The Utility of Willful Ignorance.

A frustration of mine is the characteristic of many people to be willfully ignorant. To be willfully ignorant you must actively choose not to learn something. For example, while talking on a religion forum information was gathered that repeated published scientific studies show that on average atheists have a higher IQ than dogmatic believers. The amount is 6 points, so probably less than the difference between being a bit tired and being well rested. However, a poster on the forum said that there was nothing but opinion supporting the position that atheists were smarter than believers. When showed the evidence beyond opinion this was rejected as "Lies, damn lies and statistics." In other words the individual had decided not to take on information about the world, they had decided to be willfully ignorant.

I have seen this repeatedly in politics where people will simply decide not to take on information (such as the actual words in a law) and rather choose to listen to the talking point rantings from either side. I have repeatedly shown someone accounts of observed speciation (actual evolution happening), and that person repeatedly states that there are no such things. There are people who think that Barack Obama is a Muslim despite them knowing that he does not worship in a mosque and regularly attended a Christian church. They have chosen to be ignorant.

Wilfull ignorance is everywhere. Despite there being more evidence for the fact of evolution than for any other scientific theory the majority of Americans think evolution is false. The availability of information showing that this position is ignorant is astounding. Most Americans think they know more about biology than biologists, but how many think they know more about plumbing than plumbers? How stupid is that?

Now, it would seem that choosing to be ignorant of the state of the world around you would be a big negative. Thinking that all Muslims have been instructed in their religion to conquer the world and force you to convert cannot be useful when dealing with Muslims who have not been so instructed. But the numbers of people being willfully ignorant is such a vast number that there must be some reason for it. There must be some utility in this choice.

When are people willfully ignorant? They are willfully ignorant when some belief of there's is challenged by information. The people who choose not to know that France has a better health care system at half the price of the US system make that choice because they have a belief that governments are bad at everything. If they took on the new information they would have to change a belief. Now, changing the belief would seem to be sensible, but the key is that this belief is a shared belief. It isn't just one person having that belief it is a group. That group probably has a name, an identity, and differentiates itself from competing groups. If you refuse to learn about the French health care system you are probably a right-wing, republican, free-market capitalist, if someone asked you about yourself you would label yourself within that group, and you probably compete against left-wing, democrat, socialists.

So, if you change your mind about a position based on evidence, and you identify with groups based on your beliefs, then that change of position removes you from a group with which you identify. If you are a fundamentalist Christian and you change your mind so that you believe evolution to be a fact, then you can no longer identify as a fundamentalist Christian. People are willfully ignorant to sustain their position within a group.

Through the history of humans (and many animals too) it is much more useful to remain within a strong, united group then to differ on some points and be out of a group. The bigger the group, the stronger the group the more power and rewards the individual can get from that group, and therefore the stronger the motivation to remain ignorant about facts that are contrary to the position of that group. If you were Galileo there was more utility in deciding to not believe that the planets revolved around the sun than believing that they do, regardless of what the actual facts were.

Willfull ignorance occurs because the human animal knows that without the group it dies and it is therefore better to be part of a group that is wrong about many things, than to be right about everything and all alone.




Addendum: I do find it interesting, and even a little annoying, that the spell checker on this program objects to the non-capitalization of american, or muslim, but not to the non-capitalization of atheist.

Mutterings About Human Nature

On Monday I went to the mailbox to see what there might be, with a slight hope that there would be a check of the refund of our security deposit from our rental. What I found in there was actually a bill for the entire $1200 security deposit and a further demand for over $900. My immediate reaction was incandescent anger.

We had moved out of the rental house in December, and so nothing had been done in the house since then other than me returning to clean the place thoroughly. I have had a lot of experience in renting places to live, I've probably lived in twenty rental places in my life. From those experiences I have learned that landlords almost always simply attempt to steal your security deposit. To such an extent that I had learned that the rational thing to do is simply not pay your last month's rent so that you don't get cheated. The litany of examples of hundreds of dollars being charged for tape on the walls and such would be as boring to read as Leviticus.

