Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

For a month now, I've been able to put one more or less complete thought to writing each day. This morning, after an hour and a half of work, I still cannot come to a chain of thought that does not threaten to digress into tangents that have no end.

It is no secret I am a fan of rationality. And while I do not argue that your personal choices can be made without recourse to reason, I do argue that reason must be at the core of democratic society. "I feel this more deeply that you feel that" or "I can yell louder than you" are not sound decision-making strategies.

So, in a bit of a cheat, today instead or writing, I am going to recommend a fun read for anyone who has read or seen the Harry Potter series. The book is a piece of fan-fiction called "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" originally written under the pen-name 'Less Wrong.'

In the story, Petunia married a biochemist, and Harry grew up reading science and science fiction. Then came the Hogwarts letter, and a world of intriguing new possibilities to exploit. And new friends, like Hermione Granger, and Professor McGonagall, and Professor Quirrell...

You can read on-line, find podcasts, or download for your favorite reader at hpmor.com -- Enjoy!

Dog Whistles: A Mea Culpa

I had hoped to include a reflection on dog-whistles in these musings, and it looks like today is the day. But not for the reasons I had hoped. I feel the need today to offer a mea culpa and a corrective.

According to Wictionary, a dog whistle is political allusion or comment that only a certain audience are intended to note and recognize the significance of. In the last sentence of my reflection yesterday I said "...I chose compassion, I side with love, and I believe rational conversation is a key ingredient..."

"Side with Love" is an interfaith public advocacy campaign promoting respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Under the name "Standing on the Side of Love," it emerged as a rallying point for people of faith in 2004 in Massachusetts during their early efforts for fully inclusive marriage. It's core issues of focus include, but are not limited to: LGBTQ equity, immigrant justice, and racial justice.

I should have been clear that "side with love" was a reference to a movement and organization, and I was not. I thought it was a cute homage and a nice rhetorical flourish. But a neutral observer would fairly say it was a coded message that could help cultivate sympathy among those who understood it, and slip past those who did not. Though I did not see it that as such when I wrote my conclusion yesterday, it is really is the very definition of a dog whistle.

There is a lot that is interesting there. Implicit in that definition is the idea that to one audience dog whistles are in a sense not really dog whistles. On a Unitarian-Unversalist forum, everyone would have known the meaning and it would not have been a coded message. But I am writing to a broader audience than just my church, and I should have caught that. Making that mistake opened my eyes to certain ambiguity in what constitutes a dog whistle, and a degree of sympathy for those who must speak at the same time to both broad and narrow audiences.

It seems to me it is no corrective to go back to yesterday's post and erase those words -- critical thinking requires honest self-assessment, and easily erasing the past makes such introspection less likely. Nor is it a corrective to to suggest I could not have known, or try to contend it was not a dog whistle for some. I think for me, the only corrective is to make the coded message explicit -- I have supported marriage equality since 2004 and I continue to support LBGTQ equity. I support racial justice here in the US and across the world. And I believe just treatment of human beings does not permit the gross inequality of opportunity we now see as the outcome of place of birth.

One of the great harms of dog whistles is that they allow ideas to float through our discourse without being subject to analysis. I hope I've made my beliefs explicit here, that I have demonstrated my commitment to honest discourse (as well demonstrating my own fallibility), and that I have regained a bit of your trust

Step Up, Step Back

Our church works to create what I think of as "Sacred Conversation Spaces." In these spaces, we practice listening deeply to one another and acknowledging each other's unique human experience. Most of these spaces start out with an explicit agreed-upon covenant, and often part of the covenant is to "Speak Up, then Step Back."

The idea is that we want everyone's voice to be present to the extent they are comfortable, and we do not want one person's passion or their comfort as a public speaker to outweigh thoughtful conversation or the voices of those who, for whatever reason, are not inclined to grab the soapbox.

Nearly a month ago I started writing these daily musings, and at that time I set for myself the rule that no matter how angry or frustrated I felt, I would strictly limit my voice. I would post no more that one personal reflection each day, and I would re-post no more than one other post that particularly moved me.

Limiting my output has definitely changed the way I write. It's a bit like that aphorism about "when you die, would you wish you spent more time at work?" -- if I have very limited space, I need to be choosy about what I say. If I write just one thing today, knowing it's an unpredictable world and there may be no tomorrow for me, do I want that one thing to offer hope or to offer pain? If I amplify one thing by re-posting, do I want to amplify anger or amplify compassion.

I'm sure I fail from time to time, but I hope in the last month I have shown that I chose compassion, I side with love*, and I believe rational conversation is a key ingredient in building those bonds of love and compassion that hold our society together.

--

* "Side with Love" is an interfaith public advocacy campaign promoting respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Its core issues of focus include, but are not limited to LGBTQ equity, immigrant justice, and racial justice.

Are Truth and Justice Isomorophic?

In "Anarchy, State, and Utopia", Robert Nozick argues:

A distribution is just if it arises from another just distribution by legitimate means. The legitimate means of moving from one distribution to another are specified by the principle of justice in transfer. The legitimate first "moves" are specified by the principle of justice in acquisition. Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just. The means of change specified by the principle of justice in transfer preserve justice. As correct rules of inference are truth-preserving, and any conclusion deduced via repeated application of such rules from only true premises is itself true, so the means of transition from one situation to another specified by the principle of justice in transfer are justice-preserving, and any situation actually arising from repeated transitions in accordance with the principle from a just situation is itself just.

When I read that, I kind of just pulled up short -- I do not think this line of analysis is fruitful, but Nozick's assertion just ran headlong into my understanding of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, particularly as described in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. If it is wrong, I think the reason has more to do with non-linear dynamics than incompleteness. But I just don't have the philosophical chops to get any further on my own.

