Key drivers of the growth of global capitalism

The past 300 years have seen an incredible amount of overall progress in terms of quality of life. Many of the drivers of that project have also been the drivers of immense suffering. Much of this progress and suffering is tied to what we call “global capitalism”.

The book Empire of Cotton charts the rise of the global cotton trade, which drove much of the development of global capitalism. In the spirit of learning from what has successfully fostered human development and condemning what hasn’t, I’d like to provide a summary of what, to my understanding, have been the most important factors in the development of global capitalism.

Development of markets to determine allocation of capital: The development of industry networks, contract law, and financial instruments like credit, insurance, and futures, allow capital to be allocated efficiently (“efficiently” not in a normative sense, but in the sense of producing the most outputs for the least inputs). This makes possible innovation that can allow processes such as farming, manufacturing, and shipping to be done even more efficiently.

Land seizure and clear private property rights: The ability for a large company to grow lots of cotton requires lots of land, and a state that can enforce clear property ownership laws. State capacity was built up with the support of industry leaders and merchants, and land was seized by force from native peoples in places such as India and the U.S. 

Specialization of land and labor: Before the 1800s, many people in the world lived through subsistence farming. They grew what they needed, and bought relatively little. Colonial powers, largely through coercion, forced a shift towards growing cotton for export and then buying your own food. This specialization allows goods to be produced more efficiently and increases demand for those goods, but comes at the cost of increased instability (e.g., higher likelihood of famines when low cotton prices means inability for workers to buy food).

All-compassing control of labor including slavery: The extremely low prices of finished cotton goods require incredibly low production costs. To keep these production costs low, cotton manufacturers kidnapped people from Africa to work on farms as slaves (euphemistically referred to as “elasticity of the labor supply”). They took children from orphanages to work in factories for 12 hours a day. They built dormitories for factory workers to live in and locked the doors at night so they could not escape.

Government protectionism, investment, and coordination: Government tariffs and bans on imports are needed to allow development of nascent manufacturing industries. Infrastructure such as railroads and canals allow goods to be grown in more locations and to be transported more quickly (reductions were dramatic: Getting cotton to the coast in Togo took 15 days in 1900 and just a few hours in 1907). Governments also served a coordination function in the gathering and dissemination of market data.

Commoditization of goods: Manufacturing products at a large scale requires getting resources from many different suppliers. This is very difficult if each supplier gives you a slightly different version of the good. Commoditization, as typified in the development of quality standards during the early 1800s, allows a manufacturer in 1820 Liverpool to buy 200 bales of “choice prime cotton” coming from many different growers in the U.S. and India, and trust that they will all be usable.

Observations from last night's West Des Moines Black Lives Matter protest

The group met at Valley Junction, and marched for about 2 miles in a loop around town. The gathering and march were in honor of Breonna Taylor’s birthday — she would have turned 27 yesterday.

Before marching there were speakers who gave us instructions:

• We were not to hurt any people or property

• We were to remain calm unless provoked

• If we saw a dangerous situation ahead (shooting, tear gasing, etc.), we were not to run towards it, or to run away. We were to turn, give the signal for retreat, and calmly walk away

• If witnessed anyone being arrested, we were to do everything in our power to “de-arrest them”. It was not clear how exactly we were supposed to go about doing that

• “Friends don’t let friends get arrested”

One speaker expressed irritation at being asked by the media if he advocated for peaceful protests. He stressed that he doesn’t feel that we can afford to be “peaceful” if we want to make a change, be we most certainly should be “non-violent”.

By my estimate the crowd was roughly 90% non-black and roughly 90% under thirty years old. On the order of 1000 people total.

Most people wore masks. Though were instructed to march “shoulder-to-shoulder” the typical distance between people while marching was probably around 3 feet.

The march was lead by people on bikes who cleared traffic out of the way, and a van with the back doors open blasting music and occasionally amplifying speakers hyping us up. Biggest hits music-wise based on crowd reaction were “Rock with You” by Michael Jackson and “Savage” by Megan Thee Stallion.

At ~ 25% of the houses we walked past, people stepped outside to watch us. Of those who stepped out, around 75% were taking videos, and around 40% expressed support in some way (cheering, raising fists, giving thumbs up). Passing cars occasionally honked or raised fists to show support as well.

The most commonly chanted phrases were “Say his name — George Floyd!”, “ Say her name — Breonna Taylor!”, “Black lives matter!”, “Hey hey! Ho ho! These racist cops have got to go!”, “No justice — no peace!”, and “Hands up — don’t shoot!”

Halfway through the march we took a break, and the organizers gave some heartfelt speeches from the back of the van:

• “I expect nothing from the police; I expect everything from all of you. I expect nothing from our politicians; I expect everything from all of you.”

• We were reminded that this day we wanted in particular to honor black women. All black women were asked to stand up and we gave a round of applause (for what it’s worth, the leaders of the march seemed to be exclusively male)

• We were told that while we should feel a sense of purpose and solidarity at this march, we should also be having fun

We saw police a few times during the march, but there were no interactions. Police stayed about a block away, seemingly just keeping an eye on things.

In accordance with the organizers’ wishes, the protest was peaceful, purposeful, and fun.

BlacKKKlansman’s use of “sarcastic” cross-cutting

When a movie cuts between two similar-looking images, the purpose is often to draw your attention to the similarity between the images shown. For example, Cloud Atlas uses technique to great effect to show how all human struggle is connected. In this post I’ll talk about how Spike Lee’s BlacKKKlansman uses this same technique “sarcastically” to dismantle any similarity you might have thought existed between two phrases in a particular context: “Black Power” and “White Power”. 

Towards the end of the movie, Lee cuts between two scenes: One of a group of black students listening to a recountation of the lynching of Jesse Washington by the KKK, and one of a group of Klan members watching The Birth of a Nation. The scene concludes with a cut between similar images. The Klan members gleefully give the Sig Heil salute while chanting “White Power”. This cuts directly to Harry Belafonte’s character concluding his account the lynching by saying “That’s why we’re here today in the name of black power”  which leads to the students chanting “Black Power” while giving the Black Power salute.

In a different context, cutting between these two images might imply a similarity between the two groups and the two chants, the implication being “I know that it’s bad for these white supremacists to chant ‘White Power’, so it must also be bad for these black people to chant ‘Black Power’”. That would be the typical use of this cinematic language of cross-cutting similar images. 

But Lee is using this cross-cutting language differently. Because we see what leads up to the two crowds’ respective chants, we can’t help but see that “White Power” is being used as an expression of hatred while “Black Power” is used as an expression of solidarity. The juxtaposition is “sarcastic” in that the cinematic “words” (similar imagery and cross-cutting) that are usually used to show similarity are instead used to show dissimilarity. 

There are logically rigorous ways to make the case that “Black Power” is not an equivalent expression of racial supremacy that “White Power” is in these circumstances. But Lee chooses to make this argument using the language of cinema. By intercutting between two chanting crowds, Lee uses similar images “sarcastically “ to show us that there is a world of difference between chanting “White Power” to express your hatred towards a group of people and chanting “Black Power” to express solidarity and resolve in the face of that hatred.

Amartya Sen’s Cohesive View of Development

In this post I will sketch out the conception of justice that Amartya Sen puts forth in his 1999 book Development as Freedom.