However, this time I was going to do the right thing. Money is less of an issue, and our credit rating is more of an issue. I also had the time to put into cleaning up the place, and actually actively enjoyed the process of being useful and leaving the place as I left it. I took pride in the job I had done, and I think the house could have been reasonably shown to prospective renters.

The specifics of the Security Deposit Disposition were that there was a strong pet urine smell in the house that did not go away with a special pet de-odorizing cleaning of the carpet. So they peeled off the carpet, enzyme washed the concrete and replaced the padding. Still a smell so strong that they then replaced the carpet throughout the entire house. I called the company and was given this story. Since I had been in the house repeatedly and left it in a certain condition I knew this was a lie, and when I said so they hung up on me.

So, a rental company is trying to steal $2000 from me. My initial incandescent anger came not so much from this fact, but that the attempted theft came when I had done the right thing. It's not that I don't know that rental companies try to get as much money out of their ex-tenants as possible. What makes me angry is that I did the right thing and they did the wrong thing, it's a question of fairness.

Research in everything from biology to game theory has shown that human beings (and other animals) have an innate sense of fairness. In the same way that people can fall in love, or feel sad, they know when they have been cheated. On the other hand we know that people have an innate compassion to help those within their group. We also know that within a group people work less hard than by themselves (called social loafing).

I thoroughly believe in the essential goodness of people having received great kindness repeatedly when abroad or in need of assistance. I know that people will display enormous heroism to help those in pain. But I believe the essential goodness of people only happens when faced directly with a person in pain. When faced with a different group, a faceless number, people can tell themselves all sorts of stories.

I am sure that the person who is in charge of trying to steal money from me under false pretenses is good to their friends, loves their mother, would help an injured person in the street. I am sure that their experiences of tenants is such that they believe all tenants to be the sort who destroy properties, run off with the money, let their pets urinate allover the carpets and don't clean it up. I am sure that the person has told themselves a story in which they are not trying to steal money but legitimately looking for reimbursement.

Human nature is shaped by evolution. Those who work together within a group of family or tribe in times of crisis survive and reproduce better. Those who sneak, lie, deceive and steal also survive and reproduce better when they can get away with it. I literally know not one single person who hasn't done something they know is wrong, for their own self-interest, who has not told themselves a story to make themselves feel OK about it. I might be doing it right now.

One Year On

I've now lived in Texas for over a year. I am a resident of Texas, a Texan. It seems a good time to take stock of the last year, to see where I am, where I've been, so that I can inform where I'm going. I started by going back and reading my posts on this blog from last April, something which you may wish to do as well. There are even pretty pictures.

The extraordinary thing about those posts is how they could be written again today with very little alteration. That's still the park that I take Larry to walk in and it's still a vital escape into nature. I still live in suburbia, in an environment that is anathema to a sense of community. I still have no-one I would really consider a friend (although I think there are a couple of people even more desperate for friendship who would consider me a friend). There are people across the street that I can have fun drinking beer with, and that's a major plus on where I was living.

Other than my wife I don't know anybody who would like my favorite tv show, has heard of the music that I listen to, has the slightest agreement with me politically, shares a similar aesthetic sense, has traveled to the places I have gone, or comes close to my philosophical or political beliefs. That isn't one person who shares all of those, that's one person who shares even one of those characteristics with me.

What I feel most at the moment is a sense of unreality, a disassociation with my surroundings. In the morning I walk around a few of the cul-de-sacs in my neighborhood like a student on a foreign exchange. What are these places? Who are the people who live in them? Why would you possibly organize a life to be like this. The heavy scent of pollen, the steaming lawns, the tropical sunlight streaming through tall, fragile pines all adds up to a deep sense of being a foreigner, an outsider, someone from somewhere else.

I'm even getting to the point where I am losing interest in leaving my house. Why bother?

