Family values

I don’t refer often enough to the excellent blog Halfway There, by the pseudonymous Zeno, a community-college math teacher in California. Apart from having picked an amusing combination of names (a reference, of course, to Zeno’s Paradox), blogger Zeno writes interesting things about socio-political news, frequently calling the right-wingers on their bullshit.

Today’s entry is a perfect example, where he lampoons a feigned Think about the children! argument against running a front-page photo of lesbian sailors kissing. In response to a letter to the editor in the Sacramento Bee, which said, in part, this:

Did anyone consider that young children might be confused by the display on the front page?

The Bee has selfishly and disrespectfully usurped the rights of parents to choose where and when to have a thoughtful discussion, with their children, about homosexuality. Believe it or not, there are still some families whose values are not reflected in the type of photo that The Bee published; and they are neither intolerant nor filled with hate.

...Zeno has this to say:

I can’t help wondering how Jane’s children managed to grow old enough to be confused without Mommie Dearest having had that thoughtful discussion she values so highly. It’s not as though most toddlers spend any time perusing the pages of the newspaper. And why should even older children be upset by a glimpse of a same-sex couple kissing on the Bee’s front page? Have they not seen plenty of same-sex kissing among family members and close friends? Doesn’t grandma kiss mommy? Doesn’t mommy have BFFs from high school or college who hug her and smooch her whenever they meet?

[...]

She wants us to believe that people who object to displays of same-sex affection are neither intolerant nor filled with hate. But I don’t believe that. Not filled with hate? Maybe, but that’s not self-evident. Filled with intolerance? Definitely.

Indeed. But let’s be even more direct about showing the bigotry behind that letter. Let’s suppose that the photo had not been of two women kissing, but of a black man kissing a white woman. And let’s look at the letter with that shading:

Did anyone consider that young children might be confused by the display on the front page?

The Bee has selfishly and disrespectfully usurped the rights of parents to choose where and when to have a thoughtful discussion, with their children, about interracial couples. Believe it or not, there are still some families whose values are not reflected in the type of photo that The Bee published; and they are neither intolerant nor filled with hate.

Would anyone seriously believe her claim of tolerance and love in that case?
No.

Believe it or not, there are still some families whose values are not reflected in images of warmth and affection. How sad for them.

Degrees of separation

New Scientist tells us about Facebook’s analysis of the friend relationships in their social network. Only four degrees of separation, says Facebook, goes the New Scientist headline. Here’s their summary:

A few months ago, we reported that a Yahoo team planned to test the six degrees of separation theory on Facebook. Now, Facebook’s own data team has beat them to the punch, proving that most Facebook users are only separated by four degrees.

Facebook researchers pored through the records of all 721 million active users, who collectively have designated 69 billion "friendships" among them. The number of friends differs widely. Some users have designated only a single friend, probably the person who persuaded them to join Facebook. Others have accumulated thousands. The median is about 100.

To test the six degrees theory, the Facebook researchers systematically tested how many friend connections they needed to link any two users. Globally, they found a sharp peak at five hops, meaning that most pairs of Facebook users could be connected through four intermediate people also on Facebook (92 per cent). Paths were even shorter within a single country, typically involving only three other people, even in large countries such as the US.

The world, they conclude, just became a little smaller.

Well, maybe. There are a lot of things at play here, and it’s not simple. It is interesting, and it’s worth continuing to play with the data, but it’s not simple.

They’re studying a specific collection of people, who are already connected in a particular way: they use Facebook. That gives us a situation where part of the conclusion is built right into the study. To use the Kevin Bacon comparison, if we just look at movie actors, we’ll find closer connections to Mr Bacon than in the world at large. Perhaps within the community of movie actors, everyone’s within, say, four degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. I don’t know any people in the movie industry directly, but I know people who do, so there’s two additional degrees to get to me. We can’t look at a particular community of people and generalize it to those outside that community.

There’s also a different model of friends on Facebook, compared with how acquaintance works in the real world. For some people, they’re similar, of course, but many Facebook users have lots of friends whom they don’t actually know. Sometimes they know them through Facebook or other online systems, and sometimes they don’t know them at all. Promiscuous friending might or might not be a bad thing, depending upon what one wants to use one’s Facebook identity for, but it skews studies like this, in any case.

People would play with similar things in the real-life six degrees game. Reading a book by my favourite author doesn’t count, but if I passed him on the street in New York City, does that qualify? What about if we went into the same building? If he held the door for me? If I went to his book signing, and he shook my hand and signed my copy of his book? Facebook puts a big e-wrinkle on that discussion.

But then, too, it’s clear that with blogs and tweets and social networking, we have changed the way we interconnect and interact, and we have changed how we look at being acquainted with people. I know people from the comments in these pages, and from my reading and commenting on other blogs. Yes, I definitely know them, and some to the point where I call them friends in the older, pre-social-network sense. But some I’ve never met face to face, nor talked with by voice.

So, yes, the world probably is a little smaller than it used to be. It didn’t just get that way suddenly, of course; it’s been moving in that direction for a while. Everything from telephones and airplanes to computers and the Internet have been taking us there.

Where does the money go?

Microsoft’s Raymond Chen usually blogs about interesting things about Windows. He also throws in assorted items about other things, and today he points to some old articles about how professional athletes go broke, despite multi-million-dollar salaries.

One of the articles is an NPR story from May, and it contains this wonderful quote at the beginning:

They see [their salaries] as infinite, like it doesn’t end, like they can’t spend it all, says accountant Scott Bercu, who has handled the finances of professional baseball and basketball players. But, if you get $5 million a year, by the time you get done paying your agent and taxes, you have $2 million left to spend. That goes very quickly.

That goes very quickly, indeed, hm. I should say so! Certainly the last couple of million I saw went away before I even noticed it.

The point of the story is that unlike most highly paid people, these athletes aren’t hired for their business sense, and managing money is, let’s say, not their long suit... and, so, naturally, when they come into enormous salaries, they do what they’ve always done with money: spend it all. They need, the story says, education — just as they get training in playing their sport, they need training in money management.

