Homosexual Acceptance and Cultural Change

As time has gone by we have had numerous cultural shifts in society where a group has gained acceptance and better treatment. When this happens, quite often large cultural changes result as previous behaviors and traditions become no longer morally or logically justifiable. The acceptance of black people as being equal to whites; women being equal to men; disabled people being worthy of the same respect as the able bodied; violence not being an acceptable way to discipline children; animals being more than just objects for us to use for our own ends.

When these shifts occur there are often large changes as society adapts. White people had to learn to co-exist with black people rather than segregating them. Men had to learn to co-exist in workplaces with women. People speaking up when they see someone beating their child (or wife!). Animal fighting sports become less socially acceptable.

A recent change that has the potential to cause large social changes, and that will almost certainly require a lot of people to be dragged into accepting that change, is the acceptance of homosexuals as first class citizens. For the most part, if homosexuals weren't outright persecuted, then typically the attitude of society was more like, "as long as you keep to yourselves and don't make us have to change to accommodate you, then we're cool". But as fights for homosexual rights and equality are being won, this kind of attitude is becoming less acceptable and society at large has to start addressing the behaviors and traditions we have that are not inclusive of homosexuals.

There is a rather unique area of cultural change required here, and that is the various social customs of segregating males and females. What makes this so unique is that homosexuals basically throw a spanner in the works of any social segregation that is justified by the argument that people who are sexually attracted to each other need to be kept apart under some circumstances.

Public restrooms; change rooms in gyms; schools; military and other high stress environments where sexual interest is considered a distraction or danger; prisons even. People will argue that this segregation is about things like modesty, respect, etc, but this is just a red herring. Except for some rare exceptions such as sports where the strength differences between men and women make for an unfair playing field, all of these places in society where we segregate males and females come down to perceived problems of having people who are sexually attracted to each other having to interact in ways that they may feel uncomfortable doing.

This is not controversial. Most men will fart or go to the toilet with other men around, but not feel comfortable doing the same around women. Most women will change at their local gym with other women present, but would never do so with men around. And so on.

But this is where homosexuals force society to rethink these conventions, because the same social structures simply don't work for them. When two groups are attracted to each other, you can keep them separate. But when members within a group are attracted to each other, this is no longer an option. The largest heterosexual group you can create without sexual attraction being a potential issue is effectively infinite: all heterosexual men or all heterosexual women. The largest homosexual group you can create without sexual attraction being a potential issue is two: one homosexual man and one homosexual woman. Add any other homosexual or heterosexual person and you have a potential sexual attraction issue.

Here's the thing though: we expect homosexuals to deal with it. We expect the homosexual man to deal with taking a shit in the men's restroom, and get over the potential embarrassment. We expect the homosexual woman to get changed at the gym surrounded by other women. We expect the homosexual teenager at the all boys or all girls school to deal with the distraction that these schools exist to remove. They simply don't have a choice. It's either isolate yourself or learn to deal with it.

So this is the cultural shift that we need to start dealing with. If homosexuals can handle being in close proximity with those they are sexually attracted to, maybe the rest of us can too. Maybe we should hold everyone to these same high standards. Or are we going to just say that homosexuals are more mature people and heterosexuals are immature and can't be trusted to behave? It would indeed be a strange kind of discrimination for society to say that homosexuals aren't equal: they're better people!

If you've read this far and these ideas make you feel uncomfortable, then congratulations! This is what cultural shift feels like. All of those people who came before you spending their lives with a social convention that was then changed underneath them felt the same way. This is why it's often said that for real social change to happen the old people need to die out to make way for the new ideas. And when you're living through social change, you get to choose if you're going to be part of that change, or if you're going to be one of the people that society waits to die so that progress can happen.

How Do We Decide What's Right?

So, here's a hypothetical I want you to really think about. You hear on the news one day that a new law has been passed: if the biological mother of a child up to 12 months old decides that she no longer wants the child, she can take the toddler to a clinic and have it put down.

The justifications behind the law aren't important. All that matters is you probably disagree with this law. You probably think it's morally abhorrent. You probably think that it's murder.

What would you do? If you suddenly found yourself living in a country that legalized the murder of toddlers under a year old, what would you do? Would you write a stern letter to your local paper? Would you start an activist group to have the law changed. Would you start picketing out the front of Toddler Termination Clinics? Would you wish that someone burned down those clinics? Would you consider doing it yourself?

We often have to hold our tongues and accept living in a society where the laws don't quite match our personal morals. It's rare, probably non-existent, for a person to agree 100% with every law they are held to. Maybe it's speed limits. Maybe it's some tax law. Maybe it's which drugs are legal and which are not, and the penalties involved.

For the most part we accept this. But what happens when there is a law we really object to, that we cannot in clear conscience support? Legal slavery. Discrimination against women. The death penalty. We generally feel that it is our moral duty to speak up. We may even feel it is our moral duty to disobey that law, to take a stand. And we often respect others who do this.