Financially the year has been poor for us in that we have spent thousands and thousands of dollars in moving house, buying things to put in the house, moving house again, buying cars, surgeries on the dog and people. On the other hand, the alternative to this move was unemployment, so financially we have done poorly, but much better than we would have done.

Christina's work is still difficult for her in terms of getting along with people. There's still the person who accused her of racism yelling at her co-workers without any consequence. There's still her boss who has a job Christina would have liked, but Christina in that position would have a very different job description. There's still the person who told her she would be promoted down here while Christina remains in the same position. Christina still looks on the house as a refuge from the world, a place to get away from people.

We live in a truly lovely house. A permanent vacation. But I have to get out of this place at some point. I can feel my life slowly slipping by. For me, living in Texas is like being at the airport. I have all I need to sustain life, but I'm just waiting for my plane to arrive.

A Time of Tribulation

Over the next few years something very bad, or a collection of bad things are going to happen. There are going to be terrorist attacks on US government structures or organizations or representatives and people are going to die. These attacks will be carried out by ideologues within the US population who believe that their country has been betrayed and overtaken from within by an evil force known as liberals. In the opinion of the ideologues liberals wish to expand government to control all facets of everyone's life, to make them comply with all liberal beliefs.

There have been attacks like these throughout the last few decades as this blog post describes. What is different now is that these previously radical views are being held by a substantial portion of the population. Before living in Texas I have lived in Michigan and Oregon, in college towns and the left wing oasis of Portland. I believed I had a pragmatically cynical view of the US population as being largely ignorant, reactionary, but decent in nature. I thought Americans were not hard-hearted or hateful, but rather uninformed and conservative, understandably wanting to keep things as they had been in what had been the richest and most free country on earth.

Before Obama was elected I had subscribed to the position that the US electorate was too racist to elect a black man, particularly one with such a dangerous sounding name. I thought that while the vast majority of Americans would publicly condemn racism, most had unconscious suspicions and biases that could not be overcome. I was delighted then when Obama was elected with a very solid majority, and his approval ratings suggested that the majority of Americans really are ready for a post-racial world.

The error of my ways was overestimating the numbers of racist people in the USA but dramatically underestimating the virulence of the hatred of those who are still racist. I elieve the primary cause of this hatred is fear. This fear is based upon the changing landscape of the country, that is that the dominant position that Christian, white, men had held in the USA is disappearing. These people say that their America is being taken away from them, and they are right. No longer can a conservative Christian man be confident in the knowledge that not only do most people in their community agree unquestioningly with their position, but everyone with power does. But their America is being taken away by democracy, demographics, and the march of the ideas of concern for one's fellow man.

The tragedy of this situation is that there are those who are exploiting this group for their own gain. Perhaps exploiting is the wrong word, since it may be that the media figures who are spreading lies about liberals, framing debates in terms of Armageddon instead of political differences, and making millions off hyperbole really do believe what they are saying. But it's a tragedy that a frightened group of people are being made more frightened by these forces. It's going to end up with people dying and the long term discrediting of the various forces exploiting these frightened people.

In Texas I meet these people every day. They distrust all forms of government. They sincerely believe that not a single person in government is there for the benefit of the regular person. They do not give consent to the government by which they are ruled. They will not listen to any other view, and many of them are fatalistic about the inevitability of the collapse of the USA as a functioning entity. I wish I could show them what life here will be in twenty years, take away their fears, open their minds. But they fight this with everything they have.

Bad things are going to happen, but the march towards a better world continues.

The Ratty Rambling Man

I have been sick, but not as sick as my wife who has had a fever and been mostly confined to extremely comfortable beds for a couple of days. I feel like today I am recovering and that was nice while sitting by the bayou with my dog.

I've talked before of the oddness of when I notice where I am and how I got to be there, and that oddness wandered through my spacious mind while sitting on a tree log amongst vibrant spring greenery, with my wolf, by a bayou under a near tropical sun listening to reggae.

