Is Capitalism Evil?

Alternative titles: Corporate Calumny, Evils of Industry, Venture Villainy. I like alliteration alot.

Or: Why You Shouldn't Be Surprised When a System Designed to Act Like a Sociopath In Fact Acts Like a Sociopath


A few things happened recently to spark my thoughts on this. One was that I shared this pithy piece by Avicenna over at Freethought Blogs which rightly derides alternative medicine. Why is it at all acceptable to tout alternative medicine? No one would go to an alternative dentist. An alternative dentist wouldn't be sticking it to Big Teeth; he'd just be some jackass who pulls out his own teeth.

A friend of mine responded not so much defending alternative medicine as attacking the business of medicine. I may have misinterpreted (and if so I'm sorry; you know where to find me, dude), but his argument seemed to boil down to the conclusion that "Doctors medicate too much and this is bad." I tentatively agree with part of this. Overmedication is bad, particularly with antibiotics, however I don't know that doctors do routinely over medicate or "throw medicine at the problem". If they do, that's certainly bad. A quick google search indicates this is a fairly popular view, but it's not actually what I want to talk about today, so I don't care to wade into it.

Another portion of his argument was that doctors are under pressure from Big Pharma to prescribe medication, thus explaining why it's happening (assuming that it is). That's certainly a reasonable position and presents an excellent prima facie case for investigating whether that's happening. I and many others agree with my friend that the commercialization of medicine has harmed the profession and its standards as a whole. The profit motive doesn't mix well with the health industry.

The other item that sparked this line of thought was this youtube video by jordanowen42¹, in which he takes a look at some presentations by Gale Dines, an anti-pornography feminist. FYI, he disagrees with Dines and thinks her anti-porn stance is bad for feminism. I agree; porn is pretty awesome when done right. A lot of it isn't, though. At one point he expresses some confusion by some arguments/points she makes regarding pornography's for-profit status, and specifically draws from trade magazines to attack them. The gist is that pornographers are in it for the money, they're making profit, and that's all very bad². Now, anything drawn from a trade magazine has strong potential to sound skeevy, because it's going to be discussing the business of business, and maximizing profits, which will always sound fairly manipulative on supply side, production side, or both. However, structuring business for greater efficiency and profit isn't necessarily bad in itself. For that matter, profit isn't necessarily bad in itself. And that's really the point I want to hit on.

It has long been a central thesis on the left that corporatism, capitalism, the profit motive degrade and dehumanize, that capitalism and profit are necessarily evil. Hence those apparent non sequiturs by Dines. And that's the question I want to try and address. Is capitalism evil?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Yes.

What does capitalism do? It allocates manpower, intellect, resources in order to solve a problem. In return for solving the problem the people involved get money (another resource, an external indication of value). That's not a bad thing. It's also not a good thing. Capitalism is explicitly amoral. All it does is identify a hurdle and the resources necessary to solve it (A) and compares that to the value to be gained thereby (B). If B - A > 0, then capitalism ho! This hurdle could be the problem of finding cars that don't use fossil fuels, or it could be how to murder your inconvenient wife and dispose of the body. Entirely and explicitly amoral.

So, no, capitalism isn't necessarily evil. In short term theory. In practice, we find that it is, and exploring theory in greater depth explains why.

The Sins of Abuse
You don't need high-process theory to realize that capitalism is, far more often than not, monstrous in practice. Whether you're talking about the crude barter/slave systems of the pre-industrial world, extending back through feudalistic Europe to Imperial Rome to Ancient Egypt and beyond (in both time and space), or the early era of industrialism of the early 19th-century US, the result is quite negative. People exploit inequalities of wealth, power, and information (almost always all found in a single set of hands) to take serious advantage of others, harming them financially, emotionally, and physically. This results in explicit and implicit slavery; people seriously injured, maimed, or worked to death; entire communities suffering over generations from a degrading and dehumanizing system that values them not at all and discards them when no more can be wrung from them. The systematic effects of such are still felt in the poorest areas of the United States today, and I have no doubt the same is true and will continue to be true for centuries across the world.

The Sin of Poullution
There's an additional problem in negative externalities. In a word, pollution. Large businesses, producers, manufacturers whenever possible produce as much as they can and deal with as little waste as they can. This led for centuries to the communities surrounding various businesses suffering from the air, water, and noise pollution those businesses produced, from the chemical spill-off of metal refineries and tanneries to the choking smog of coal-powered mills, to carcinogens and toxins from modern plants. These were spewed carelessly into the environment, the cost born by those who had to live with them rather than those who made them. Why should your neighbor have to put up with your stink? Why should he die from it?

The Sins of Fraud and Perjury
Then there are acts of deliberate fraud. The toxic and addictive nature of tobacco was known as early as the 1890s, yet the tobacco industry fought long and hard, and lied, to prevent the public from knowing that; it took more than a century to bring them to heel. The DuPont corporation a decade fighting standards to control CFCs (aka, the ozone-destroyer). The Ethel Corporation and the Oil Industry spent decades lying about the effects of lead on the human body, beginning a few months after tetraethyl lead began being produced and added to gasoline³, not stopping until the Clean Air Act forced lead out of gasoline, more than half a century after it was first added. These are just three examples of corporate malfeasance. All of them in the name of profit.

