Monthly Archives: February 2013

A Free-Market Argument For The Social Safety Net

(Note: Ozy Is Not An Economist. Ozy’s entire knowledge of economics comes from blogs, books, and AP Macroeconomics. Please do not take this seriously.)

I think a truly free market requires a strong social safety net, for two reasons. (By “strong social safety net” I mean “giving poor people and unemployed people way more money than Americans currently do.”)

The assumption of a lot of people who talk about economics, I think, is that the employer and the employee are in a roughly similar position: that is, that it’s a free exchange of money for labor. The problem is that (except for a very few employees with specialized skills) there are way more employees than there are employers. I can fire you, take out a want ad, and find someone new relatively quickly; if you quit, you’re facing months or potentially years without a job that matches your skills. (This is basically the concept of the reserve army of labor. I’m a sociology major, I have to work Marx in somewhere.) Therefore, the employee needs the employer more than the employer needs the employee, which means the employer can treat the employee like shit.

On the other hand, the social safety net equalizes the employer and the employee’s position to a degree. If I’m not paying you enough or making you work crap hours or refusing to let you take breaks, you can think “this fucking sucks! I’d rather be unemployed!” and then you can quit. To keep their employees, the employer has to offer a better deal than unemployment and the social safety net. (This appeals politically much more to me than increased regulation, because it lets the individual decide what qualifies as “worse than unemployment”– although of course regulation is important for working conditions that employees probably wouldn’t know about, and “appeals politically to Ozy” is not the same thing as “works better.”)

At the same time, the free market relies on a lot of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship increases competition, which means that companies have to offer customers a better deal, so prices go down and quality goes up and there’s innovation and everything is sparkle rainbow ponies. On the other hand, about half of new businesses go bankrupt. How many more people would be willing to start businesses if they knew that even in the worst-case scenario they wouldn’t go completely broke and have to live on ramen? I’m going to guess the answer is “quite a few.”

In short: support the free market, give money to poor people.

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Why Orson Scott Card Should Keep His Job

You are absolutely free to buy or not buy Orson Scott Card’s Superman comic or tickets to the Ender’s Game movie. It’s your money, you’re allowed to spend it however you like, and “I don’t want to watch anything written by a homophobe” is exactly as valid as “I don’t want to watch anything with a romance subplot” or “I don’t want to watch anything with Bendydick Cummingsnatch in it, I hate his face.”

But I think that it’s wrong to petition DC Comics to fire him or to refuse to stock his books in your store. (I was wrong about this– see comments.) 

Firing Orson Scott Card punishes the wrong thing. Not giving money to Orson Scott Card doesn’t punish being a homophobe; it punishes being public about being a homophobe. Homophobic authors who never wrote about their homophobia are not going to suffer from the boycotts. Personally, I don’t want the homophobes to be quiet about their homophobia, smugly self-satisfied about how oppressed and persecuted they are by the pro-gay mafia. I want them to stop being homophobes. I am unclear how harming Mr. Card’s career will persuade him that homophobia is wrong.

Second, I believe that it is wrong to punish writers with loss of career for expressing controversial ideas.

You know why? Because “homosexuality isn’t a sin” is controversial. Because “black people should learn to read” was, and “atheists should be allowed to testify in court,” and “people other than white male landowners should have the right to vote,” and… look, name anything we consider obviously a good idea, it probably went through a period of being controversial. “A lot of people dislike this idea” is absolutely no evidence about whether it’s a good idea or not.

The only way that anyone has figured out to sort out whether controversial ideas are good or bad is to argue about them until a majority of people are convinced. In order to argue about ideas, you have to have people who are willing to support them. And you’re not going to have that if the smartest and most articulate supporters of any given idea– that is, the writers– are punished for expressing ideas that disagree too much with what the majority holds sacred.

–Of course, it’s possible that you just happen to be the only person on the entire planet who is magically correct about everything, in which case you can infallibly sort out which controversial ideas are good and which controversial ideas are bad and punish anyone who disagrees. How lucky we are that you have this power.