I took the feeling of oddness and used it to examine myself, and today the examination consisted of the material possessions that I had. I reviewed them one by one and I shall do so again for you here, with the chance that it may reveal something about me.

On my feet were a pair of Teva sandals purchased within the last year from REI in Houston. A replacement for the last pair of sandals that were casually destroyed by the wolf this year. They consist of a rubber sole strapped securely to my feet with simple velcro straps. These are the newest and most expensive items of clothing I am wearing.

I am wearing a faded, off-white pair of carpenters pants purchased at Target three years ago for $15. They have a pleasantly thick, rugged material. They are deliberately purchased too long so that I roll up the bottoms. I do this because I like the way that they hang with this concentration of eight at the bottom.

My underwear is just a year old, also purchased at Target in a pack of three boxers for twelve dollars. Comfortable, thick, machine-woven cotton.

I have a black T-shirt which was a going away gift from The World Famous Kenton Club, the local bar I would frequent in Portland. The slogan on it is "Booze, Music, Regrets" and I have drunk a lot of booze in there, heard large amounts of wonderful music there, and player some myself. If I have a regret about the place it is that I can't go there this evening, I wonder if it is still bluegrass on Mondays.

The final piece of clothing is a Gap sweatshirt, modeled on the old wild west underwear, given to me by an old girlfriend just over a decade ago. The cuffs are frayed, there's a small hole or two, and something is encrusted over the selling of my belly. It is a navy blue. I think it was purchased to make me look more cool and smart than as my wont at the time. The process of time has turned this item into a statement of my particular style.

In my pockets are a set of keys, with two house keys for two different houses, two car keys for two different cars, a bicycle lock and a drum key for tuning drums, unused in years. There's an ostrich leather wallet purchased in Mexico. Two plastic shopping bags for disposing of dog poo and a barely used leash for the wolf.

Clipped to the belt loops of the carpenter pants is a tiny MP3 player with several hundred songs on it, mostly reggae, irish folk and rock. The headphones have a dodgy cord which has to be wound around the MP3 player in a particular manner in order to make both earpieces work. The headphones were scavenged from my wife after previous cheap headphones had perished, and this cobbled together job has lasted me for three months so far as I keep forgetting to replace something that hasn't yet quite failed. I think this MP3 player might be the most wonderful thing I have ever possessed. It contains the best musicians of the last forty years in marvelous quality and yet is almost weightless, almost physically unnoticeable, as if this music simply pours into my head whenever and wherever I am.

Ideology and pragmatism.

Ideas are fundamental to the production of a functioning society. Even a society, or the concept of functioning are ideas. Who would want to live in a society without justice or freedom? Without ideas of how we should live there is is simply anarchy, a dog eat dog world. I have an ideology for how the world should be which is based upon equal rights for everyone regardless of here they live in the world. My ideology consists of people being free to do basically what they want in a system that has a safety net so that everyone gets food, shelter, education and healthcare regardless of who they are and where they came from.

One of the important ideas for me came in a discussion while walking on a mountain with a friend of mine. It as one of two fantastic concepts we developed that day, both of us are agreed upon that, but unfortunately this is the only one we can remember. It is the importance of being able to have two different opinions about the same thing. This seems like an oxymoron, but let me try to explain.

I think that it is absolutely a moral imperative that all people in the USA should have healthcare. In the richest country in the world no-one should die because they can't go to a doctor to get something checked out. I also am a firm believer in a democracy, that while it is messy and inefficient a democracy stands for one of my ideals that people should decide for themselves how they wish things to be. In the USA right now the majority of people do not want what I want in terms of healthcare. I have two beliefs about the same subject that are incompatible, but I still think it is important for me to have these two beliefs.