Is this not enough to prove it's the industry standard? How many more do you need? Enron? Madoff? Subprime mortgages?

The Failure in Feedback
And then there's the fact that capitalism is necessarily unstable. It's a system governed by positive feedback. Any engineer will tell you that a system with positive feedback is doomed to crash, that negative feedback is the proper control mechanism. Negative feedback is like a marble at the bottom of a bowl: if you push the marble (perturb the system), then gravity will pull the marble back down (feedback opposite the perturbation). Positive feedback is like a marble on top of an upside-down bowl: if you push the marble (perturbation), then gravity will continue to pull the marble away from the top of the bowl (feedback in the same direction as perturbation). Like a microphone too close to the speakers, a system governed by positive feedback will spiral out of control until it breaks. The history of the US economy is one of boom and bust, boom and bust⁴.

Assuming some business manages, through luck or shrewd practice, to escape this cycle of destruction, it finds itself in the enviable position of attempting to end the cycle by destroying capitalism. The end goal of any participant in the free market is to become a monopoly and destroy the market. The end goal of competition is to destroy all competitors, end competition, and set prices not by some measure of value, but simply by what will make the monopolist the most profit. Where monopolies can't be forced into existence, oligopolies and cartels will suffice.

But Why?
I'll give you one minute to come up with ten hypothetical scenarios where a business could increase profit by behaving immorally. I'll give you an additional minute to come up with one scenario to increase profit by behaving morally. Go.

An Injection of Morality
Nowhere will you find morality in a corporate mission statement. At no point does capitalism stop and ask, "Setting profit aside, does this achieve greater human welfare?" Profit is the beginning and end of capitalism. This is, in fact, the law of the land, going back to 1919 at least when the Supreme Court held that shareholder shareholder profits must be placed above the good of the community or of the employees. By law, the best you can expect of a company is that it will be amoral. The best you can expect is that it won't be evil. As my examples showed above, that is literally the best you can expect. And you shouldn't expect it. Centuries of history should prime you to expect corporate villainy as the default. Every business will try to duck responsibilities, to force in all ways the cost of its operations onto other people, to squeeze money from the market regardless of value, to eliminate competition by any means necessary.

And that's where we come in. That's where government comes in. Our laws, our regulations, our courts, and our press⁵ are our defense against immoral corporate practice. They are the means by which we force morality and conscience into a system that is deliberately designed to have neither. They are the only we to prevent a monstrous tyranny, a terrible, sickening (literally) system of abuse and exploitation. It's the only way to prevent tragedies and create a modicum of justice. Even the mildest of honest history lessons will expose centuries of evil, ameliorated only by hard-won battles, in the face of well-funded and often violent opposition, instituting systems of oversight and regulation. Only government can save society from the economy.

1 - I bet his name's actually Bob.[/fatuous]

2 - I get the feeling that, as far as Dines was concerned, pornography would have been damned either way. Either they're in it for the money, which is bad because they're exploiting women for profit, or they're in it for the sex, which is bad because they're deliberately with malice aforethought exploiting women! Maybe I'm being uncharitable, though. Perhaps she'd really appreciate organic, free-trade porn, or a pornographer who enthuses "I'm just in it for the sex!"

3 - Tetraethyl lead reduces engine knock, a problem of multiple detonations in an automobile's combustion chambers. It causes damage to the engine and results in a characteristic "Ping!" noise. Interestingly, the man who discovered this, Thomas Midgely, also developed CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons, for use as a refrigerant. Fuckin' a, dude.

4 - Too make things worse, even that part of the game is rigged. The rich make money building the system, they default on their debts when the system crashes, then they gather the pieces and start over. Meanwhile the poor get poorer and are locked in a pattern of debt and ill health from which they, unlike the rich, cannot escape when the system crashes.

5 - Until the press becomes a corporate monopoly. Yay. "Liberal media" my ass.

Suffer the Little Children

Remember what Focus on the Family says: True Love means hitting her until she listens.

Found here

A few issues have come up lately that I think highlight a divide and a problem that should be getting more attention, that being the difference between the liberal and conservative view of children. As I've said before, Jon Haidt's work is incredibly useful for understanding these differences and how they lead to entirely different politics and philosophies. Here I'll just be focusing on a small part.

The liberal view of society is atomic; the basic unit of society is the individual, which individuals come together in free association to form communities and groups. The conservative view is molecular; the basic unit is the family, which form the smallest of a nested set of authoritarian hierarchies. Father is at the head of the family, then the family is part of a church with a priest at the head, then state/governor, then country/president, then Christian Commonwealth/God. Authority descends from god in heaven, to each level of the hierarchy below.