I don’t know; I find this really hard to accept. Basic, rank stupidity just isn’t something I have much tolerance for, and most people don’t have to be told that even large quantities of limited resources are still limited. It’s hard to have sympathy for someone who’s paid five million dollars, only has two million left after some necessary expenses, and then finds that the two million just goes very quickly.

Maybe it’s just schadenfreude, but, no, I have no sympathy at all.

The race for prosperity

Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times about how populations shifts and lower wages can appear to create jobs locally, but notes that it doesn’t translate into prosperity and doesn’t scale to a nationwide job plan. I agree with his analysis. But I have another question, which I’ll introduce in a sort of roundabout way.

A friend of mine once commented about arcade-game scores. Typically, when you hit a target in an arcade game, you score thousands of points — maybe 1000 for this, 5000 for that, and 10,000 for a big target — resulting in final game scores in the hundreds of thousands, and, for top scorers, in the millions.

Is that really any different from having the targets give you, say, 1, 5, and 10 points, with final scores in the hundreds, or maybe the low thousands? Everything is relative, isn’t it? If we peel three zeroes off of everyone’s score, all players still rank against each other in the same way. It may be a psychological thing to have a score over a million, but in comparison to other players, does it matter in real terms?

Put another way, does adding zeroes to everyone, equally amount any real improvement. The numbers are bigger, but is anyone better off than before?

No.

Now, is it the same with wages, prices, and cost and quality of living?

Were I to get a 10% raise, I’d be happy, of course. It certainly feels great to bring in 10% more money. And, hey, my co-workers are good at what they do also, so they deserve 10% more as well, don’t they? And if my boss is going to give us all 10% more pay, he’ll want that for himself as well.

Before we know it, lots of people are getting 10% raises. How does the company afford to do that? The folks controlling the profits want their 10% too, of course. So that means that prices have to go up. Now the people who work at other businesses, affected by rising prices at the ones that are giving out 10% raises, need wage hikes as well — they want to continue to afford the products and services they’re used to buying.

At some point, everything — everyone’s wages, as well as the prices of everything from food to fuel, housewares to housing to haircuts — is up 10%.^[1] And, of course, I’m still doing a great job and I deserve a raise... and the process repeats.

But is anyone better off? Does it matter, when this all accumulates for some years, whether I earn $10,000 a year and a dinner for two costs $5... or I earn $100,000 a year and a dinner for two goes for $50? If renting an apartment has also gone from $200/month to $2000 in that time, and gas, which used to cost 40 cents a gallon, is now $4, has anything changed in real terms? Despite the extra zero in my salary, the extra zeroes in the prices mean that my buying power is the same as it was. And if everyone has gotten that added zero, we’re all just keeping up with one another.

Nothing has changed.

I’m better off for a short time after getting my raise, until everything catches up to me. And that’s assuming I’m on the leading edge of the cycle; the people on the trailing edge of the cycle are always behind, and only catch up at the end, just in time for things to start moving away from them again soon.

The economic cycle is a zero-sum game, at least for the vast majority of the population. It will only ever be the people in control of the top who will make out. The rest of us place ourselves somewhere else in the hierarchy, some of us better off than others, and then, for the most part and with only small variations and jockeying, we’re all just running a perpetual race on stationary treadmills.

---

^[1] In fact, since the people getting the profits also want their raises, the prices need to go up by 10% to cover our raises, plus more to increase the profits. And since our suppliers want raises too, and are raising their prices, our prices have to go up even more to account for that. So the cycle is more complicated than this, but the point is the same.

What are people searching for?

I had a conversation with a friend the other day, a piece of which went like this:

Friend: Do you know who Contessa Brewer is?

Me: Is Contessa her name, or is she some kind of royalty?

Friend: She’s a news anchor on MSNBC.

Me: No, never heard of her.

I don’t watch MSNBC, you see. I don’t eschew it purposefully, but I just don’t happen to watch it. So later, when I had a chance, I did a Google image search to see what she looks like, and whether I might have seen her after all. I haven’t.

But here: Google image search shows me, at the top of the search results, some related searches to the one I made. I’d searched just for the name. Here were the related searches, which I presume are ordered by popularity:

contessa brewer legs
contessa brewer msnbc
contessa brewer cleavage
contessa brewer bikini
contessa brewer body

She’s a news anchor, but all most men want to do is see her legs and cleavage.

Men are such pigs. Damn, but it makes me embarrassed to be one.

What to teach children

On Tuesday, a local radio talk show hosted by Brian Lehrer included a call-in segment about sleep-over parties for children. It seems that some parents don’t allow their children to host or to attend them. Who knew? The guest for the segment was a pediatrician called Perri Klass.

I wasn’t especially interested in the topic (and some of the commentors on the web page agree in ridiculing tones), and I’m not especially interested in talking about it here. But I happened to be in my car and I heard it... and what did interest me was the last caller, Max in Larchmont. Here’s my transcript starting at about 12:35 into the audio stream:

Max: I’m calling because I’m wondering if the doctor has heard about people having problems with religious and political differences. I have three kids, and when they sleep over at other people’s houses, especially if they’re religious... my wife and I, we teach our children that religion is a pernicious force in the world, and is a terrible thing, and sometimes the parents of other kids get upset if my kids tell them that while they’re doing their prayers or something.

Lehrer: Well, while they’re doing their prayers may not be very nice. But, all right, so how do you handle it... Max, how do you handle it?

Max: We just... I don’t know if the doctor agrees, I think children should be legally shielded from religion until they’re sixteen. I think it’s crazy to expose children to superstitious ideas like that; it makes them dumb. And I think a lot of the kids are swayed when my kids meet their kids and they stop going to Hebrew school and so forth, and I think that’s a good thing.

Lehrer: Thank you, Max. Doctor Klass, any response?

