Scott Adams' brave new world Pt1

Scott Adams made what is unquestionably a very bad argument and got crapped on from all sides for doing so. He entered into one of those special areas where we respond to arguments we don't like with moral outrage. And that is interesting.

The argument in question is here. Lots of people have responded to it by reaching moral conclusions. See, for example, The Last Psychiatrist's take. (You can also find some links to other moral attacks on Adams at that link as well.)

Here is a sentence that shows us what upset people:

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable.

Now that is a bizarre claim but at most times in history it wouldn't have raised any eyebrows (although it was more often asked the other way around leading to societies in which women were cloistered and forced to wear veils and given very few rights.) Why is our era different?

The central issue is pretty simple, what if the natural instincts of men and women combined with rational choices don't lend themselves to civilized social behaviour? Wolves naturally form packs and sheep naturally herd together in flocks but you don't see many natural societies made up of both wolves and sheep.

Of course, putting it that way makes Scott Adams argument look pretty stupid because male and female wolves have no trouble forming packs and male and female sheep have no trouble forming flocks. And even if you didn't want to base human society on either of those models (and practically no one would) it is still reasonable to suggest that there might be a natural form for human society.

And there it gets a little tricky because, as I noted above, there are lots of historical examples of societies that felt plenty natural to the people in them that we find repulsive. For a long time, most people thought that slavery was natural. Racism and sexism too. The enlightenment moral solution was to replace natural societies with one based on rational choices.

And here we can begin to see what Scott Adams is really getting at. This may come as a surprise to him but he is an anti-enlightenment thinker. The classic Enlightenment view was that morality was a matter of making decisions based on rules that are arrived at on purely rational grounds. What you were naturally inclined to do simply didn't enter into the equation. Is lying wrong? If your answer is yes, then perfectly natural instincts such as lying to avoid of shame, lying to spare other people's feelings and lying to maintain a private sphere are irrelevant.

In the extreme case, that being Kant, the Enlightenment argument was that the right thing to do was the right thing to do even if it was impossible for you to actually do it.

In opposition to this, Adams favours a view that takes human nature into account and his blog is full of references to recent science suggesting that the Enlightenment understanding free will is bunk. Adams doesn't actually believe we have no choices, although he often talks as if he believes that. What he really believes is that what science tells us about human nature should play a big role in how we think about morality.

I'm not sure how carefully he has thought it out, for he is a crude and unsophisticated thinker about both morality and science. He has strong opinions about both and tends to think that anyone who disagrees with him is an idiot. But he makes crude and poorly evidenced arguments all the time so it is hard to take him very seriously.

Take a look at this paragraph from the post that caused so many people to get offended at him for example:

Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.

An alarming trend in the news? Meaning what? That news reporters have shown an alarming tendency to treat circus sideshows as if they were important news? Because Adams cannot reasonably expect us to believe that a few recent news stories tells us something about how powerful men in general behave can he? Well, actually, that is exactly what he wants us to believe.

And here you can begin to see why people responded angrily. The two examples he dwells upon at any length are Hugh Hefner and Anthony Weiner and he clearly thinks these examples tells us something about the natural instincts of the human male.

Consider Hugh Hefner. He had every benefit of being a single man, and yet he decided he needed to try marriage. Marriage didn’t work out, so he tried the single life again. That didn’t work out, so he planned to get married again, although reportedly the wedding just got called off. For Hef, being single didn’t work, and getting married didn’t work, at least not in the long run. Society didn’t offer him a round hole for his round peg. All it offered were unlimited square holes.

To be fair, if a man meets and marries the right woman, and she fulfills his needs, he might have no desire to tweet his meat to strangers. Everyone is different.  But in general, society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires. I don’t have a solution in mind. It’s a zero sum game. If men get everything they want, women lose, and vice versa. And there’s no real middle ground because that would look like tweeting a picture of your junk with your underpants still on. Some things just don’t have a compromise solution.

 Elsewhere Adams says, " I don't draw conclusions from anecdotal evidence". Well, actually you do Mr. Adams. and worse than that you draw this anecdotal evidence from sketchy anecdotes.

Marriage didn't work for Hefner? Actually, Hefner showed zero interest in marriage for decades. Then he got married around the time when his ability to get and maintain erections began to fail. Then someone invented a drug to deal with his erection problems and he started to cheat on his wife and she didn't think that was acceptable so the marriage ended. Just recently, he tried to get married again and he seems to have been taken for a ride by a woman who set out to exploit a foolish old man.