I suppose you could say “well, free and open debate is all very well for some things, but homophobia hurts real people! We should stigmatize beliefs that hurt people!” On the other hand, it was the consensus belief for a long time that accepting atheism would lead people to become atheists and thus suffer an eternity of torture in hell. Homophobia does not cause eternal torture. “Yes, but they were wrong about that.” And how the fuck would they have known that they were wrong about that unless atheists were allowed to say their piece?

If homosexuality, as Mr. Card believes, risks destroying society itself via destroying the institution of marriage, this is information I would like to have. At the moment, I have read the best arguments anti-homosexuality people have to present, and I have found them scientifically and anthropologically laughable, morally bankrupt, and utterly unjustified unless you accept the premises of a certain brand of Christianity. But I am glad that I had access to those arguments, and I oppose anything that is going to significantly punish people for offering them up.

Gifted Kid Syndrome

Society is set up in favor of people with brains that more closely approximate the “average” brain, at the expense of those of us with brains that are fucking weird; that’s basically the idea of neurodiversity. A thing I think is potentially important is that “brain that’s fucking weird” doesn’t just include people whose brains are broken or different-but-still-good; it also includes “brains that work better in some important way.”

For instance, think about kids who have, for whatever reason, more academic aptitude than other kids.* The “gifted kids” (ugh, I hate that word) and particularly the kids who always wound up at the top of gifted class.**

There’s a stereotype of the smart kid not having a lot of friends, and in my case and the case of a lot of people I know, that’s true. If you’re good at academics, it’s probably at least in part because you love academics (or at least part of it). You also, once you get at a certain level, have absolutely no one to share your love of academics with. When I was in third grade, I was reading Plato’s the Republic; my peers were playing Pokemon. I’m not saying that I was better (both occupations are entirely useless except for entertainment purposes), but it makes it terribly difficult to make friends if you want to talk philosopher-kings and they want to talk Pikachu. At the same time, while all my peers were out socializing I was… alone. Reading Plato. Because Plato was more interesting than whatever the people in my class were getting up to.

This means I was alone a lot, obviously. Because I was alone I never really learned a lot of really basic social skills you’re supposed to learn when you’re young. (I theorize that this is behind not just former gifted kids with poor social skills but also the geek social fallacies, most of which are about Not Excluding People Like We Were Excluded.) I felt like I was the only person in the world who loved the things I loved, which is a terribly lonely thing to feel. And, well, when kids see someone who’s weird, who doesn’t have a lot of friends, and who has rather poor social skills, they tend to bully them.

Adults don’t help either. There’s a natural tendency when someone is good at academics to praise them for being good at academics, which means that a lot of gifted kids (including me) wound up defining ourselves as The Smart One. This interacts really badly with social exclusion, because it’s really easy to conclude that the reason everyone keeps excluding you is because you’re better than them. That way lies arrogance and a rather unpleasant personality.

At the same time, if you define yourself as Smart, there is going to come a time when you’re Not Smart. When you meet people who are smarter than you, or you  have to suddenly start working at a class. This can induce low self-esteem, depression, and general emotional crisis, because if you’re The Smart One what happens if you aren’t smart anymore? (Bad things. Especially if you’d already decided that you’re better than people because you’re smarter than them and suddenly they’re smarter than you.)

Classes, up to a certain point, are really easy for people with a lot of academic aptitude. You learned it the first time the teacher went through it, but she has to spend the whole hour reviewing it because no one else is as quick as you– for that matter, you might have learned it last year when you taught it to yourself. This means that a lot of people get bored and disengage from classes, which can (oddly) lead to very poor grades and the classic “but you test so well!” syndrome.

If classes are easy, it’s really easy to coast through on native ability, which means you don’t learn how to study or work hard. When suddenly you have to work in class, you haven’t developed the study habits that you need. You’re used to getting to play around on Tumblr or work on your own projects, and now suddenly you have to reread the textbook and make flashcards? And, of course, you suddenly feel stupid because Smart People don’t need to study.

Anyone else have thoughts/experiences about being one of the quote-unquote gifted kids?

Possibly related: The problems with being smart, which offers a different perspective on some of the stuff I’m talking about here.

