A proposition may well be an incomplete picture of a certain situation, but it is always a complete picture of something.
Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said. (Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus)
We thus derive the first law of comedy, that which allows it to travel faster than light. By the logic of a closed system: if the set-up exists, then so must the punchline.
hey man there’s a hole in my head where information goes
I.
1 And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another: ‘Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
4 And they said: 'Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said: 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.
7 Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:1–9)
In Sunday School or Illustrated Classics, we are taught that God punished humanity for hubris, for daring to disobey Mesopotamian zoning laws. That’s not what it says here.
Trying to extract useful information from the 24-hour thinkpiece cycle is like trying to learn English by listening to low fidelity death metal: the signal to noise ratio is very, very low. (Admittedly, kind of a silly comparison—one imbues the audience with depraved bloodlust for unspeakable atrocities, the other is a genre of music.) The cacophony of 40,000 anhedonics exhausting every topical combination of syllables would be enough to institutionalize the Dalai Lama; words are infectious; once you find yourself forming political opinions about internet memes, your life is game over, A + B + Select + Start. I mean damn, I love pattern matching as much as the next former toy-sorter, but sometimes it’s okay to accept that a cigar is a cigar and a butterfly in New Mexico was having a bad day.
If you do want to stay “informed,” instead of doing something worthwhile like working at a soup kitchen or practicing the yo-yo, my advice is that you train yourself to zoom out. No one post-puberty will make a significant error of deductive reasoning. Nothing horrifies a teenager like hypocrisy: the first thing we learn out of Eden is how to circle A —> B around into Z —> A. Logic is easy, ask any expert on Aether. Nor will anyone worth rap battling commit a decisive factual error. Our flat earth has enough case studies to support even the most whacked ideology, ask any schizophrenic. Further, we humans of latitude have practiced the art of the squeal since our first lung expansion. We may be terrible at diagnosis, but we are the GOAT at identifying symptoms. So when you roll up your sleeves to shadowbox with a Bad Argument, you are going to face an internally consistent worldview backed by genuine hurt and fitting examples. This is why change is so difficult, and why other people are so infuriating: the problem is not bias, it is incompleteness. The only way out is to spot what is not included, the lie of omission, which requires perspective. Any given data point is both true and meaningless, a straight line across points makes you Nostradamus. Most arguments are nonsense, but when everyone chooses the same type of nonsense, that tells you something very interesting indeed.
With this methodology in mind, it is my contention that three of the most prevalent post-election news trends are designed with a single goal in mind: to prevent you from looking too closely at this picture—
—while humanity gets crunched into Google AdWords and fed to Cthulhu. The end of all things will be search engine optimized, at least we can take comfort in that.
The advertising campaign in the weeks leading up to the 2017 Oscars—that is, the #Oscarsowhite boycott, low budget underdog Moonlight vs. slick self-congratulatory La La Land, lines drawn based on tribal identity; “I even talked to a voter who gave Moonlight his top vote, sight unseen;” tension building up to a stunning (!!) last minute twist; an insipid academy in which Sean Penn is a voting member “held to task” instead of the people with actual power, i.e. the studios, i.e. us, the viewers—was annoying, to say the least.
Even so, I am grateful that I will only have to hear “Best Picture winner” and “La La Land” in the same sentence once.
What does white people courtship look like in the age of the internet? Well, OKCupid and asphyxiation, but it’s hard to make a musical out of that one. So what is romance supposed to look like? According to Hollywood: love is someone who makes it so you never have to talk to anyone else.
Washington, DC (January 26, 2015) - It seems harmless: getting settled in for a night of marathon session for a favorite TV show, like House of Cards. But why do we binge-watch TV, and can it really be harmless?
The classic set-up: a #superrichkid in pastel board shorts downs a fifth of Cristal, starts up his dad’s Jaguar, and delivers ½ mv^2 to a trio of Girl Scouts. Sentence: six months in a rehab center that used to be a Hyatt. Clickbait vultures catch the scent, compare/contrast to an economically disadvantaged African-American who’s serving a decade in the Gulag for smoking a joint before his dialysis appointment.
Conclusion: the American justice system is racist, classist, and ableist.