At least, when we agree with them.

And that's kind of the point of my hypothetical at the top. Most people would feel outraged if such a law was passed in their country, and would probably become actively involved in trying to change it. It would not be uncommon for people to verbally attack those who made use of the law. Some might even commit acts of violence. And many people would, if not outright support such things, at least be sympathetic to those who did.

So when it comes to issues like abortion, most would probably claim to understand this point, but I actually don't think they do: for a person who genuinely believes that life begins at conception, they really do believe that abortion is murder, and you're asking them to accept and live in a society that legalizes the murder of a helpless 'child' under some circumstances. It doesn't matter whether their belief is true here. To them it is. It's just as true to them as the belief that terminating a six month old toddler is murder to you.

And this raises the really crucial question: how do you determine the laws of your country for issues that some group will find morally abhorrent, no matter which side the law favours? How do you decide which people get a law that matches their moral intuitions, and which people have to just suck it up and live with laws they strongly morally oppose?

One option is simple strength in numbers, and this actually is kind of what does tend to happen in practice. Slavery is legal until enough people object to it. The death penalty is legal until enough voices speak out against it. Euthanasia stays illegal in most places because too many religious people believe that suicide under all circumstances is an unforgiveable sin, and not enough other people have witnessed a terminally ill loved one suffering to be outraged.

But most people would not say that slavery should be legal as long as the majority are okay with it. We tend to think that there is a certain objectivity to morals, and that as societies develop and flourish the people within those societies gain empathy. Something that is also undoubtedly true but probably acknowledged by less people is that as science and understanding of the universe increases and the power of religions decreases, we learn things that make the justifications behind some laws no longer hold.

Once you can show that black people are not mentally inferior to white people, you can no longer justify slavery on that basis (at least, not if you're honest and rational). You can't withold the vote from women because they're inferior to men if science shows that this isn't true. And you can't claim that life begins at conception if the evidence shows that a fertilized egg doesn't become a viable organism until much later.

But you can certainly claim that a soul is injected into that fertilized egg at the moment of conception.

Of course you can claim that. How could anyone prove otherwise? Just like you can claim that homosexuals are an abomination in the eyes of god, or that suicide is a mortal sin, or that god grants men dominion over women.

The problem when people use religion as a justification for any moral belief is that there is no way to prove them wrong, not even in theory, because their claims are not testable in the physical world. But religious people generally claim to get their morals from their religious beliefs, and as we've seen above, those morals then become the basis of the laws they try to have govern their country.

So there's no such thing as a person's religious beliefs being kept to themselves and not affecting others, as long as their beliefs inform their sense of morality. And there's no way to reconcile two opposing moral beliefs when they're based on religion. And this is quite often the situation we find ourselves in.

Where does this leave us? As an atheist, obviously I think that laws should not be based on religious beliefs. But we live in a world where most people still hold religious beliefs and think they are a valid source of morality. And as I made clear above, you can't have a stable society with laws that a significant number of people hold a moral objection to, whatever the basis of those moral beliefs.

The only real answer seems to be addressing religion itself. As long as people think it's okay to believe things based on faith, this problem will never go away. Anti-abortionists will feel 100% justified in their opposition to pro-choice laws. Many Muslims will feel that the death penalty is perfectly appropriate if someone tries to leave the religion (i.e. become an apostate). And anyone who thinks that faith is in any way a valid reason for holding certain moral beliefs really can't criticize any of these people without being a massive hypocrite.

13 Observations From A Newcomer To Edinburgh/UK

Note: This is a guest post authored by my awesome wife, Diana

I have been living in Edinburgh just over 6 months now, and I thought it would be fun to share my initial thoughts on things that have stood out for me for one reason or another. Maybe some of these things are just Edinburgh or Scotland specific and are different in the rest of the UK. This is not meant to be a newcomer’s guide to the UK.

Maybe it helps for you to understand these thoughts if you know that I have lived in various parts of Australia, and I lived 3 years in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. So it is not just from the perspective of someone who has never lived overseas before, but I have only lived in one other country, so I am not exactly an expert on these sorts of things, and if I was I would probably see these things I have noticed in a more balanced way.

You will probably notice that some things I am quite particular about for emotional/non-rational reasons, and so I'm not pretending that my position or point of view is always logical and well reasoned here, but that's not really the point of this post. I just want to present some of my reactions to things over here and I'm hoping others will find it interesting or amusing.

Anyway, let's get started...

13. My feet should not touch the end of the bed

Apparently a double size bed is the standard bed size for couples in the UK. Even some UK hotels will provide this size and it is a special thing if they have UK king size (Which is Aussie Queen size). I guess this is mainly due to smaller room sizes? Maybe if you never turn over and are deep sleepers, and are slim and short, and do not have pets that sleep in your bed, double size is fine for two people sleeping, but for me this size really reduces the quality of my sleep. And good quality sleep is really important to me and I don’t think I am alone on this.

