Trashing entertains

Roger Ebert died a few days ago, and I noticed a lot of people linked to his harshest movie reviews.  Why not link, instead, to reviews of the movies he liked best?  I admit that an extremely harsh review can be quite entertaining.  When you are passionately bashing something, there seem to be many opportunities for humor.  However, in reading some of his harshest reviews, I noticed that much of what is entertaining is not exactly witty.  For example, in his review of Transformers:

The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots®, Decepticons® and Otherbots® is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.

While this is an extremely harsh critique, he’s not exactly writing comedy here.  It’s just an honest critique, extreme on the dislike scale.

Consider, as an alternative, a critique that as extreme on the favorable scale:

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is one of the greatest of all fantasy films, even though it is anchored so firmly in the reality of war….The film is visually stunning…What makes Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” so powerful, I think, is that it brings together two kinds of material, obviously not compatible, and insists on playing true to both, right to the end. Because there is no compromise there is no escape route, and the dangers in each world are always present in the other. Del Toro talks of the “rule of three” in fables (three doors, three rules, three fairies, three thrones). I am not sure three viewings of this film would be enough, however.

The extremely critical review seems to be funnier than the glowing one, even if neither is exactly making jokes.

I do recall a few cases where someone was so extreme in their praise that the description itself was entertaining and funny.  But for the most part, that is difficult to accomplish.

Why the asymmetry?

I think this is because we are used to hearing people give extreme praise.  In polite society, you compliment often, even if insincere.  The norm is complimenting more than is warranted.  Thus, it’s hard for praise to catch us off guard.

On the other hand, we are not used to extremely negative comments.  Simon Cowell is entertaining for that reason.  In normal interactions, if you do not like someone’s work, you try to say so in a nice way (soften the blow; give them encouragement).  Thus, the extremely harsh critique is not what we are used to hearing, so there is an incongruity.

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Brain activity predictive of things that require brain activity

One of my pet peeves is claims that imaging studies prove that we consciously make decisions after our brain has already made them.  For example, Jerry Coyne describes has a blog post titled ”Yet another experiment showing that conscious ‘decisions’ are made unconsciously, and in advance.”  First, this isn’t another study showing this.  There haven’t been any studies that have shown this.  Second, there is no evidence that the things that are going on in advance in the brain before the decision are all unconscious.

He goes on to say:

In the last few years, neuroscience experiments have shown that some “conscious decisions” are actually made in the brain before the actor is conscious of them:  brain-scanning techniques can predict not only when a binary decision will be made, but what it will be (with accuracy between 55-70%)—several seconds before the actor reports being conscious of having made a decision.

We cannot (currently) tell from fMRI data when the brain has made a decision.  The particular study he focuses on is great for illustrating this point. From the abstract of the paper:

Here, we show that the outcome of a free decision to either add or subtract numbers can already be decoded from neural activity in medial prefrontal and parietal cortex 4 s before the participant reports they are consciously making their choice

“Decoded from neural activity”?  No. What’s really going on there is they know when someone claims to have made a decision (in this case, to either add or subtract numbers), and they use fMRI data that preceded it to try and predict the outcome.  They are able to do this, in some cases, with about 58% accuracy.

In other words, before a final decision is consciously made, there is stuff going on the brain that can (somewhat weakly) predict the outcome (e.g., like we are thinking about it and are leaning one way).  Given that the brain is what is used to make the decision, it would be rather shocking if brain activity was not at least a little prognostic.

These studies aren’t strikes against free will or evidence of determinism (or evidence for or against compatibilism). They show what regions of the brain seem to be involved in the decision making, which could be quite useful, but nothing like the claims are being about them.

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Not born this way

I will argue that sexual preferences, desires, and fetishes are shaped by culture, experience, and yes, biology (especially prenatal hormone exposure, I’d guess).  Someone who is homophobic might warn  ”the presence of same-sex couples on TV will lead to an increase in the number of people who find people of the same sex attractive.”  To which someone who embraces the LGBT community might respond “you’re born gay or straight (or bi).  Hollywood can’t turn people gay.”   I must say, I think the homophobic person’s argument is probably closer to the truth (even though I don’t share their concern).

Consider some of the extremes we have seen in various cultures.