Klass: Well, I’ll just make a general response, which is that if you’re gonna let your children go over to other people’s houses, either for sleep-overs or during the day, you’re gonna have to teach ’em to be good guests. Leaving aside your politics and leaving aside your religious issues, if you’re going to go into somebody’s house and you’re going to accept their hospitality, part of growing up is learning to be a good and respectful guest. Now, that doesn’t mean that you have to agree with things that you absolutely don’t agree with, and it doesn’t mean you have to necessarily join in practices which aren’t yours, but you do have to learn how to be polite, or, in the great way of the world, you won’t be invited back.

Some of the last batch of comments talk about Max’s call (unfortunately, they’re not numbered, but start with MP from Brooklyn at 11:58, and read up from there). Some think it’s a prank call, and not real. Some support the attitude (Robin from NYC, YZ from Brooklyn). One, Samantha from Sunny Riverdale seems to think the kids should be shunned for their parents’ attitude. That certainly seems the good, Christian thing to do, eh?

I agree with Max: as I’ve said many times, I consider religious indoctrination to be tantamount to child abuse. Teaching children made-up nonsense as truth, whether it be...

• about Xenu the space dictator abducting his citizens, bringing them to Earth, and then killing them by blowing up volcanoes, or
• about Apollo driving his chariot across the sky, carrying the sun through the day, or
• about a talking snake convincing a primordial couple to sin by eating the wrong fruit, or
• about a virgin who had been separated from that original sin giving birth to God’s son, who was then tortured to death but rose from the dead to rule in heaven, or
• about Isildur defeating Sauron and severing his finger (and ring) in the Battle of Dagorlad,

...is ludicrous, and, yes, often makes them dumb. It certainly ill prepares them to think critically, when we demand that they accept preposterous stories without question, simply because it is written, it’s God’s word, and they must have faith. We spend far too much time either actively promoting belief in fantasy or passively allowing it to interfere with the education we need to be giving children — see, for example, this article.

All that said, though, I agree with Dr Klass: we don’t call people our friends, go to their houses, eat their food, sleep in their beds, and tell them, while we’re there, that their beliefs are stupid and ridiculous. Whatever we think, and however public we are about it otherwise, when we’re invited to people’s homes we make a choice: we decline the invitation if we’re unwilling to be civil, or we accept the invitation and stay clear of things that we know will upset them.

And, so, it’s a pity that Max and his wife have what I think is an admirable approach to teaching their children sense and reason... and yet have chosen not to teach them civility and the polite behaviour of a guest.

When do your wacky ideas get in the way of your job?

There’s been a lot of talk around blogland about the case of Martin Gaskell. Dr Gaskell is an astronomer, and was, in 2007, up for a position at University of Kentucky, where he would be director of the MacAdam Student Observatory. According to all reports, he was highly qualified, and would have been likely to get the job. They then, as we Internet technologists refer to it in very technical terms, Googled him, and found aspects of his religious beliefs that led them to hire someone else.

This, of course, is where the accounts begin to differ. Dr Gaskell sued the University of Kentucky on grounds of religious discrimination; the university said that it wasn’t his religion, in general, that was a problem, but his specific views on things like the age of the universe, things that have direct bearing on the job at hand, that informed their decision.

In November of 2010 (things don’t always move quickly in the court system), a federal judge ruled that the case could go forward, and a date was set for February. Last week — what has prompted the new interest in talking about it — they settled out of court, ending the legal proceedings. The University of Kentucky will pay Dr Gaskell $125,000, without making any admission of wrongdoing.

Paying to make the problem go away is common, but unfortunate: it leaves everything fuzzy. Dr Gaskell’s supporters will claim that they won, and that there was, indeed, improper discrimination against him. His detractors will say that he extorted money from the university. Neither is really true.

More broadly, though, this case isn’t just about Dr Gaskell, and settling with him leaves open the question of when a person’s beliefs — religious or otherwise — make it reasonable to rule that person out for certain jobs. And should religious beliefs have any more protection in that regard than beliefs rooted elsewhere?

Richard Dawkins, in a BoingBoing guest post, has given his opinion on the matter. I mostly agree with him, but I can’t say that unequivocally. Read his essay, either now or after you’re done here.

I’ll answer the second of my questions two paragraphs up before I discuss the first: No, I do not think the reason one believes what one does has any bearing on how we should treat that belief. If you believe, say, that people should be at peace with each other, and that war is always evil, it shouldn’t matter whether you’re a Quaker or you come by that from somewhere else. If you’re vegetarian, what’s the difference whether it’s because you’re Hindu or because you simply can’t bear to see animals die? If you believe that the Universe is about 6000 years old, whether you get that from the bible, from a science fiction story you once read, or from a private sense that came to you one evening, it’s all the same. We shouldn’t be any more critical of what you think because you learnt it in church... but neither should we be more tolerant of it for that reason, if it gets in the way of what we’re working with you for.

And that leads us to the other question: When is it acceptable to say that what you believe is inconsistent with the job we’re hiring you for? Can a vegetarian expect to get a job as the sole food critic for a small newspaper? There’s an obvious issue there, but, surely, a vegetarian Hindu couldn’t reasonably sue the paper and claim religious discrimination. You have to be able to do your job.

Of course, there’d be no reason to prevent a vegetarian from, say, being the director of a university astronomical observatory. It’s likely we’ll all agree on that point.

At issue here, though, is that certain beliefs can damage your credibility to the point that, while they might not stop you doing your job, they could easily make it impossible for people to take you seriously in it. Were I, for instance, to apply for a job as Internet technology advisor for a right-wing tea-party senator, I might very well be able to give sound technical advice while choking back my revulsion to the senator’s political agenda... but could the senator ever trust that I wasn’t trying to undermine her in some way, given what I’ve written in these pages? Of course not.

Where I have a little trouble fully agreeing with Professor Dawkins is about where we draw the line. Between beliefs that can live in the background without having any effect and those that clearly whack one’s job in the face, there’s a continuum, and we have to decide when there’s enough effect to matter.