Sen makes two overarching and interconnected arguments in Development as Freedom: a philosophical argument, and a practical argument

Philosophical: Human development should be seen as the increase of individual liberty, which is a multifaceted object

Practical: It is important to take into account all the facets of individual liberty when measuring or trying to improve a country’s development

The philosophical argument is a claim about the nature of justice in a society. Individual liberty under Sen’s conception is at its core tied to the opportunities we have. A free person is one who has more options about how to live her life. So being truly free means having a plethora of different kinds of freedoms such as political freedom, economic mobility, health, education, and access to open markets.

Sen sees his view of justice as being distinct from the 3 standard theories of justice (utilitarianism, libertarianism, and Rawlsian liberalism). Utilitarianism does not respect individual liberty except as a means to the end of welfare — Sen rejects this, seeing political rights as being important in themselves and not only as a means to greater human happiness. Libertarianism has the opposite problem, viewing liberty as the end-all and be-all without regard for what the consequences (e.g. the economic consequences) of individual liberty are. And Rawls views certain individual rights as always taking precedence over other types of well-being, while Sen says that it would be better for someone to be well-fed and oppressed than starved and free to vote (though he argues that real instances of these kinds of tradeoffs are rare).

This practical argument says basically that we should not collapse down our view of individual liberty into one metric to be used to compare countries along a linear scale of “how developed they are”. You could try to make such a metric by taking measures of each component of individual liberty (life expectancy, infant mortality, democracy index, GDP per capita, median years of schooling, etc.), assigning each of them weights, and summing them. But to simply try to maximize this metric would be to bake in the assumptions you are making about the relative importance of each of these factors in a manner that is not very transparent. Sen instead says that when making decisions, we should look at how our decision will affect each of the components of individual liberty that we care about, and consciously make any necessary tradeoffs.

I admire the nuance Sen uses when approaching both the philosophy and application of development principles. I understand that, out of a desire to quickly communicate about complex issues, people often use shorthand measurements for development, such as GPD or health indices. But I believe that on balance, discussions around development could use the kind of nuance Sen brings. I’d love to see more economics papers framed within this cohesive view of human development, emphasizing that any one particular developmental metric we look at is only part of the story.

The Proper Use of Ideology

Terminology alert: Political ideology — a system of belief about how the institutions of society (like governments, economies, companies, families) work at a high level, and how they ought to work

In this post I’m going to explore the value of political ideology and will suggest that the purpose of ideology is to give you answers to political questions that you haven’t had time to ponder in detail.

What would it mean to not have a political ideology? It would mean forming my political opinions on an issue-by-issue basis (assuming you have political opinions at all). At face-value this might sound like a very even-handed position to hold. Without having an overarching narrative about society to believe in, I might be able to interpret the facts of any issue in an unbiased manner. For example, if I’m not predisposed to seeing companies as evil, and I’m also not predisposed to seeing the government as evil, then I can proceed to think rationally about an issue like the minimum wage, and come up with an “unbiased viewpoint”.

Now you should question anyone who has political opinions but claims to have no ideology. Almost everyone has some high-level views about how society ought to be structured (e.g. the government should be doing more, people ought to have more liberty than they do right now). And even if you didn’t have any ideological bias, there are other factors that will cause your thinking to be biased (how you were raised, self-centeredness, loss aversion etc.).

But in general, it’s better to think hard about an issue than to have an opinion based mostly on ideology. The more you  attempt to be informed, thoughtful, and objective in analyzing a particular issue, the more likely you are to be correct.

So if we could all be totally informed, thoughtful, and objective about analyzing every problem in the world, then we’d have no need for ideology. But of course we can’t. I can only know so much, think so much, and overcome my biases to a certain extent. The proper function of ideology is to give me opinions on issues where I haven’t had time to delve deeper. 

Ideology is a useful heuristic for forming rough opinions on a bundle of complex issues. It’s important to understand that ideology will not give me the right answer in many situations. It gives me a starting point, but I need to refine my opinions as I learn more about specific issues. Only by being open to changing my mind can I hope to get closer to understanding how the world works, and how we might make it better.

How many people do I kill with COVID-19 when I go to get groceries?

Quick post today: A back-of-the-envelope calculation of how worried I should be about going to the grocery store that I’m giving somebody COVID-19.

(These numbers are a little bit out-dated now — I originally did this calculation a week ago, when I was in Chicago. I am now in Des Moines IA, and am not going to the grocery store any more.)

Chances I kill somebody through COVID-19 when I go to the grocery store = (chance I have COVID-19) x (chance I transmit the virus if I have it) x (chance the person I give the virus to dies of the virus)

1. There is a 0.4% chance I am carrying COVID-19

   • 1.7% of people in Cook County are carrying the disease

     • 5.2M people live in Cook County

     • 93,000 likely carriers in Cook County

       • 186 deaths in Cook County (and 8,034 confirmed cases)

       • .2% death rate (Source). 186 / .2% = 93,000 carriers

     • 93,000 / 5.2M = 1.7%

     • ~1/4 people who have the disease are asymptomatic, and I am asymptomatic. So there is a 1.7%/4 = 0.4% chance I am carrying COVID

2. 4.5% chance that I give someone COVID when I go to the store if I have COVID-19

   • 2.5% chance I transmit by coughing on someone

     • This number is totally made up. It is likely lower, because I have not been coughing at all when going out, have been wearing a cotton mask when near people, and have been staying more than 6 feet away from people

   • 2% chance I transmit by touching someone with my hands. These numbers are all totally made up as well 

     • 15% chance virus goes onto something I touch with my bare hands

     • 15% chance someone else picks up virus after touching that thing

   • 2.5% + 2% = 4.5%

   • Sense check: R0 is ~1, you have the disease for 14 days, so the average odds you give someone else the disease each day is ~7% if you have COVID. I would estimate that I’ve had far less social contact with people since the outbreak started than most of the people who are driving the spread of the disease, so my personal R0 would probably be much lower than 1 

     • (I’m not sure if “my personal R0” is a meaningful thing to say — maybe R0 is only defined for a population? But I can’t fit the research that would be needed to find that out on the back of this envelope)

3. .6% chance that person dies from COVID-19

   • .2% chance someone dies if they have COVID-19

     •  Source

   • Of course, if they have the disease, then there is some chance they give it to someone else, and on it goes. So let’s multiply this number by 3 to get .6%. Perhaps it should be much higher —  I think this is the biggest weakness in my methodology

This means my chances of killing someone when I to the grocery store is 1.1 x 10^-6

For context, this is approximately equal to your chances of killing someone while driving ~100 miles if you get in the average number of fatal car accidents / mile.

For a different kind of context, if a human life is valued at $10M (I believe this is what the department of energy uses when doing nuclear power cost/benefit calculations), then the equivalent cost of my trip to the grocery store is $11.

Now I’m not saying that the value of human lives can be directly translated to dollars, but I think that these kinds of utilitarian calculations are useful to get a sense of the magnitude of what we’re talking about. I don’t really have a sense for what 1.1 x 10^-6 means  — my imagination isn’t that good. But I know what $11 means. It means that if I would be willing to pay an $11 “grocery shopping fee” then it’s probably alright to go get groceries. I should be moderately worried about going outside, but if I get groceries or go for a run, I don’t need to feel waves of guilt, as long as I am taking precautions.