We rent a furnished place as otherwise I would have bought a larger bed (the room is just barely big enough for a larger bed). But I am surprised that couples here seem ok with sleeping on a double bed. I guess something is wrong with me. Adam and I had a king size bed is Australia (UK super king size) and we had plenty of room and you could not notice if someone turned in bed, and there was even plenty of room for the cat. I guess with hot weather as well, you do not want to be close to someone else when trying to sleep. So maybe that is it, UK couples snuggle and if so that is great. But yeah, I look forward to sleeping in a larger bed again.

12. Trash bins in the streets

I get that Edinburgh is an old city, and it was built before they had to think about effective garbage removal, but seeing all the large black garbage bins in the streets makes the place look shitty (the bins are out there all the time, not just on rubbish collection day). I think it leads to more bits of rubbish being in the streets. This is not everywhere, and our newish apartment complex has a storeroom for the common garbage bins, but there are still plenty to be seen around Edinburgh. I guess this particularly bothers me as the place is so beautiful, so it seems such a shame to have big black garbage bins on the street ruining this. Maybe people here are used to seeing the bins and they do not even notice them anymore? I have noticed recently on Leith Walk they are trialling having the bins there only certain times during the week, when they are actually going to come around and empty the bins, and I think this has really improved the look of that road.

11. Power points in Bathrooms

I want to be able to dry my hair in the bathroom.

So, bathrooms can be small here, true. But apparently there is some rule about how there needs to be 1m between a power outlet and a water outlet (Or something like this), so this basically means very few bathrooms have any power outlets. They can have an outlet for shavers, and you can buy electric toothbrushes that can plug into these shaver outlets. So, from what I have heard most people just dry their hair in the bedroom.

I know they are trying to save me from electrocuting myself or someone I love. But I don’t care, I can handle a power point in the bathroom. I know my brother’s first apartment only had one power point and it was right up near the ceiling away from any water source, and you also needed a ladder to use it (maybe an exaggeration), so I guess Australia had something like this before. Aren’t there things you can install like a safety switch that stops electrocutions in houses anyway?

And a minor note, but do the shaver power outlets emit some kind of magic electricity that can't electrocute you? How is one type okay but not the other?

10. Mailboxes, you are doing it wrong

Actually I guess they are mail slots, because you basically get your mail delivered through a slot in the front door. For our place it is actually quite nosy when the mail gets delivered, the first few times it really scared me! What I understand even less about this, is that we live in an apartment which you need to either have a key or get someone to buzz you in to get inside, so how does the mailman get into the building? Does he have keys, or could anyone who buzzes and says they're the mailman get let in? Then why have security? Also, surely it annoys him having to walk up 3 flights of stairs to deliver my mail. Perhaps we can all agree having mailboxes at the front of apartments that we can also access with a key makes more sense.

9. Let me run free

One of my favourite things about Scotland is the freedom the average person has to walk on someone else’s land. The Pentland hills near Edinburgh are a great example of this. I won’t go too much into this, as I could write a whole other post on this topic. And I am sure most of you already know more about this than me, and if you don’t, google it!

I had this more or less at Lennox Head growing up. I use to walk on farmland, but I would have to climb through barbwire fences to do this (I got quite good at this) and I obviously was not meant to be walking on this land. But because I guess I was a bad child, I got to see some really beautiful parts around where I lived. Down the end of my street there was a bit of rainforest where there were vines me and my friends could swing on, but I had to get through barbwire fences to access this. So I really love the freedom to explore over here.

8. What’s all this about no sunshine?

Honestly it is not that cold, and not that cloudy. Maybe we have been really lucky with the weather, and I admit the sun setting at 3:30pm is a little soon, but this only lasts a short while, and in summer you get the sun setting at 10:30pm, so to me the trade-off is worth it. Maybe it is just because I love variety, and the weather and daylight hours vary quite a lot here. What bothered me was the endless sunshine and hot days without any rain in Perth. I really missed the rain. The cold is fine as you just have the proper clothes, and the heating in our home is great. I was way colder in my home in Perth in winter.

7. Scottish people are awesome

Yes, I know this is a generalisation, but you should be used to that now from me and meh!

Our first impression of a Scottish person in Scotland was our cab driver. He went out of his way to find exactly where our apartment was as we did not realize apartment number and street number are switched here when you write them (So 9/10 is unit 9 street number 10 in Australia , whereas here it is street number 9 apartment 10). We gave him a tip, and he handed back half of it as he said it was too much. Pretty much this first impression has held up. I feel really welcome here which is nice. Maybe I am actually not as welcome as I think, but I certainly feel like I am.

6. Castles, for real

Castles for us are such a novelty. We love roaming through them. We get as excited about castles as we do about snow. I am very glad that so much effort and money has been put into keeping these amazing buildings accessible to the public.