I do feel it is an unproven assertion. Just saying that justice operations are exactly analogous to truth operations seems to skip over an essential part of the argument. Maybe the proof lies elsewhere? Maybe it is self-evidently true for some reason I do not see?

Dear reader, if you can help me resolve my lack of understanding, I'd be grateful.

Toward a More Skeptical Media

I want to talk about "Krystal and Saagar: NASCAR, police poisoning hoaxes show media MUST be more skeptical." It's worth watching. The main point is right here in the title - the media must be more skeptical.

They (correctly) point out confirmation bias. I would suggest that their characterization of Bubba Wallace shows that while they are aware of confirmation bias, they are not aware of the Fundamental Attribution Error. But that is another article.

What I want to focus on is the idea that the media should be more skeptical. I do agree. But only to a point. We do want that from our media sources. But even more than that we want a free press and a free market. In such conditions, if one media source eschews that enraging unconfirmed story, another will provide it if the market wants it.

Further, with the democratization of media we can all be publishers. I am doing it right now. But we do not all have the editorial boards and institutional norms that used (ideally at least) provide some checks against bias and inaccuracy. We are now our own editors. And again, the market rewards the sensational story that activates our emotional responses.

I have compared internet memes to viruses. They exploit our system 1 thinking to evade our cognitive defenses of critical thought, and reproduce at the expense our rational discourse. But this suggests another comparison -- these memes and these salacious stories are like addictive drugs:

• They create biochemical rewards in our brains
• These biochemical rewards cause us to seek more, typically in larger and larger doses
• Any "War on Memes" akin to a "War on Drugs" will fail if it only looks at reducing supply
• To be successful, a "War on Memes" needs to look at our own addictive behaviors and reduce demand.

This is your brain. This is your brain on memes. Any questions?

Two Views of Human Nature

I have come to believe that there are only two ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution that really matter. All the rest are really implementation details.

The essential core of Declaration of Independence is the claim that we are all endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, as individuals, there is something sacred in our nature.

The constitution builds on that premise. It is holds that rights originate in the people and are given to the state and the nation. But the unique genius of the constitution is that is asserts that no human being, and no human institution, is without flaws.

These are nearly opposite views of human nature. On the one hand we are said to have a divine spark, on the other we are said to be intrinsically corruptible and fallible. Both at the same time.

All the rest of the constitution and the amendments are just ways to ensure these two contradictory conceptions of humanity are resolved.

It struck me while walking this morning that some might say those two statements are the fundamental lessons of the Christian bible -- we are all flawed and we are all divine. Having been recent witnesses to the strife different personal conceptions of God creates, the founders set about to create a response to those two truths that was secular in practice.

In our personal relations with others, we tend to see our own divinity and the flaws of others. This is the "fundamental attribution error" where we see all the nuances of our own motivations in considering our behavior, but hold others to a standard that is not based on -- or does not even allow -- understanding their mitigating circumstances.

How might we treat one another if we always remembered we are fallible? How might we treat others if we always remembered they also embody something sacred?

A Hard Practice

In a conversation yesterday, a friend recalled a pretty intense argument we once had (this would have been about 35 years ago). I straight up admit that back then I almost certainly would have dug my heels in and argued with everything I had -- that I would have had to be sure I "won."

I know there are still situations that get my back up and make me defensive, but I also feel that I've been lucky enough to have some experiences that have helped me learn to listen and accept criticism better than I once did. One of them is the practice of working on a modern software development team.

Part of releasing code involves peer review. In practice, what this means is more or less every day I am actively seeking out people to find the places where my logic fails, where I have missed a possibility, and where I am flat out wrong. And more or less every day my co-workers ask the same of me.

It doesn't take long to start learning a bit of humility.

Still, when I've worked for a day or more on a problem, it's pretty easy to get attached to my solution. So language matters. Conversation has to be crafted to attack to problem, not the person. Comments need to be as informative as possible, built to probe and explain. The person seeking the feedback needs to seek to understand the concerns, not refute them.

It's a hard practice. But a good one.

Ask Yourself...

When is the last time you tried to change someone else's beliefs with an argument or social media post? When is the last time you read someone else's social media post with the hope that they might change your mind?

(A hint...the second should generally be more recent than the first)

When did you last admit you were wrong or tell someone they had a good counter to your general beliefs? Or thank them for changing your mind?

If your goal is only to persuade or be made to feel better by having your beliefs confirmed, are you truly treating the people in your life as individuals with a divine spark in them?

If you treat other people's minds or bodies as objects of conquest, are you not committing a grievous sin?

Using Memes to Sell Reason?

I recently posted a link to a podcast by Sam Harris that caught my attention -- "Can We Pull Back from the Brink". Though he reaches some conclusions I don't agree with, I am a committed fan of his basic stance that the best tools for improving our world better revolve around rational, fact-based discourse. It is well worth the time to listen to him. He has his detractors of all political stripes -- but he also appeals to calmer rational voice across the spectrum. That alone counts for a lot in my reckoning.

A few days after I first listened to the blog I went back to get a link and found a presumably well-meaning listener, apparently sympathetic to the same ideals, had posted a meme -- one of the more compelling quotes alongside a photo of Sam Harris staring directly at the reader.

Now, I get that we all want to sell our points of view. But I think that in this case the medium truly is the message. We know that people respond to eyes and faces in a way that bypasses our type 2 thinking processes. So to use to these kinds of marketing tactics to sell the idea that people should use skepticism and reason to avoid being manipulated...well, it rubs me the wrong way, even when it's promoting a point of view I agree with.

Notice the Plank

It's easy to tell others "before criticizing the mote in your neighbor's eye, remove the plank from your own." It's harder to do ourselves. In fact, in my experience "plank" seems like like the perfect metaphor because this New Testament aphorism is so easily used as a sort of verbal bludgeon to shut someone else up. And I'm sure I've been guilty myself.