You can plug in your own updated numbers or use different assumptions to get a different result for your likelihood of killing people when you do various activities. It’s fun! And allows you to compare the relative riskiness of different activities, and to prioritize your worrying towards the things that are truly the most worrisome.

On Competition

Terminology alert: Competition = “A situation in which two or more people are working towards the same goal without necessarily cooperating”

People are motivated by competition. Like any other source of motivation (love, fear, pity, hunger, etc.), competition can push us towards being the best versions of ourselves, or push us towards destructive behavior. In this post I’ll explore the different mechanisms through which competition can motivate us to action, and then discuss how we can harness our competitive nature in a way that pushes us to do good. 

There are a few different ways that we might be motivated by the knowledge that somebody else is striving for the same goal that we are. Here are all the different manifestations of  competitive motivation I can think of:

1. If the goal is rival, so my success in achieving the goal depends on your failure to achieve the goal (e.g. in winning a sports competition, getting a contract, winning an election), then the desire to achieve this goal equates to a desire to be better than you.

2. Even if the goal is not rival, I can still be motivated by my own pride to be better than you just because I don’t like the idea of someone being better than me at something (e.g., playing the harmonica, expounding poetically about jazz music, baking cookies, the kinds of things we all are really prideful about).

3. Other people with the same goals as me can serve as a reflection of the type of person I want to be. It’s much easier to imagine myself writing a novel when I see my friend do it. And it’s much harder for me to make excuses for not working towards my goals when I see somebody else working hard.

So how can we harness these feelings of competitive pressure in order to be the best versions of ourselves possible? I propose a couple general guidelines:

Reframe your rival goals as non-rival goals: Competition for rival goals tends to be the type of competition that brings out the worst in us. Because basically, if the only way I can succeed is for you to fail, then I am incentivized to hurt you and disposed to rejoice at your misfortune — neither of which are healthy. But in many cases (not quite all, but maybe most cases), I can shift my goal away from succeeding in this zero-sum competition, and towards a more fundamental achievement of excellence. 

Some examples: 

• Instead of having my goal be to win a swimming race, my goal can be to swim the best race that I can possibly swim. 

• I can reframe a desire to get a job at someone else’s expense to be a desire for me to be extremely capable so that the employer has great options when deciding who to choose for the job. 

• Even when competing in an election, you could reframe your fundamental goal from being “I want to win this election” to being “I want to ensure that the people clearly understand what I would do if I win this election, so that they can make the best decision about who to vote for”.

Reframing goals in this way is not always easy and requires a degree of selflessness and ego-control. But the times I have been able to do it, I have a degree of peace and confidence that I don’t feel when my goal is to achieve at someone else’s expense.

Pride is a crutch for when your intrinsic motivation isn’t enough. Imagine that, much to the delight of the kids in my neighborhood, I put up crazy amounts of Christmas decorations every year (including lights that flash in sequence, actual reindeer, animatronic nutcrackers performing a synchronized dance to a Trans-Siberian Orchestra song, the whole deal). It would be great if I was motivated to do this out of a fundamental desire to bring joy to the kids in my neighborhood. But maybe if I’m honest with myself, the real reason I work so hard at putting up these decorations is because Brian across the street just got a giant inflatable Santa, and there’s no way in heck I’m going to let him out-do me this year. 

It’s still better to act based on this prideful motivation than to not act at all (as long as I don’t go so far as to sneak over at night and stab Santa in the kidneys with a carving knife). The kids are still getting the joy of my decorations, regardless of my motivations. So I can accept that in this case my intrinsic desire to delight the children of my neighborhood isn’t enough, and I can harness my prideful desire to be better than Brian to motivate me to do good. Maybe next year I’ll be a better person, but for now I’ve got to work with what I have.

Advanced Market Commitments! What Are They Good For?

Advance Market Commitments are a method for countries or NGOs to incentivize the production of vaccines for developing countries. This helps overcome the basic problem that pharma companies are less likely to develop vaccines for illnesses that people won’t be able to pay high prices for.

An well-functioning AMC has two main purposes:

• Ensures that vaccine companies invest in the capacity to sell their vaccines in low-income countries

• Ensures that the price of those vaccines is low enough for it to get to the people who need it

An AMC is basically a contract between a funder and a company. The funder gives the company a bunch of money, and the company agrees to provide a certain number of vaccines, at a certain price, for a certain amount of time. After that time, it’s theoretically possible that the company could jack up its prices so that the poorest people would no longer be able to afford the vaccine, or that it would simply stop selling the vaccine. But the likelihood of either of these happening is low if the AMC was designed well. Competitive and PR pressures would prevent the company from jacking up its prices. And because the marginal costs of production for a dose of the vaccine are low, it’s unlikely that the company would leave the market after having already put in the up-front costs needed to produce, distribute, and sell the vaccine.

The AMC is a relatively new idea, and the first “pilot” AMC program has just completed. From 2010-2019, the GAVI Alliance paid companies who agreed to sell a pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) to developing countries. In 2007 when the program was announced, a vaccine to treat PCV in developing countries was in late-stage trials, so the idea of the AMC was not to incentivize the development of an entirely new vaccine, but rather to incentivize the scaling up of production and distribution capabilities for a vaccine that would be available soon. If a company agreed to provide 20 million doses of the vaccine per year for ten years at $3.50 per dose, they got $150M. This $150M is in addition to the $3.50 they already get per dose.

The AMC appears to have been incredibly successful. Three companies (GSK, Pfizer, and Serum Institute) are distributing the vaccine, and charging <$3 per dose (so they are charging even less than they are mandated by the terms of the ACM, making it seem unlikely that they will phase out production of the drug now that the 10 years are over). Over 50 million children received the vaccine per year, and an estimated 700,000 lives were saved. That’s astounding — almost as many people as died in the Civil War. And all saved in the past 10 years by a vaccine I knew nothing about until 2 weeks ago.

This is very exciting to me as someone who wants to see more of the world’s talent and capabilities being efficiently allocated towards our toughest problems. A great idea + organizational knowledge and international cooperation + generosity of donors + power of markets led to hundreds of thousands of lives saved. Potential solutions are out there — it just takes dedication, work, and cooperation to bring them to life.

—

All my information comes from this working paper by Kremer, Levin, and Snyder.

Some other interesting tidbits:

Countries participating in the program had to cover part of the vaccine cost themselves roughly $0.20 per dose. Kremer et al. show that from a strictly financial perspective this doesn’t make that much sense — the 20 cents that GAVI saves per dose are not worth the possibility that takeup of the drug will be lower than it would have been if the vaccine was free. But they note that it still may be worth it to have small copayments to function as a market test to see if there is really a demand for these vaccines.