5. That was not food

The quality range here can really vary. My impression is that things are a little more expensive in Germany but you have better quality. We had some Toad in the Holes (admittedly this was frozen food) heated up in the oven and I have never felt so ill from eating something in my life (except when I have gotten food poising). I have no idea what type of meat they used but it was such bad quality. Maybe we should have known better, and maybe you all know better. Maybe all frozen meat products are a no go here. I do not know. Adam and I have frozen vegetarian meat as part of our lunches now.

4. Pierogi my favourite

So apparently there is quite a large Polish community here, there are Polish speciality shops all over the place. And we totally win from this as I love Polish food. I can get a pack of mushroom and sauerkraut pierogi from the local supermarket for £1-1.50 (AUD2-3.00 roughly). Bargain! My background is Ukrainian, Polish and Belarussian (or as Adam says it does not matter, and I guess I tend to agree), and my grandma use to make varenyky which is more or less the same as pierogi. I would like to make it too, but it is too time consuming. So it is nice to get it (or something close enough) so easily here. Now if only I could get cabbage rolls like my grandmother use to make…she was the best cook.

я голодний

Hope that translation was correct, I know how to say it, I don’t know how to write it. (It says "I am hungry!")

3. Not hot chips with meals, what?

Just so there is no confusion, I mean what you call crisps in the UK or potato chips in Australia. We have had a few times now when we have ordered a sandwich at a café where it would come with a few potato chips or corn chips on the plate. We have never had this before, and we think it is the strangest thing. But I guess do hot chips make more sense? Yes, yes they do! Or else you might as well throw a few Gummi Bears on the side if you're going to head down that path!

2. Washing, washing everywhere

It seems so odd to me that dryers are common in Australia but they are not in the UK, not even laundries seem common. In some units/apartments in Australia they do not have a separate laundry, but they will have something within the bathroom, like a cupboard with the washing machine and dryer behind it. Maybe this comes back to the lack of power points in the bathroom… and smaller sized places in general. In Germany we had a communal laundry room where we could all put our washing machines and dryers.

With the unpredictable rain, you cannot really hang your washing up outside here (There is not even the option where we rent), so the only option for our case, and I think this is common in the UK, is to air dry your clothes inside your home. So this means almost all the time we have two clothes racks with washing drying. From what I have seen new places are also being built without a laundry, and with the washing machine in the kitchen.  Why! Does it honestly not bother UK residents? I have seen some larger homes will have a laundry, so maybe having a laundry is a rich person thing here? I think maybe it would be fine to dry your clothes inside if you were one person, and you could open the windows to have airflow remove the dampness. But with it being 0 degrees outside, I do not really want the windows open all the time.

1. Tiny deathtrap bathrooms

They seem to love having the shower in the bathtub here. I think this is a US thing too. In Australia, only cheap places (Or maybe old ones) have the shower in the bathtub in the main bathroom. We tend to have a separate shower. Bathtubs are slippery, the shower curtain sticks to you, and it’s cold! With a shower with glass doors you are in this warm, safe box. I don’t know how old people manage to step into these bathtub/shower combo’s. In Australia, if there is a lack of space, they will only have a shower and not bathtub. The main plus of the shower/bathtub combo is not having to clean the grout. But to me, that is it.

Because the bathrooms are so small, the sinks tend to be right up next to the toilet, virtually to the point that you could be going to the toilet while leaning over the sink and brushing your teeth at the same time. I can't even imagine what this does for hygiene, but I know Adam is not overly impressed putting contact lenses in and out of his eyes two feet from a toilet bowl!

We tend to dislike the trend of putting toilets in bathrooms in general, but over here it's almost like they built the bathroom at a size intended only for a bath and sink, and then just decided to jam a toilet in there because they've been playing too much Tetris or something.

Atheism and Belief

I've seen many atheists try to distance themselves from the concept of 'belief'. They will tend to argue that atheism isn't a belief, but rather the lack of belief. They will say that an atheist doesn't believe that there is no god, but rather lacks any belief that there is one. They will point to the infinite possible things that may or may not exist, and say that you don't explicitly believe that these things do not exist, but rather that you don't hold a belief unless there is evidence to support it.

I understand why many atheists head down this path of reasoning. It's a common debating tactic of religious people to claim that atheism is 'just another religion' or 'just another belief', implicitly or explicitly trying to remove any claim atheism has to being more truthful or rational than all the religious belief systems.

Now it's certainly true that atheism isn't a religion. However you want to define a religion, it really doesn't seem that atheism will fit the bill, since it's purely the belief that there is no god. There are no other core 'tenets' to atheism. While many atheists will tend towards similar moral principles and beliefs (such as humanism), these are not part of atheism itself, just like most atheists accept that evolution is true, but evolution is not a tenet of atheism.

The problem I have is with atheists trying to distance themselves from the concept of 'belief'. I'm yet to meet an atheist who doesn't actually hold the belief that there is no god, whether they consciously realize that they hold this belief or not, and here I hope to explain why this is the case.