In the wonderfully titled chapter “Why Women Once Hated Sex,” Roy Baumeister (h/t) argues that during the Victorian period, not only did women not often engage in sex, but they seemed to have a very low sex drive.  This appears to be in contrast to most of human history, where women’s sex drive was regarded as stronger than men’s (see also evidence of sperm competition etc).  Baumeister points out that Victorian women:

protested against the double standard of sexual morality, but not in the modern sense.  By abolishing the double standard, they did not mean to given women the sexual outlets and opportunities that men had, but rather to bring me to the level of sexual restraint and virtue of women.  They wanted equality, but an equality based on chastity.

He explains Victorian passionlessness was a way of obtaining meaning in their lives:

After centuries of oppression, contempt and exploitation…that made women seem almost useless and superfluous, women found a source of meaning in life that offered them respect, influence, efficacy and goals…Given the cultural environment, moral superiority was incompatible with lusty sexualty, and so it was necessary to renounce much of their sexual appetites.

Here we have an example of culture essentially leading to a loss of sexual desire.  We are not talking simply about culture taking away sexual desires for someone of the same sex, but for culture to take away sexual desires for anyone.

Culture can also affect what we find sexually appealing. Ozy Franz gives the following example:

To me– just like to any other modern American– footbinding is less attractive and more incredibly squicky body horror. But men wrote poems about the beauty of lotus feet; for a thousand years families crippled their daughters so they would be beautiful. I mean. That is serious commitment there. Your options here are “sexually is culturally influenced in an enormous way,” “for some reason Chinese people evolved to find footbinding beautiful and no one else did and they’ve mysteriously stopped in the past hundred years,” or “Chinese people spent a thousand years breaking their daughters’ feet for no reason.”

So, culture can shape people’s sexual desires in many ways.

If Hollywood does start producing many sex-positive, same-sex positive, polyamory-positive TV shows and movies,   I find it hard to believe that young people who grow up in that culture will not have, on average, more sexual attraction for people of the same sex than they would have if they had grown up with the hollywood of the 1970s.  If you think same sex relationships (or premarital sex) are bad (for whatever reason), then you should be concerned about pro-gay or sex-positive messages coming from Hollywood.  I see no reason (other than strategic, perhaps) for the sex-positive folks to deny the role of culture, and to insist that sexual preference is innate (or binary (especially binary)).

So, we are not born with fixed sexual preferences, but we are born into a culture and do vary in terms of how culture shapes our passions.  The cultural immune system (cultural conservatives) often do correctly identify the channels that are letting in foreign elements.  There are often valid reasons to suppress an immune system, and I think the case here is quite strong (without resorting to innateness arguments).  I think the libertarian argument is stronger, and is more likely to appeal to conservatives than is an argument based on overstating the role of genetics.

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Single event causes

Using potential outcomes (or counterfactuals) to think about causality is quite useful, in my opinion.  However, when talking about causes of a single event, confusion often arises because people (a) are used to thinking about events having a single cause and (b) mistake cause for blame.  I will illustrate these ideas with a hypothetical example.

Causal definition

First, I will say that an action A caused an event B if the event B would not have occurred if action A had not been taken.  That is, what actually happened was an action A was taken and at some time later an event B occurred.   We will say that A caused B if, in that same world, you could go back in time and not take action A,  then event B would not occur.

Example

Dan gets up in the morning, eats breakfast, and starts to drive to his father’s house.  On his way there, a car goes through a red light and crashes into the side of Dan’s car.

Later that day Dan tells the story to his dad.  His dad says, “Eating breakfast caused the accident.”  Dan says “What?  Some guy ran through a red light! That’s what caused the accident.”

Many causes, most blameless

Dan’s father is almost certainly correct.  Had Dan decided to skip breakfast, he probably would not have been in that intersection when the other driver drove through the red light.  Thus, action A (eating breakfast) caused the event B (that specific car accident).

For the same reason, it’s also true that the other driver caused the accident by not noticing the red light.  There are many other causes.  For example:  Dan’s decision last year to move to the town where he currently resides; the driver who was in front of Dan who didn’t just sit at the green light, blocking Dan’s path to the intersection; Dan’s father, who called him the night before, asking if he’d come for a visit. Etc.

When someone says that your action caused something, it feels like they are blaming you (‘your action caused it’='it’s your fault’).  That might be what they are implying, but in general, your action causing something does not imply that you should have anticipated the effect.  For the large majority of causes, the effect was not foreseeable.

When should cause imply blame?

To evaluate whether we should anticipate an event B caused from an action A, we need to think about population level causal effects.  On average, if a large number of people (in a similar situation to your own) took action A, would the event B occur more often than if they did not take action A?  If so, and if there was a way for you to know this, then it is fair to assign some blame to you (with the level of play proportional to the size of the causal effect).

