules like an obedient child. What I'm seeing now, in the anti-virtue-signalling "don't act like you're good" sentiment, has more bitterness to it. It's like a resentment at being made to look bad by someone else being good.
I don't mean to imply that I think I am virtuous in my words and deeds. Not at all. I try to be, but I am not anywhere near as successful in this as I would like. I'm not really talking about me personally in any event; what I'm troubled by is the form of the argument as I've encountered it, and as I've seen it used on others. What kind of words and deed do we have a moral duty to perform? Is it wrong to express aspirations to "good" behaviour or principles if, in so doing, we make someone else look bad? Does that mean we have a duty to look as bad or worse than other people? Really, what's wrong with wanting to do good?
Example One: A friend was complaining about the previous provincial government, and claimed they were trying to turn Alberta into a communist state. I asked him to elaborate, and he said something about the old communist slogan, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." Not that the NDP government ever cited that slogan, mind you. Just that he seemed to think they adhered to that as an ideal, and so that made them communist and therefore bad.
Example Two: In another conversation with a complete stranger online who expressed the opinion that racists and fascists deserved to die, when I said I didn't care what they deserved and the reason to oppose them is to protect their victims, not to mete out just deserts to people we think deserve punishment, he said, and I quote "You're not a good person, don't act like it."
I can sort of understand at least some of the genesis of the first example. Communism does not exactly have a great historical track record in practice when it comes to things like human rights and morality, so it's not wrong to be suspicious of it. But that slogan? There's nothing inherently communistic about it. It's the kind of bland platitude that almost any political movement could at least pretend to espouse, with roughly similar amounts of fudging and equivocation. Capitalism, for example, ideally has everyone contributing what they can (according to their ability) to receive in trade the ability to meet their needs. We can certainly disagree about the best way to attain these goals, but who could seriously object to a principle of people contributing what they can and getting what they need? So what disturbs me about the first example is that a general goal that would seem to be uncontroversially good is rejected as bad because of its association with an arguably bad political ideology. It's as if my friend thinks that, to be good champions of freedom, we have a moral duty to deny people what they need, and encourage people to contribute less.
The second example is even more bizarre, and seems to come from a different pathology, one I've referred to before in this blog. Charitably, I think my interlocutor might have been saying that I shouldn't falsely put on the façade of a good person when in fact I'm not. But I can't imagine how one would go about trying to be a good person without trying to act like one. And so the admonishment that I shouldn't act like a good person seemed to be just plain perverse.
I realize this isn't entirely a new thing. People have been disparaging virtuous behaviour in various ways forever. But somehow the tone seems a little different from the old "goody two-shoes" insult I remember from my youth. That was more about the belief that being "good" was unrealistic, that being a grownup meant having a more nuanced and pragmatic approach than just naively following The Rules like an obedient child. What I'm seeing now, in the anti-virtue-signalling "don't act like you're good" sentiment, has more bitterness to it. It's like a resentment at being made to look bad by someone else being good.
I don't mean to imply that I think I am virtuous in my words and deeds. Not at all. I try to be, but I am not anywhere near as successful in this as I would like. I'm not really talking about me personally in any event; what I'm troubled by is the form of the argument as I've encountered it, and as I've seen it used on others. What kind of words and deed do we have a moral duty to perform? Is it wrong to express aspirations to "good" behaviour or principles if, in so doing, we make someone else look bad? Does that mean we have a duty to look as bad or worse than other people? Really, what's wrong with wanting to do good?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)