The WHO standard for a cost-effective intervention is $1,638 per DALY (DALY = Disability Adjusted Life Year. Basically, if you can allow someone to live an extra year for $1,638, that’s a cost-effective intervention). Kremer et al. don’t provide an estimated cost per DALY for this program because they don’t have the data to do so, and they’re good economists. But I’m not not a good economist and a lack of data isn’t going to stop me from making a back-of-the-envelop estimate: 

The program cost $1.5B plus $3.50 per dose + ~$1 per dose in administration. In 2016 there were 160M doses distributed. So let’s say the overall program cost over the 10 years is $8.9B. ~700,000 lives were saved by the PVC vaccine. We don’t know how quickly and at what price the vaccine would have been brought to market in the absence of the AMC, but let’s say that the vaccine would have been on the market in each country just two years later without the AMC (and at the same $3.50 price). Then we should only count one-fifth of the 700,000 lives as being saved by the AMC, and we’d be looking at $63,571 per life saved, or ~$1,000 per DALY (assuming 60 year lifespan). So it seems reasonable to claim that the program was cost-effective by WHO standards.

To Live Would Be An Awfully Big Adventure

Things are not great. This has all the appearances of a great adventure.

The world is facing a deadly threat. Everyone’s lives has changed in a matter of weeks. Nobody knows what to do. There are enormous stakes.

The future is uncertain. The fate of our families, communities, nations, world hang in the balance. There’s great opportunity for each of us to have an impact on what life is like in a month, in a year, in a decade. Our actions matter.

You have to grow up fast, to overcome obstacles, to change your life. You to focus on what’s important. You pull close to the people you love. You feel a connection with everyone you see. Everyone’s mind is on the same thing.

This is serious, as true adventures always are. People die during adventures. There is loss. There is true misery.

But there is beauty, if you can find it, in the unexpectedness. In the new ways of living we have to adopt. In the feeling of solidarity with everyone else on the planet who is dealing with this in one way or another.

I never used to understand when people valorized war as a great vehicle for heroism and purpose and unity. But I’m starting to.

From Gödel -> Faith

Gӧdel’s incompleteness theorem says any sufficiently complicated mathematical system is either incomplete or inconsistent. There’s a lot of complicated math here that I don’t totally understand, this basically means that in any logical system, there are logical statements that you can make that are true, that cannot be proven to be true from within the system.

“1 + 1 = 2” is a statement you can make using basic arithmetic. And it’s true according to the rules of basic arithmetic. Because we assume that it’s meaningful to talk about things like numbers, and addition, and equality when we are doing arithmetic. And we define 2 as being equal to 1 + 1. But you can never really prove that 2 = 1 + 1 using only arithmetic.

If we were arithmetical beings that could only communicate using mathematical statements, I could prove to you that 3 + 2 = 5 by saying:

“2 = 1 + 1

4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1

4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 2 + 1 + 1 = 2 + 2

4 = 2 + 2”

If you were suspicious of my claim that 2 + 2 = 4, but agreed with me that 2 = 1 + 1 and that 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, then you would be forced by my argument to accept that 4 does, in fact, = 2 + 2.

But suppose you objected to my claim that 2 = 1 + 1. How could I answer you? I can’t, since I can only speak to you using arithmetic, and part of what it means to do arithmetic is to assume that 2 = 1 + 1. If we were non-arithmetical beings (imagine we were humans instead) I could try to convince you using words. I could say “Listen up punk, the fact that 2 = 1 + 1 is the foundation of arithmetic, so it’s something you just have to accept if you’re doing arithmetic.” But this is not an argument you can make to an arithmetical being, because words aren’t available to beings living in the arithmetical world. The fact that 2 = 1 + 1 forms the basis of the arithmetical world, and so cannot be proved from within it.

So it is with the world we live in. There are facts about the universe that are true, that cannot be rationally proven by beings like us that exist within that universe. Some of the biggest ones I can think of are:

• Morality exists; i.e., there are certain things that people should do, and certain things people should not do

• Cause and effect exist

• The people around me are conscious beings just like I am

• The natural world is governed by mathematical principles

You might disagree with these statements. And as much as I love to argue and debate about them, there is no way I can rationally prove to you that my views are the correct ones. Because the tools I’d need to prove them aren’t available to rational beings living in the natural world. I believe these facts form the basis of the world we live in, and cannot be proved.

So how can someone reasonably come to believe in facts that cannot be proven rationally? This is a really important question, because these “unprovable truths” form the basis of the world we live in. I would say you should believe what seems the most reasonable to you. For some people that will mean religious belief, for some it will mean a strict commitment to scientific inquiry, and for some it will mean skepticism. And even though some of these people are right and some of them are wrong, it’s not possible to make rational arguments proving that this is so.

And for some people maybe none of this matters. Maybe not all our beliefs don’t need to be rationally built up from reasonable assumptions about what the basic facts of the universe are. But that’s a topic for another time.

What are the moral teachings of The Good Place? Part II [spoilers abound]

This is a continuation of last week’s post about the moral arguments contained in the recently concluded NBC sitcom, The Good Place.

Argument #4: “Do no harm” should not always trump “do good”

This is kind of a complicated argument to articulate. In The Good Place the reason the afterlife points system is flawed is because a person’s score is overwhelmed by negative points due to the unintended consequences of their actions. The world is so interconnected that the simple act of me buying an apple means I’m implicitly supporting the exploitation of farm laborers, and contributing to greenhouse gas emissions because of the fuel that was required to transport the apple, and giving profits to the co-owner of the apple company who hates orphans. There are a bunch of negative externalities to my actions, so I get a bunch of negative points.

We might not initially have a problem with this (especially if we’re utilitarians) because there are also lots of positive externalities to my act of buying an apple. And these positive externalities are just as hard to predict as the negative ones. Maybe the trucker who transported this apple was having trouble holding down a job, but now has steady apple-trucking work. And maybe I’m also giving profits to the other co-owner of the apple company who loves orphans way more than the first co-owner hates orphans. So we might say “Sure, there are a lot of unintended side effects of any action we decide to take. Some of these actions will be good, and some will be bad, but on average they will cancel each other out. So what’s important to focus on is just the outcomes of your actions that you can reasonably predict.”

But we don’t see this “canceling-out” effect in the afterlife points system. If we did, we should still see some people making it into the Good Place. Maybe they would be people who just got lucky, because the apple they purchased happened to be the one apple that saved the company from going out of business and saved all the apple farmers in some community from losing their livelihood. But we don’t see anyone making it into the Good Place. The fact that we don’t means that in the afterlife points system, negative externalities are given more weight than positive externalities. And the characters reject this points system as unjust as a system of morality.

This can be seen as a kind of argument against the idea that the most important moral command is to do no harm. If you believe that in the trolley problem, it’s wrong to divert the train so that it kills one person instead of three people, then you probably believe that it is more important to avoid hurting people than to help people. You don’t want to divert the train because then you would have killed a person who would not have otherwise have been killed, which is bad. The fact that you saved 3 other people is good, but not good enough to make up for the bad thing that you did. You can’t just sum up all the harms and goods that you’ve done in order to decide what the right thing to do is, because somehow the moral need to avoid doing harm is more important than the moral need to do good.

You would need to believe in something like this in order to design the afterlife points system that is in place at the start of The Good Place You would have to believe that because people are doing accidental harms with their actions, then those harms will almost always outweigh the accidental goods they are doing. By rejecting this points system, the show can be understood as saying that we shouldn’t necessarily give these harms any kind of special weight, and that the accidental good and bad we do by our actions really do end up cancelling each other out.