Though the exhortation is clear, the strategy to live that way is less so. Living a godly life and loving one's neighbor are great goals. But, for me at least, they are not the tools that move me closer day by day. For those tools, I draw on the ideas in Buddhist meditation practice. In meditation we seek to silence the "monkey mind" that takes over our inner self when we sit in silence. It's not easy. I'm not sure I've ever done it. But the standard direction on getting there is something to the effect of "if your mind drifts, notice that and gently bring your attention back to the present moment."

Take a moment and re-read that last sentence if you will.

It seems to me, some of the current conversation about race, privilege, opportunity, and justice in the US can be seen as a national call to this sort of meditation. We are being asked to focus for a sustained period of time on the feelings of injustice and alienation felt by segments of our society. And we are tempted to feed our monkey minds. We are tempted to rage and scream and rally the troops to our side.

That is not the meditation we need. Gently invite your mind to back to the present moment. Extend a sympathetic thought to those who share this nation and this world with you. If you read a post that you disagree with, notice any anger you might feel. Give yourself permission to have those feelings, then set them aside.

Later, you can decide if you really must respond. Later you can think about how to respond in a way that brings more love, more peace, more justice to the world. In that one instant, read the post, notice your anger. Then return to the moment at hand and the great gift you have be given - to share a connection with another person.

This, to me, is the grievous harm of too much re-posting. I write this and I read your comments with the hope of making a connection with you, my friends, as individuals. Not to Kevin Bacon or whoever else six degrees away wrote the post. Of course, as a way to share news, re-posting makes perfect sense. And I will allow myself one public re-post per day. But as a way to amplify our anger and outrage, it is toxic to our souls and to our democracy.

Martian Magnetoshpere

Friday night I watched The Biggest Little Farm. It really was a wonderful film, filled with tender little scenes and a powerful vision of ways to build a more resilient agricultural base for our country and the world. It's not a spoiler to say that film is about a couple who set about to create a sustainable farm by building up a vibrant ecosystem on a failed 200-acre farm in the California hills north of LA. The place starts out as a dust bowl. Essentially, they are terraforming the earth.

Well, that phrase "terraforming the earth" came to me later. It struck me as interesting and stayed with me. At the same time that we have used energy from fossil fuels and synthetic fertilizers to feed billions, we have also created deserts and fantastically fragile monocultures. The fact is that, as a species, we're pretty horrible at terraforming earth and the idea we could terraform another planet like mars seems, well, just far-fetched.

So let's think about it! It'll be fun!

At this point, it seems to be true that mars once had an atmosphere and oceans. When the martian geodynamo weakened, its magnetic field collapsed and the air and water were essentially stripped away by the solar wind. (e.g., It's Official: NASA Announces Mars' Atmosphere Was Stripped Away by Solar Winds). So I'm thinking small-scale greenhouses are a really sketchy premise for an effort to colonize another planet. To settle mars, we'd have to re-establish that planetary magnetic field. Of course, there are a few obvious ways to do that.

• We could somehow inject more iron and radionuclides into the core of the planet to heat it up. Seems hard.
• We could gradually haul asteroids to the planet until it's mass increased enough to undergo something like earth's iron catastrophe. Might take millions of years and and we would not be able to have any settlements there until after it happened. But somehow still seems more practical than some giant space needle injecting uranium into the core.
• We could lay a network of wires on the surface of the planet and use a combination of nuclear and solar energy to create a magnetic field that acts like earth's does for us. Okay -- that actually sounds remotely plausible. This is where I was going to stop. That would be cool. I can totally imagine that.

Humans are generally subject to a pattern of thought called "satisficing." Once we have an idea that is acceptable, it becomes a lot harder to question the idea or to seek better alternatives. I'm no exception in that vulnerability. I thought I had a reasonably clever solution that might be hard but actually possible.

I went to get a link on how the ancient martian magnetic field stabilized its atmosphere and found this: NASA proposes a magnetic shield to protect Mars' atmosphere. In short, this is a proposal to provide a magnetic shield by parking a magnetic dipole shield at the Mars L1 Lagrange Point.

Okay. Mind blown. That is amazing.

Honest Debate

As the author in a written space like this I frame the argument, and in some ways that is unfair. Of course, comments and replies provide a measure of interaction, but it is still basically asymmetric.

Debate and discussion do not share that asymmetry, but still we often focus on being sure we are heard -- we too often try to change someone else's thinking. It is not a remarkably subtle observation, but people usually don't like to be told that the things they think are true might be incorrect.

In the most productive debates I've been part of I've been able to adopt the stance that I am completely willing to have my mind changed. That position creates an honest conversation -- where there is no ego, and all that matters is increasing wisdom. The key to good debate and to conversations that spur discovery is to create the psychological safety that minimizes ego, and to set aside the desire to be right.

People are great BS detectors. Pretending to be open to a new opinion is not enough. But what I have found is if I am open to change, the people I talk with are more likely to be, if only because of a general human tendency to mirroring. So yes, if I am truly open to change it is more likely my position will shift. But it is also more likely my conversational partner's position will shift.

Put another way, if you and I sit down to mull over or hash out a topic, I have no reason to believe it is more likely I am right than you are. My goal is for both of our views to converge on a useful, shared truth to the extent that's possible. I'm not keeping score of who had to move the most to get there. I'm only trying to model the attitudes that seem most likely to allow us to get to that shared perspective.

The struggle is to be willing to listen to others and be teachable -- to remember that I am not always right, and that there is always more to learn.