*Obvious Disclaimer: it is way better to have a ton of academic aptitude and a society that isn’t really set up to deal with people with a lot of academic aptitude than it is to have no academic aptitude and a society that isn’t really set up to deal with people with not very much academic aptitude. In the latter, you get a sucky situation and society makes it worse; in the former, you get something awesome, and there might be shit related to it, but at least you still get academic aptitude. However, we can talk about problems that are not The Worst Problem (TM). It is allowed.
**Other Obvious Disclaimer: this is a generalization that won’t apply to everyone– in fact, most of it doesn’t apply to me. And it’s based on my observation of myself and other former gifted kids, so it is not scientific in any way.

Fetishization!

I see a lot of people get confused about the topic of “fetishization.” They’re all “people complain about fetishizing trans people/fat chicks/bi women/women of color, that means it’s anti-feminist to be attracted to trans people/fat chicks/bi women/women of color!” And then half of them are like “therefore FEMINISTS HATE YOUR BONERS!” and the other half are like “therefore I must self-flagellate about my evil evil boner.”

No. Feminists do not hate your boner, and you should not self-flagellate about your evil evil boner. It is not anti-feminist to be attracted to trans people/fat chicks/bi women/women of color. It is not even anti-feminist to be attracted to a trans bi fat woman of color!

Fetishization is not about attraction, it’s about using your attraction as an excuse to objectify people. The misdefinition of objectification is one of the very few things I get legitimately angry about (my sources of anger are few and geeky), so let’s review what it means with the help of Granny Weatherwax:

“And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

 

“It’s a lot more complicated than that–”

 

“No it ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

 

“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes-”

 

“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

Basically, “don’t fetishize me” means “don’t treat me like a thing because you’re attracted to me.”

One of the really common ways that fetishization plays out is the assumption that  people you’re attracted to exist for your boner. For instance, dominant women in the kink scene regularly report submissive males assuming that because she’s dominant and female that she wants to dom them in exactly the way they want to be dommed. I mean! She’s dominant! In public! Clearly that means you don’t even have to ask before you lick her boots and call her Mistress.

Similarly, fat women who post pictures of themselves on Tumblr often get reblogged onto porn blogs, because clearly the only reason someone would post a picture of themselves on the Internet is so you can talk about how much you want to stick your dick in their fat jiggling ass. Fat women also often face problems with chubby chasers whose apparent thought process is something along the lines of “we have so much in common: you’re fat, and I like fat women.” For fat women and other women culturally considered unattractive, there’s also this really nasty “look, people who are attracted to you are so rare that you should be willing to fuck literally anyone who’s attracted to you” angle.

(PSA: you should not be willing to fuck literally anyone who’s attracted to you. Sex is amazingly much better if you’re attracted to the person you’re with and they care about you enjoying yourself too.)

Furthermore, a lot of the reasons that people give for being attracted to certain kinds of women are… really really gross. For instance, you should not believe “bi chicks are hot because two girls fucking is hot!” As a bi, poly, and female-presenting person, I have met approximately ten million people who believe this. I am sad to disappoint all of them by pointing out that when I fuck a lady, it’s because I want to fuck that lady, not because I want to give some other random dude a boner. It’s almost as if my sexual orientation is not entirely related to giving dudes boners. (I also hate threesomes and have no interest in being the third in your marriage. Sorry to crush all your Hot Bi Babe dreams.)

“I like Japanese girls because I love sushi and anime and I want a girl I can–” NOPE. You know there are Japanese women who grew up in Iowa and like McDonalds and Glee, right? You can’t assume that every person of a particular ethnicity shares all the traits you associate with that ethnicity. (Not to mention “I want a Japanese girl because Japanese girls are submissive and moe and I have never actually met a Japanese person” guy. Do not be that guy. If you become that guy I will fly to your house and light all your hentai on fire.)

“I like trans women because they’re the best of both worlds! A combination of male and female!” No, trans women are women, stop invalidating people’s genders. Furthermore, ‘best of both worlds’ implies all trans women have penises, which is just… not true.

“Ozy, you’re saying I can’t be attracted to anyone!” No, I’m not. It is perfectly fine to be interested in women who want to have threesomes with you, or women who like sushi and anime, or people who combine male and female– just don’t call those groups “bi women,” “Japanese women,” and “trans women,” because that isn’t true. Similarly, it’s perfectly fine to be attracted to women with penises or people with typically East Asian features or fat women, as long as you’re not an asshole about it.