Found here, but common elsewhere.

This is important for two reasons. The first is that it grants the father with god-given authority over the lives of his family, and that any outside interference is an abrogation of god's will, Christian duty, etc. The second is that this isn't interpreted merely as authority or hierarchy, but as ownership. By any reading, the Christian bible says that children are property (sons until they're grown, women until title is transferred to her new owner, her husband). Thus interfering with parental authority is in fact abrogating the most sacred of American rights; property rights. This finds expression in a number of harmful ways, not least of which is simple and straightforward physical abuse, but also emotional abuse.

This conflict has a history going back decades, as when conservatives attacked Dr. Seuss's objecting to spanking as "permissiveness", which epithet is still popular today. Because, obviously, if you're not hitting your child then you're letting it do whatever it wants, yes? They still find outlet by attacking, for example, that most wondrously uppity of bitches, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who wrote the book It Takes a Village, and who is still attacked for trying to steal children¹.

Take two examples that cropped up in my RSS feed recently. Both are from Christian fundamentalists: Ken Ham and Mark Driscoll. Ham was upset that mean atheists were attacking a poor, defenseless Christian school (notwithstanding that no one was certain which school it was until Ham put its name into the public discourse) for the most painfully ignorant and vile of indoctrination. Children learned to spew creationist talking points (behemoth=dinosaur, sharp teeth <> carnivore, "Were you there?") and atheists were appalled. Ham defended the school and said it was just another part of evil atheism's recent growth in attacks. He included a list of bullet points that PZ Myers took apart quite handily. However, Myers was mystified at number five and didn't know what to make of it (except to say "Citation needed"). Number five was "Many atheists claim that children belong to the community, not to their parents."

Meanwhile, Hemant Mehta was appalled by a recent sermon by Driscoll, which included the following gem.

One of the dumbest conversations I’ve ever had on this topic was with a pastor. He asked me to pray for his teenage daughter, who claimed to be a Christian but was dating and having sex with a non-Christian teenage boy. I asked him what specifically i should pray for — that God would give him a steady trigger finger? He told me that he had never told her not to have sex because she was an adult, and he did not want to pry into her personal life. I told the man that I would not pray that god would give his daughter wisdom, because God had already given that wisdom to her father, who did not lovingly dispense it to his daughter, and that he was a wicked man who apparently hated his daughter and was a coward unfit for the pastorate.

Emphasis mine

How clearly do you think it needs to be stated? Driscoll obviously denies the woman any agency, laying all blame for her actions at her father's feet, as if she were a dog who broke the leash rather than an actual human being. And then Driscoll thinks the only proper thing for the other pastor to do is to kill someone. My guess? The heathen who vandalized his property (the man who had sex to his daughter. Not with, because that implies she's human something can be done with).

This is all rather disgusting, and part of a larger conservative Christian worldview that posits that children aren't human, but property, and only men truly escape the status of being property and graduate to humanity.

On the other side, we have the progressive view that posits parents as limited caretakers of their children, who have a positive duty to see their children happy, healthy, and well-prepared for adulthood, and who have limited rights stemming only and necessarily from their obligations as parents. All obligation flows from parent to child and not, as a conservative might have it, the other way around.

1 - Ironically, that's exactly the sort of shit fundies pull with the Good News Club, an after-school program that indoctrinates children into fundamentalism. Their parents think "Oh, it'll be like Sunday School but with their friends" and instead they end up wetting the bed in terror thinking they're going to burn in hell for not cleaning their room. Be careful following that link; you might end up infuriated. Remember what Eusebius said, "If you're doing it for Jesus, anything goes."

Why I Stopped Following Sinfest

I found Sinfest back in college. It's a webcomic by Tatsuya Ishida, a very talented artist. At the time the comic was, well, the sort of thing an immature college guy would like. A little T&A (PG stuff), jokes about drinking or porn or weed, irreverent toward religion and so on. It was funny, not particularly deep. Still, I followed it for about a decade because it was consistently humorous and the artwork is consistently high quality.

But I've recently stopped following the comic.

If anything, Ishida's work has only improved over the years. It can often be described as Wattersonesque, with long, gorgeous strips that tell a story without any dialogue, allowing the art to stand on its own. He's a phenomenally talented artist and writer, so there are absolutely no complaints there.

Ishida has matured along with his work and, hopefully, his readers. He's started tackling more serious issues. Like feminism.

I'm a feminist. Or an ally, or whatever you want to call me. Women are fully equal to men and must be treated that way by anyone who wishes to have any claim to moral standing. Ours will not be a just society until male privilege is a thing of our barbaric past. I absolutely cannot fault Ishida for espousing feminism in his comic.

It appears Ishida came to his feminism recently, as the comic made a dramatic turn in tone and subject matter a few months back. I only wish Ishida had discovered intersectionality and sex-positive feminism, rather than the harsh second-wave feminism he seems to be espousing. Intersectionality is the understanding that there are different kinds of privilege, different ways for life to suck. For example, that wonderful moment in Scrubs when Turk and Elliot start to argue over whether it's harder to be black or a woman in medicine... and both shut up when a black woman walks by.