To be sure, we often think of college professors as being a bit kooky. It’s clear to me that the University of Kentucky people made a reasonable decision in this case, and it bothers me that they had to agree to pay Dr Gaskell off. But other cases are bound to be less clear, and it may be fine to hire the professor with the nutty ideas sometimes... even if the students do have a laugh once in a while, he’ll still have enough credibility to teach them what needs to be taught.

Ideally, of course, I fully agree with Professor Dawkins: we want clear thinkers in our universities, and accepting people who support discredited or fringe ideas in areas not connected to their main expertise still pollutes the clear-thinking pond. We’d like to select, say, Holocaust denialists, moon-landing skeptics, homeopathists, and idiots who still think that President Obama was not really born in Hawaii, and make sure none of them are teaching at our colleges and universities. It’s a nice goal. In practice, though, we have that sort of situation all the time, and I’m not sure how rigorous I want to be in avoiding it. Should Stanford University have distanced themselves from William Shockley because of his ideas about eugenics? Perhaps, perhaps not.

What’s clear, though, is that we have to prevent every employment decision from being the basis of a religious discrimination suit. In this case, the judge who allowed it to go forward made the wrong choice. It only cost the university $125,000, but it’s set a precedent that makes me very queasy.

Touring Beijing, appendix 3: Final Notes

Before we leave China, I have a final note, on the people and the country and the daily life.

Yes, it’s communist; yes, it’s authoritarian; yes, there’s the network censorship, and all that. There’s no political dissent. The press is controlled. There’s a lot of risk to speaking out.

But, day to day, there is no sense of oppression in these people. They are free to do as they like from day to day. They are happy. There’s little police presence (less than what I see in New York City, for example) and no sense that people are being watched. Apart from knowing that they can’t openly speak their minds, I feel that could be in New York, Los Angeles, London, or Frankfurt, as far as the daily life goes.

The missing stuff is important of course, and I won’t ignore that. It’s just that this is very much not Mao’s China, not the China of fifty years ago. It’s clear that one day, it won’t be the China of today, either. Things continue to change.

They’ve embraced capitalism in a big way, and the Chinese companies are competing with the rest of the world in a way that was not imaginable when I was a child. For that matter, even the idea that I might one day visit China, much less happily work for a Chinese company, was complete fantasy. I remember that when President Nixon went to China in 1972, it was a really big deal.

The world has changed, and continues to.

Mickey Mosque

I don’t know whether the rest of the country has to cope with the same lower-Manhattan mosque Islamic center news flood that we’re being subjected to here in the New York City area. I suspect so, because New York tends to feed the news, and anything to do with September 11th and the former World Trade Center site is always a fun topic for the media to grab onto.

Let’s consider a few things.

If you lost someone dear to you in the World Trade Center buildings, you get to be very, very sad about that. You get to have a share in the victims’ compensation payouts. You get my eternal sympathy, along with that of many, many others throughout the world.

You don’t get to tell other people what to do, and you don’t get to decide what’s done with the land.

The area is a chunk of real estate in lower Manhattan, some of the most expensive land in the world. It’s in a business area. It’s not a tomb; it’s not hallowed ground. It’s owned by people, and the city of New York has rules about how they approve construction projects. Those rules don’t include asking citizens and doing what they want, regardless of what a particular square of ground means to them, emotionally. We’re all sorry about what happened, but this is how it is.

If you’re a politician, and you’ve decided to stick this issue into your political witch’s brew, well, you don’t get to tell other people what to do nor decide what’s done with that land either. I could expand on that, and say that you’re a bottom-feeding scum-sucker who’ll feast on any misfortune or bigotry you can get your teeth into, but that seems unnecessary, so I won’t.

For my part, I’d just as soon not have anyone build any places for people to gather and spout nonsense about fantasy beliefs, ever again, anywhere. I don’t want to see land, money, time, and other resources wasted on mosques, synagogues, churches, cathedrals, or, for that matter, Fox News studios.

But, you know, I don’t get to tell people what to do or decide any of this either. None of us have any more say in what happens with this Islamic center, or anything else to do with that ten acres or the area near it, than we do about any other block of ground in the city.

So let’s all leave it alone now, and go find some real news to talk about.

[Here’s the New York Times editorial on the topic.]

You’re my best friend...

In a New York Times article last month, we heard about concerns from parents and educators about what happens when best friends turn into exclusive subgroups, prompting children to block other children from their inner circles.

Still, school officials admit they watch close friendships carefully for adverse effects. When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others, said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future.

I’m at a loss.

I understand the problem of bullying, an age-old malady that’s become all the worse as our standards have changed and as technology has created new ways to bully.

I understand the problem of in groups, another age-old malady that’s become all the worse as our standards have changed and as technology has created new ways to exclude.

But let’s be realistic. Humans have two primary characteristics that are at play here. One: we’re tribal by nature, which is one of the reasons that racism is so hard to eradicate. That makes us want to stay in small to moderate group sizes, to form bonds within those groups, and to make it relatively difficult for others to come in. We have country clubs, German-American clubs, Knights of Columbus, and church social groups. We have class reunions, where we attempt to maintain or revitalize bonds from twenty, thirty, and fifty years ago.

Two: we naturally form especially close bonds with just a few other people, sometimes one. Why are buddy films so popular? Because we can relate to the buddy, partner, sidekick, special-trusted-friend relationship at a very basic level. It’s not just that we want to have a relationship like that; it’s that we want a relationship like that deep inside, as part of what makes us human.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everyone is like that all the time. As I think back to my childhood, I know that there were times when I had a best friend, or perhaps two... and times when I didn’t. It isn’t a need that has to be filled all the time.

But it’s a need that humans drift to, some more strongly than others. I don’t think we serve children well when we try to get in the way of that. And they are getting in the way of that when they try to separate best friends because that group of friends is not including some other child.

Also, of course, we expect our children, as they move into adulthood, to develop one special relationship that will turn into marriage. We expect them to establish this relationship for life, and to remain faithful to it. Will it help them learn to form such bonds if we disallow the best friend connection?