Be willing to listen to others and be teachable. You’re not right about everything… nobody is. Read more at: https://dailyinspirationalquotes.in

Be willing to listen to others and be teachable. You’re not right about everything… nobody is. Read more at: https://dailyinspirationalquotes.in

Freedom Day

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered his speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” to a gathering of 500-600 abolitionists in Rochester, N.Y. In part; he said:

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?...

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions!...

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

It was nearly 13 years later that Gen. Gordon Granger arrived with Union soldiers in Galveston, Texas, and announced to enslaved Africans Americans that the Civil War had ended and they were free.

On this day we celebrate "Juneteenth" or "Freedom Day" -- the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. There is no day more fitting to rededicate ourselves to the ideals of equality, and to fully realize the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

Does the media really not want you to see this?

Today I want to talk about the irony and deceit of a social media post that proclaims "the media doesn't want you to see this." This assertion serves to provoke an emotional response -- both in supporters and opponents. That emotional response drives page views and makes money for the media. The media very much wants you to see it. It is a self-falsifying claim.

The media's interest in such claims lies not in the truth or falsehood of their payload. It lies only in the cycle of emotion that provokes addictive engagement with social media and drives people to outrage-fueling news sources. The actual message matters little, and the truth of the message has little to do with the passions that drive its propagation.

Like viruses, these memetic packets of communication exploit the replication power of their hosts to make more copies of themselves. It does not matter whether we survive the encounter as long as we launch more copies into the world. If our mental machinery is rendered inoperable, we have still served the function of disease vector. Even worse, when we surrender to uncritical propagation of other these viral ideas we typically leave our minds perfectly capable of transmitting more dangerous mental infections, but less capable of evaluating or blocking them. Replication remains intact, but our immune system becomes more and more suppressed. And we create an ecosystem where other related mental parasites thrive.

Like viruses, spread of these metal pathogens depends on exposure, immune response, and replication rate. We should seek to bolster our immune response by practicing critical thinking and rational skepticism whenever we can. We should strive consciously to avoid spreading infectious ideas, like those that rely on tribalism for their power and appeal. Some people chose to limit their exposure by remaining silent or avoiding social media altogether. While effective, to me that seems akin to saying "that city is suffering from the plague; I have a vaccine but I would prefer to withhold it and watch to see if anyone survives."

The vaccine is rational, compassionate conversation. I am making as many doses as I can. I invite you to join me.

Principle of Charity

In debate, the "Principle of Charity" asserts that we must consider arguments in their most positive light. It is not fair or reasonable to reject a point because you can pick at a poor phrasing or an inconsequential exception to throw shade on an idea. This may seem a genteel relic of a more rule-bound or hierarchical society, but I'm going to argue that it goes much deeper than that. It is not only vital to discourse, but to sophisticated thought itself.

A couple of weeks ago, I resolved to think deeply each day about the challenges facing our country. So each day I walk and think. In less volatile times I might have thought mostly about a technical problem facing me at work. These days I think about civil liberties, democracy, and constitutional rights. What I have noticed in these periods of reflection is that none of the problems that concern me stand alone. They are all intertwined and few ideas can be expressed atomically. Even in my own internal dialog, I am nearly paralyzed by the constant weighing of exceptions, examples, counterexamples, and ways in which an idea is part of a system with complex interactions among its parts.

We cannot think about racism without thinking about power. We cannot think about power without thinking about money. We cannot think about money without thinking about economic vitality. We cannot think about economic vitality without thinking about creativity. By now we are no longer thinking about racism.

Of course, we need to keep tabs on peripheral arguments to come back and see in what ways they might matter. But when I allow an argument to be fully presented, I often find that the little voices of objection that rise up are really the desperate protests of my preconceptions that do not want to be upset. I am seeking to be challenged and to be made uncomfortable by ideas that are new to me. That requires lowering my defenses enough to examine them, and adopting or rejecting them based on the deeper consideration enabled by what in some sense amounts to a temporary willing suspension of disbelief.

This Principle of Charity is necessary even for the simple act of framing a complete thought to be discussed. Without the discipline of giving each other the benefit of the doubt, almost any idea that has depth and value can be hijacked and diverted by the most specious of asides. Without the Principle of Charity, our common effort simply cannot be brought to bear on the problems we face.

Mocking Disability Is Never Good

At West Point this past weekend, president Trump showed signs of age (the horrors!) This is a reduction in function to which nearly all of us aspire. From the point of view of the ADA, advanced age is a disability. From the point of view of equal opportunity, ageism is a discriminatory act.

When then-candidate Trump mocked a reporter with arthrogryposis, I think it was correct to point out that we should expect more from a presidential candidate. I can't get into Trump's head, but whatever his intent I think it is clear his actions had the effect of mockery. And none of the denials I've seen hold water or speak well of the candidate.

In my opinion, the same holds true for analysis or commentary on the speech at West Point. The ramp clearly did not meet ADA standards. It was way too steep to comply with ADA (it is also possible for an incline to be too long to comply with the ADA, and both at the same time, but I do not think the ramp was 30 feet long, so it was probably only too steep.)

What I saw was an illustration that we should look beyond the surface of people to their substance. And I saw an illustration that we should redouble our efforts to make all public buildings not only fully accessible, but fully accessible with dignity. Whether due to age or injury, most of us will benefit from these affordances at some point in our lives. Accessible design benefits us all.

None of the jabs and comedy bits at Trump's expense are a vast left-wing conspiracy to subvert democracy - they are just tribal human beings doing their tribal thing. So I see nothing here that should cause Trump supporters to get up in arms about the press. By the same token, this is just about ageism and accessibility, so trying to switch topic to any other faults Trump may have is just "whataboutism." It is not a fair or valid argument. If you wish to comment, please reflect on the above points before making an inflammatory reply.

During the campaign, we were reminded we could expect more from a candidate. Let's remind ourselves now that we can also expect more from each other.