Reasons For Belief

I think the underlying problem is that people misunderstand what a 'belief' is, thinking that it somehow implies either refusal to change your opinion if you get counter evidence, or that it means thinking something is true without evidence. But a belief can be a perfectly scientific and rational concept. We all hold beliefs on countless different things: whether humans are causing climate change; whether gravity exists; whether it's safe to drink the water out of your tap; whether your next door neighbour is a nice person. These are all beliefs, and we will hold them to different degrees, based on our reasons for holding them.

The strength of your belief in something will be based on how solid you think your reasons are for that belief. This is true regardless of the particular type of reason. What are the possible types?

• Evidence is the obvious one, with the scientific method being the route of choice for evaluating evidence. It's not perfect, but based on results it seems to be the best way we have for testing beliefs against real world data and separating out what is likely to be true from what is likely to be false.
• Faith is the other big one, where people will explicitly admit that they don't have evidence for their belief, but choose to hold it anyway, for whatever their justification is.
• Authority is another common one, and is interesting because it can fall in between evidence and faith. Ideally we would never rely on authority and always insist on evidence, but in practice we often have to. For instance, I will tend to rely on the authority of an expert like Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss or The National Health and Medical Research Council to help determine my beliefs about things within their areas of expertise. On its face this looks like faith, and to a degree it is. But my trust is not based on blind whim or just wanting them to be right, it's based on evidence having supported their previous claims, which increases confidence that they are reliable on other issues within their area of expertise, combined with the fact that I know I can look for specific evidence on these things if I want to. I'm never required to take their word on faith; I'm just using that as a shortcut because I don't have the time to look into the evidence for everything in my world that may or may not be true.

So, for a rational person, the strength of their belief in something will be based on the strength of evidence to support it. This can range from near certainty for extremely well supported theories like general relativity or evolution, or well refuted theories like phlogiston (look it up) or the moon landings being faked. You implicitly use the same method to determine what constitutes a healthy diet, or if your partner is cheating on you, or what the fastest route is to get to work.

(Note that the scientific definition of a fact is generally considered to be something that is so well supported that it would be perverse to deny it. So it's not really anything qualitatively different from a belief, just something so well supported that you'd basically need a damn good reason to expect anyone to waste time questioning it; time is limited and we've all got better things to do!)

I Think Therefore I Believe

But here is the key thing about belief: as soon as you ask yourself whether or not you believe something, you now hold a belief about it.

Up to now, you will not have held a belief one way or the other about whether or not an orange unicorn named Shirley is happily living at the top of Mount Everest, but as soon as I pose the question of whether you believe it or not, you now hold a belief. You effectively weigh up the evidence you have for and against it (which would include things as specific as whether you've heard of this exact thing before to more general things such as knowledge about whether unicorns exist and the survivability of the peak of Mount Everest) and decide whether you believe it is true or believe it is false (hopefully the latter).

The strength of this belief can vary by all kinds of degrees, but you're going to believe something about it, somewhere along the spectrum from absolute certainty that it's false to absolute certainty that it's true. You would have to be the blankest of slates to have absolutely no opinion one way or the other, to have absolutely no knowledge that would make you lean even slightly one way or the other.

So when you ask an atheist what his belief is regarding the existence of a god, the fact of the matter is that this particular belief is not the same as the infinite other possible things that may or may not exist, because he has specifically pondered it. In reality, if you believe that the evidence at all leans towards there being some kind of higher power, then you are a theist, even if you think the evidence is very weak. And if you at all lean towards there not being any kind of higher power, then you are an atheist, and you believe that there is no god. This belief may be weak; you will of course be willing to change it if you are presented with good evidence to the contrary; but it's a belief, not the absence of one.

And this holds true for anyone taking an agnostic stance too. Agnosticism is just the belief that it's not possible to prove the existence of a god one way or the other. This is completely separate to whether you believe a god exists or not. You can hold beliefs without the hope of ever having definitive proof, and quite often you have to do so because you usually have to take action in life with incomplete information. Whether you can get definitive proof or not is generally a moot point because we have to act without definitive proof most of the time.

Consider whether it is knowable or not that the water in your tap is safe to drink. In theory it's knowable, but in practice you do not have certainty and never will. But you either drink it or you don't, and that says what your belief is on the issue. Is your car safe to drive? If you drive it, then you believe it is (to some degree). Can you fly? If you jump off a building and flap your arms then you believe that you can (at least strongly enough to risk your life over it). Do you believe in a god? If you act in a way that you would not if you did not (such as praying or making moral arguments based on sin or the existence of souls), then you believe it. Knowability is just not really relevant in practice.

Conclusion

So I hope with all the previous rambling I've made a reasonable case that 'lack of belief' is really not what atheists have, and that any atheists who read this are more willing to own their actual beliefs without feeling that it compels them to make any claims to certainty, or equates beliefs based on evidence with beliefs based on faith. And for any theists who read this, I hope I've made it a bit clearer that you effectively apply reason and evidence to 100 different things every day, and maybe start to apply the same to your opinions on religion and the existence of supernatural beings.