It’s terrible for the excluded child, of course, if he or she can’t find a group to be a part of. Perhaps the kid is considered weird, fat, or ugly. Maybe the kid’s shy, and no one’s willing to make the effort. Or maybe it’s just the luck of the draw, and the other kids have just left this one out for reasons we can’t figure. Adults at school are right to try to help.

But separating true friends, with the idea that they’ll then be forced to include the outsider, is not the right answer. Apart from the intrusion on the child’s life and the heartbreak of having a best friend pulled away... apart from the uncertainty involved whenever you try to force people to like each other... there’s the risk of psychological consequences it may take many years to see.

Voting while under the influence

One indication of why our political system is as screwed up as it is comes from researcher Neil Malhotra of Stanford University:

Malhotra and his team looked at how political candidates fared in 62 US county elections between 1964 and 2008, and compared that with the local college American football team’s results. They found that in years when the team won in the two weeks prior to election day, the incumbent or their party received 1.6 per cent more of the votes than in years when the team lost (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1007420107).

It’s not that football has a direct effect on its own, of course — that’d be, um, stupid. What matters, according to Mr Malhotra, it that we’re voting with our guts, our moods, and not with our brains:

A bad mood draws us to change, and a good mood to the status quo, regardless of what causes that mood, says Malhotra.

It’s not news that when we vote, many of us choose for the wrong reasons. Instead of choosing based on the candidate’s intelligence, platform, and suitability for the job we’re entrusting her to, many vote according to religious, sociological, or ethnic biases. We’ve known this.

But now it’s clear that something as trivial as whether the local college has a winning team right now can be the deciding factor.

Remember: friends don’t let friends vote while they’re high on football.

The World Cup is in the quarterfinals, and the U.S. is not

Perhaps you’ve heard that the U.S. was eliminated from the World Cup competition, with their loss to Ghana the Saturday before last. Sad for the U.S. team, indeed. But is it sad for all the American World Cup viewers? Should it be?

Most significantly, should they stop paying attention now?

On Friday’s Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, our local public radio station, they had a segment with this as a teaser:

Had they beaten Ghana, the USA would be playing this afternoon. So, why should you still care what’s happening in the world cup? Mike Pesca, NPR sports correspondent, and Franklin Foer, editor at The New Republic, soccer fanatic, and author of How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, join us to discuss soccer in the USA.

I didn’t listen to the segment, and don’t especially care to. I just find the idea that one might lose interest in a sports competition just because your team is out of the running... to be odd. And, yet, it seems a widespread attitude, which affects sports coverage, including our coverage of the Olympics — events in which the U.S. is not a significant force are often very lightly covered, with coverage focusing on those events the U.S. is expected to win medals in.

I don’t get it. If you like soccer, then

1. you ought to be interested in watching the World Cup whether the U.S. is in the competition or not, and
2. you ought to prefer to watch the best matches, which involves eliminating the weaker teams.

And, of course, if you don’t like soccer, then why would you want to watch it just because the U.S. is competing?

Maybe it’s because I don’t watch sports on television — though, honestly, if I’m going to watch something, I’d rather it be soccer than anything else — but I just don’t get the parochial my team or nothing attitude.

Thinly veiled reasoning

France is considering legislation to ban the burqa or niqab, the full “veil” that some Muslim women wear, which covers the whole face. The surface reasoning is that people need to see each other’s faces — that being able to do so makes people safer by allowing identification, and establishing social connections. What some are critical of is the idea that this is anti-Muslim legislation.

In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Jean-François Copé, the majority leader in the French National Assembly (UMP Party, the political conservatives), argues the UMP’s side of the question.

This criticism is unjust. The debate on the full veil is complicated, and as one of the most prominent advocates in France of a ban on the burqa, I would like to explain why it is both a legitimate measure for public safety and a reaffirmation of our ideals of liberty and fraternity.

I’ll note that he doesn’t mention “equality”, the third French ideal.

Setting aside whether or not I agree with the legislation — M Copé is correct that it’s a complicated question, and I have conflicting thoughts about it — I find his particular arguments specious, and I wanted to look at the key points here.

The ban would apply to the full-body veil known as the burqa or niqab. This is not an article of clothing — it is a mask, a mask worn at all times, making identification or participation in economic and social life virtually impossible.

This face covering poses a serious safety problem at a time when security cameras play an important role in the protection of public order. An armed robbery recently committed in the Paris suburbs by criminals dressed in burqas provided an unfortunate confirmation of this fact. As a mayor, I cannot guarantee the protection of the residents for whom I am responsible if masked people are allowed to run about.

M Copé adds that “The visibility of the face in the public sphere has always been a public safety requirement,” but this strikes me as a fairly silly argument. Before we used cameras, when we relied on human identification, the identification of random people in the street was so unreliable as to be essentially useless. Now, with street cameras, we still find that crimes are not solved by finding people on the camera recordings and linking them to the situation. Rather, we’re only able to find them afterward — once we know who the perpetrators were, we can go back to surveillance recordings and say, “Ah, yes, see, there he is.”

Now, facial identification by witnesses or security cameras at the crime scene is much more useful, and such identifications often are the linchpins of prosecutors’ cases. And, as we know, robbers wear masks of all sorts at crime scenes, all the time. I can’t see that banning facial veils in the street will make any difference to someone who wants to put on a ski mask or a gorilla suit in order to rob a convenience store.

What’s more, it is not illegal to walk around most cities in ski masks, gorilla suits, Halloween outfits, or any other form of disguise. I recently saw, in the Times Square area in New York City, someone in a Lion King outfit to promote the Broadway play, and two guys (or girls?) in Elmo outfits, promoting something, one presumes (or perhaps picking pockets; can we be sure?). One often encounters mimes with heavily painted faces, people in clown outfits, and so on. Will all those be banned as well?

For that matter, could I be arrested for covering my face with my hand? A floppy hat might shield one’s face from the surveillance cameras; are floppy hats allowed? Suppose someone worried that young people wearing “cargo pants” might be concealing weapons, and concluded that cargo pants should be banned... along with trench coats and who knows what else?

Public safety is neither ensured by nor compromised by clothing.