Democracy as Dialog

As a system of values, I think it is reasonable to suggest that democracies can be measured by the degree to which they represent the will of the governed. They must also be able to respond to events in the world in a manner that is timely enough to protect the body politic, but that is an issue I'll discuss some other time.

The minimum standard for a functioning democracy has to include a fair means of deciding who gets to vote. In the US, we have adopted the stance that after the age of majority suffrage should be universal, with some exception for those who by virtue of criminal acts have been deemed to have separated themselves from the body politic. Another minimum standard is protection of the minority. If the losers of an election are executed afterward, it is not democratic.

It is my sense however, that these minimum standards are not the essence of democracy. In my view, the essence of democracy lies in the ability to harness diversity of thought to provide better, clearer, and more innovative decision making than individuals on their own can. This is the source of "American inventiveness." It does not lie in some genetic extra we have in the US that others don't. It does not lie in western European ancestry. It lies in creating a forum where ideas can be put forward to contest with one another, to sort them out according to correctness and suitability to circumstance, and often to imagine unique and creative opportunities that (at least initially) only a few see in those juxtapositions.

If there is truth in my assertion, then how we protect freedom of the press, free speech, and the freedom of peaceful assembly matter critically to or democracy. But they are minimums. If we truly want to have the advantages of a free commerce of ideas, we must pay the price for that commerce. We need to listen to one another. We need hear what our fellow citizens have to say and then we need to let let them know we have heard them. We need to include the powerful and the dis-empowered. We need to create spaces where conversation can happen, and we need to nurture that conversation.

That national dialog is the heart of our democracy. Voting rights and first amendment protections, as important as they are, are only the mechanisms by which we protect that conversation which is our democracy.

Threatening Citizens is not Democracy

I read a post on Facebook yesterday that suggested controversy over the Confederate battle flag is a new thing. It struck me as wrong, so I did some research to look for primary sources. Among the quotes I found:

"In 1999, as a result of the insistence of the State of South Carolina to continue to fly the Confederate flag on the grounds of the state capitol, the NAACP called for a boycott of the state South Carolina"

In 1972, Frank J. Francis told Forward, an African American newspaper in New Jersey “If anyone is familiar with the South, then one knows that...black people have been and are still being terrorized by... extreme anti-black, racist organizations. These people use the Confederate flag as a symbol of their allegiance to the racist South and all of its anti-black policies.”

In 1952, W.E.B. DuBois said "...most people forget for just what the Confederate flag once stood. It stood for human slavery...To me, naturally, the stars and bars of the Confederacy are more than insult, they are threat"

I did find references to Frederick Douglass saying similar things about the Confederate flag during the civil war, but that was not a reference to the battle flag. In fact, I expect it will be hard to find discussion of the Confederate battle flag prior to the late '40s and early '50s because, according to National Geographic, "The Confederate battle flag made its reappearance following the end of World War II. A group of southern states seceded from the Democratic party and ran their own ticket, the Dixiecrats, and the Confederate battle flag was very prominent with the Dixiecrat campaign in the 1948 presidential election."

This survey of African American voices shows that contrary to being a recent phenomenon, people have raised their voice against the iconography of the Confederate battle flag since it began to be used as a political symbol. Opposition to it is not a product of modern political correctness, it predates the civil rights movement of the 1960s and this opposition been continuously held to the present day. People using this iconography have been Democrats, Republicans, rabidly political, and distinctly apolitical.

I think it is worthwhile, if not imperative, to raise up the end of the DuBois quote: "...they are threat"

In a country that has our history of lynching and voter suppression -- undeniable in Jim Crow south, and arguably to this day -- a decent respect for reality has to acknowledge that sense of threat is justified, warranted, and real. We have made progress, but even if we had successfully removed all racism from our shores (to me, a doubtful proposition), there frankly would not have been enough time for people feel that sense of threat removed. In that context, we can reasonably expect that some or many people still view the battle flag as threat.

I think it is important to see that the sense of threat the battle flag can reasonably be expected to create is antithetical to democracy. In many, it immediately invokes a time when attempting to participate equally in voting and civic life was potentially fatal. And I don't think it helps to say "it is not the flag of the Confederacy, it is the Confederate battle flag."

Now, you may disagree with me on that. That's a conversation we can have. But don't try to snow me and say the conversation is part of some knee-jerk modern politically-correct liberal college conspiracy -- or whatever labels you want to apply. These are real voices of protest, they date back to the moments when it was first introduced into our political iconography, and continue today. At least be honest and acknowledge them.

Broken Windows

In a personal conversation, a friend said "broken windows policing does not work." That feels like an opening to tell my broken windows story.

My parents were good parents -- they are good parents: I still learn from them and I feel their love continually. I wonder how much the parenting moments that shine brightest in my mind were even things they noticed, never mind remember. This is one of those moments where they were at their best, as I remember it at least.

I was wandering around the house in one of those long, boring afternoons that seem so typical in my mind of growing up in a rural environment. Out of idle carelessness, I was tossing a rock up alongside the front of the house -- I suspect I wanted to see if I could reach the third floor attic window. More accurately there was no real reason.

As you can probably predict, I did reach the window and it did break. My mom did come out the front door, and I suspect she was pretty mad. But I don't remember her showing it. I remember her saying "you'll discuss this with your father when he comes home." Dad came home, and we did discuss it. He said "We'll take the money out of your allowance, we'll go down to the hardware store on Saturday, you'll buy a new window. You'll climb a ladder and you'll replace that window." What I do not remember is anger.

Was this my first experience with the idea of restorative justice? Though in today's concept, restorative justice is a very different thing, but we learn as children through what are at first very primitive analogies, so maybe in some limited sense it was. It taught me about ways to move forward with reason rather than anger. It taught me how to replace a window. It was a solution that gave me power, rather than taking power away. And it gave me a chance to constructively rebuild a relationship that I had harmed.

