These are people, and they shouldn’t be treated like a curiosity. Is the “National Indian Foundation” going to keep them ignorant of the outside world in perpetuity? How stupid — that is essentially condemning them to historical and cultural obscurity. And don’t give me that crap about they might be living an idyllic life – the “noble savage” is a myth. Our advanced civilization isn’t the product of cultural isolation, but the product of communication and trade (see Guns, Germs and Steel for more details about how Eurasian cultures got the benefit of ease of communication and cross-pollination). Preventing contact with these people isn’t humane, it’s the exact opposite. They will never grow or advance in isolated small groups; no one would.

When I get back to this, I’ll be starting a project that was the initial motivation for starting the blog.

Gah! No — these two (home field advantage and winning) are correlated, but that doesn’t mean one causes the other. Home field advantage doesn’t cause winning. Instead, home field advantage and winning are caused by a third thing — namely, actually being better than the other team. A team has home court advantage if they performed better over the course of the regular season, and are thus also more likely to win. There’s nothing mystical about it. Yes, home court is an advantage, but it shouldn’t at all be surprising or warrant a two page “investigation” that the home court correlation is more pronounced in the playoffs.

All that being said, I’m still not a capitalist. And I’m not a democrat. Capitalism and democracy are not an end goal; I don’t believe in them as a starting point. What I believe in is personal liberty. Capitalism and democracy just happen to be the best ways we’ve found to preserve individual freedoms. They’re a reflection of that underlying value system, and they are far from perfect.

Winston Churchill said ”democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried from time to time.” The same thing applies to capitalism; it doesn’t always work, and people who are militant about it as a foundation scare me sometimes. They refuse to believe that it has faults. I think a lot of people are forced into a corner like this due to semi-socialists. Whenever someone points out a failure of capitalism, their solution is almost always socialist in nature. From there, it’s a reflex action for the “capitalist” in the situation to defend capitalism as an economic system. And we end up with people rationalizing away the faults of capitalism because they don’t like socialism.

The correct solution to a fault in capitalism is not socialism. That’s the equivalent of saying that because democracy sometimes fails or gives bad results, maybe we should try monarchy. We gain nothing by replacing a faulty system with a more faulty system. What we need (to both problems) is a novel solution. For me to support a new system, it would have to preserve individual freedom at least as well as capitalism and democracy do.

I have no idea what such a system would look like; after all, it was hard for people to envision how capitalism was going to work while they were still stuck in mercantilism. I like some of Kim Stanley Robinson’s ideas on eco-economics from the Mars Trilogy. Is it really free? Will it work? I may have a post about that someday. But I have no doubt we’ll eventually find something better.

As an example, the email says: “Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2 percent”. This isn’t a big deal if the population went up by 3% as well. Good statistical analysis would look at homicide rate, typically per 100,000 people. Longer term trends (beyond one year change) are more important. AIC has a good graph showing the long term change in homicide rates here. Global warming denialists make very similar “arguments“.

The true rebuttal to gun control activists makes use of counter-cases. The pro-gun control crowd justifies their stance by saying that removing guns will lower crime. Is it true? Many cities in the U.S. that have strict gun control (look at D.C. for example) have extremely high crime rates. There are enough examples for each side to cherry-pick from to make their argument, but taken as a whole, can we infer anything? Yes.

What these contradictory sets of data do prove is that crime seems at least somewhat independent of gun control. That is, anti-correlation disproves causality. This is the same argument people like Dawkins (and I agree with him) against those who argue that religion makes people better. There are many non-religious people (and societies, such as Western Europe) that are irreligious and are still “civilized”. The argument for causation falls flat. Crime rates are dominated by entirely different factors and it’s not easy to find causal links in societal problems due to the massive number of variables (unless you happen to have a Ph.D. in psychohistory).

What all this means is that gun control activists’ rationale for depriving innocent people of their liberty is completely specious and wrong; unfortunately it also means that many people opposed to gun control use equally bad arguments. The bottom line is that you need a very, very, very damn good reason and rock-solid data before you even start thinking about limiting freedom. Maybe not even then.

Environmentalists pressure the government and oil companies (this is their right) to fund alternative sources of energy, but these projects have almost been doomed from the start due to economic pressures. The free market does wonderful things, including innovation of better, newer, and cheaper things. However, since most environmentalists tend to have little faith in the free market (and are usually decidedly socialist), they believe the only way to get what they want is to force the government to fund the R&D. The biggest impediment to finding alternative energy sources is that oil has been so cheap that it hasn’t been worth it from an economic standpoint — it just hasn’t been profitable, except in the sense of good publicity².