The permanent concealment of the face also raises the question of social interactions in our democracies. In the United States, there are very few limits on individual freedom, as exemplified by the guarantees of the First Amendment. In France, too, we are passionately attached to liberty.

But we also reaffirm our citizens’ equality and fraternity. These values are the three inseparable components of our national motto. We are therefore constantly striving to achieve a delicate balance. Individual liberty is vital, but individuals, like communities, must accept compromises that are indispensable to living together, in the name of certain principles that are essential to the common good.

Let’s take one example: The fact that people are prohibited from strolling down Fifth Avenue in the nude does not constitute an attack on the fundamental rights of nudists. Likewise, wearing headgear that fully covers the face does not constitute a fundamental liberty. To the contrary, it is an insurmountable obstacle to the affirmation of a political community that unites citizens without regard to differences in sex, origin or religious faith. How can you establish a relationship with a person who, by hiding a smile or a glance — those universal signs of our common humanity — refuses to exist in the eyes of others?

OK, this one’s just dumb: if someone wants to sequester herself from social interactions, legislation that blocks one way of doing that is pointless. Orthodox Jews in New York City often separate themselves socially from outsiders, and they can do that quite effectively without covering their faces. Fraternité is an ideal, not a demand; there isn’t — and there shouldn’t be — any requirement that anyone, be she a Muslim woman or anyone else, establish social connections with others in French society.

And likening it to nudism is also silly. Leaving aside, too, whether we should be allowed to walk in public in the nude, these are just not the same things.

It’s fine to say that you don’t want to live next to someone who hides her face, but then admit that that’s what’s going on, and be open about it, rather than trying to hide behind community ideals and slogans, and bogus claims about public safety.

Who’s not on the Internet?

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has reported on a survey of non-Internet households:

For many Americans, having high-speed access to the Internet at home is as vital as electricity, heat and water. And yet about one-third of the population, 93 million people, have elected not to connect.

It’s not surprising that the ranks of the non-connected are disproportionately

1. older,
2. rural residents, and
3. less affluent.

It’s also not surprising that the reasons given for not opting into the Information Superhighway (remember that moniker?) include

1. cost,
2. discomfort with computers, and
3. the view that that the Internet is a "waste of time".

Congress wants the FCC to provide a plan for increasing the adoption of broadband Internet access, and the guy who managed the survey says that lack of Internet access puts those people “at a distinct disadvantage.”

Well, yes and no.

In the early 1990s, as the worldwide web was beginning to take off, a couple in their 80s asked me if they “need a computer.” Hm, I said, that depends upon what you mean by “need.” I suggested that if they wanted to learn about computers and the Internet, and embrace the upcoming technology, they absolutely should get a computer. But they don’t need one. I still think that’s true.

Whether you need to be on the Internet, and are “at a distinct disadvantage” without it, is still a question of what you will do with it, and what stage of your life you’re in.

Children — and families with children — are almost certainly at a distinct disadvantage without ready access to the Internet. The educational and social opportunities that such children will miss are crucial, and that lack will affect the children for the rest of their lives. Unfamiliarity with using computers and the Internet will limit job possibilities. For a child in school today, not being on the Internet is almost like not being able to read and write.

Middle-aged adults may be at a disadvantage if they have a job — or hope to get one — for which it’s important to be computer- and Internet-savvy. If they have school-aged kids, of course, they should also be providing Internet access to them, and it’d also be good for them to be able to supervise what they do, and perhaps help them.

But there are plenty of people who can happily choose whether or not to deal with the Internet without being at any disadvantage for their choice. At least for now, we can still buy things in stores, we can still listen to the radio and read newspapers, we can still call people on telephones, we can still watch television. For those who feel the Internet is a waste of time, it probably is. We can easily get through life without the Internet, even if some of us find that hard to fathom.

One third? Yeah, I figure that’s a good estimate of the portion of the population that can manage without the Internet. The most compelling reason to address that portion is that the third that doesn’t have it is probably not the right third (the “less affluent”, above, for example).

A Pew report for Dr King

The Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project has given us a Martin Luther King Day gift: a report on their new survey on racial attitudes a year after President Obama’s election (full report (PDF) here).

Not surprisingly, the number of African Americans who think that they are, as a group, better off now than they were five years ago has about doubled since 2007, from 20% to 39%. And more than ¾ think that blacks and whites get along well.

It’s clear that perspective is a significant thing. When asked, “Has the country done enough to give blacks equal rights with whites,” 54% of whites and 42% of Hispanics said yes, “The country has made the necessary changes,” while only 13% of blacks responded that way. That doesn’t surprise me either: it’s easy for whites to see some bit of progress, as we’ve had many of over the years, and to say, “That’s made it better,” while those at the receiving end of the discrimination still see the problems, and what has yet to be done. Even the election of an African American president doesn’t automatically fix everything.

The part I find the most interesting is the section on interracial marriage. It seems, there, that blacks are, as a group, more accepting of familial diversity than whites and Hispanics are. See the graphic to the right (click to enlarge). What it says is that about 80% of blacks say they’d “be fine with” a family member’s marrying someone of another race, whether that person be white, Hispanic, or Asian... it doesn’t seem to matter which. In contrast, Hispanics and whites are more apprehensive about adding a new African American family member than they are about the other ethnic groups, and only 64% of whites say they’d “be fine with” a black in-law.

I find the difference curious. It seems to dispel a myth — one that exists among whites, at least — that about the same proportion of blacks dislike whites as the other way around. That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case, at least when folks are made to say that they wouldn’t want their daughter to marry one.

Finally, in both 2007 and 2009, significantly fewer blacks have put the blame for difficulty “getting ahead” on discrimination. On this question:

Which of these statements comes closer to your own views—even if neither is exactly right?

A. Racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.

B. Blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition.

...52% of blacks (and about 70% of whites and Hispanics) chose B, and 34% chose A. The answer by whites fairly well tracks the numbers who think that discrimination is no longer a problem, but that’s not true of the statistics from blacks. That seems to say that blacks think there’s more that they, themselves can do to address or to overcome discrimination.