A black woman went to college and wanted the focus of her academic career to be black women's issues. She found she couldn't just double major in Black Studies and Women's Studies because the first was focused on black men and the second on white women (significant problems in both areas). She had to create her own field. Being a black woman isn't simply a matter of being black and being a woman; it's about being black and a woman and a black woman.

Intersectionality is about all of that. It's about recognizing that there are different ways to be disadvantaged within a cultural context, and that combining those disadvantages creates a situation that is different from either independently, and that those disadvantages change depending on the situation. Being a black man is a disadvantage in white America, but when that black man goes home, suddenly he's just a man and the field has changed.

I've seen no real evidence of an understanding or appreciation of intersectionality in Ishida's work. That's not to say he doesn't agree with it, but if he did I believe his work would have certain nuances that are lacking. I think he'd be tackling a broader range of topics, for one thing. And he wouldn't be focusing quite so much effort on porn.

In a nutshell, I'd describe sex positivity as embracing any and all sex acts and sexualities within the broad umbrella of "enthusiastic consent". Whereas the Abrahamic religions feed on human sexuality by demonizing it, sex positivity recognizes sexuality as simply another facet of human nature, and its expression as a positive and healthy act. Sex positive feminism got its start in the early 80s in response to an anti-pornography current in feminism, and it has evolved since then. The views and beliefs among sex-positive feminists are wide ranging and complex, and I'll certainly not try to summarize them here. Suffice it to say that Ishida's blanket condemnation of pornography isn't in keeping with the majority.

Take for example these two comics. Here, a woman walks in on her boyfriend watching porn and condemns him to the sofa. In the next, she complains to someone who urges her to dump him. Ignore the fact that he's Uncle Sam and she's Lady Liberty, that's largely irrelevant. Just focus for the moment on the fact that Sam's watching of porn receives blanket condemnation. That's absolutely wrong. But the last bit is right; Sam pressuring Liberty to do things she doesn't want to do? Also wrong. Remember, enthusiastic consent.

Some porn may be questionable, a lot of it certainly isn't to your taste (unless you're an onmniphile, in which case more power to ya, I guess). But condemning someone for their masturbatory habits? No. I'll try and stave off a quick criticism, here; this is just the most recent of Ishida's attacks on porn and, apparently, male sexuality, not the only one¹. I agree it's more ambiguous than I'd like, but I didn't want to do an archive trawl. I feel confident using it, however, because Sam receives a blanket condemnation even before his pressuring of Liberty is attested.

So that's a big problem with Ishida's latest work. He's become something of a one-note musician and I disagree with the note. But that's not the biggest problem.

He's not bringing the funny. You can be wrong, and you can be unfunny, but if you're both I'm not going to stick around.

1 - Sex positive feminism does address issues of pornography only focusing on male fantasies, male pleasure, etc, which is as much of a problem in pornography as it is in video games and comic books. And movies. And television. And newspapers. And politics. Anyway, there actually is feminist porn out there and, no, it's not men doing housework in tight clothes. It's people fucking, and her orgasms are believable.

Mad Men, Sexism, and Irony

For those who don't know, Mad Men is a show about ... stuff. Okay, it's a character study and a demonstration about life in the sixties. Also, Jon Hamm's Wang. In addition to the fascinating life of the characters, the show adores slapping you in the face with the things that have changed in the last sixty years. Like when the Draper family has a fun afternoon at the park and, when they're done, they clean up by throwing all their trash on the ground, folding their picnic blanket, and driving away. Also, rampant racism, and sexism, and drunk driving (the legal limit was .15!)

The character of Peggy Olson is just nifty, played by the phenomenal Elisabeth Moss. You might remember her from The West Wing. Peggy's a bit different. She goes from being a naive suburban Catholic girl to, well, a wicked awesome icon of second-wave feminism. A woman working to have it all, a satisfying personal life and accepted as an equal in the workplace.


I started watching Mad Men when the local Blockbuster folded. They sold off their stock at cut-rate prices and I, like the rest of the town, descended and picked over the carcass. Among other things, I got the first season of the show and watched it with my mom. Then I got the second and third seasons. Simply phenomenal television. Mom's not nearly as into that sort of thing, so I watched the commentaries by myself and I noticed something. When discussing the male actors, the actors, writers, directors simply talk about the writing, the deeper significance, and the craft. When discussing the female actors, they talk about how beautiful they are.

In a show that likes to slap you in the face with, among other things, how sexist things used to be, they continue to embody sexism behind the scenes. Is that ironic? Or just meta?

When I die...

This isn't as morbid as you might think. I've been reading Walt Whitman, because I've had Leaves of Grass for years and, why not? Well, the poetry's phenomenal. I'm working through "Song of Myself" right now, and every once in a while it occurs to me that bits of it would be perfect for things. Mostly for proving Whitman was probably bi.