On May 31, the New York Daily News reported that 2 Brooklyn lawyers are facing federal charges over accusations they tossed a Molotov cocktail into an NYPD vehicle early Saturday morning during a protest over the police killing of George Floyd. The car was empty.

Undoubtedly, this was an illegal act. And most people, myself included, see it as a reckless and regrettable act. They face a minimum 5-year prison sentence if convicted. But I wonder if we can find a place in national dialog to consider something other than a form of justice where the state as an instrument of power seeks vengeance...where the opportunity to rebuild relationship is given priority over meeting the letter of the law.

Art Matters

One reason art matters because it is a primary method of talking about our world in ways that are non-binary and non-categorical. I'm sorry I can't remember the source of this quote I'm about to paraphrase, but it seems to hit the mark...an author was asked to summarize their book and replied "If I could have said it in a sentence I wouldn't have written the novel."

In my mind, it may be that there is no better example of this than Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing." It raises questions of systemic racism, cultural appropriation, paternalism, the tragedy of violence, the need for violence, our care for the vulnerable, and so much more in two short hours. It opened my eyes at the time. I still believe that if every person in the US could watch that one film with sympathy for each other, we would be much more able to have this difficult conversation we have launched into.

Watch that film. Spike Lee and the talented actors who created it deliver the message much better than I ever could. Have a conversation with someone who is different than you. Seek out art and let it change you.

Small Farmers

Here in Boston, most of of know of at least one person in our circle of friends who has lost someone to Covid-19. Many of us have friends and family who have died from it. So the social distancing feels very real and has vividly reminded many of us how dependent we are on our health care workers and on our food chain.

So today, I want to take a moment to honor the original American environmentalist - the small farmer.

Before it became trendy, the small farmer lived a life that was built on "reduce, recycle, reuse." If you get emotional about baling wire, you know what I mean. If you don't, you can skip ahead to the next paragraph. We're having a bit of a moment here.

You want to talk about reducing consumption? Farmers produce what other use. And what we throw away...any farmer I know is shocked and dismayed to see how much food we waste in the US. And paying someone to take away your mulch, manure, and compost -- it's heretical. That is brown gold.

Reusing? Many small farmers use tractors older than they are. I have used hand tools owned by my great grandfather and kept in good repair and working condition.

I will grant you that recycling is harder -- but mostly because on a functioning farm, so little makes it into the greater waste stream to be recycled.

And how about the Cooperative Extension? This organization unites the observations of thousands of actual farmers with the scientists and experimenters of our universities. This is science, based in the real world, making lives better for all of us.

And of course, I would be remiss to leave out the original small American farmers - the ones who gave us the three sisters in the first place.

So I raise my glass to you -- the people who know as well as any other that our resources are finite, but our ingenuity is almost limitless

Systems of Thought and Defunding the Police

Many of us have friends that have revived a relationship to find that all the same patterns come quickly back - in spite of both parties honestly believing they have changed and deeply desiring a different outcome. I have done this myself, and I was not able to stop...no, we were not able to stop...the relationship from sliding into the same general place.

I think this is in some ways analogous to the ways systems perpetuate behaviors that we as a society don't want. It takes an incredible amount if insight and energy to avoid those old behaviors and responses, and if one of hundreds or thousands fails to switch to the new dynamic - even for a minute - it is astounding how quickly the effort can be derailed and the old dynamic can reassert itself.

This, I think, is deeply related to the ability of human minds to be so powerful while consuming so little energy - we actually offload significant parts of our "thinking" to the habits we have and the cultures we create. These things channel and constrain our behavior so our brains can do less actual work. They think for us.

I believe that in the US we should be striving to deepen the channel of thought that relates to others with peaceful compassion and replace the channel of thought that relates to others through projection of force. This is the reason that, while I have used rifles, shotguns, and pistols, I nonetheless have an immediate negative emotional reaction to a lot of the 2nd amendment rhetoric I see. It is also the reason I think it is wrong for activists today to suggest that violence is an acceptable part of protest.

Seeing these system and cultures play out in our society, I think those using the language of "defunding and disbanding" the police have a powerful point. Changes at the margin that leave even a perception that policing is about projection of force will be very hard to sustain. And if they do succeed, in the end they may be so indistinguishable from "defund and disband" that one would be hard pressed to see the difference.

The police I have known personally are peaceful people who have been called to serve in a stressful job. They are deeply committed to supporting youth and and the vulnerable people in their communities. And it seems inevitable that even having this conversation adds to their stress and heartache. Yet, in spite of my admiration for these individuals, I am not sure their virtue is enough to place the whole dynamic onto a different track.

This is a deep and nuanced conversation, with a lot of pain and passion. To have the conversation at all will require more compassion and sympathy that we are used to bringing to the public square. That is the challenge of our time.

Left and Right United

At this moment, I am heartened that the left and the right in the US have come together to advance the same basic solution to the major problems in the US.

You know what I mean of course...

I mean everyone is talking about it...

Really?

I am talking about the urgent request to reduce government and strengthen community. There is a striking similarity between the movement to defund the police and the cry for smaller, less intrusive government that has been a battle cry of US politics.

This is literally "starve the beast," in important ways this is Bush's "thousand points of light". And it is Stokely Carmichael's "call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.” There are major points of common ground to be seen here.

If you supported the tea party and cannot distance yourself from the passions of the moment to see that common ground, you may want to ask what is blocking your vision. If you support a movement that takes an act of property destruction as its name, could it possibly be prejudice that stops you from offering any sympathy at all to today's protests?