Argument #5: Follow your conscience and be a better person

This is probably the most straightforward argument the show is making: We all ought to try to be a little better every day. Michael argues over and over again throughout the show that people have the capacity to improve. Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason all become better people throughout the course of the show, and are meant to serve as an inspiration to those of us watching the show.

Under this reading, The Good Place can be seen as a source of practical advice for how to live rather than a rigorous logical argument for what ought to be done and what ought not to be done. It is more like Confucius (offering different advice to his pupils based on their personalities and the context) than Kant (making a structured rigorous argument for a system of morality with defined rules). The show tells us it’s important to take morality seriously, but not so seriously that you have decision paralysis like Chidi. It’s important to think about the outcomes of your actions, but you can’t always predict all the harms your actions might do. Don’t be too self-centered. Forgive those who have hurt you.

None of these are not hard and fast rules for how to live, but they are moral guidelines that most people know at some level. The purpose of the show might just be to bring these ideas to the forefront of our minds, so that we are a little better tomorrow than we were today.

Argument #6: Your relationships with the people around you are of primary importance

This is the final argument I’ll explore here, and  I think it’s The Good Place’s biggest and boldest claim. This is the claim that my relationships with the people around me are what is most important from a moral standpoint. If we are to be good people, we should above all focus on caring for those around us as opposed to trying to maximize the good we do in the world or follow abstract moral or religious codes.

The show is far more concerned with how the main characters behave to the people around them than to how they follow abstract moral rules. At its core, the show is not as much about saving humanity as it is about 6 friends learning to care for, rely on, help, and forgive each other. The reasons each of them were bad in their first shot  at life was because they had terrible relationships with the people directly around them — Eleanor because of her unwillingness to form connections, Chidi because of his indecisiveness, Tahani because of her envy, and Jason because of his petty crimes. 

To the extent to which the show focuses on the ways we influence people far away from us (because of the interconnectedness of the global world), it actually argues that the way we affect these distant people is so hard to determine that it can’t be a basis for morality (see Argument #4). It’s significant that when Eleanor walks through the doorway at the very end of the show, the magical dust she turns into encourages someone to be good in a way that helps Michael. She doesn’t turn into an abstract force of morality that helps everybody in the world indiscriminately (or if she does, we don’t see that). The abstract force of morality she turns into helps a person she loves.

Of course, this is a very natural moral claim for an NBC sitcom to make. A sitcom is naturally about interpersonal relationships, because relationships are dramatic. And a relationship-focused morality is not going to offend anyone. It’s a comfortable kind of morality that a lot of people would like to believe in anyways. It feels nice to care for the people around me, doesn’t require too demanding of sacrifices or too much thinking about the externalities of my actions, and having loving relationships in my life will actually make me happier anyways. But I still say this is a big claim, because the idea that direct personal relationships are of primary moral importance is not what is taught by most major religions, or by most philosophers.

Throughout these two posts, I’ve tried to articulate 6 ways you can read what The Good Place says about morality. I’m not sure what exactly the creators of the show wished to say by making the show they did, but to some extent that doesn’t matter. What matters is the effect the show has on the viewers, and what lessons each of us draws from watching it. I think all of the above are reasonable lessons to draw from the show. But there are countless other lessons that you could just as reasonably draw, because the show is not didactic. It is an exploration in what it means to be a good person. And hopefully all of us who have watched it are now better people than we were before we watched it.

What are the moral teachings of The Good Place? Part I [spoilers abound]

“A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in a story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.” – Flannery O’Connor

“Oh dip” – Jason Mendoza

“What does it mean for art to mean something? How should we try to understand art? What makes a piece of art good? What is even the point of art? These are all big thorny questions that 1. Are not directly addressed in but are at the core of today’s blog post 2. I think I have the answers to, and 3. May be the subject of future blog posts” - Luke Eure

Trying to understand what arguments a work of art is an exercise I find very fun and insightful (“work of art” is a phrase which here means “basically any creative endeavor, ranging from NBC sitcoms, to haikus you wrote while bored in freshman bio, to philosophical sci-fi novels”). Some works of art make very clear arguments (Atlas Shrugged has a character give a 50+ page monologue where he tells you what the books is about). Some can be interpreted as making any number of arguments, many in direct contradiction to each other (talk to anybody about Parasite or try to untangle what Kanye’s message is in Gold Digger). And some works of art are more interested in raising questions or exploring emotions than in articulating specific arguments about those questions (e.g., Whiplash: Is the self-destructive pursuit of excellence worth it?).

So it’s not always the case that a work of art clearly makes a certain moral argument (i.e. a piece of art isn’t always telling you to act or feel a certain way). And even if it is making an argument, it’s not likely that you can exactly reproduce the argument with all its subtlety in words, because if you could then the piece of art would just be a philosophical argument and wouldn’t be interesting at all as a work of art. But trying to articulate all the different moral arguments a piece of art could be making is one fun and useful way to approach interpreting art, and one that can lead to understanding.

In this week and next week’s blog posts I’d like start to try to analyze what kind of arguments are made in NBC’s The Good Place. Take as a whole, what do the four seasons of the show tell us about how we ought to live our lives?

Disclaimer: I’m not an art critic or a serious philosopher, and don’t know that much about TV or art criticism or the nuanced history of philosophy. Lots of very smart critics and philosophers have written about this show I’m sure, but I don’t know who any of them are and haven’t read any of their work. But I like to think critically about things, and have read a good number of New Yorker articles in my time. And I have a blog which you’re inexplicably reading, so here we go.

There are 3 big moral arguments that The Good Place makes that I’d like to explore in this post. I will tackle a few more arguments in next week’s post, because the length of this post is already getting out of hand and I haven’t even started on the arguments.

1.     A meta-argument: Morality is important and worth talking about

2.     An argument for existentialism: Morality is what you make of it

3.     An argument for moral realism: “Justice” as a concept really exists

Argument #1: Morality is important and worth talking about

Any work of art can be said to be making at least one argument about its subject matter, and that is “this thing is important! Important enough that I’m making art about it!” In Little Women when Jo March writes a book about domestic matters, she’s implicitly saying that these domestic matters are important enough to write and be read about. The fact that the world is full of love songs can be interpreted as an argument that love is really important and ought to occupy roughly half of our singing time.

Similarly, when Michael Schur makes a TV show about moral philosophy, he’s saying that moral philosophy is important. And when that show is on NBC during primetime, and stars Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, and is designed to be broadly appealing, then that show’s existence is an argument that moral philosophy is important for everybody. Everybody, not just academics and pretentious teenagers, should be thinking about what it means to be a good person.

Argument # 2: Existentialism -- Morality is what you make of it (this is where the spoilers start)

My one-sentence summary of the plot of The Good Place is: “Some people and their demon friend discover that the universe’s system of morality is broken, and design their own system to replace it.” When confronted with a system of morality (the points system) that doesn’t reward and punish people the way our main characters think it ought to (because it sends everyone to the Bad Place), they take it upon themselves to reject this system of morality and replace it with their own (people are allowed to try and try again to improve themselves until they are good). The idea that morality is not fixed and each person must seek for themselves what is good and meaningful is a core idea in existentialism.