There’s lots more interesting stuff in the full report and in the data from the questionnaire. Far fewer blacks than whites trust the police, for instance. And about 10% of us have no friends of a different race than ourselves.

What do you call your doctor?

...and what does your doctor call you?

Last month,^[1] Anne Marie Valinoti, a physician in New Jersey, opined about that subject in the New York Times. Dr Valinoti is generally called that — “Doctor Valinoti” — though there are some patients, generally ones much older than she, who call her by her first name. In the other direction, she claims consistency:

Regardless of whether I am “Anne Marie” or “Dr. Valinoti” to a patient, I rarely call a patient by his or her first name. As a rule, patients who are my senior are always “Mr./Ms./Dr.” Patients I meet for the first time are always addressed by their title, even teenagers (it seems silly, I know).

It doesn’t seem silly to me, because there’s more than an age or class difference conveyed by the sort of formality that dictates the “Dr Valinoti” and “Mr Smith” pairing. There’s a clarity of roles and the creation of a mutual respect between the patient and the physician, which I think are important aspects of the relationship.

It seems more natural for “Doctor” to do the poking and prodding that’s sometimes necessary, than for it to be “Anne Marie” or “Andrew”, and my saying “Doctor” reminds us both of the professional aspect. And it may facilitate the giving — and receiving — of difficult news for me to be “Mr Leiba”, and not “Barry”.

There’s also the linguistic side of this: other languages have separate second-person references for formal and familiar address. “Usted” vs “tú” in Spanish, “vous” vs “tu” in French, “Sie” vs “du” in German... these allow speakers of those languages to maintain formality in normal speech, just by how they say “you”. In English, we’ve lost the formal forms of address, leaving us to rely on titles (or the often stilted “sir” and “ma’am”) to maintain a separation from the too-familiar.

Of course, each patient will have her own sense of this, and doctors should defer to patients’ wishes on the matter. If a patient feels more comfortable being on a first-name basis, the physician should accept that. In no case would, “That’s Doctor Veeblefester to you!” be appropriate. (If it’s a child stepping over the line, it should be a parent who addresses that, not the doctor.)

Q: What do you call the guy who graduated last in his class at medical school?

A: “Doctor.”

---

^[1] Yeah, a month ago; I’m behind.

Lacrimae

I’ve mentioned that the local Methodist church with the marquee sign seems to have come up with some new  aphorisms to put there. Maybe their source puts out updates periodically. I wonder whether they have to buy a subscription. Or maybe they get it from the mother church as part of the franchise.

The current blurb is another new one:

EYES WASHED BY TEARS
CAN SEE CLEARLY

I thought about that for a bit. (I guess that’s part of the point.)

I wondered whether there might be some relation of tears to Methodist tenets. There’s certainly a lot of tears and crying in Biblical religions. An old friend used to enjoy the bit of trivia that the shortest verse in the (King James) Bible is “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35)

The Catholic Requiem mass contains the Lacrimosa verse in the Dies Irae (day of judgment) sequence, referring to a tearful day:

Lacrimosa dies illa
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus
Huic ergo parce, Deus

At the Passover seder, Jews use salted water to represent tears of the enslaved Jews in Egypt... and dip out some of the celebratory wine to acknowledge the suffering of the Egyptians under the ten plagues.

It’s not clear how any of this relates to seeing clearly, though. Is it that only through tears of suffering can people understand life (or God)? Maybe it’s that through the tears, we learn to appreciate what we have.

Another thought: the tears aren’t literal, here, but the slogan is a metaphor, reminding us to be compassionate toward others. If we weep for those less fortunate, maybe we’ll see our way to helping them, as well.

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

— Virgil, from “The Aeneid”

The world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.

— Translation by Robert Fagles

Of all the displays on that sign, I think I like this one best.

And it brought to mind a different view of “seeing clearly”, from my high school days:

I can see clearly now; the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sun-shiny day.

— Johnny Nash

Women at Risk

Bob Herbert’s op-ed pieces in the New York Times are often good ones, and last week’s is particularly so. Written in the days after the attack on a gym, which resulted in the death of three women, Mr Herbert notes that such attacks are far too common:

We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.

Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.

I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.

That, as he says, “[w]e have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected,” could even be seen in the presidential campaign, when candidate Hillary Clinton was belittled with sexist comments of the sort that we’d never see for a serious male candidate — and they were excused by press and public alike, putting us in collective denial of the obvious bias.

I’ve spent no small amount of outrage about bias and violence  against  women in these pages before, and this is another case of the pervasive misogyny in our society. This time, though, I want to have a word about the motivation, the male side of it. Again, Bob Herbert:

One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.

And he quotes Dr. James Gilligan:

What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal, is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.

That last point really connected, and reminded me of male coming-of-age rituals in societies from African and American tribes to criminal groups and street gangs. Tolerate pain. Show how tough you are. Assert dominance. Fight, and win. Kill, and be proud of it. And, whatever you do, be strong, and don’t let any woman get the better of you.

Our legends and fiction, too, are full of that last message. Beware the femme fatale, the woman who will undo you if you aren’t wary enough. The Sirens. Delilah. Their power comes from what they can get men to do. And the message is clear: avoid them... or kill them.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Physical strength no longer has the importance it once did. In our modern society, balance is more important. That we have an anthropological basis for these sort of demonstrations of power and dominance doesn’t mean we have to keep them. They do not serve us well now, if they ever did.

Some will write all these attacks off as perpetrated by unstable individuals, and deny that it’s supported by our mainstream society. And, to be sure, these people are unstable, nuts, very far from the norm, and there will always be such people. We can’t change that.

But the point is that, while their behaviour is extreme, its direction is set by what we see all around us, every day.

We can change that. We have to.

Is your wallet safe?