The Last Psychiatrist says that Adams's premises are false but that is too generous. He doesn't have premises. The arguments above are so poorly framed and drawn on evidence that is so fragmentary that you can't really call them premises. A premise can be wrong or right. Those two paragraphs are just confused nonsense that can't even be wrong.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people have assumed that some psychological projection is at work here. They have assumed that Adams identifies with Hefner and Weiner and that his irrational premises reflect his own sexual frustrations. I don't think so given that his very next move is this:

Long term, I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge for sex, he also doesn’t miss it. Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond.  Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.

That might sound to you like a horrible world. But the oxytocin would make us a society of huggers, and no one would be treated as a sex object. You’d have no rape, fewer divorces, stronger friendships, and a lot of other advantages. I think that’s where we’re headed in a few generations.

That is not, I'm fairly confident, the choice that either Hefner or Weiner would make.

The puzzle here is that Scott Adams doesn't know things about human nature that any preschooler can demonstrate an instinctive grasp of. That may be why he is so funny. Like a lot of comedians, Adams is perpetually alienated from people around him. he also has a very poor understanding of where the sorts of "solutions" he proposes above have tended to lead in the past.

Of course, the solution that Adams finds so convincing has an unexpressed premise which is that society will be run by people who share the same values as he does. He doesn't consider the possibility that we might get a society in which low-status males are all chemically castrated in order that high status males can maintain huge harems. And he certainly doesn't consider the possibility that the solution that seems benign to him might be pure horror in practice.

(He also seems utterly unaware of how much women want sex and it's impossible not to suspect that his views are shaped by, sorry to be so brutal, a history of poor success in relating to women sexually.)

He does consider the possibility that the world he considers might sound horrible to us but he doesn't seriously consider the possibility that it might actually be horrible.

Should that scare us? For an awful lot of the outrage at his argument is driven by fear. It would be scary if Scott Adams and people like him get to be the dominant political and cultural class. But we don't live in such a world. I'm fairly confident that won't happen but it could. It's one of the risks you have to live with.


Part 2 tomorrow

A magical visit to the Land of 10,000 Lakes

That's Minnesota.

But not only Minnesota as Mr. Lileks points out. There is a spot an hour's drive down the highway from here that still has a few well-worn billboards that, if you look really closely, identify it as the land of 10,000 lakes. There were places all over North America that pitched themselves as the vacation spot where you could go and fish, and swim and just hang out and read a magazine in a lodge or cabin by the lake.

James Lileks has scanned a Minnesota 1958 tourist guide for our enjoyment. It's a wonderful trip into the past. Not just the past that was but the past of fantasy as well. If you visit page 12 of the stuff he has put up, for example, you will see a lovely posed shot of a family at a lodge somewhere in Minnesota.

I've been there. Not that exact there but to places just like it. And I would love to be able to go back just for a second. I want everything in that picture: the room, the furniture, the view, the fir tree. I want to stand outside and smell the needles in the heat, hear the power boat way out on the lake, feel the feeling of being out of school and on vacation with my family.

And yet not. Because stop a moment and try to imagine what it would be like to get two people who want to read, their daughter who wants to play the electronic organ (and probably isn't very good at it) and their son who wants to play shuffleboard into the same room together.

I still want to go there. And I want to sit on the floor laughing at this.

 

Mom will enjoy herself more if you treat her to "eating out'. I bet she will!

Perhaps not as much as the Serpentine One and I would have enjoyed ourselves laughing at these promotional materials. Why, oh why, did the editor put those scare quotes around "eating out"? It's like they meant us to take it the wrong way. And look at the expressions on the faces of "Mom" and "Dad". He just made a lewd offer but couched it as a joke and she just one-upped him by telling him she intends to hold him to it. His leer is a mixture of shock and not believing his luck and her smug look says she enjoys still being able to do this to him all these years later. It's a good thing that they are so wrapped up in one another because their daughter overheard and her expression suggests that she has just become aware of a side of married life she hadn't thought possible before and is getting a vicarious thrill out it all. Only kid brother is absolutely oblivious.

Sigh. A world that is gone forever. A world that was both innocent and "innocent" if you know what I mean. I'd even be willing to be the obnoxious, shuffleboard-playing kid brother who doesn't get the hidden subtext to be able to go back there for a while. Go visit Mr. Lileks' site. Every page of this brochure is a joy.

But what I'd really like is to go back right now and sit at that table and .... And I know just who I'd take with me.