Anyway, when I die, I want to be composted¹ and spread in a flower garden for a few years of happy blooming. Screw burial; stupid and wasteful.

Also, everyone who shows up has to get shitty drunk. It's what I would have done, right?

1 - Yeah, I know, you can't compost meat, right? I want someone to make the effort. At the very least, I want to be mulched.

Thermoquick Composter, 160 Gallon (Google Affiliate Ad)

Sometimes I get odd whims.

Schrödinger's Cat

Before you there is a box. In the box there is a vial of deadly cyanide. There is also a radioactive isotope with precisely a fifty percent chance of decay, and a Geiger counter to detect when it does so. If the isotope decays, the poison will be released. This will kill the cat that is also inside the box. Is the cat alive or dead?

Erwin Schrödinger proposed this thought experiment without any intent that it be taken seriously. He certainly never actually put a cat in a box with a vial of deadly poison. He intended it as a damning counter-argument to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

In short, the math of QM tells us that there's no reason for a particle to exist in one state rather than another. The Many Worlds model (popular with authors of speculative fiction, for reasons that are probably obvious) states that the particle exists only in one state in this universe, but in other states in other universes, leading to a branching infinity of possible universes. As an untestable hypothesis, this isn't popular with scientists, particularly since other models are testable and have been confirmed to be true.

The Copenhagen Interpretation states instead that if a particle can exist in multiple states, that it does exist in multiple states. Imagine walking into the kitchen and, rather than choosing to sit in one particular chair, you instead sat in all of them at once. Perhaps 80% of you is in chair A, while the remaining 20% is spread evenly across chairs B-F. In QM math terms, that's saying that the wave function¹ tells us there's an 80% probability of finding you in chair A, 4% in B, 4% in C, 4% in D, 4% in E, and 4% in F. If we looked 100 times, roughly four of those would find you in chair C. More than that, though, the Copenhagen Interpretation tells us that until we looked you wouldn't just be in one of those chairs, you would actually be in all of them simultaneously, but more in A than in the rest.

Therefore, Schrödinger argued, according to the Copenhagen Interpretation, the wave system of the cat in the box is 50% undecayed isotope/alive cat, 50% decayed isotope/dead cat. Conclusion: The cat is simultaneously alive and dead. This is stupid². This is a reductio ad absurdum, taking an argument to a logical and absurd conclusion to demonstrate that the argument is false.

And it's hard to argue with. It proceeds ineluctably from the mathematics of QM to the well-tested and confirmed knowledge we all share about the way death works to demonstrate that the Copenhagen Interpretation is false. And Schrödinger was a really smart guy whose name is still all over QM and he must have understood it, right?

Then why is the Copenhagen Interpretation the number one interpretation of physicists today? Why is it the one taught in schools as the truth while others get, at best, a passing mention? Mostly because it accords with all the evidence, and also because Schrödinger made a little mistake. Actually, a big mistake.

First, the evidence. If a system can exist in multiple configurations simultaneously, then it doesn't merely bounce from one to the next to the next. It actually does exist in all of them simultaneously. Every measurement we can do on electrons and molecular bonds, and extended metallic or ionic structures confirms this. A chemical bond that's half a single bond and half a double bond actually is somewhere between the two, not one or the other at different times.

Second, Schrödinger's mistake. It's rather similar to the one made by Roger Barrier in an article I discussed elsewhere. It's the mistake of not knowing exactly what an observer is. Douglas Adams, brilliant and trenchant as always, noted in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency that the cat itself counts as an observer! However, he got it wrong as well.

The Geiger counter is the observer. It's the one that measures whether or not the isotope has decayed and actually makes the "decision" to release the poison. In the same way, when you read these words on your screen, you yourself are not the observer that collapses the wave function. The single molecule in your eye that captures the photon is itself the observer, not you. The Geiger counter captures the energetic particle released by the radioactive decay and transforms that energy into an audible click. The molecule in your eye captures the photon, is transformed into a high energy state that then, through an awesome, high-fidelity QM process transfers that energy downhill and into your brain where... something happens so your brain can process it. I don't actually know much neurology. Brain is pink thinky thing. It's a goop.

Anyway, the point is that the cat is not simultaneously alive and dead. By continually observing the isotope, the Geiger counter is keeping the isotope's wave function collapsed in the "undecayed" state until such time as it hopes over into the "decayed" state and the poison is released. And the moon is being continuously observed, but God doesn't have to do that, because everything in the universe that interacts with the moon, from the Earth, to the sun, to every single particle in your body, is doing that whether you notice it or not. When a tree falls in a forest, everything around it observes that fact. It does make a sound. Reality exists absent our perception of it.

Just try to remember, there's a reason "scientific" "proofs" for the existence of a god aren't being shouted from the rooftops and taught in schools. It's because they're wrong. That's why I put them in quotes up there. There are a few scientists, a minority, who are both fully educated in their field and who also believe in a god of some kind, but they almost all, with only a few, eye-roll-inducing exceptions³, stay far, far away from any statement of the sort "Scientific Theory X proves that my god exists."