In truth I could ask the same of those who support today's protests but are unable to see any connection with tea party rhetoric. So, if you support the protests, you don't get off either. If you were ever dismissed the ideas of the tea party in whole cloth, it's time to eat crow. If you every unfriended a tea party supporter, its time to welcome them back as a potential ally.

Wherever you stand, I do think we owe it to ourselves to make the effort to see that common voice in who you might have thought of as "the other". We owe it to ourselves to start our days out with a bit of sympathy and understanding. I myself was pretty bowled over to hear the language of the tea party in the words of black lives matter. I have a bit of crow on the stove which I'll be snacking on as I walk this morning.

Trying to Write without Giving Offense

A week ago the anxiety I was felt following events in this country was so intense it was interfering with my work. I started a discipline of thinking and writing every day to clarify and reclaim my thoughts. It has made all the difference in the world to me.

At the same time, I wanted what I wrote to be explicitly about creating community and diminishing unnecessary strife. On the other hand, If you know me you've probably heard me say "I reject the idea we should not talk about religion and politics with friends and family. Religion and politics are about the most important things in our lives - if we cannot talk about them with those closest to us, what hope is there for our democracy?"

So the key is to learn how to speak clearly and authentically without giving offense. For what it's worth, here are a few of my guidelines:

• Get the media out of my mind for a significant period every day. I wanted to reclaim space for MY thoughts.
• Be suspicious of internet memes - they are viruses packed in humor or outrage that are designed to slip past our facility for critical thinking.
• Avoid catastrophizing. Not everything that makes me mad will lead to the end of civilization.
  
• Avoid adjectives. They tend to inflame rather than inform.
  
• Avoid categorizing. I do not believe there is any one thing that Republicans or Democrats monolithically believe, nor the left and right. In fact, I've often found terms like left and right obscure more than they reveal.
  
• Speak from my own experience. My effort to understand the world I Iive in is not binding on your viewpoint or behavior.
  
• Avoid collective pronouns like "they" (and the plural sense of "you"). As humans, we are remarkably susceptible to tribalism, and I do not want to cater to that.
  
• Avoid gender-specific pronouns. You should be free to define your own place in this world, and there is no need for me to reinforce gender stereotypes by bringing them into a conversation that belongs to all of us.

You may have noticed that the last two points reduce my set of English personal pronouns to I/me and you. But me are you are at the core of relationship and conversation, so I think that is OK.

Have a great day!

The Analogies I Carry with Me

I recently read "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking" by Hofstadter and Sanders. It has to be read with a caution about blindly trusting analogies (I recommend "Thinking, Fast and Slow") but it was an illuminating view of how the mind might work.

If our thinking is fueled by analogy, then the material we have available for analogy might be expected to be an important aspect of practical intelligence, and the rich experiences we make available to our children may pay outsize dividends. Cool stuff.

Science and technology has been for me one of the most fertile sources of analogy in my life. Some of the powerful sources of analogy I carry with me from that domain include:

• Signal and noise
  
• Feedback
• Resonance
  
• Statistical thermodynamics
• Abstraction and functional programming
  
• Ecosystems
  
• Evolution and natural selection

But of course, we draw analogies from many other places. In "Surfaces and Essences" the authors use the example of "L'sprit de l'escalier" (the staircase mind) - a French term for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late. In the US, we have probably all had that feeling, we just don't have the phrase for it. Likewise, I have a small raft full of fictional settings and characters that are evocative of a specific cluster of thought that just does not have a phrase:

• Frodo's feelings on returning to the Shire at the end of the "Lord of the Rings"
• Rieux's sympathy for others in "The Plague"
• The complex web of violence, injustice, compassion, and forgiveness in "Four Ways to Forgiveness"
• The beauty, tragedy, and loss evoked by "Koyaanisqatsi"

When I see the world in a new way through one of these analogies, it's like cresting the summit of a steep, tree-covered mountain to get a stunning view of a world you couldn't quite imagine as you sweated your way up the trial.

If you made it this far, I would love to hear some of your favorite sources of analogy and inspiration. If you're so inclined. please share a comment or response.

Protests, Feedback, and Signal Theory

Today I have a question: "How will we know when to stop protesting?"

I ask this as someone who believes racism is pervasive in the African-American experience and that these protests were entirely warranted. I ask this because I believe it would be tragic if the message of the protests was attenuated because they "just petered out."

At the same time, what I see in the news makes it seem as if both the protesters and the police are set to engage in cycle after cycle of escalation with no means of de-escalation. Further, this is happening in the context of large crowds, which by themselves are prone to spasm of violence and vandalism, and where it seems clear there are at least some cases of external provocateurs hostile to the movement actively seeking to start the violence and discredit the movement.

I am not asking this from a moral point of view. I am asking it from a signal theory point of view. This is in some sense a simple feedback system. Think of it like a stereo amplifier -- the output is amplified by the output transistors, but it is modulated by negative feedback that prevents the system from being driven to its highest energy output. Feeding back the signal into the system without attenuation leads to a situation where all the signal is lost: the energy is entirely consumed by the feedback and the music is gone.

Without identifiable leaders who can dial down the protests, without a set end date, without open channels of communication, it is hard for me to see how we can reduce the time and energy spent in protest so we have more time and energy to spend fixing the things that need to be fixed. Maybe sustained low level protests are part of the plan too -- I recognize there is a history of paying lip service to an issue and then moving on. But if we can _only_ escalate, we will end up in a place where there is no capability to reform, and that will hurt us all.

--

Aside: If you think the signal theory analogy does not apply, please tell me why. I'm generally a hopeful sort, but when I look at the past weeks' events from this perspective, it starts to be hard to maintain that hope.