The Good Place rewards our main character for replacing the established moral system with their own version of morality. During the course of the show, we see that our main characters question the real metaphysical rules that govern the Good Place and the Bad Place – rules that have been in place for as long as humans have been giving rocks to each other and killing each other with those rocks. Our heroes come up with a version of morality that makes more sense to them than the established system, and then are rewarded for following their intuition about how morality should work over the established rules. If someone like Chidi comes along with an idea of what the rules of morality should be, then it’s fine for the whole universe’s system of morality to change in response. Morality is not a given, but can be molded to fix the preferences of those it affects.

If I’m to follow Chidi’s example, I should live my life searching for the version of morality that gives my life meaning and that makes sense to me and that will make me and the people I love happy. And then I should use that as my moral code. Moral codes are arbitrary and can be changed if they don’t work anymore – what’s important is my own interpretation of how the universe ought to work in this time and place.

Argument # 3: Moral realism – “Justice” as a concept really exists

“But wait”, you might say. “The self-improvement-simulation system of morality that we end up with in Season 4 of The Good Place isn’t depicted as being an improvement on the points system just because our main characters like it better than the old system. It’s really a more just system. The whole reason Michael convinces the Judge to replace the old system is because everyone can see that the existing points system is not a good system.” But this doesn’t make sense if we think that morality at its base really consists of the points system as enforced by the Judge. Because how can the ultimate moral system of the universe be “not good”? The “good” thing to do is defined as “the moral” thing to do. So in order for the points system to be a bad system, it must not be the true underlying morality that governs the universe.

The show can reasonably be interpreted under the view that there exists a fundamental moral law that exists at a higher level than the points system. This law escapes all of the main characters. None of the supernatural beings -- not the basic Judge, the petty Demons nor the ineffectual Good Place Committee -- really have a full grasp on what the rules of this fundamental morality are. But they can tell that something is going wrong when their point system is sending everyone to the Bad Place, really truly wrong and unjust. So they create a new system with the help of some humans. It’s clear that the self-improvement-simulation system that they create is more just than the points system, and the fact that everyone agrees that it’s more just is an indication that there exists some external sense of “justice” that they are measuring against.

If interpreted as arguing for moral realism in this way, then the message The Good Place to us is that we ought not to accept rules of morality or societal structures that are handed to us if they are unjust. We should search for what is truly good, and pursue that.

These are just three of the moral arguments that you can interpret The Good Place as making. Since I’m already way longer than any of my blog posts have been so far, I’m going to stop here for this week, and pick up next week with a few more moral arguments made by the show.

Two Ways of Looking at Moral Rules

Terminology alert: I will use “utilitarian” in this post to mean “someone who thinks that their moral duty is to maximize the happiness of sentient creatures”. My understanding is that there are many different versions of utilitarianism that prescribe moral duties that are different than this, but I think my definition is a decent baseline, and that anyways the points I make will apply to other versions of utilitarianism. 

Here are two ways of thinking about moral rules:

• Type I Rules: There are certain moral laws that govern what we ought and ought not to do. These can be rules like “don’t kill” and “recycle all your recyclables” and “strive for a society where people have freedom of speech”. If you believe these rules have value as Type I Rules, then it is because you believe there is some intrinsic moral value to about life, recycling, and freedom of speech, and you would follow these rules even if they lead to misery and ruin because they are the right things to do.

• Type II Rules: These are rules that are not morally binding in themselves, but are useful as means to help you achieve some moral objective. If you’re a utilitarian who thinks that it is your moral obligation is to maximize human happiness, then you might think that a rule like “don’t steal” is a good way to maximize human happiness. People aren’t happy when they’re stolen from, and theft breaks down trust in society. But it’s possible that stealing would be justified in certain circumstances, e.g. if you’re Jean Valjean and need some bread to feed your family. Type II rules are more like guidelines that point you towards the best moral action.

If you are a utilitarian, you don’t really believe in Type I Rules (except the foundational rule that you should maximize happiness), and all of the moral rules you follow on a day-to-day basis are Type II Rules. But even people who believe that their life is governed by Type I Rules (e.g. Christians, who believe in things like the Ten Commandments) still have Type II rules, because no moral code gives you rules that will help you make decisions in every situation you will encounter in your life.

I’ve found it useful to distinguish between the Type I and Type II rules that I follow in my life. Identifying as Type II rules that I previously thought were Type I has opened me up to new ways of thinking about the best way to accomplish the moral objectives I care about. That last sentence was incredibly general, so here are some specific examples.

Example 1 -- Recycling: I used to think it was my moral obligation to recycle. A sense of shame at throwing an empty bottle into a trash can had been drilled into my head as long as I can remember, mostly by my mom and articles in National Geographic Kids. It was black and white: It’s good for me to recycle, and bad for me not to recycle. But I’ve since realized it’s not inherently evil to throw away recyclable material, but it is better for the world if more things are recycled. So what really matters is the total amount of material recycled, and it’s better for me to spend 1 minute going through the trash at work and moving 5 bottles from the garbage to the recycling than for me to carry around an empty bottle for 2 hours because there are no recycling bins around.

Example 2 – Free Speech: As a proud American, I used to think that the idea that society should have freedom of the press and free speech was a Type I rule, and that free speech was valuable in its own right. It’s nice that having free speech and freedom of the press contribute to the open flow of ideas in society, and that citizens are happier when they have these freedoms, and these freedoms allow for mechanisms (like the press) that hold powerful organizations (like the government) in check. But these benefits of free speech weren’t the fundamental reasons I thought free speech was valuable. I thought the ability for citizens to speak their mind was valuable, even if that didn’t make the citizens any happier and didn’t contribute to the flourishing of society. But now I believe that free speech is a means to an end, and is only valuable insofar as it contributes to the flourishing of society and the happiness of citizens.

Note that I think that a prescription of free speech is so conducive to human flourishing, that for all practical purposes I think of it like a Type I rule. I think every society should have free speech (with similar exceptions as are made in the US, e.g. shouting “fire” in a crowded theater). So while there aren’t any fundamental moral laws that require freedom of speech, it should still be sought in every society. What is fundamentally a Type II rule is elevated to a pseudo-Type I rule by its near-universal applicability.

Another reason to act as though your Type II Rules are Type I Rules is to send a stronger signal about the morality of certain actions. I fully admit that this is why I started being vegetarian. Two years ago I became very concerned about the treatment of animals on factory farms, as well as the effects of animal agriculture on climate change, so I adopted a practice of “not contributing to meat production”. What this meant to me was that I would not buy meat, but if there was leftover meat from a meal (which there was every day at my fraternity), I would eat it, with the idea that on the margin this wasn’t contributing to meat production.

But I send a much stronger signal about how I feel about the ethics of eating factory farmed animals if I say “I’m vegetarian” than I do if I say “I don’t buy meat but will eat it if it’s leftover”. So even though I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with eating meat, I believe that being vegetarian is one of the best ways I can help reduce the suffering of animals and carbon emissions. The important thing isn’t that I don’t consume meat myself – it’s important that the total amount of meat being consumed decreases. But the best way to do that is to not consume meat myself (for full transparency: I don’t treat my vegetarianism as entirely a Type I Rule – I still occasionally eat meat if it’s leftover from an event and was going to be thrown out anyways. But this happens infrequently enough that I am still comfortable calling myself vegetarian).