1 - A wave function details all the information about a system, whether it's a particle in a box, the electron around a hydrogen nucleus, or the 92 electrons around a uranium nucleus.

2 - Yes. It is. Don't argue. This is the world of the everyday we're talking about. You're alive or you're dead. Even if you're in a persistent vegetative state and your brain is dead but your body is still alive, then your brain is dead and your body is alive but it's still not fifty fifty.

3 - Like the doctor who recently made the news for saying the afterlife was real. He made Newsweek. And it was terrible science.

Quantum Observation: A Religio Gets Science Wrong

A lot of people just don't understand quantum mechanics (QM). That's okay, a lot of people don't understand Newtonian mechanics, either. Nor, for that matter, do they understand cars. Or hot dogs.

The problem is that they think they do. It's a known phenomenon that people rate their understanding of a topic completely independent of their actual expertise. That is to say that ask anyone if they understand a topic and they'll say they do, but when you test them on it, they could be anywhere. The only people whose understanding truly matches their self-evaluations are the experts.

In the field of science, this is exacerbated by the fact that science necessarily uses jargon, and that jargon often overlaps with common language. The term "fragility" in the study of glass-forming materials doesn't mean "it breaks easily", it describes the relationship between the viscosity of the liquid and temperature¹.

Some people, like Deepak Chopra, are quacks and frauds who make money by dancing around these misunderstandings, claiming the mantle of science before the public, and then retreating into simple mysticism when challenged by an expert. Seriously, fuck Deepak Chopra. Most of the time, though, it's much more innocent.

Take this, for example. This guy is trying to use QM to prove that a god exists. It doesn't help that Einstein was given to semi-mystical quotes. It also doesn't help that he gets the science wrong, and not just the QM; he gets every day things wrong as well.

For example, he claims that when a tree falls in a forest, it doesn't make a sound. He admits that it makes "air waves", but claims that "sound" is our perception of the event. This isn't a mere quibble over terms. It's a deeper part of both his misunderstanding of QM and central to his "proof".

The problem is the quantum mechanical act of "observation". There's a serious disconnect between the everyday act of observation and that which takes place in the world of QM.

In everyday life, observation is a fundamentally passive event. Information is flying through air all the time and you receive it. Sounds are created, and travel through the air until they reach your ears, at which point your brain interprets them. Light waves travel from a source, bounce off an object, and travel to your eyes, at which point your brain interprets them. At all times, information comes to you absent your effort to retrieve it, and at no time do you actually decide when or how or whether to interpret it. Your brain does that regardless. The human experience of observation is as a passive recipient of some of the vast quantities of information that fill the world around us.

In the realm of the very small, such is not the case. The interactions of the everyday world happen at inconceivable scales; the photons striking your bookcase are so much smaller, that the effect is negligible. But a photon exists on the same scale as an electron. When you observe an electron using a photon, it's like observing a baseball with a baseball bat, like finding a coffee table in a dark room (you know, with your shin). In short, observation in QM is an active event that necessarily impacts (literally) both the object being observed and the object with which you observe. The effect of the one on the other is how you make the observation!

The disconnect, and the reason it allows people to draw false, mystical conclusions, is that the effects are only significant on that small scale, and they're only truly active on that scale. Between the QM world and the world of the everyday, a switch occurs and observation once again becomes a passive event. Newtonian mechanics may only be an approximation, as author Barrier noted, but they're very, very good approximations. Using Newtonian physics, military artillery can fire shells over the horizon, taking into account wind, curvature of the Earth, and the Coriolis effect to not only land the shell but even to set its timer so it explodes precisely and devastatingly above the target. It's an approximation that works in the realm of the everyday.

The act of human observation hasn't been altered or shifted in some way by the discoveries of QM or relativity. When I read a book, it only moves me emotionally. To proceed from QM to the notion that the universe must be observed in order to exist is a non sequitur. The former doesn't lead to the latter. When a tree falls in a forest, it does make a sound, and here's why: In Which I Discuss Shcrödinger's Tired Cat.

1 - If you must know, the ideal relationship is a perfectly straight line when ln(η) is plotted against 1/T. Like many things, viscosity is an exponential function... ideally. In reality, glass-forming liquids deviate from the ideal, and the greater the deviation, the greater the fragility.

Mainstream vs Average and Atheism Plus

I was part of an interesting discussion about the urge by creators to destroy their most awesome creations, which was dubbed the Lucas Principle¹ and discussed with respect to Ridley Scott and his repeated attacks against Alien and Blade Runner, with a brief foray into the Card Effect² and a very interesting discussion of gender neutral pronouns³.

At one point, Roberta Williams was brought up. This is because we were casting about for female creators to put alongside the likes of Lucas and Scott. Williams was (and apparently still is) a video game designer and co-founder of Sierra Entertainment. In the 90s she came under criticism of elitism for stating that she was creating games for more educated and affluent gamers, codified in '99 by the following:

Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, than they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn't watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn't quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More "average" people now feel they should own one.

