Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Sunday, November 3, 2019

The Economics of Toil

As a baseline, everyone has a certain amount of toil which must be allocated to or from them in order for them to survive.
To support a leisure class (not just the rich, but people like CEOs, professors, and marketers) some people must toil much harder than they need to support only themselves in order to allow for this class to exist. This is why the human race has historically relied on slavery, and we still use economic conscription (sometimes brutal) when we're not using outright labor camps to produce goods and services. Without this de facto slavery, humanity could not really advance.
This will always be true short of us automating everything and/or achieving a post-scarcity economy (freeing us from toil altogether)
Under most forms of socialism (excepting models like mutualism and collectivism that allow for wealth accumulation) everyone must toil to support both themselves and the overhead of the community, meaning everyone is working beyond what they need in order to have baseline survival. Everyone is indentured, even in its ideal and theoretical form, never mind in practice. It cannot support a leisure class in its pure form. Maybe that's why the Khmer Rouge set about murdering academics.
Under capitalism, the toil is not evenly distributed, so some people toil so others do not. This creates class disparity and "unfairness" (life isn't fair) but allows for a thriving leisure class and the human advancement that comes with it.
Post-scarcity would make all of this obsolete, but we're not nearly there yet, if we ever will be. I think that would probably be a type 1 society on the Kardashev scale, and if so we're probably a century or two away from that, assuming we survive.

5 facts about crime in the U.S.

BY JOHN GRAMLICH
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/17/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/

Donald Trump made fighting crime a central focus of his campaign for president, and he cited it again during his January 2017 inaugural address. His administration has since taken steps intended to address crime in American communities, such as instructing federal prosecutors to pursue the strongest possible charges against criminal suspects. Here are five facts about crime in the United States.
1Violent crime in the U.S. has fallen sharply over the past quarter century. The two most commonly cited sources of crime statistics in the U.S. both show a substantial decline in the violent crime rate since it peaked in the early 1990s. One is an annual report by the FBI of serious crimes reported to police in more than 18,500 jurisdictions around the country. The other is a nationally representative annual survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which asks approximately 160,000 Americans ages 12 and older whether they were victims of crime, regardless of whether they reported those crimes to the police.
Using the FBI numbers, the violent crime rate fell 51% between 1993 and 2018. Using the BJS data, the rate fell 71% during that span. The long-term decline in violent crime hasn’t been uninterrupted, though. The FBI, for instance, reported increases in the violent crime rate between 2004 and 2006 and again between 2014 and 2016. Violent crime includes offenses such as rape, robbery and assault.

2Property crime has declined significantly over the long term. Like the violent crime rate, the U.S. property crime rate today is far below its peak level. FBI data shows that the rate fell by 54% between 1993 and 2018, while BJS reports a decline of 69% during that span. Property crime includes offenses such as burglary, theft and motor vehicle theft, and it is generally far more common than violent crime.
3Public perceptions about crime in the U.S. often don’t align with the data. Opinion surveys regularly find that Americans believe crime is up nationally, even when the data shows it is down. In 18 of 22 Gallup surveys conducted between 1993 and 2018, at least six-in-ten Americans said there was more crime in the U.S. compared with the year before, despite the generally downward trend in national violent and property crime rates during most of that period.
Pew Research Center surveys have found a similar pattern. In a survey in late 2016, for instance, 57% of registered voters said crime in the U.S. had gotten worse since 2008, even though FBI and BJS data shows that violent and property crime rates declined by double-digit percentages during that span.
While perceptions of rising crime at the national level are common, fewer Americans tend to say crime is up when asked about the local level. In all 21 Gallup surveys that have included the question since 1996, no more than about half of Americans have said crime is up in their area compared with the year before.
4There are large geographic variations in crime rates. The BJS statistics don’t allow for specific geographic comparisons, but the FBI data shows big differences from state to state and city to city. In 2018, there were more than 800 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in Alaska and New Mexico. By contrast, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont had rates below 200 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. And while Chicago has drawn widespread attention for its soaring murder total in recent years, its murder rate in 2018 – about 21 murders and non-negligent manslaughters per 100,000 residents – was less than half of the rates in St. Louis (about 61 per 100,000) and Baltimore (about 51 per 100,000). The FBI notes that various factors might influence a particular area’s crime rate, including its population density and economic conditions.
5Most crimes are not reported to police, and most reported crimes are not solved. In its annual survey, BJS asks victims of crime whether they reported that crime to police. In 2018, only 43% of violent crimes tracked by BJS were reported to police. And in the much more common category of property crime, only about a third (34%) were reported. There are a variety of reasons crime might not be reported, including a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help” or that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report,” according to BJS.
Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile, are not solved, at least based on an FBI measure known as the “clearance rate.” That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution (or through “exceptional means,” such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution). In 2018, police nationwide cleared 46% of violent crimes that were reported to them. For property crimes, the national clearance rate was 18%.