So here are the takeaways: Find out whether the moral rules you follow get their value from the underlying importance of the rules themselves, or if they get their value from the predicted outcomes of following the rules. If they get their value from the predicted outcome, then it’s possible that you should still follow those rules in all circumstances. But understanding why you think it’s important to do or not do a certain action will help you to be more certain of and more committed to your actions.

Venmo: The Scourge of Reciprocity

The existence of apps like Venmo make it very easy to pay your friends when they buy you something small. This means the likelihood of me and a friend reciprocally buying things for each other is much lower. If I buy you a coffee, you can just Venmo me the exact amount the coffee cost instead of just buying me coffee the next time. If we split a Lyft when going somewhere, you can pay me for half of it — to the penny —  instead of just letting me cover it, and then you paying for the Uber on the way back.

The kind of reciprocal spending that Venmo has made less commonplace is usually done in a pretty approximate way. We wouldn't worry that each of us was spending the exact same amount on the other. I just do you a favor when I get you coffee, you do me a favor when you call the Lyft, and things generally even out in the end. (Note that you can have a lesser version of this reciprocity with Venmo if you just pay each other approximately what things cost — e.g. you paid for my $2.99 dinner, and instead of calculating tax and tip I just send you $4. But if you are a to-the-penny Venmoer, you don’t even have this).

I think the decrease in this kind of reciprocity is not necessarily a good thing. There’s a nice feeling I get when I do you a favor, and know that we have a relationship in which I can expect you to do me a favor in the future, without us needing to tally up exactly who owes each other up. But because Venmo makes money transfers so easy that it feels a little like you’re showing off your deep pockets if you tell people they don’t need to Venmo you for something.

So we have here a situation where Venmo makes something more convenient, but the fact that this thing was inconvenient before actually brought people together in a certain way. This is a general pattern that you can see in other places areas affected by technological advancement:

• Instead of needing to visit your friends when they are sick to make sure they’re alive, you can just call them. And if they’re locked up at home, there’s no need to bring them groceries or hot soup, because they could just use DoorDash

• It’s so convenient to navigate on Google Maps that there’s no need to ask people on the street for directions

• Facebook alerts you to people’s birthdays automatically, which means that if someone wishes you happy birthday, you can’t be certain that they remembered it themselves, which might make it a little less meaningful

• Because so many facts are so easily Googled, there can be a sense of purposelessness around having an idle debate about something random (“is the climate in France colder or warmer than in the US?”) because if you really wanted to know the answer, you could just Google it

• The existence of sturdy, waterproof rain boots means that there are far fewer men spreading their jackets across the mud so that ladies can walk without dirtying the bottoms of their dresses (okay, maybe there are other reasons contributing to the decline of this habit)

Basically, many advancements make it easier for us to be independent. On balance I think this is a positive thing. But there is great spiritual and emotional value in having to rely on other people for things — in being interdependent. So maybe it’s worth looking out for situations where you can do small favors or ask for small favors from people, even when it’s relatively easy to avoid the need for favors. It’s nice to help and it’s also nice to be helped.

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Thanks to Connor for suggesting this topic! And sorry I don’t have many insights beyond what we talked about

Visions of Human Potential; or, One Factor in Why People Disagree

When you disagree with someone, it can be very insightful to find out what is the root cause of your disagreement. Is it that you have fundamentally different values? Fundamentally different ideas about how the world works? Different beliefs about the facts of a situation are? In this post I’d like to explore two different fundamental worldviews that affect how people think about morality and politics.

Here are two ways you can think about the potential of humanity:

• Constrained vision: People are inherently subject to certain limitations, particularly selfishness and egocentricity

• Unconstrained vision: Selfishness and egocentricity can be transcended, and are not inherent characteristics of humans

There is clearly a spectrum here — few people have either a totally constrained vision or a totally unconstrained vision of humanity. But I think this framework is very useful for understanding a lot of moral and political disagreements between people. Your vision about humanity’s potential drives a lot of your assumptions about how people interact and how they ought to interact.

Here is an assortment of examples of how I see this framework being applied to different groups of people:

• Someone who thinks that strong social systems are needed in order to make people behave well is more likely to be using the constrained vision (e.g., Hobbes).  Because people are inherently very egoistic, we need laws and social norms to keep us from acting solely out of self-interest

• Someone who thinks that people would live in harmony if only we could get rid of the social institutions that warp our incentives, like capitalism, are using an unconstrained vision (e.g., Rousseau). Egoism isn’t inescapable, but a society that encourages selfishness causes people to become much more self-centered

• If you are using a constrained vision, you might be more likely to advocate for incremental changes to existing economic and political systems. Since people are inherently greedy and shortsighted, a perfect system will never be possible, so we might as well improve the one we have

• If you have an unconstrained vision, you might be more in favor of completely overhauling the current western capitalistic system. A different way of structuring society has the possibility to be much much better than the one we have now and to free us of the greed and selfishness that are imposed on us by capitalism

• Christians tend to have an unconstrained vision, which fits well with teachings about hope, and the power of grace to help us overcome our weaknesses. Because of original sin, people behave selfishly, but it is possible to overcome this egoism through the grace of God

• Broadly speaking, those with an unconstrained vision are more idealistic about what humanity can achieve, while those with a constrained vision are more cynical

What I like most about the constrained/unconstrained distinction is that it describes a fundamental difference in worldview that can help illustrate why people have disagreements about moral matters. I might think that everyone should stop eating meat because of the harmful effects that raising animals has on the climate. And you might think that Americans as a whole will never stop eating meat because it tastes so good, so there isn’t really a point to being vegetarian because the overall meat-production system will not change.

In this instance, it’s helpful to know that I have an unconstrained vision of people’s capacity to overcome selfishness, and you have a constrained view, because that informs our opinions on whether people ought/ought not be vegetarian. These visions are fundamental assumption about humanity that affect how we view the world. They don’t completely determine our views, but they do explain at least part of them. And greater understanding of the people you disagree with is always to be cherished.

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My ideas about are paraphrased from ideas described in the book A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. 

@Maggie, sorry I didn’t write about coronavirus, but here’s an article about it that’s better than anything I would have written.

Nothing to say

In the spirit of the BBC, I have nothing remotely interesting to say this week. But here are a couple interesting facts about square dancing:

• The square dance is the state dance of 24 states

• Henry Ford hated jazz and was a driving force in square dancing becoming so popular

Some Thoughts on Journalism

There are lots of problems in the world that a person can devote time to getting informed on, or solving. Because we all have different personalities, skill sets, and positions in life, we will each be interested in and suited to solving different kinds of problems. I might be a schoolteacher who can work to improve the experience of my students, and you might be a climate scientist who works to predict the effects of our efforts to slow greenhouse gas emissions. The types of issues I need to be informed about might be things like racial achievement gaps, economic disparities between the different neighborhoods in my town, and the effects of stress on learning outcomes. These are very different from the issues that you should be aware of, like the limitations of the Paris climate accords, the importance of the oil trade, and the difficulty of accounting for Scope 3 emissions. 