For example, if a world where a large number of people eating breakfast results in many more car accidents than in the same world but where no one eats breakfast, and there was a way for Dan to know this, then it might be reasonable to put some blame on him for the accident.  If that is not the case, then while his decision to eat breakfast might have caused the accident, there is no reason to blame him for it.

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Doomsday argument

Yvain (of lesswrong fame) stated that he’s “never heard anyone give a coherent argument against” the anthropic doomsday argument.  I was surprised to read this, because I think the doomsday argument can easily be dismissed.   I’ll briefly argue against it.

First, I’ll quote wikipedia on what the doomsday argument is:

Simply put, it says that supposing the humans alive today are in a random place in the whole human history timeline, chances are we are about halfway through it.

…

Denoting by N the total number of humans who were ever or will ever be born, the Copernican principle suggests that humans are equally likely (along with the other N − 1 humans) to find themselves at any position n, so humans assume that our fractional position f = n/N is uniformly distributed on the interval [0, 1] prior to learning our absolute position.

The problem I have with this argument is that the assumption is bad.  We have plenty of reasons to believe that humans are not randomly placed somewhere in the human history timeline.  In fact, not only is it not true, but it would be hard for me to imagine a process less random than this.  I only exist because the specific humans that came before me existed in exactly the way that they did.  There is a gene-culture co-evolution, with each change being dependent on the previous change.

Why do a bunch of mathematics based on an assumption that we know isn’t even approximately true?

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Communication failures*: gun control case study

The gun control debate has been irritating.    Here are some examples of things that have bothered me.

Example 1:  ”your policy did not perform better than anyone expected it to or claimed it would, and therefore it was a failure”

I recently heard someone from the NRA say that the assault weapons ban (AWB) didn’t work because the Columbine shooting occurred during the 10 year period in which the ban was in place.   Picture yourself in September of 1994, arguing in favor of a federal AWB.  You were arguing that we should: do(AWB).  Denote by Y the number of mass shootings in the next 10 years.  If your claim was that there would be no mass shootings if the AWB passed, i.e.,

P{Y=0|do(AWB)}=1,

then the NRA guy was right.    In reality, your claim would probably have been more like this:

E{Y|do(AWB)}<E{Y|do(no AWB)},

i.e., that there will likely be a reduction in mass shootings if there is an AWB.  In that case, neither you nor the NRA guy knows who was right.  It’s possible that there would have been a dozen more mass shootings during that 10 year period, had there been no AWB.  It’s also possible that the AWB increased mass shootings.

Example 2:  the highest risk products should be the most regulated

“Many more kids die per year in a swimming pool than from mass shootings, so why not ban pools?”

Whether it’s rational or not, if a total of 20 kids die in swimming pools in different locations and times, the public will not have as strong of a reaction as they would have 20 kids were shot at a single school on a single day.  Mass shootings, especially when kids are the victims, have a large negative impact on the public.  Millions of people feel sad and scared.  Whether they should or shouldn’t doesn’t seem very important.  More harm is done in mass shootings.  Because of the shooting at the movie theater last year, I’m sure many people are a little worried when they go to a movie theater (again, it doesn’t matter whether that is rational or not).  Many parents now worry every day when they send their kids to school.  With a pool, you have a feeling of security (whether false or not).  You can watch your kids while they swim.  However, if someone with 30 round clips starts firing into a crowd, there isn’t much you can do.

So, you can either base policy on how much harm you think each death should have caused the public, or you can base it on what actually happens.  An alternative, of course, is to try and convince the public and the media to care the same amount about each death.  To be successful, you’d just have to get people to change what they respond to emotionally.  That can’t be too hard, right?

(there are also other reasons why pool deaths differ in important ways from mass shootings, but this example was long enough)

Example 3: exaggerating the differences in opinions

I’ve heard many people say that they are against gun control because of the 2nd amendment.  The debate appears to then be between people who want to ban guns and people who want no restrictions.  However, this is an exaggeration of the differences in opinions.  Everyone** has a weapons control line, and the question should be about where to place it.  For example, I do not think most people would be comfortable if Walmart was selling surface-to-air missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, grenade launchers, or tanks.  So, people agree that there should be a line.  Similarly, I haven’t heard many people say that all weapons should be banned.  Thus, the debate should simply be about where to draw the line.