A related issue is whether it’s possible to fetishize conventionally attractive, privileged women. My intuition would be “yes,” but for some reason the feminist movement has decided to go with “fetishization” for fetishization of marginalized groups and “sexual objectification” for fetishization of conventionally attractive and privileged women. I don’t get it.

Deconstructing “Intelligence”

I am not sure there’s a single thing called “intelligence.”

Obviously, people have different mental aptitudes and capabilities! I want to put that right up front because people tend to get confused and assume that if one says “I’m not sure intelligence is a singular thing” one actually means “…because no one has different cognitive abilities at all!” However, I think that there are a lot of different kinds of cognitive abilities under the thing normally called “intelligence,” some of which are correlated and some of which are not, and that classifying them all as “intelligence” risks conflating them.

So here are some things I’ve thought of that people mean when they say “intelligence”:

Sounding smart. Your ability to say things like “when I read the Aeneid in the original Latin” and “reifying the social construction of homonormative sexuality” and “its transcendence degree over Q, the prime field of C, is the cardinality of the continuum.” If you want to sound smart, I recommend studying mathematics, philosophy, physics, or classics, using lots of jargon and complex sentence structure, and adopting an aura of arrogance and contempt for the plebes. (Do not, however, brag about your IQ or your Mensa membership. People will laugh at you.)

Unfortunately, while sounding smart does correlate to some degree to Actually Meaningful Cognitive Abilities, a lot of times the person talking about how Feynman is a classy-ass motherfucker has way more knowledge of physics than the person wittering about quantum vibration.

Credentialing. Having a high school degree, a college degree, a master’s, or a PhD. Of course, a lot of people with a college degree are smart. On the other hand, a lot of them got drunk and went to football games and played video games for four years and passed their classes because they cheated or took nothing but easy courses. And a lot of people who don’t have a college degree are very intelligent but were too poor to attend college, flunked out because of depression, or didn’t even realize college was an option for them. Even attendance at a top college is not necessarily an indicator of Actually Meaningful Cognitive Abilities, given the rate of legacy admissions to Ivy League schools. Class and ability are incredibly important here: poor people and disabled people are, all things considered, less likely to have access to credentials.

Knowledge. Knowing Lots of Things. Knowing lots of things about lots of topics, particularly topics that are generally considered academic, is often considered to be a sign of intelligence. Note that there are lots of autodidacts who know lots of things, and people with impressive credentials who forgot it all or never even learned. Also that knowing things does not necessarily mean that you know what you should do with that knowledge, or that you can come up with brilliant new ideas on your own.

Memory. Or, well, semantic memory, anyway. The ability to remember all the world capitals, not the ability to remember where you put your car keys. This is linked to knowledge, but different– after all, if you have a good semantic memory but little library/Internet/school access or no desire to learn things, you’re probably not going to know a whole hell of a lot.

Reasoning ability. Your ability to do things like solve math problems and do well on tests. This gets called “intelligence” a lot, and I don’t have a problem with people calling this “intelligence” as long as they’re careful with their usage. Because, once again, you can have a lot of reasoning ability and be irrational or have really massively incorrect opinions or drop out of high school or speak solely in Tumblr speak.

Creativity: The ability to think of new ideas! I… really can’t think of much to say about this, okay. But it’s a thing.

Executive functioning. Executive functioning is one’s brain’s ability to do things like “remember what you’re doing” and “do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it” and “get to class on time.” People don’t necessarily assume that people with a low level of executive functioning are stupid– as everyone with poor executive functioning who gets told “you’re so smart, why can’t you just–?” knows– but a person with a high level of executive functioning often is likely to come off as more intelligent.

Rationality. Susceptibility to cognitive biases! Like “I already know this, so I’m going to avoid any information that might disprove it.” Or “look, the coin came up heads a dozen times, we’re due for a tail.” Or “that person cut me off because he’s a jerk, but I cut this person off because the sun was in my eyes.” (It occurs to me that not all cognitive biases have the same origin, so you might be able to divide up this category further, but I don’t know enough to say what the divisions are.)