The essence of this issue is the problem of ideology and the real world. Throughout history (but most especially in the 20th century) there have been attempts to institute ideology as political fact. These have had, at best, mixed results. While the spread of human rights and democracy has been ideologically based, the results of communism, fascism, pacifism, and the primacy of various religious ideologies in the real world have usually been appalling. The idea that everyone should share everything equally, that there should be no violence, and that everyone should believe in the same values as determined by the One True God is a lovely idea that fails spectacularly when it comes across acquisitive people ho are willing to fight for their beliefs which are different than yours. Since the world is largely made up of such people ideologies generally fail.

As I have said, the 20th century as a time of ideology, a time largely of experimentation and conflict between various ideologies. Looking at the world around us I would say that through the process of social evolution there is pretty close to a worldwide consensus of what works, and that is a representational, democratic government with a limited regulation of a free market economic system. There are pockets of resistance to this concept, and then there are ideologues within the concept.

The resistance to the concept comes from antiquated belief systems, essentially that there is a single right way to live and that everyone should conform to that method of living. I would say that the two places that are the core of this resistance are the fundamentalists within the muslim and christian faiths. With the jihadists of Asia there is the belief that the hole world should live under their version of Sharia Law, and that those who disagree should be eliminated. In the fundamentalist Christian south of the USA are those who believe that God has outlined how everyone should live and that these should be the laws of the land regardless of the opinion of most of the people in that land. The fact that these two groups have been responsible for the majority of the war in the world for the last decade should not be a surprise.

But the resistance in this manner is shrinking inexorably. Ideologies flourish briefly but history shows us that they all succumb in the end to the facts of the world. Fundamentalist belief is shrinking at an extremely rapid rate throughout the world because when faced with reality it is obvious that this belief is flawed. Societies with the lowest proportion of fundamentalists are the most peaceful, wealthiest, most flourishing societies of all time. Fundamentalism survives because those within those cultures produce children at a much higher rate than other cultures, and still as a proportion of people their numbers are shrinking. This is because a lot more fundamentalists leave the culture than people are converted to fundamentalism.

The USA still is a very idealistic country. There are a large group of fundamentalist Christians here, perhaps a fifth of the country. There is also a very large group of people who still hold to an ideology of the 20th century, the dogma that was laid down during the cold war. This group holds to the position that anything related to socialism is evil, that the free market is best. This is probably half the country despite being rather a silly position in a country with social security, a post office, government health care for veterans and seniors, care for poor children, government run education and so on. Finally there is about a fifth of the country that are progressives, left wing people who want rights for gay people, no wars ever, more even distribution of wealth and a vast safety net for the disadvantaged.

I'm a believer in the principles and ideology of the progressive movement and I firmly believe that this movement is where the USA is going (and where much of Europe has gone). But I am also a pragmatist in that I know that most of the people in the USA to not yet agree to these principles. I am comforted by the knowledge that the direction of public opinion is moving towards my ideals, away from the bigoted, racist, sexist, aggressive, xenophobic past. I think that a black man named Barak Obama named an hispanic woman to the Supreme Court, and that there is a serious debate about same sex marriage is ample evidence of that.

To return to my original point of having two different opinions on the same subject I believe that Barak Obama has a number of concepts that make up an ideology. I think Barak Obama thinks that all people in the world should be free, able to vote, practice their religion, marry anyone they want, and that everyone should have education, shelter and health care regardless of who they are and where they live. I also think that Barak Obama is a pragmatist and knows that you can't magic these results out of thin air against the majority opinion in the USA. Progressives right now are furious with the wishy-washy, centrist, compromising nature of Obama's presidency. Many threaten to remove their support unless he delivers what they want. I say that ideology has always been the driving force for good, but good has only ever happened through pragmatic action. Progressives should hold on to their beliefs, their dreams, their ideology, but they should also understand that change is gradual, incremental and comes about through convincing others rather than imposing an ideology on the unwilling.

Habits

If who you are is what you do then what makes up most of us are our habits. I define a habit as something you do without really thinking about it. I think most of us get up in the morning and go through a routine without deciding what to do at each step. We wander from step to step as we did the day before, without consciously deciding what we should do. Most of our lives are taken up with these habits, most of our lives happen without us thinking.