Benefit of the Doubt

There is not much that instantly infuriates me more than being told how I feel or what I think. Yet, when I look around at political discourse today, it astonishes me how common it is to ascribe emotions and motivations to the other in order to foster division:

• An article in Vox: "The coronavirus fight demands unity. But Republicans just want to own the libs."
• Candace Owens promoting her book "I finally wrote it. The book Democrats don’t want Minorities to read."
• A headline in http://NJ.com/ "Republicans don’t want you to vote"
• A headline in madison.com: "Liberals want to use virus to win"

I suspect you've seen them too.

This effort to ascribe evil motivations to the out group is part of what divides this country. And that division is killing us -- literally in the streets and figuratively in the see-saw of policies where one administration entirely reverses the last so that instead of moving forward we just zig-zag back and forth, going nowhere in midst of these culture wars.

Take policing for example -- it is probably sufficient the know that a significant portion of the US feels targeted by the police to understand that increasing accountability and transparency is a good thing, and building communal relations between police and the public is a good thing.

We can work together to make these things happen, whether or not we agree that police forces should be mode smaller or eliminated. The experiment of increasing trust will itself provide the answer to how small we can safely make the police force, and we have no need to get trapped in dogmatic arguments on the point.

Our words can help build common cause, or can lead us to Fortress America. I much prefer the former. To further that cause, I will continue to give my fellow citizens the benefit of the doubt, and when I can't be certain what their intent is, I will ask them.

Metal Hygiene

The mind is astoundingly powerful and efficient. With 12 watts of power -- less than a light bulb -- your brain extracts meaning from the world in ways our most powerful computers cannot. But the mind also works in ways that make it exquisitely vulnerable to self deception and manipulation by others.

We have only a few tools against this manipulation, but they are splendid: science, mathematics, and rational debate. These are the tools of the enlightenment, and they are the tools that have allowed us to feed billions, raise the global standard of living, introduce a measure of dignity and justice to our political systems, and to see that we have much more work to do.

What are the anti-tools in this struggle for understanding? What should we be fighting against if we seek truth? The top three on my list are unquestioning belief, fear and anger, and mental viruses.

The importance of questioning probably needs little explanation. If we do not question our thinking, falsehoods that have slipped by our defenses will persist. Just as importantly, as conditions change, we may not recognize when a behavior that was acceptable or maybe even optimal in one situation becomes a liability in another.

Fear and anger are among the most potent toxins to inquiry and change. Modern software development makes "psychological safety" a pillar of the productive workforce. To build new and creative solutions, we strive to foster an environment where all participants offer ideas freely. This allows us to work with the broadest possible starting set of solutions and to benefit from the surprising ways that ideas interact with one another to create even more solutions. We should do the same in our politics.

What are mental viruses? At the end "The Selfish Gene", Richard Dawkins explored the concept of a meme - a replicating bit of information that travels though its ecosystem of thinkers (that is, us) making copies of itself. Like genes, its survival is not directly linked to our survival as individuals, and may even be detrimental to the survival of the individual or the group.

In this conversation I prefer the image of a virus - a packet of mimetic material wrapped in maybe a lipid layer that allows it to slip past our body's defenses and take hold. I prefer that image because it seems to me that is an apt description of many internet memes. These ideas float around, pithy statements surrounded by a protective layer of humor, or fear, or righteous indignation. And once they get in us, they can take over our thought processes in ways we have little defense against.

I think it is a problem when memes replace hard conversation. They allow too much to slip by unquestioned. They do not have sufficient respect for the hard work required to truly understand a complex world. And I have contributed. Just yesterday in fact.

From today on, I pledge to practice good mental hygiene so I am not a spreader of disease. After exposure to a mental virus, I will wash my mind for a good 20 seconds before I risk passing infection on to others. And I will strive to practice the kindness and courtesy that are essential to the kinds of conversation that changes minds instead of hardening them.

I Am Wrong More Often than I would Like to Be

I believe all successful democracies require compassion, open-mindedness, and clarity of thought. And clear thinking is neither easy or free.

In order to increase my clarity of thought I am resolving write publicly and frequently about the things I see happening around me. This is not because I think I am right or have the answers. It is because I think I am wrong more often than I would like to be and I know I do not have the answers.

I do this in public, because the discipline will help keep me honest and because I know my friends have the capacity to help me sharpen my thinking...with grace and compassion, with insightful questions, and most of all with sensitivity to the fact that writing does not come easily to me and I will make mistakes.

If you are not livid...

It truly said that the US was built on slave labor and exploitation. This sets up the idea that whites benefit from discrimination. And in some narrow, short-term ways that is true also. However, while it clear that non-whites suffer from discrimination, but this is not a zero-sum game. It is neither zero-sum, nor is it a game. Nor is the "short-term" very short -- to this day, redlining and substandard housing take money from the disadvantaged, harm their communities, and benefit those in power -- disproportionately white males like me.

Even forgetting the moral outrage, If you truly believe in the power of a free market, then it has to be free for all. If through silence or active discrimination, the US leaves half of its strength and creative potential on the sidelines, we are all poorer.

Of course, we cannot forget the moral outrage either. I saw a sign yesterday: "If you are not livid, you are not listening"

I am listening, or doing my best to.

E Pluribus Unum

My friends...

This morning, take a breath.

Remember that in these conversations we are having we are talking about and talking to other humans beings.

Here in the US, remember we are talking to and about our fellow Americans. Reflect for a moment that we can fairly assume nearly everyone we know is also committed to securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

The Great Seal of the United States says "E pluribus unum" -- "Out of many, one." This rage machine we feed every day makes our manifold views apparent. The many is alive and kicking...and screaming and yelling and shouting from the rooftops. Let's ask ourselves as we start this day, "What have we done in support of the one?"

And then, maybe with quietness and humility, set about trying to heal some part of the world.