Desire to know. Do you like thinking? Do you want to learn? Is knowing things fun to you? Do you like debate and solving problems? This is the one I tend to value most highly in people, and what I’m most likely to mean when I say “smart.” (Which is weird, because everyone else seems to mean “reasoning ability.” Harrumph. Perhaps I should start saying I only want to be friends with people with a high need for cognition instead.)

All those those things are pretty heavily correlated with each other. For instance, wanting to know things, reasoning ability, and memory are all probably correlated to how much you know. Reasoning ability, creativity, and memory are also correlated fairly well, at least if you believe our current methods of measuring those three things work fairly well. Credentialing and sounding smart are correlated to all the Actually Meaningful Cognitive Abilities.

But they are not all the same thing. Do not assume that because someone is good at reasoning that they’re necessarily rational, or that because someone has a college degree that they necessarily know lots of stuff. In particular, credentialing, sounding smart, and knowledge are influenced by things like social class and access to an actually decent educational system and not being mentally ill and having parents that take an interest in your upbringing and who your friends were as a kid and so on.

On Weight Loss And Health

TW for discussion of dieting and, in the comments, eating disorders.

Let us grant for a moment that being fat is unhealthy. (I’m not really sure whether it is, as I haven’t looked into the subject, so I’m stuck with the heuristic of “well, a lot of people with impressive-looking degrees say one thing, and a lot of people with blogs say the other.”)

The thing is that sustained weight loss is really hard. Of the people who have lost more than thirty pounds and sustained it for more than a year, 90% exercise at least one hour a day and 78% weigh themselves at least once a week. I think that overweight and obese people could very reasonably look at these results and say “actually I would rather not exercise that much, thank you, I’ll take the health risks.”

At the same time, focusing on weight loss means that some people will choose demonstrably unhealthy methods of losing weight, such as juice fasts, fad diets, eating so few calories that they’re literally starving themselves, smoking, etc. On a less disastrous level, a weight loss emphasis also results in really terrible advice about diet in women’s magazines (“eat candy canes, not cheese, candy canes contain fewer calories!”– this is not a straw man, this is an actual article I read).

On the other hand, a lot of advice typically given as weight-loss advice is still good for you even if you’re not looking to lose weight. It is not like eating lots of vegetables, cutting down on your sugar consumption, and exercising regularly are suddenly bad ideas if you happen to do them and still be obese afterward. For that matter, it’s not like eating nothing but cupcakes and refusing to exercise are mysteriously good for you if you happen to be thin.

So I am puzzled about why we continue to emphasize weight loss as opposed to “eat more plants and less sugar and do some form of exercise on the regular.” Why do we say “do X to lose weight!” as opposed to “to live longer” or “to be stronger” or “to be healthier” or “to be happier”? Other than diet industry profits, of course, because people trying and failing to lose weight buy lots of diet books and unused gym memberships. Which is just sad.

In Defense of Stereotypes

If you ask a random person on the street what social justice is (once you explained to them that “social justice is that thing where people complain about sexism and racism and homophobia a lot’), they would probably say that social justice is about “not stereotyping people.” You shouldn’t think people are all the same just because they’re black! Or women! Or gay!

I disagree. I think that it is possible to identify traits that people who are members of certain groups share and that, in fact, it is quite impossible to do social justice without doing so. I mean, imagine if you took it literally. “You shouldn’t say women have body issues, lots of women don’t have body issues, that’s SEXIST! You shouldn’t stereotype people of color as being poor, lots of people of color aren’t poor, that’s RACIST!” If you want to talk about how marginalization affects a group of people, you have to talk about traits and experiences that members of that group tend to have– that is, you have to stereotype. The entire concept of “the [insert marginalized group here] experience” is a way of stereotyping!

For that matter, social justice advocates often defend stereotyping: just look at Schrodinger’s Rapist. It is perhaps unfair to some random dude who just wants to talk to a woman on the bus that many women will assume that he’s creepy, disrespectful of boundaries and possibly dangerous, but a sufficient number of random dudes on buses are creepy and disrespectful of boundaries that this is a reasonable stereotype to have.