And I agree: the American justice system probably is racist, classist, and ableist. But there’s a more insidious—and harder to solve—problem. Hard problems are rarely the result of malice or even stupidity. They are the result of ordinary people doing what they are told.
Wait, how does arresting people before they’ve actually done anything wrong help? This is obviously the focal point of the entire essay and I feel it hasn’t been adequately defended. Having an arrest on your record labels you as a criminal and makes you more likely to identify as such. (Does anyone here know they name for this phenomenon?) If we already send people to prison for marijuana use, how much room do we have left or escalate when someone commits murder? How can you have a functional justice system if the people you’re policing don’t accept your authority as legitimate?
@wirehead-wannabe: I don’t think sending people to prison for marijuana is a good idea. There are less stringent options available (fines? mandatory D.A.R.E.?), but “whether these rehab/deterrence techniques are worth the cost is, obviously, a matter of debate.”
However, there are cases where “arresting people before they’ve actually done anything wrong” seems reasonable. @serinemolecule mentions DUIs: a 0.20 driver hasn’t hurt anyone yet, but has a high risk of doing so. The justice system deems it acceptable to preemptively punish him in order to prevent this harm.
(Technically, selling nuclear weapons is a victimless crime.)
The same logic is used against marijuana users. Your average manbunned Boulder resident is not going to become El Chapo, but people who sell marijuana by the ton often have a shady past/present/future. Our punishments increase commensurate with the kilogram.
And if you agree with the justice system that “risky people” should be punished based on their risk, you may find yourself agreeing to some ugly disparities.
@ranma-official: Let me officially state that I do not endorse long prison sentences at hellscapes.
However, are you sure that they don’t prevent recidivism? If you’re sentenced to life in prison, you will not be able to perform Grand Theft Auto.
In a semi-ideal world—i.e. ignoring the way prison hardens criminals—you should give a unlikely-to-rehabilitate defendant a longer sentence, both increasing the deterrent dose and preventing a few more years of potential crime.
(A lighter example: you should give a heavier fine to a text-and-driver who shows no remorse; the fine isn’t going to have much effect on the already repentant.)
@alexanderrm: Fine, there are other reasons the government punishes victimless crimes. Like keeping a high IQ, sober workforce—except that’s still lopsided, note that white-collar jobs don’t get drug tested. Also, to kill good vibes and immanentize the eschaton, but that goes without saying.
And yes, my argument is exactly “utilitarianism disproportionately punishes those who are most likely to commit crimes [even if those people have done nothing wrong except have the wrong demography].” If you’re cool with that, vote Nixon ‘68.
@jbeshir: The first part of your argument is, essentially, “Humans are not very good at utility calculations.” I agree. But it seems like you’re throwing the baby out with the water utility. Consider the legal distinction between first degree murder and voluntary manslaughter. It’s hard to find a convincing deontological reason for distinguishing between them: “Thou shalt not kill, unless thou art really mad.” But utilitarianism resolves this easily: the guy who Dexters his homicide is more likely to do bad stuff in the future.
Do you disapprove of all context-dependent sentences? Should someone on his tenth offense be punished the same as someone on his first?
If you stick to your guns and claim that all such distinctions are naive, fair, but this is the naive utilitarianism that is actually being used by the courts today, and this is the logic behind its use. Write a letter to Congress.
You and @misanthropymademe are both correct: it was sloppy of me to say that the harm of public distrust is impossible to calculate. (Although I imagine “the cost of public distrust specifically due to sentencing disparities between privileged and not-privileged” would be a doozy for Wolfram.)
To clarify: I didn’t write this essay to defend the current system, nor to uphold it as an exemplar of utilitarian thought. I wrote it to explain the logic behind otherwise opaque injustices, a logic which seems to stem from (perhaps imperfect) utilitarianism.
Moving forward—my gestalt is that some degree of context-dependent sentencing is necessary, but that our current justice system allows far too much leeway. Most real crimes should be deontologically fixed to their punishment; most victimless crimes should not be punished.
If anyone has a better solution, I would be pleased to hear it.