Sort of political Monday

Political religion
Walter Russell Mead wraps up a three piece series on the failure of Al Gore with some questions:

The serial rise and fall of these vacuous civil society movements and the peculiar grip they exercise over the minds of some otherwise intelligent people is an important subject: why do so many people who want to help solve global problems waste so much time and money and, sometimes, do so much harm?  Is there some way to harness that energy and idealism to causes and strategies that might do more good?  What does the repeated rise and fall of clueless but well educated and well placed enthusiasts teach us about the state of our civilization and the human condition?

I'm not sure I can answer any of those questions but I'm pretty sure that most human activity is vanity and  that nothing will change that. I don't think we can change that but I do think we could be considerably more self aware about it.

Ottawa had its "Run for the Cure" a little while ago and walking along the route afterwards I was reading some of the inspirational stuff people had written to help the runners keep going. The one that really jumped out at me was this:

You are making a  difference!

It jumped out at me because, in all honesty, no you aren't making a difference. There is very little you can do about breast cancer, cystic fibrosis, ALS, poverty or the climate. I'm sorry but you are deluding yourself. You can do particular things but these big things you can't do much about.

Yeah, someday, someone might find a cure for cancer and it may even turn out that that person who finds the cure was working on a project funded by a run for the cure but pick any woman randomly out of the Run for the Cure crowd and she is not making a difference. (And it may be that cancer is incurable. Poverty certainly seems to be.)

And it ought to trouble us a lot more than it does that we dress up what are really self-indulgences as making a difference. Charity balls, charity golf tournaments, charity runs ... it's odd how we keep dressing up things we really want to do anyway so we can pass them off as "making a difference". If someone ever finds a way to frame binging on junk food or masturbation as making a difference the entire economy will come to a great grinding halt.

A lot of politics consists of creating and nurturing problems that can be solved so as to satisfy our vanity that we are making a difference. An awful lot of what we praise as the opposite of selfishness is the very height of selfishness.

On the other hand, the most generous, caring people in our world work at jobs to make money. Then they take this money and invest it, or build homes with it, or buy stuff with it. They do all this so they can take care of the people they love. And yet we often delude ourselves into thinking them selfish.

I'm not saying don't play golf or run for charity. Pick your charities well and go ahead and do it. But remember that these are things you do after you finish doing the really important things. And you can do as much by quietly writing a cheque and handing it over with the request that your donation remain anonymous, thereby avoiding some (but not all) of the temptations of vanity.

And we should always remember that these are things that don't make a lot of difference in this world. The world will be what it is no matter what you do. There will be poverty, war and disease and not even the most powerful people on the planet can change that.

Write the words "You are lying to yourself" on a piece of paper and pin it up somewhere so you can go and read it any time you get swept up in the vanity of thinking that you and others really are making a difference. Then to your spouse or some other person you love and do something nice for them. That won't make a difference. It will just be the right thing to do.

Happy independence day! Our God-given rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness really are the things that matter most.

Because it's summer: smooth song of the day #24

Flashdance: What a Feeling by Irene Cara
I remember when this movie came out the critics rained all over it for being unrealistic. Hmm, a girl who works full time as a welder during the day and then dances 'til late at night at a strip club where the strippers don't have to take off their clothes applies for and gets admission to a dance conservatory even though she has had no formal training and is already 18? Happens every day I'm sure. But attacking a musical for being unrealistic is like criticizing a dance tune for having a steady beat. It's the whole point.

The smooth, clean girls were in university and dressing preppy and the thing about the music was, as I've said before, that it wasn't about her life. The music was about some fantastic creature who could live the sort of high-risk, roller coaster life she never would live.

She knew such lives existed. She knew this intimately because she had an older sisters or cousins who had thrown caution and taste aside in the 1970s and she was well acquainted with the wreckage such lives left behind them. That's why she was making damn sure it wasn't going to happen to her and it is why she knew stories like this belonged in the movies. The song says, "I can really have it all" but any girl with a reasonable sense of prudence knows better and the smooth, clean girls who'd popped up at the end of the 1970s knew better in the 1980s.



By the way: I'd say we're long overdue for a return of girls with that 1980s preppy attitude.

The series starts here.

Everything comes to an end and the era and this series wraps up here.

Because it's summer: smooth song of the day #23

On and On by Stephen Bishop
Yes, I know, I said I was moving into the new decade and this is a throwback to the 1970s. But this song just hung around for years and years. And besides it's a holiday and besides it is a personal favourite.  It was never that big a hit but the smooth, clean girls kept playing it for years after it first came out. Often they'd apologize as if they were ashamed of liking it or try and hide their love of it behind irony. Eventually,  they admitted it was just great.