Recently, BoingBoing pointed us to an interesting article about a study involving “lost” wallets:

Hundreds of wallets were planted on the streets of Edinburgh by psychologists last year. Perhaps surprisingly, nearly half of the 240 wallets were posted back. But there was a twist.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist, and his team inserted one of four photographs behind a clear plastic window inside, showing either a smiling baby, a cute puppy, a happy family or a contented elderly couple. Some wallets had no image and some had charity papers inside.

The results surprised me. First, 42% of the wallets were returned — surprising enough to someone from the New York City area. But then an amazing 88% of the wallets containing the baby picture came back, and only 15% of the ones with no picture at all did. That’s a hell of a difference! (It’s also important to note that none of them contained money or credit cards.)

The researchers’ hypothesis for the reason for the difference is evolutionary — an innate predisposition to protect children. They don’t explain the difference in return rates for the wallets with the other sorts of photos, though. In any case, they offer some advice:

Whatever the scientific explanation, the practical message is clear, said Dr Wiseman. “If you want to increase the chances of your wallet being returned if lost, obtain a photograph of the cutest baby you can find, and ensure that it is prominently displayed,” he said.

That’s amusing enough, I guess. But the whole study just cries out for a bunch of follow-up questions. Of course, there’s the obvious one of varying the ethnic identity of the people in the photos. Make the baby white, black, south-Asian, east-Asian, and so on, and see what changes. Make the family photo show different races, different types of dress. Include interracial and same-sex couples. Within that last, does a pair of men inspire a different rate of return from a pair of women?

Would the presence of money change things? Would the money outweigh all the photos equally? Would there be a difference between Edinburgh and, say, New York City? (I should think so, but....) Assuming that there is, would the relative return rates still be the same, nonetheless? Maybe not; maybe New Yorkers prefer puppies or grandparents to babies.

I’d then want to try it with different sorts of work IDs. Strew some wallets about that indicate that the owner is a teacher, a lawyer, a plumber, a car salesman, a firefighter, a waiter, or a banker. What do you think? I wonder where a computer geek falls.

Or try different medical specialties. One might think an obstetrician’s wallet would be more likely to be returned than that of a proctologist. How would cardiology compare with oncology? Would a neurosurgeon do better or worse than a dermatologist in the wallet-borne sympathy vote?

I think this is a fascinating way to study our unconscious preferences and prejudices, and I hope this is just the start of a batch of these studies worldwide.

Well, yesterday we wanted to find out just how honest the people in our audience were. Are they as honest as they like to say? We chose a lady from the audience and gave her ten $10 bills, each one in a separate envelope, each one marked with her name and address. We asked her to drop them around the studio to see how many would be returned. Well, we found out how honest people are: the lady cut out with the hundred dollars.

— George Carlin, “Daytime Television”
from “Take-Offs and Put-Ons” (1967)

Woody, on meaninglessness

I’ve always loved Woody Allen’s movies. Not all of them equally, of course, but most of them are at least amusing, and some are true masterpieces. Annie Hall, of course, the one that won the Academy Award for Best Picture (1977), is at the top of the list. My other favourites are Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, and Play It Again, Sam.

Mr Allen has a new movie out, called Whatever Works, and Terry Gross recently interviewed him on her radio show, Fresh Air.

His movies, almost all of them, display a depressed angst, a kind of existential difficulty that’s hard for some to take. As he points out, his movies aren’t autobiographical... and yet they certainly reflect the man’s own philosophy and internal troubles.

Here’s a transcript from 6:38 into the audio:

Terry Gross: So, may I ask, what are some of the real problems that making movies distracts you from?

Woody Allen: Well, they distract me from the same problems that you face, or that anyone faces. You know, the uncertainty of life, and inevitability of aging, and death, and death of loved ones, and mass killings and starvations, and holocausts and... not just the man-made carnage, but the existential position that you’re in, you know, being in a world where you have no idea what’s going on, why you’re here, or what possible meaning your life can have, and the conclusion that you come to after a while that there is really no meaning to it, it’s just a random, meaningless event. These are pretty depressing thoughts, and if you spend much time thinking about them, not only can’t you resolve them, but you sit frozen in your seat, you can’t even get up to have your lunch.

Wow.

Indeed, should one so internalize the struggle to find meaning, and collect all the troubles of the word under one’s hat, one might indeed find oneself unable to function. For most of us, though, it doesn’t come to that.

Because Mr Allen really does have it there, in what he says: there is really no meaning to our individual lives. The are, indeed, just random, meaningless events, from a cosmic point of view. From a universal vantage point, our meaning, our purpose, is to be part of the life-cycle of the Earth. There’s no more nor less to it.

And then, one day a very unusual thing happened in the village: a little baby boy was born. A boy named Oblio. Now, don’t get the wrong idea: the being born part wasn’t unusual. Little kids were being born all the time in that village. What was unusual was that Oblio, unlike any of the other babies born that day, or any other day, had no point! He had no point at all.

Of course, that doesn’t mean our lives need to be meaningless, purposeless, pointless.

Woody Allen responds to his existential angst by “distracting” himself with filmmaking. All the things he has to deal with in that endeavour, he says, leave no time to think about the disturbing stuff. But, really, can anyone but him say that filmmaking is, for Mr Allen, a distraction? Surely, it’s his purpose. He entertains us with his films, and he has a fulfilling life from that. Filmmaking is Woody Allen’s meaning.

It’s not, though, a meaning imposed from on high. It’s one he has developed himself. In looking for a meaning, he’s found one, or created one for himself. In lamenting the meaninglessness of life, and its randomness, he’s made his less random and more meaningful.

How is it we are here, on this path we walk?
In this world of pointless fear, filled with empty talk

— Michael Pinder

And so it is with us all. We all fulfill our natural purpose, the cycle-of-life part. But we each make our own “higher purpose” in what we do while we’re in that cycle.

The three famous people who died last week, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson, made it their purpose, as does Mr Allen, to entertain. Some decide their purpose is to help people, and they become teachers, firefighters, and physicians. Some lead, some provide services, some make things that others use; those are their meanings. For me, it’s my work with computers and the Internet. Our natural “purpose” provides us with the intelligence to develop our own, individual meanings of life.

And that’s the point.