The fact is that Williams was in part correct. Computers became mainstream just as video game consoles, telephones, and cars have all become mainstream. Her real mistake lay in calling it "average" and in assuming that this was in any way a bad thing. It's really not.

This brought to mind a speech given by Greta Christina as the keynote speaker for the Secular Student Alliance in 2010. The video (embedded below) is about an hour long and she discusses the similarities between today's atheist movement and the history of the gay movement, and what the former can learn from the latter. One of the many things she discusses is actually a warning: atheists should prepare to see themselves become less special.

Once upon a time, coming out of the closet was a guaranteed way to get yourself killed. Oscar Wilde was convicted of homosexuality and his time in prison was so injurious that he never fully recovered and died shortly after his release, spending the last few years of his life penniless and advocating penal reform. Alan Turing, hero of the second world war, was convicted of homosexuality half a century later and committed suicide following the loss of his career and chemical castration. The Stonewall Riots of 1969 were the nucleus around which the defiant Gay Rights Movement was formed.

Because coming out was still difficult, dangerous, and in some places illegal, out gays of the 70s and 80s were a very different group than today. Homosexuality has become mainstream, perhaps even seen as merely a "different kind of normal" rather than dangerous, sick, or criminal. The discussion today is whether gays can legally get married, not whether they should be in prison; and conservative steadfasts have admitted that opposing that is a losing proposition as young conservatives are coming into the fold who don't see homosexuality as a problem to solve.

Where once you had to be an incredibly strong, independent, and indeed fabulous person to withstand the withering hatred of daily life as a gay person, now you may be just another person who simply happens to be gay, who rolls their eyes and says "We're not all like Kurt Hummel." As gays have become mainstream and the mainstream has become more gay, being gay has become less special. Just another kind of normal. This is somewhat sad, but it's victory.

In the same way, Christina reasons, atheists will become less special as the mainstreaming already underway continues. Being an atheist in an overwhelmingly religious society such as that of the United states usually involves growing up in, understanding, thinking deeply about, and ultimately rejecting religion. It means facing abiding discrimination and hatred⁴, and facing the scorn of your community and even being kicked out of your home. It means being better informed about religion than the religious, and spending far more time thinking and arguing about matters of faith, history, and morality. It means being well-informed and articulate in a way that the population at large is not. In means, in short, being special.

Are atheists becoming not-special? Far from it! Rather, they're experiencing a different growing pain resulting from mainstreaming. They're experiencing a problem the gay community might wish it suffered from in 1975. The atheist community now has minorities. It has women, and blacks, and transgendered people, and disabled people, and all that other stuff. Christina points out that the gay movement still has trouble reaching out to the black community because, as is often the case, the gay movement was led by white men back in the day. As leaders, they were the public face, and that hurt them in reaching out to gays where were not white or not men.

This brings us to Atheism Plus. A number of women and minorities have been clamoring for greater inclusion in the atheism movement. They've also been holding leaders' feet to the fire to get them to be more outspoken about matters not traditionally part of the atheist wheelhouse⁵. They've been pushing for discussion of feminism, homosexuality, race relations, alternative genders, and other issues in progressive politics. This has received significant push-back from individuals who don't think that that's part of what it means to be an atheist. "The skeptical, fact-based worldview can be brought to bear on other issues." vs. "What we talk about as atheists is the god thing. Stop bugging us!"

About a year ago, atheist blogger Rebecca Watson accidentally set the internet on fire by saying she found it creepy when a guy hit on her in an elevator. What followed was an all-out troll-fest as the misogynists women always have to face when they speak in public piled on, clueless atheist men came in to defend elevator guy or ask what the problem was, other feminist atheists (male and female) spoke up in Watson's defense, and more trolls piled on, names were called, and discussions exploded everywhere⁶. This firestorm hasn't died down in the 15 months since it started. Other feminist atheists have become more outspoken about how the atheist community isn't and hasn't been friendly to female atheists. Minority atheists have spoken up saying much the same about the community's relationship with non-white atheists. And the whole time, the old guard, from their position of privilege, have argued that everyone needs to shut up, quit whining, and get back to not believing in god, dammit!

The latest development in this ongoing discussion has been Atheism+, atheism plus progressive social issues. A movement which seeks to bring skepticism and scientific methodological naturalism to bear on social issues. I've found it quite informative. I'm not exactly a lurker there, but I'm nowhere near as prolific as some of you might expect. Instead I mostly read and learn. Not all are so reticent to participate. Misogynist and MRA⁷ trolls have been a serious problem in the weeks since its genesis and it's proved very divisive within the atheist community. Even those who aren't misogynistic assholes⁸ don't necessarily see the need for a space to discuss these issues safely, don't see these issues as being part of atheism, or think the feminists are assholes themselves, particularly for calling them assholes for not agreeing with the first two points!