It might be great if everyone be informed about all the problems of the world, because oftentimes our actions have effects on problems that we aren’t as directly engaged in solving. For example, we vote for politicians who have plans to solve all sorts of problems, and being fully informed about all the problems that the government is trying to address would help each voter to pick the politician that would address them.

But of course, we can’t be informed about everything. So the next best thing is to be informed about the issues that are most relevant to each of us. I’ll focus on being informed about school-related issues, and you’ll focus on being informed about climate-related issues.

If you accept this premise, then the ideal journalistic system (Terminology alert! “Journalistic system” is a phrase which here means “anywhere people hear about the issues, like newspapers, Youtube, blogs, TV”. Maybe “the media” would be a better phrase, but that sounds off to me in this context) would deliver the relevant news to the right people, in the right proportions. If I’m a schoolteacher, I should probably be much more worried about barriers to educational achievement than about corruption in the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia. 

So to an extent, a beneficent journalist shouldn’t want their story to be widely read and distributed if it will distract from the problems that are more important to reader. But this is not how journalism works — journalists and publications are incentivized to have each of their stories be as big as possible. So this is a flaw in the media system we have: Journalists want each of their stories to be big, not for their stories to be big in proportion to the importance of the problem they address. There’s an incentive for them to have everyone read their story on health effects of vaping or of Ghosn’s escape from Japan.

I don’t have any particular solution to this problem, other than to realize that it’s easy to think the issues that receive the most airtime, whether among friends or on the front page of the New York Times, may be taking your attention away from other issues that you are more able to address. That doesn’t mean that the high-airtime issues aren’t issues — we each just need to prioritize.

St. Paul was Just Some Guy so He's Not Always Right

In this post, I’d like to argue that it’s not very meaningful to say that the Bible is “the word of God,” and that Christians should stop treating the books of the Bible as having fundamentally higher status than other writings. 

Within Christianity, the Bible is seen as being a consistent source of truth that should guide what we believe and how we behave. Biblical verses are often used as justification for certain beliefs or moral proscriptions, and within Christian circles it’s seen as far more robust to back up your argument with a quote from St. Paul than with a quote from C.S. Lewis.

Now maybe St. Paul does know more about morality, and is more in touch with what God wants than C.S. Lewis. But the comparison isn’t often even made in discussions about God’s teaching, because what St. Paul wrote is in the Bible. And the Bible is assumed to have authority of its own.

My basic problem with treating the Bible as something “special” in terms of how much weight we give to what is written in it goes as follows:

1. Stuff written by human beings have the chance to be wrong, or not relevant to my life

2. The different books of the Bible were written by human beings

3. Therefore, the books of the Bible have a chance to be wrong, or not relevant to my life

I want to be very clear that I think people ought to trust the Bible less, not trust God less. If God absolutely said something, then we should absolutely listen. But the main problem with how the Bible is often used, is that it’s not acknowledged that it was written by people. And people are often wrong.

You can make arguments that God used people when writing the Bible, that the Biblical authors were divinely inspired and that everything they wrote is in some sense true, if not literally true. But those lines of thinking don’t hold water. Even if you grant that God did divinely inspire some authors to write things that are incontrovertibly true (a dubious claim in my view), how do we have all the divinely inspired writings, and only the divinely inspired writings, collected in the Bible?

The disparate writings that are included in modern versions of the Bible were writings that the early Christians thought were important. I don’t know of any good argument to show that these writings have been marked with special approval by God (if you have such an argument, please let me know). Tradition is what gives them their power, and that’s okay! Even without placing the Bible on an epistemological pedestal, the writings collected in the Bible are still valuable  as sources of wisdom, historical facts, and instructive stories. But there are other sources of wisdom, historical facts, and instructive stories, and the assumption should not be that if you learn two things, one from the Bible and one from somewhere else, then the Bible is correct.

Christianity does not need the Bible to be the inarguable source of truth in order to make sense as a faith. And requiring the Bible to be something it is not leads to closed-mindedness. If you believe that the writings in the Bible are incontrovertibly true, relevant to your life, and self-consistent, then you are locked into reading the Bible a certain way, and into learning about the world a certain way. 

Having an a priori belief that an anthology of what we think people wrote 1800-3000 years ago contain indisputable truth does not put you in a good starting place towards learning about the biggest mysteries of life. If you want to learn more about God — or even if you don’t — approach the world with an open mind. He can speak to you from anywhere. Seek the truth and you will find it.

The Art of the Digitally Socialized

Terminology alert: I will use the term Digital socialization to mean the types of social interactions that digital technology enable like sharing memes, reaction GIFs, texting, social media

The song “Reflections On The Screen” by Superoganism is a certain type of art that up till now, we haven’t had very much of. As I read it, the song is about being the emotions of being separated from someone you were once very close to. What I find innovative about how much reference the song makes to technology, and taps into the emotions I’ve had while using technology, without being about technology.

There is plenty of art out there that deals with our relationship to technology (things that immediately come to mind are OK Computer, 8th Grade, Black Mirror). But I can’t think of any other pieces of art that explore the emotional relationships we have with each other as mediated by technology.

Most art that features technology has something to say about technology itself. My hypothesis is that this is largely because the people who make most art right now did not grow up with digital socialization as a prominent part of their lives. Their formative years were not filled with smartphones, Facebook, memes, Snapchat, and texting. They have an experiential reference point to a time when digital socialization, if existent at all, was not as prominent and widespread as it is today. Digital socialization is the not the norm to them in the same way it is to people who grew up with it. So when they make art about digital socialization, there is a tendency to say something about it – it’s bad, it’s isolating, it’s changing how we interact with each other.

I was born in 1996. I got my first cellphone when I was in 8th grade, and my first smartphone during my junior year of high school. In high school, friendships were built on sharing memes, romance was mediated largely through texting, and some of my funniest memories are of conversations that happened in GroupMe chats. Each of these types of interactions has certain types of emotions associated with them.

Digital socialization made up a significant part of my adolescent life, and I can’t really imagine what it would have been like to go through high school without it. But this part of my life and the emotions associated with it are not really addressed by most of the art I consume. Much of great art is about our relationships to others, but very little of it addresses how digital socialization makes us experience these relationships unless it is trying to make a statement about digital socialization itself.

Orono Noguchi is the lead singer -- and presumably lyricist -- for the band Superorganism. I imagine that digital socialization has played an even bigger role in her life than in mine, seeing as how she’s younger than me, makes a living by creating digital content, and has cited “sharing memes and all that” as helping her bond with her fellow members of Superorganism. The lyrics of “Reflections On The Screen” read to me as if they’re written by someone who takes digital socialization as a given. She is able to articulate the specific emotions of communicating with someone who is important to you via text and GIFs, but doesn’t view this kind of communication as something interesting to explore on its own. In the same way that the Marvelettes “Please Mr. Postman” is about the emotions of waiting for a letter without being caring about how the postal system has changed people’s relationships to each other, “Reflections On The Screen” explores the emotions of looking at your phone without being “about” how smartphones have changed our methods of interaction. The postal system and digital socialization are both just facts of life for those who grew up with them, and as a part of life have emotional dimensions that are worth exploring on their own terms.

I expect we will see more of this kind of art as people like Orono Noguchi, who grew up surrounded by digital socialization and taking it for granted, reach an age where they are creating emotionally insightful art.