An Atheist's Guide to Scripture: Using the Bible Without Being Used


First of all, I'm not religious. I'm not here to sell anyone on religion. I'm not here to convert you. I'm here to show you how something actually works, and some hacks with it. Life is bewilderingly complex, but it's full of little maps, if you know where to find them and how to use them. The Bible is one of them, and a pretty neat one, especially the Old Testament.

1. Matthew 7, among other things, suggests that most people, especially the people that bang on the Bible the most don't get it all. Seem familiar? The religious are lost.

2. These are stories but that doesn't make them "false". The Boy Who Cried Wolf is similarly not false on the basis that there is truth to the moral it conveys.

3. That being said, approaching the Bible as a moral treatise is pretty much the worst way to use it. This is where pretty much everyone gets it wrong.

4. Because the Bible is exactly as terrible as people are. That's the point. It's about how we're wired, not some ideal. The goal is to "solve" the law, not enforce it. If you go to enforce the law you'll be exactly as terrible as people are. We'll approach this later.

5. The God character is not omnibenevolent, not entirely omniscient and not omnipotent, despite what you've been told. God follows certain rules, like nature, and God is as cold as nature. God is basically allegory for nature and consequence. This is so important: God is not an absolute moral entity in any human sense of it.

Now, if you're caught up, the above should outline a much different approach to scripture than the common Christian one.

We're going to read the Bible a bit more like a Rabbi would than a Christian, though I don't want to sell this as a Jewish take on scripture. It's not necessarily. I'm just trying to help draw a bead for you, the reader: This isn't Christianity.

Scripture as Sociology

Scripture contains patterns for human behavior that were developed using storytelling and observation generation to generation. Some of these predate the Torah and the Old Testament, and come from Babylonian folklore, for example. The oral storytelling allows the tales to adapt over time, and become more refined. In the end some are quite useful for predicting human behavior because we follow patterns, and those patterns are "baked" into scripture.

Scripture maps out conditions for a society, and then the arc that puts society on, so your goal would be to map your society to the appropriate scripture that best reflects the conditions the society is in. From there, you can use the story to chart a course for that society under those conditions.

A couple of good examples of these are contained in Genesis 19 and Ezekiel 16. 

Genesis 19 is about Sodom and spells out what happens to a society with rampaging rape gangs and general cruelty. You can see the state of such societies by looking to war torn bits of the Middle East where these things are common, especially where ISIS operates. They are doomed. 

Ezekiel 16 is about Jerusalem and spells out what happens to a society given over to social vanity, and the impact of that. It states that such a society is cruel. Such a society promotes queerness and taboo. Such a society promotes the worship of false idols (like money). Such a society is indifferent to the poor. This is the cost of social vanity. Such a society will falter but recover as according to the passage God "forgives" rather than destroys them. One might look to the arc the United States is on for an example of this.

Scripture also contains patterns for relationships between individuals and groups generally, but we'll cover some of that later.

Navigating Scriptural Laws

Scripture lays out different laws for different groups, precisely because different groups have different needs and different behaviors.

As a gentile, in order to be considered "righteous" - or rather, upright and sensible all one need observe is the Noahide laws:

  1. Not to worship idols.
  2. Not to curse God.
  3. To establish courts of justice.
  4. Not to commit murder.
  5. Not to commit adulterybestiality, or sexual immorality.
  6. Not to steal.
  7. Not to eat flesh torn from a living animal.

Of these 1,2 and 5 probably require further explanation:

Number 1 is important, because idolatry is a kind of obsession, and obsession leads to all kinds of ugly. The central idol of the modern world is money, and we can see what obsession with money brings. None of it is good.

Number 2 is important, because cursing God is as pointless as cursing the universe. It makes a fool of you, and worse, makes a victim out of you. There's a word for people that go through life cursing it, feeling like they're put upon by the world and the world owes them something: "Criminal" - this is how you become lost.

Number 5 is important because, victimization inherent to things like adultery, bestiality and general sexual abuse aside, things like sexual fetishes become idols, and obsession sets in. Admittedly I'm not clear on what constitutes "sexual immorality" for gentiles, but my advice is to avoid clinical paraphilias generally. For Jews as I understand it sexual immorality is basically sex outside the confines of marriage, possibly non-reproductive sex, but I have some reason to suspect the latter standard would not apply to gentiles.

As a Christian the laws are simple to understand, but difficult to follow. They boil down to "treat others - even your enemies - as you'd be like to be treated", detest your own sin first and foremost, and operate from a position of love. Jesus suggested that by doing this you'd fulfill all of the "old laws" which we'll get to.

As a Jew the laws are numerous, and navigating them, much less following them all is incredibly difficult, if not impossible for most people.

We're going to be focusing on these "old laws" that the Jews use, precisely because there are so many and they're so intricate, but also because you use them differently than you would something like secular law, or the way Christians tend to use Christ's laws.

First of all, for all intents and purposes nobody will follow all the old laws all the time. That doesn't make us criminal - it makes us human. Following all the old laws all the time would be conceptually a perfect execution of one's life, and everybody makes mistakes, makes suboptimal choices, etc. We are not Jesus Christ. We are not one of the 36 righteous individuals ("Tzadikim") for which God does not destroy the world, nor must we be. Achieving this level of perfection would be analogous to being a Buddha. It's simply not something most humans will ever do.