Things have been pretty rough over there, in case you're wondering. In addition to a lot of temporary bans to slap down people who've too insulting, hurtful, or hateful, there have also been a number of permanent bans. An average of nearly one a day. In my opinion, all have been justified.

Atheism+ is an outgrowth of the mainstreaming of atheism. It's no longer a club reserved for a very few people, a small, uniform community. It's reached the point where different people, with different interests want to join. Atheism should learn from the history of the gay rights movement and not be a movement just for white men. Avoid the problem by learning to be inclusive. Don't commit the ecological fallacy and assume that a community becoming more average means each member is becoming more average. The community is becoming more diverse, and this will bring in a variety of views, a variety of arguments, and it means there will be more ambassadors to different communities. Gay has become another kind of normal because everyone has come to realize that someone they love is gay. That the black community in America is less gay-friendly than mainstream America is a direct result of the gay movement's failure to be more racially inclusive back in the day. The atheist movement shouldn't make that mistake.

Just in case it's not clear, I'm fully in support of atheism+. My atheism isn't something I keep in a box, away from the rest of my beliefs. I like to believe that it's the result of the same skepticism and scientific worldview as the rest of my beliefs. I'm certain that my worldview isn't as cohesive and self-consistent as I would like, but I'll keep learning and growing and working on it, and I'll try to ensure consistency by not keeping each part in isolation from the others.




So where does that leave us with Roberta Williams? She was factually correct that computers and computer gaming had become more mainstream, more average, and that that meant the market for games had changed. Where she was wrong was in assuming that meant every computer owner was now average. That's the ecological fallacy. The market had become larger and more diverse. Her affluent, educated gamers were still there, still waiting for her kind of game, but there were other gamers as well with different tastes. There's room for Call of Duty, Batman, and Fallout on the shelves at the stores. There's room for heroes who are black, female, or disabled. There are people waiting to hear the stories that all of the creators have to tell. They don't all want the same stories or heroes, but that's okay. It takes all kinds.


Greta Christina's Talk at SSA




Footnotes

1 - Lucas isn't a good writer. He's not the greatest director. He is a man of enormous technical vision and a good producer. Unfortunately, he also thinks he's a writer and director. The Star Wars prequel trilogy isn't good. This is his fault.

2 - When knowledge of a creator's rampant bigotry spoils your enjoyment of earlier works where that bigotry's more subtle manifestations become more apparent. Orson Scott Card is a damn good writer. Unfortunately, he's also a devout member of the Church of Latter Day Saints (a Mormon) and is kind of a rampant bigot and climate change denialist. It makes it hard to read some of his earlier books. You read the Homecoming series and it's like "Oh. This is the book of Mormon but with a sentient computer and Russian astronauts." Or you read The Tales of Alvin Maker and you're like "Oh. This is the book of Mormon, only the guy's name is Alvin instead of John and he actually has magic powers rather than being a misogynist fraud." And his sympathetic homosexual characters become less so when you realize he honestly believes that if they just tried harder the gays could at least pretend to be straight and have families instead of living in sin and burning forever. Yay?

3 - I'm now fully on board with using they/their for the third-person singular when I wish to remain gender neutral rather than torturing my prose; turns out that's the way we originally used our language before yet another British busybody ruined it for everyone else.

4 - Studies have shown that atheists are the most despised group in the United States. Moreso even than Muslims. This surprised the authors because no atheists in living memory have murdered thousands of people in a single act of terrorism. Also unlike gays and minorities and "foreign" religions, bigotry against atheists has been resistant to change over time. How much does the US hate atheists? Half again as much as Muslims, the second most hated group. If America hates Muslims to the amount of 10, it has its atheist hate-meter set to 15.

5 - Traditionally in the atheist wheelhouse: how much god doesn't exist, how alt-medicine is stupid, the continued non-existence of god, how much religion sucks, why we wish people would doing that god thing, and how hard it is being an atheist. Not in the atheist wheelhouse: what it's like being something other than a financially secure, well educated, heterosexual white male, except insofar as being different from that may or may not make you more likely to believe in god.

6 - It didn't help when atheist celebrity Richard Dawkins threw fuel on the fire by posting as a commenter at PZ Myers's old Pharyngula blog at scienceblogs, saying that Watson shouldn't complain about the creepy guy because women have it worse elsewhere.

7 - Men's Rights Activists. They're misogynists but rather than calling you a cunt and telling you to get back in the kitchen, they come in and whine "What about teh menz?!", bitching that feminists ignore the problems men face (they don't) and that men have it worse than women (they don't). They make claims that are exaggerated at best and false at worst, rarely backing them up with links or statistics. In other words, they're like climate change denialists, only they complain about feminazis instead of treethuggers.

8^X - Atheism+ isn't just about feminism, but that and gender issues are still the main focus of what I've seen on the fora. It's been branching out in its focus more in the last 10 days or so, I think. It's only about 5 weeks old.

X - Seriously? That's a lot of footnotes!