 The problem, I think, was the mention of Sinatra. Nowadays, everyone knows that Sinatra was the greatest singer of the American songbook ever but it was the height of uncool to like him back in the early 1980s (believe me, I know, I cleared rooms over and over again when I tried to get people to listen to Sinatra. I had a  Sinatra pin I used to wear and everyone assumed I meant it as a joke. They wouldn't believe me when I tried to tell them that I really thought Sinatra was the greatest.

Anyway, that Stephen Bishop clearly saw something special about Sinatra made the song less credible back then. Nowadays, it has the opposite effect.

There was something prophetic about it too. Smooth would mean something different from now on.

I think I'll "Toss up my heart and see where it lands".

The series starts here.

The next song is here.

Pink maps

When I was a kid, all the countries of the British Commonwealth were on the globe I had at home in pink. I loved to look at it and at age 10 could list every country in the Commonwealth, something I couldn't come close to doing today. When I first saw the map-template that I use here at Blogger, I knew I'd have to customize it to make it pink.

Anyway, it is Canada Day (lamest name for a national holiday ever!) today and Independence Day on Monday and I plan to celebrate both with gusto. Posting will be light and I won't be able to respond to comments. I'm sure I'll look in occasionally on account of my hard-core Internet addiction but much less often than usual and typically with a drink in one hand, which slows the typing down considerably and might even affect my reading comprehension somewhat.

I'll be drinking Pink Gin and Tonics this evening and Bourbon Old-fashioneds come Monday.

Have a good one all.

Womanly virtues Friday ...

A good argument gets overstated
Simcha Fisher gets going on a good argument about a girl's track team that performed better when they were allowed to wear loose skorts over their skin-tight compression shorts. And then she undermines herself by going further than the evidence justifies.

Here is what she says the take away from the experience is:

1. Boys will ogle at girls who expose their bodies.
2. Girls feel uncomfortable when they are ogled.
3. Girls get nervous when they feel uncomfortable, and can’t function well when nervous.
4. There is something wrong with dressing immodestly, so let’s stop pretending it’s normal.
5. Yay, Dunbar! And yay for their coach—sounds like a sensible, compassionate guy who cares for his athletes.

The first problem here is one of vocabulary. The second problem is precision.

Let's start with "ogle" which means, according to my Oxford Concise Dictionary, "to stare at lecherously".  Rather a loaded term, wouldn't you say? Ogling is rude and inconsiderate. So, right off the bat, we have made a negative and unfair generalization about boys.

Do boys look at girls in a sexual way? Why yes they do. Is there something wrong with that? Well, sometimes yes but let's come back to that some other day.

Let's move on to "uncomfortable". Girls are uncomfortable being looked at in a sexual way? Some of them no doubt are but unless agents of Satan are forcing girls to get dressed in ways they really, really don't want to, the evidence to the contrary here is so overwhelming I feel guilty even entering into such a lopsided dispute.

(And when it comes to the sexual experience of girls and boys there is an apt distinction between "uncomfortable in a bad way" and uncomfortable in a good way". Anne-Marie Ellis who sat in front of me in Grade 10 Math made me very uncomfortable in a  good way and my marks suffered as a consequence that year. Both my Math teacher and my parents were unhappy about it but I wasn't complaining.)

How about we choose a more neutral term like, I don't know, how about "self conscious'.

Then we can restate #3 above in a far more defensible form: "When girls are self conscious about being looked at in a  sexual way it tends to distract them in ways that hurt their performance in other areas."

And we might even soften it further and admit there are degrees. As Ms. Fisher correctly points out a mini-skirt-length skort over compression shorts is not exactly devoid of erotic interest. (I myself have a hard time imagining how any piece of clothing with an athletic young woman in it could be non-erotic.)

Could it be that the some girls aren't hampered by being looked at in a sexual way so much as they are hampered by being looked at in a sexual way while wearing clothes they don't feel their best in? I'm just guessing here but I'm thinking maybe that is a factor.

Here are some interesting quotes from members of the team:

“You look good, you run good,” Phillips, a co-captain, said. “It makes you feel different when you’re out on the track, like no one can come get you.”

Added teammate Manaiza Kelley: “I feel classy in it. I feel like a woman.”

Learning that dignity matters and that respecting the dignity that comes with being God's special creation are really good things to do for your own happiness is something that girls and boys need help with. I'll tell you one thing girls really like at that age: limits. They may not admit it, but the girls I grew up with and the girls I later taught all really liked knowing that there were certain limits on what can and cannot be worn.

The take away, I think, is that  if you want school girls to do well at sports or academics, you want to limit the ways in which their sexual self consciousness might hamper their performance. How about that Simcha Fisher?

Oh yeah, Yay coach! I agree absolutely.