So why have the laws? Because they show us how to make effective choices. Following a law puts you in a position where you have more and/or better choices from there. The laws are action/consequence. Consequence is typically not meted out by man but by God, so for example in Leviticus 20:13 where it says males engaged in homosexual acts shall be put to death it's saying God will kill them. In other words, they'll die sooner. This is true, by the numbers. Sexually active gay men do not generally live as long as straight men or celibate men. 

If a human tries to enforce the law, they are trying to do God's job. "Vengeance is mine", sayeth the Lord. God's job is to mete out God's justice (the laws of the universe). We are not meant to enforce natural law. That's God's province. Our job is to endeavor to prevent the laws from being broken, not to punish. Otherwise we become bloodthirsty, and this is where so many Christians get it dramatically wrong.

What this also means is that the laws are often predictive of human behavior and consequence, not simply laws like you'd find in a court. They're more like laws of nature.

So when Paul for example (who draws from the old laws a lot despite being Christian), declares that sexually active gay men shall not inherit the kingdom in 1 Cor 6:9-12, he's also suggesting that people will endeavor to enforce this law and cast gay men out of mainstream society (social allegory for the kingdom) - indeed we see this among homophobic people - and it's especially directed at the men, just like the law.

Scripture on Slavery

I feel this requires its own section as it's typically dramatically misunderstood.

Scripture acknowledges slavery as a fact of life. When the Bible was written slavery - even chattel slavery - was a fact of life. 

Today we still rely on a form of slavery in order to support a leisure class (non toiling class) - not just the rich, but also people like professors and marketers. They can exist because someone somewhere is toiling under slave like conditions - toiling far more than what they need themselves to survive. This has been how humans have operated since time immemorial, and still do, and likely will until we automate toil or otherwise escape it. Scripture acknowledges this.

Scripture repeatedly implores slave masters to treat their slaves well, and indeed suggests that treating slaves well makes them become like family (see Proverbs 29) - this is true often of people that treat their "help" or their "employees" like family. This is important.

Scripture repeatedly implores slaves to be obedient. This is something people get really hung up on, but it makes sense. Someone in that situation usually does not have the option of escape or open revolt - in fact they depend on their master in order to survive - for food and shelter. So what happens to a disobedient employee, like a slacking maid, or even an actual slave in a labor camp? They suffer consequences for it, and they are trusted less by their masters and treated worse for it, down the road, and since their master has so much control, he can make their lives miserable, at work, or worse, in that labor camp. It's common sense to act upright. 

There's another advantage of acting upright in the face of oppression, as Peter suggests. You remain blameless. The reason people blame antifa is antifa isn't obedient to the existing powers like MLK Jr was. Contrast their methods of resistance. MLK Jr's powerful legacy speaks for itself, and it could only happen because he remained honorable and upright in his actions, even toward his oppressors.





Friday, November 1, 2019

A Nascent Evidence and Reason-Based Political Party

The Common Sense Party is working to become a registered party in California. The group needs about 67,000 registered voters to register with the CSP as their party to obtain official recognition by California. A group of voters decided to form the CSP last September out of frustration with the two major parties. I joined the group effort a few days later when I heard about it. The party intends try to to mostly set standard liberal and conservative ideology aside and instead look more to evidence, reason and public opinion as influences on policy formation and choice. The group has registered over 15,000 voters so far.

Not surprisingly, local commentators have pointed out the difficulty that third parties have in gaining traction with the public. Lack of ideological unity among independents and dropouts from the two main parties is cited as one reason for why third parties don't easily gain traction. Despite the problems, there is enough discontent to lead about a quarter of California voters to register as no party preference or NPP voters.

A possible unifying belief that might help to attract ideologically disparate voters is a belief in facts, truths and sound reason as important guides to inform both reality and policy choices.

My participation
Once the party is officially registered in California, the group plans to have party members vote on a platform. I communicate with the group's Interim Chairman, Bob Campbell, a former republican US congressman and currently a Professor of Economics and a Distinguished Professor of Law at Chapman University. At present, I am writing platform and position papers for the CSP to take up once the party is officially recognized. 

To the extent I am able to do so, I will take this unusual opportunity to introduce the anti-bias mindset and moral basis of pragmatic rationalism to the CSP. In part, doing that is my attempt to provide some basis for cohesion and CSP identity. Obviously, CSP members will accept or reject anti-bias and pragmatic rationalism in whole or in part as they see fit. Nonetheless, my position and platform papers will be informed and shaped by my anti-bias mindset and the moral principles that pragmatic rationalism is based on. 


For California residents interested in registering with the CSP, you can do that online by going to the Secretary of State's online registration form: https://covr.sos.ca.gov/ . When you get to the choice of party option, select OTHER and then type into the Other (specify) box that lights up when OTHER is selected. After you fill out the form and submit it, you will receive a card a week or two later indicating that you are registered with the CSP. Note, this is a legal affidavit and the registration form must be filled out honestly.