The Problem With Cultural Significance

I was listening to the latest Cracked podcast (as I tend to do) and they were discussing how often year end retrospectives and top ten lists get things wrong: http://www.cracked.com/podcast/21-viral-stories-everyone-got-wrong-in-2014/

In particular, they looked back at some lists from previous years, such as the top movie lists from a few years ago, and saw how they often list important movies that have since been largely forgotten, while often missing movies from that year that have gained cultural significance since.

Part of their argument was how often we are unable to tell the significance of events in the moment and can only get a reasonable idea in hindsight. So, for example, Academy Awards often go to movies that then get largely forgotten, or at least fail to stay on peoples' "most significant" lists.

How many of the biggest news events of the year will still be considered so important 10 years from now? Will the Ebola outbreak be remembered? How about Malaysian Airlines Flight 370? The news media went nuts about that for weeks, yet it's almost certain to be completely forgotten in years to come (since it was actually not as unusual an occurrence as people thought). After this year will Bill Cosby be remembered as a groundbreaking comedian or a serial rapist? 

But, while all of this discussion was very interesting (and I highly recommend this and pretty much all episodes of the Cracked podcast), it made me think about a bigger issue which they didn't really tackle in their discussion, which is what we're actually trying to capture with retrospective lists anyway, and do they ever really tell us anything useful?

Cultural Significance

When we make lists of important things from a particular year, decade, or even century, what are we trying to capture? It seems that people see these lists as a summary of the most important things in that time period, a distillation that removes all the noise and just gives the things that are worth remembering. Or possibly drawing your attention to things that you missed but that a culturally aware person should know about.

So for an event, this could mean something that had big repercussions, or caused a great deal of change. But it could also mean something that grabbed lots of attention, but ended up not making any real difference to anything. Or maybe it could even be an event that should have been noticed by more people and had a more significant impact, but for some reason did not.

The same goes for movies, music, books, all works of art. Something that makes a 'most important' list could be important because it's a masterpiece, a demonstration of great skill or insight. Perhaps it's been recognized as such, or it's been largely overlooked. It could be important because it was hugely financially successful. Or it could be noteworthy because it was a massive flop.

Or take a list of the most important or influential people of the year. You could end up with people like Edward Snowden, Vladimir Putin, Pope Francis, Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber all on the same list. These are all people who dominate the news and are household names, so clearly have cultural significance, but all for different reasons. How much will each be remembered 10, 50, or 100 years from now? How much should each be remembered?

Remembering the Memorable

The problem seems to be that, as time goes by, we remember the things that keep getting referenced the most, and forget about the others, in a brutal distillation process. But we tend to make the assumption that the things that get referenced the most are the things that matter the most, the things that we should be referencing, and that the things that get forgotten by history deserve it.

But a close examination of the past shows how often this turns out to be false. Things become remembered for silly reasons, or even malicious reasons, the result of a deliberate campaign by one party against another, and something important literally gets wiped from history, at least for the vast majority of people.

So lots of people list the Mona Lisa as the most famous painting in the world. But this has only been true since 1911 when it was stolen and later recovered in a well known heist. It has only held this position of significance since then. But clearly it didn't become a better painting by being stolen, so the fact that it now takes up the number one spot in so many peoples' minds while other works of art get crowded out and forgotten is a failure of some kind on our part. You have to ask yourself whether there are better paintings far more worthy of being remembered but through some twist of fate or another you're simply not aware of.

A book I read a few years ago called Banvard's Folly tells the story of various people who were often very famous in their day but have since largely been forgotten by history. So, for example, John Banvard, for whom the book is named, was once considered one of the greatest painters in America, but was ultimately run out of business by the superior advertising (though inferior product) of P. T. Barnum. It would be a little like if, 100 years from now, everyone remembers Michael Bay but Steven Spielberg has been largely forgotten.

There is a very strong effect that we're starting to become aware of that makes a very small proportion of things snowball and become significant, while everything else tends to be forgotten. Thanks to the way we can track so much more information these days we can see this more than we ever could in the past. We see it in such diverse places as the brutal marketplace of mobile apps, where many very good products disappear into obscurity, while a mediocre game like Flappy Bird makes a fortune for no good reason; or in citations for scientific papers, where so many potentially significant papers get forgotten while a very small number get referenced a lot.

Conclusion

We have a long history of remembering things for bad reasons, and ignoring or forgetting things that actually matter. I think there's a lot of value in always being skeptical of the 'important' things that get presented to us and wondering what things have slipped under the radar and missed our attention. Hopefully we will start finding better methods to catalog and rank things in a way that pushes back against this snowballing affect that seems to have a high cost to our society but we end up being mostly unaware of.