But oil and gas prices are going up. At some point, gas prices are going to be so high that private companies are going to be able to realize enormous profits from investing in R&D for alternative energy sources. If gas prices keep going up and stay there, I predict that we’ll start seeing a flood of innovation from the private sector that will lead to all sorts of good consequences for the environment and consumers. Most people seem to be blaming Bush for outrageous oil prices. Personally, I’m not sure how much control the President has over such things, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Bush is solely responsible. He could wind up being the single greatest force for the environment under this scenario. Environmentalists should be rejoicing at high gas prices and praising Bush for his unintentional foresight.

¹

I don’t intend to use the term in a derogatory manner. I consider myself an “environmentalist” in that I am concerned about it, etc. In this article, I’m generally talking about the extreme version of environmentalis.

²

Publicity is a good motivator insofar as it affects a company’s profits. It’s a one-off motivator; if you really want to motivate a company to do something, find a more direct route to the bottom line.

In the last video linked above, Parsley goes off on activist judges. This is one thing I’m so tired of — anytime a judge strikes down a law as unconstitutional, they are labelled as activist for thwarting “the will of the people” or their chosen representatives. Bullshit. These are the same people who claim to have special insight into the ideas that America was founded on (insisting on “Judeo-Christian” principles), yet don’t seem to realize that one of the most important roles of the judiciary is to protect the rights of the minority from the will of the majority. It astounds me how many people misunderstand this basic principle of our government.

Our dubious sense of morality is responsible for all these stupid laws…Morality’s a damn good thing, but only when it is rooted in respecting the rights of others. Laws that infringe on the rights of people to live their lives as they please are deeply immoral – and they exist even in countries that pay lip service to freedom.

Indeed. Some other gems:

On protectionism: “Producers exist to satisfy consumers; production is the means and consumption is the end.  Protectionism is a policy built on the premise that consumers exist to satisfy producers. 

On reservations (similar to affirmative action here in the U.S., but for castes instead of race):  “With prosperity and an open economy, barriers of caste gradually erode. Yes, India has a long, long way to go before we’re prosperous enough and open enough, but consider that reservations actually increase one’s awareness of caste, and exacerbate tensions between them. You cannot fight injustice with injustice.  ”

Good words. I highly recommned the blog.

Later in the book, Harris discusses the rationalizations for torture and comes to the conclusion that torture can in some cases be justified, even without being 100% certain of the guilt (beforehand) of the person under torture. In other words, even if you end up torturing some innocents, the potential for gleaning lifesaving information outweighs this risk. Essentially, he’s saying that tortured innocents are collateral damage. But they’re not equivalent. Innocent people get killed by bombs on accident — as Harris points out, we would avoid this if we could. We have to accept them as a cost of war and do everything possible to minimize this kind of suffering. But we don’t intentionally put them at risk — they aren’t specifically targetted. We don’t say “Well, we’re going to kill these 100 people, and hope 75 of them are bad guys”. But that’s essentially the argument he’s making for torture.

We have to draw a line between passively and directly harmful actions. In the case of collateral damage, the goal is to kill person X, and we take every action possible to only have that direct effect — person Y may unfortunately be nearby. But person Y being injured is a side effect of our intended action. What Harris is trying to is turn this into a probabilistic argument and say “Well, if we’re willing to deal with 10% extra casualties that are collateral damage, we should be willing to tolerate 10% of those who we torture being innocent.” But the two situations are not the same — in the second, 10% (or whatever percent), the torturer is intentionally inflicting harm on an innocent person. The probablistic argument fails because each case of torture is a specific person, not a hypothetical.

Let’s look at a contrived example to compare the two. If there were two sets of people in danger, and you could only save one group — you’d choose whichever option led to saving the most people. The people you are unable to save would be collateral damage. What if the situation required you to actively kill one person to save five? I think most people would balk at this — it’s the difference between active and passive harm.

Also note that Harris is sanctioning torture of the guilty, completely ignoring the fact that we have laws against cruel and unusual punishment even for people who have already been tried and convicted. His argument above assumes that torturing guilty people is acceptable. But haven’t we moved past that? Torture dehumanizes both the subject and the torturer. In short, torture is bad, bad, bad.