Instead, I would like to propose three kinds of stereotypes that are bad:

1) Stereotypes that don’t acknowledge you can be a member of a group and differ from the stereotype. No duh, this is bad, because it is incredibly inaccurate! Of course, I think it’s more common as a way of strawmanning other people’s stereotypes than it is as an actual belief. If you interpret someone saying “men talk less than women” as saying that every man talks more than every woman all you have to do is find one laconic woman to disprove it; if you interpret them as saying “on average men talk less than women” (which is, you know, what people who say that are usually actually saying) then you actually have to do science to prove it’s not true and science is, like, hard. (It’s not true, by the way.)

2) Stereotypes that are factually incorrect. If most Muslims were terrorists, you’d be perfectly justified in being suspicious of the Muslims who moved in down the street. Given that most Muslims do not support terrorism, much less actually commit suicide bombings, you’re being an asshole. Similarly, since most depressed people are not lazy bums who are just making a big deal about being sad, and most self-injurers are not emo kids doing it for attention, and most people with ADD are not faking it, those stereotypes are wrong– not morally, just factually.

The problem with believing wrong things about people is that you will act in wrong ways towards them. The correct way to act if someone is lazy is not the correct way to act if someone is suffering from a neurological condition that makes doing things hard if not impossible. The correct way to act if someone is probably a terrorist is not the correct way to act if someone is not a terrorist and just happens to worship Allah.

3) Stereotypes that are not actually stereotypes, they’re norms. “Women should reclaim their femininity!” is not actually a stereotype of women, it’s a norm about what women should be like. A stereotype is an “is” statement– this is what this group is like; a norm is an “ought” statement– this is what this group should be like. It is perfectly possible to have a stereotype without having a norm; the social justice community does it all the time. I can believe women tend to have body image issues without believing a woman who’s comfortable in her body is a failure as a woman; I can believe people of color tend to be poor without believing that people of color should be poor. I talk here about why (a lot of) norms are bad.

How The Blatant John Stuart Mill Ripoff Relates To Social Justice

I think a lot of people underestimate how powerful social norms are. But humans are social animals! “My social group approves of me” is a big motivator for most people. But American culture has this whole rebellious individualism thing going on. So we have words like “good” and “cool” and “successful,” all of which essentially mean “my social group likes this!”

A lot of social norms are good. For instance, “you must not be stinky” is an excellent social norm (as anyone who’s been around someone with con crud can attest). Social approval or disapproval is a great way to handle actions that affect other people, but in such a minor way that anything more than social disapproval would be way too fucking coercive. Furthermore, social approval feels really really good! There’s nothing wrong with a “fans are unreasonably enthusiastic about children’s cartoons” norm, as long as the people who aren’t unreasonably enthusiastic about children’s cartoons are free to hang out with the “watches the football game every Sunday” group. And a lot of social norms don’t really matter– “everyone stands facing the door on the elevator” is a norm, but a minor constraint on one’s “which way do I face in the elevator?” choices has very little effect on one’s life.

But a lot of social norms are really dumb. For instance: I do not like my college’s parties. They are loud and involve drinking and drug-taking (which I have a phobia of) and lots of strangers (which I also have a phobia of). The music makes it hard to talk, and I can’t follow a conversation with more than a handful of people in it anyway. I like dancing, but I can dance in my room alone just as well. Practically, whenever I go to one I tend to fall asleep in the room intended for people who are having bad trips (which is admittedly an awesome room that has vegan cookies and tea and stuffed animals and crayons). It is completely irrational for me to go to a party. And yet every time I kiss my boyfriend goodbye as he goes off to the party I feel this sense of “I ought to be going to the party!”

Because… well, you’re supposed to. Going to parties is cool. Staying inside alone and reading is Terminally Uncool. It is a Sad and Pathetic and Lonely thing and therefore (my brain insists) I ought to not be Sad and Pathetic and Lonely by… doing something I don’t enjoy and that gives me panic attacks. Okay. That’s dumb. It benefits no one, as far as I can tell, and makes me feel like shit for no reason.

A lot of social justice-y things are really bad social norms. (Structural marginalization is obviously a case of unnecessary constraints upon choices, and thus Bad.)