Spirit of the Law, Letter of the Law

Loopholes

It seems to be an accepted thing these days that people will always look for loopholes in laws. A law will get created, people will find loopholes to get around it to their own advantage, then the law will be updated to close the loophole (sometimes), and the cycle begins again.

People often consider themselves clever for finding loopholes, and treat it like a reasonable pursuit. Some people even go so far as to say that it's the job of lawyers to find loopholes, and that it's completely reasonable to expect this as normal behavior by both companies and individuals.

We all end up doing it because everyone else does it, and if you know people around you are exploiting a loophole to get ahead and you don't, you feel like a sucker. And no one likes to feel like a sucker.

This is one of the things that has made Greece, for example, have so much trouble recovering from the global financial crisis. Tax avoidance is such a social norm there, that now they need the money they're having a terrible time trying to actually get people to pay.

The end result of all of this is that our laws get more and more complicated as they need to handle more and more special cases to close loopholes. Or the loopholes are left, and the social wisdom gradually shifts to everyone doing it, and it becomes the norm.

The funny thing is, I think that in the vast majority of cases, people know that this is a loophole. They know full well that they are circumventing the intention of the law. In other words, they are fully aware that they're violating the spirit of the law, while complying with the letter of the law.

Spirit of the Law

So the question is this: what would happen if we made the spirit of the law the legally binding definition rather than the letter of the law? What would happen if a judge could effectively say, "Look, you knew damn well that this thing you did isn't what the law intended, and you just exploited a loophole to do something you knew you shouldn't. Tough shit, you broke the law."

The plus side to this would of course be that laws could become much simpler, and we would no longer have a legal arms race that rewards people who spend time trying to find ways to violate laws while technically obeying them.

My favorite example of this is how Goldman Sachs fucked over the aluminium commodities market by exploiting a loophole to their own advantage, and absolutely no one else's. Basically, they bought up a bunch of aluminium to affect the trading price, but regulations required a certain amount of this aluminium to be shipped every day (I forget the precise wording). So to comply with this, they would load it on trucks and move it each day from one depot they owned to another one they owned, keeping it stockpiled while still technically moving it. This made them obey the letter of the law, while obviously violating its intent completely, and costing consumers billions of dollars as a result (you can read more about it here).

In this case, doesn't it seem reasonable for a judge to be able to just say, "Fuck you, Goldman Sachs, you clearly violated the spirit of the law here, any reasonable person can see that. That means you broke the law. End of story."

The big problem here is then, how do you define what a reasonable person thinks, and can you really base laws off that?

A Reasonable Person

The answer turns out to be that, yes, you absolutely can base laws on what a reasonable person thinks, and we do it every day. It is a common feature of criminal negligence cases to use what a reasonable person would think is negligent in order to decide if a person is guilty. I don't know the definite history of this, but I'm betting it came about because in practice it's pretty much impossible to list every possible scenario and say whether it constitutes negligent behavior, so they chose this practical shortcut instead.

Regardless of the reason, it demonstrates that the concept is clearly legally feasible, so to base more laws on it might not be so crazy. At the least you could have the law state that if a reasonable person would think something violates the spirit of the law, then it does, but if it's too subtle for a reasonable person to be able to confidently decide either way, then you have one of the cases where you maybe can just follow the letter of the law or have some other process to figure it out.

It's interesting to note that the legal system generally argues that ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse for violating it, which means that the more complicated laws get, the less confident anyone can be that they're not inadvertently breaking the law in some way. This disproportionately affects individuals who are not rich, and also small businesses, because rich people and large companies can generally afford legal counsel to figure this out for them. The average person typically does not have the time or money for this except in exceptional circumstances. They also have less ability to scour all the laws looking for loopholes to exploit.

So the current situation disproportionately benefits rich people and big companies. If the spirit of the law became the norm, it would almost certainly level the playing field. Sure, the little guy probably can't get away with bullshitting on his tax return, but this is small fry compared to companies like Apple and Google doing things like exploiting the Double Irish tax loophole to avoid paying billions in taxes every year.

And, honestly, a world where everyone stops trying to game the system and pat themselves on the back because they think they're so fucking clever for violating the law in a technically legal way, wouldn't that kind of be a nice place to live?

The Future of Human Labor

Brao Couple Planting Food by BigBrotherMouse - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

As we see more and more jobs becoming obsolete due to automation or computer technology changing the way we do things, it's natural to ask where this will eventually lead. How much will society change in the long run if these trends continue?

The conventional wisdom has always been that some jobs will never be replaced by machines, and that for the jobs that do get replaced, new higher skilled jobs appear in their place. But the real answer stems from a simple concept that is almost certain to be true, provided we don't destroy ourselves in the meantime:

At some point in the future, there will be no job that a human can do better than a machine.

If you're already on board with that idea, then you won't need me to try and convince you, but it constantly surprises me how strongly most people seem to object to this idea, as though somehow the identity or intrinsic value of human beings depends on it.