The classic set-up: a #superrichkid in pastel board shorts downs a fifth of Cristal, starts up his dad’s Jaguar, and delivers ½ mv^2 to a trio of Girl Scouts. Sentence: six months in a rehab center that used to be a Hyatt. Clickbait vultures catch the scent, compare/contrast to an economically disadvantaged African-American who’s serving a decade in the Gulag for smoking a joint before his dialysis appointment.
Conclusion: the American justice system is racist, classist, and ableist.
And I agree: the American justice system probably is racist, classist, and ableist. But there’s a more insidious—and harder to solve—problem. Hard problems are rarely the result of malice or even stupidity. They are the result of ordinary people doing what they are told.
We are winning the war against transmissible disease.
Between 2000 and 2015, global malaria incidence fell by 37% and malaria mortality rates decreased by 60%. The per year rate of new HIV infections has declined 35% since 2000, and the number of AIDS-related deaths has dropped 42% since 2004. Tuberculosis incidence has fallen 18% since 2000, and the TB death rate dropped 47% between 1990 and 2015. Smallpox and polio have been nigh-eradicated; shigellosis, measles, and diphtheria are on their way out.
I do not want to downplay the significance of these diseases. Globally, the Big Three (malaria, HIV, and TB) and neglected tropical diseases are responsible for more suffering and death than just about anything else. If you want to make a difference, this is where your money and effort should go.
However, we are trending in the right direction [1]. Barring some unforeseen apocalypse, it seems likely that sanitation, education, and vaccination will continue to do their saintly work, and it is thus conceivable that all of the above diseases will one day be eliminated.
Compare:
CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics estimates that, based upon information collected for billing purposes, the number of times people were in the hospital with sepsis or septicemia (another word for sepsis) increased from 621,000 in the year 2000 to 1,141,000 in 2008. (Source)
Between 28 and 50 percent of people who get sepsis die.
Sepsis is the end game of infection. If your body fails to control an infection—any infection, be it influenza, a pimple, or fungal meningitis—then your immune system will freak out, your capillaries will leak, your organs will starve, and you will die.
If we’re so good at fighting transmissible disease, then why is sepsis on the rise?
Pneumonia is the most common cause of sepsis, and Streptococcus pneumoniae is the most common cause of pneumonia. Strep pneumonia is not very contagious: even if someone French-kisses sputum directly into your bronchioles you probably won’t get sick. Why not? Because the immune system absolutely crushes strep. It has to—Streptococcus pneumoniae is part of the normal human microbiota, and even if it doesn’t live in your throat, you are exposed to it frequently. Yes, some strains are worse than others, hence vaccination, but if you’re an eighty-five year old man on chemotherapy and you get strep pneumonia, the problem isn’t the bacterium, the problem is you.
This is the pattern that explains the future of illness. We’re not getting worse at fighting sepsis—the per-case mortality rate has actually decreased—but people are living longer, the immune system goes caput with age, and eventually we all run out of luck.
Which means that sepsis isn’t going away. The prevalence of fungal sepsis secondary to Candida albicans is increasing, thanks to our weakened immune systems, but we can’t eradicate C. albicans, it’s in our GI tract, it’s in our respiratory tract, it’s on our skin, and even if we did somehow eliminate it, another microbe would instantly take its place. Klebsiella is normal flora, so is Bacteroides, and no one even pretends that we can get rid of E. coli.Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the final boss of opportunistic pathogens, is “found in soil, water, skin flora, and most man-made environments throughout the world”, “thrives not only in normal atmospheres, but also in hypoxic atmospheres”, “uses a wide range of organic material for food”, and has “more than fifty [antibiotic] resistance genes.”This thing is going to survive the heat death of the universe.
It is useful to divide diseases between “self” and “other”: those diseases which are intrinsic to the machinery of the human body, and those which are caused by some external assault. Over the 20th century, medicine made great strides against the “other”: smallpox, polio, asbestos, lead. But sepsis is a disease of the self. Just as cancer results from a failure to control the normally cooperative cells of our body, sepsis results a failure to control our beneficial and commensal microbes. This sort of failure is inevitable as long as we face the inexorable decline of aging.
I’m not saying that we will never beat sepsis, but when we do, we will have changed what it means to be human.