“Women should prioritize their families over their careers, and men vice versa” is dumb: what if the man would be happier as the primary caregiver? “Trans people must know they were trans from early in their lives, be gender-conforming, want all available surgeries and hormones, and fit perfectly into the binary, or they are Not Really Trans” is dumb: what if you aren’t and you’d still be happy with a different hormone arrangement? “Bisexuals should be equally attracted to men and women and ideally date 50% men and 50% women” is dumb: what if you happen to meet a string of really cool guys, does that invalidate your attraction to women?

In Which Ozy Gratuitously Rips Off John Stuart Mill

My primary problem with libertarianism is that it does not go far enough.

I am suspicious of governments exercising power over people, sure. But I am also and equally suspicious of corporations, non-governmental organizations, unions, and other people exercising power over people. My suspicion is not of governments; it’s of power. I believe that humans should have the absolute maximum freedom possible, given resource constraints and other practical problems, without interfering with the ability of other people to exercise that freedom.

(Note: some people will say “then why aren’t you an anarchist?” Because observably whenever one gets rid of a government one does not get rid of power relations; one just makes it so that the most powerful person in the area is whoever has the most weaponry and willingness to kill, and without the safeguards a government offers about use of force. This, needless to say, does not maximize freedom.)

A lot of people tend to justify limiting freedom by pointing out that it’s for the people’s own good. People are, in general, fairly dumb. We get tricked by pseudoscience and date people who are bad for us and refuse to exercise and say “yes, the last five years I didn’t do my New Year’s Resolution but this year will be different!” By any measure, humans are really bad at decision-making. Surely it makes sense to have someone smart constrain people’s choices so they have to do what makes them happy?

The problem lies in “someone smart.” As of yet, we have not invented any hyperintelligent computers; therefore, anyone who exercises power is going to be  a person, and therefore dumb. Our ability to identify non-dumb is fairly low: fifty percent of Harvard students cannot correctly answer the question “if a bat and a ball cost $1.10, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?” (Try that question at home!) In fact, I discover as I read that article I just Googled as a citation for the Harvard thing, more cognitively sophisticated people may be more prone to cognitive biases, which is an absolutely terrifying result that gives me nightmares.

(Of course, there are a lot of cognitive biases and forms of self-delusion that people are less susceptible to in other people’s cases than they are in their own– for instance, you’re more likely to correctly guess how long it’ll take someone else to do something than how long it’ll take you. My intuition is that this is not a major factor a lot of the time, but I could be wrong, in which case I’d have to change about half of the things I believe. Anyway, “people are consistently dumb about this and we can nudge them into making correct decisions” is a sufficient justification for constraining people’s choices on a case-by-case basis. Thus, opt-out of organ donation, not opt-in.)

Given that humans are dumb, the average person is much better at seeking their own happiness than they are anyone else’s. If you’re trying to seek someone else’s happiness, you have divided loyalties: the other person’s happiness and your own. If you’re an elected official, then you want what’s best for your country but also you want to get re-elected and make lots of money; naturally, these will sometimes conflict. If, however, your primary job is seeking your own happiness, then divided loyalties are not an issue.  

If you limit people’s freedom, you end up treating different people the same way. (No duh.) An individual can choose to work midnight to eight am if that’s when they do their best work, but a business has to make everyone work from nine to five.* A social norm has to say “everyone is only allowed to have one partner,” but an individual can choose to honestly and openly date multiple people. Given that people are diverse, a “people freely choose things” plan allows more scope for different people being happy in different ways than a “people follow these rules” plan.

In short: I think you should not constrain people’s choices without a Damn Good Reason. “It interferes with other people’s freedom”? Good reason. “It hurts other people in ways they would not like”? Good reason. “We can’t actually afford to pay everyone an infinite amount of money without the economy falling apart”? Good reason. “…because?” Not a good reason. If you do limit people’s freedom, limit it as little as possible– don’t pass a law when a social norm will do, don’t force people into organ donation when defaulting to organ donation will do.

Tomorrow: how this all relates to social justice!

*Obviously, there are sometimes good reasons for the “everyone works nine to five” rule, such as people having to communicate with each other.