So if you object to this idea, the first thing to do is to stop and genuinely, honestly ask yourself if you object because of some evidence that you think refutes it, or if you object because you don't like it. I suspect that most people simply don't like the idea of humans becoming effectively obsolete, or that they need to believe that humans have something special about us, some soul or spirit or spark that makes us different to everything else, and that could never be replicated by a cold, calculating machine.

And so you hear all the things that machines can never do, in their opinion. And while, right now, there are still plenty of things that machines can't do yet, every day there are more and more things that they can do. If you recognize that the human brain is incredibly complicated, but still just a physical object, you can see that, theoretically, there is no reason why that kind of complexity can't be replicated artificially. And without the constraints of evolution via natural selection, it can probably be done better and more efficiently, since you don't necessarily need a sequence of incremental improvements in order to get there. This opens the door to a lot of alternative processes when designing and building things.

It's interesting just how similar the "there are things machines will never be able to do" argument is to the "science can never explain everything" argument, and I think they're both fueled by the same need. A lot of people want their religious beliefs to be true (obviously), and they see scientific explanation of everything as removing the need for a creator. So they list things that science can't explain, and over time science explains more and more, and so they keep sticking to their "god of the gaps" arguments and trying to identify things that science hasn't yet answered. But this is just being led by what you want to be true, not what is true. Reality doesn't care about what you want, it is whether you accept it or not.

As with the god of the gaps, so to with the 'human ability of the gaps', and these gaps will keep on disappearing over time, until eventually there are none left.

So, without belaboring the point further, let's say that machines keep on improving, machine intelligence gets better, robotics gets better. What jobs are safe from that?

Think about how aircraft pilots have gradually had more and more responsibility replaced by computers, and at least under ideal circumstances, planes can take off, fly, then land all on their own. Over time, they'll be able to handle more and more of the less ideal circumstances, until the only reason to have a person at the controls is to comfort passengers. The same is true for self driving vehicles. These were a fantasy 10 years ago, and already it's become pretty clear to most people that they're going to happen.

People are only comforted by humans controlling things when the automated versions aren't very good. As soon as automated versions outperform people, humans at the controls immediately seem like a liability. How many young people insist on going to physical banks and using a bank teller because they just don't trust their online banking to do as good a job?

You could argue that jobs involving social and human aspects can never go. This is certainly interesting. We definitely need human contact. But consider, for example, just how much people's social patterns have changed over the past 10 years. How much do people happily have their faces glued to their computer/tablet or smart phone rather than interacting with the actual physical people around them? Don't underestimate the ability of people to adjust socially when technology lets them trade one aspect of social interaction for others. In this case, the actual physical presence of another person is traded for the ability to communicate with lots of people at once, and to drop in and out of conversation based on their interest, in a way that would be socially unacceptable in face to face communication.

So where does this lead us, in the long run?

The limits on providing a higher standard of living for all human beings come down to the availability of physical resources, and the availability of labor to turns those physical resources into useful tangible goods or provide services. The more of these you can get for free, the more you can improve the average quality of life for free.

So imagine more automated machinery to get those resources. Imagine machines to refine those resources and turn them into useful items. Imagine if you could go from digging up minerals through to the creation of, say, solar panel arrays or wind turbines, without any human involvement. Imagine if you could build and deploy water desalination plants and pipelines without any human involvement. Imagine if you could collect, sort, and recycle waste without any human involvement.

One possible future, if we humans could get out of our own way, is a future where our basic needs are provided for us, and where no one actually needs to work. If everything could be done better by machines, you wouldn't need or want humans doing those things. Sound crazy? Sure, but there's really no good technological reason why it couldn't happen. If it doesn't happen, it's because we fuck it up for ourselves, because that small minority of people who need to be richer and more powerful than everyone else will do their best to stop something like this happening.

Now, you might say, if machines could do everything better, then what would be the point of living? What would people do? To which I would say, do you need to be the best author in the world to enjoy writing a book? Do you need to be the best athlete in the world to enjoy playing a sport? Do you need to be the best cook in the world to enjoy making a meal? Do you need to be the best lover in the world to enjoy sex?

A future where no one needs to work is a future where people do things because they want to, not because they need to. Think of all the things you never get around to because you don't have enough time. All the things that you'd like to do someday. Think of all the people you'd like to catch up with or spend more time with. Think of all the hobbies you've never even considered taking up because of time. Think of all the books, movies, TV shows, games, music, plays and works of art you wish you had time to enjoy.

Right now we live in a world where the vast majority of people are less well off and suffer more than you do. People are dying all the time due to lack of basic resources and medicine, and struggling their whole lives just to survive. If you could live in a world where all these people could enjoy a reasonable standard of living, without fear or desperation, and no one ever had to work a day in their lives if they didn't want to, and the only real cost is that a tiny fraction of us might have to give up being super rich assholes, would that really be such a bad tradeoff?