–

*I’m making the assumption that people are attempting to communicate about actual policy implications, not just cheerleading

**usual caveat about everyone not literally meaning everyone

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Dream questions

Suppose you have the ability to simulate a human and place him/her in a virtual environment.  You won’t know ahead of time what kind of environment they will be placed in — it could be a wonderful place or it could be a terrifying place.   They will live in that environment for a short period of time, after which they will die and you will inherit some of their memories.  What’s in it for you is that, by inheriting some of their memories, you will experience the equivalent of reading a good book (it could be terrifying, erotic, fun, etc).  Is it ethical to do this?  Should we care about the simulated human that was in a simulated environment for a short period of time?   If it’s unethical, does that suggest that we should work towards developing ways to stop nightmares from happening?  And what does this say about creating life in general (without having confidence that we are not sticking the person into a nightmare)?

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How to acknowledge and not discourage uniqueness?

If I notice that a friend of mine has some unusual behavior, something I’ve never seen in anyone else, I have the strong desire to point it out to him/her and discuss it.  I want to know why they do this thing.   

However, I worry that once they realize that what they do is ‘weird,’ they will try to stop doing it.  I do not want to change the person. I love quirky things.  Yet, even if I tell them that I don’t want them to change, it’s hard for a person to not be self-conscious about standing out. 

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Extremely short stories

Recently I have been writing a few extremely short stories per week.  This was inspired by Vonnegut’s brief descriptions of Kilgore Trout stories.   Here are a few:

Beauty.  Like many people, Mindy was unhappy with some of the features of her body.  She was determined to do something about it.  So, Mindy worked overtime whenever she could, and diligently saved until she could finally afford cosmetic surgery.  Today, Mindy’s life has changed, as she no longer has asymmetric kidneys.

Cold.  Tonya Larsen was born with an unfortunate combination of traits.  She experienced emotions extremely intensely.  However, Tonya could only communicate with words.  She had no emotional prosody, couldn’t cry, use hand gestures or vary facial expressions.  People saw her as cold and unfeeling.  She would tell people how much she loved them, how happy she was, or how sad she was, but nobody believed her.  As a result, Tonya never had close friendships, and suffered from the most painful case of loneliness the world has ever known.

Pyramid. Every parent stacks tin cans in a pyramid shape in front of their home.  This makes it extremely easy to identify the good from the bad parents.  Good parents, of course, make sure the cans do not have scratches or dents.  If the wind knocks the cans over, good parents quickly stack them back up.  To encourage good parenting, schools began to offer can stacking classes.

Roomba.  A team of scientists and engineers created a conscious Roomba vacuum.  They designed it so that it would get satisfaction out of keeping the floor clean.  In addition, they wired a button on the side of it to its pleasure center.  It could push the button by bumping into a wall. However, once the button was pushed it would not work again for 24 hours. To the surprise of its creators, the Roomba felt morally obligated to abstain from button pushing.

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Motivated ignorance

When I see curbside recycling containers lining the street, I sometimes picture the recyclables being loaded into a recycling truck, and then being taken and dumped in the landfill.  I imagine a world where recycling is too expensive, but cities have separate recycling containers to make people feel good.  And of course, I assume people are happy living in ignorance.

I do wonder how many cities do just that.  I’m sure it’s greater than 0%.  I’ve heard stories from restaurant employees whose job it is to empty the recycling bins into the dumpster out back.

Let’s assume you think recycling is important enough to make the effort to separate trash from recyclables.  Now, suppose you can choose between living in world A and living in world B (described below).  Once you choose a world, you will be placed there, and your memory of having made the choice will be gone.

World A:  All recycling goes to the landfill, but you are unaware of it.  You think your recyclables get recycled.  

World B:  All recycling goes to the landfill, and you are aware of that fact.

In World A you feel good about recycling   You believe you have done something for the environment. 

In World B you know the truth.  So, you can try to do something about it (which will take effort, and might not be successful, but you have the opportunity).

If you really care about the environment, shouldn’t you prefer World B?  But do you care about it more than your own happiness (I’m assuming World A is happier place for you)?

I wonder what most people would choose.

I suspect a lot of people would prefer World A.  

Recycling is a somewhat benign example, but it’s easy to think of examples with more severe consequences. 

While the above is a thought experiment, in reality, people can take steps to make sure they are in the world of their choice.  People who prefer World A, for example, have motivation to avoid unpleasant facts.    

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