Having most of our lives happen without us thinking sounds alarming, but it needn't be. Thinking takes lots of effort, but mostly it takes attention. Most of the things that we do can be efficiently done without thinking. We don't need to consciously decide about how to get ready for work, or how to do the laundry as we have already developed efficient methods for doing these things. Many tasks are done more efficiently by our unconscious minds, such as driving. It is a good thing that we can develop strategies for dealing with things that happen every day without having to go through the "design" of those strategies each time.

The problem lies when we wish to change our lives. Habits are extremely difficult to break, and since they make up so much of our lives it becomes extremely difficult to change who yo are by changing what you do. I am often told that I could do all sorts of things, that I have huge potential, and that I should make use of this. I have pictures of myself as having written a novel, of being an accomplished musician, or perhaps becoming an artist in some other manner. I have the intellectual capability to do these things, the subjects interest me,and I either have the skills or could learn them if there was enough application on my part. In other words, in order to become a writer, artist or musician I have to habitually write, create, or practice playing music. This means that as part of my regular routine I have to take the steps to do these things without thinking.

How do you change your habits? This may seem facile, but what you do is repeatedly do the thing you wish to be a habit, and consciously try to stop the doing the habits you wish to end. For me that would mean routinely putting aside time every day to practice music or write and then filling that time with those activities rather than the competing habits (which would be going to the same internet forums to discuss in excruciating detail unimportant things). From my self-help research I have found out that the most effective method of creating this routine is to keep the idea of the habit in your head rather than concocting a grand plan with a schedule and outcomes (think of the success of those who join a gym on New Years Day and say they will go every day after work compared to those who try to consistently think about how to be healthier.)

I have been thinking of being a writer or a musician for several years now. When I think of the future and how I would like it to be there is always a vision of me playing good music in a pub, or of me producing an income from my imagination. I think of these things basically every day. Yet I find myself at this time writing less than I have done in years and practicing the mandolin less than I have done in years. I have not managed to make these two activities into habits despite repeated attempts, despite a pretty consistent conscious will towards these activities.

On the other hand I find myself time after time after time listening to he problems of other people, immersing myself in their difficulties, and helping them to find solutions. This is despite a conscious will on my part to stop doing this as it has damaged me in the past. It is as if I simply cannot help myself when faced with someone who wants to tell me a problem, and somehow people can tell this in me.

The most ancient and prevalent piece of ancient Greek wisdom was "Know thyself." This is as good today as it ever was back then, and the opportunities to do so are so much greater since we know so much more about people than we used to. Why is is that I must listen and help those who want to tell me about their problems, but cannot sit down every day and write for half an hour and practice the mandolin for half an hour? I must examine myself to find the answer. What I find is that I am not a toiler, not someone who puts out consistent amounts of effort. On some days I am extremely productive, getting vast amounts of things done. On other days I barely get out of bed and dress myself (and this isn't always negative, I often absolutely love those days). What produces effort in me is the confluence of energy and interest.

I still want to be able to play good music, but I think upon reflection that it will not be achieved through a rigorous routine, through habit. It will be achieved through goals and interests, through a desire to play a particular song, with or for someone. I think my recent reduction in practicing the mandolin is a result of discovering that none of the people I know or care about (with the exception of my old bandmates) have any interest in my ability to play at all. They like the idea that I can play music, but what the music is or how well I play is of no interest at all. To know myself is to know that I don't love practicing the mandolin, I don't have an innate love of playing music. What I have is a love of playing for, or with people.

With writing I have a love of ideas, expressing those ideas, and discussing those ideas. What I do not have is an innate love of the craft of writing. It is does not move me to craft a piece of writing over the course of weeks and months. The response to my writing is more important than the writing. What interests me personally is thinking about things, the writing seems to be a chore.

How to proceed? Well, I shall keep the thoughts and dreams in my head, and when the mood strikes me I shall move towards the goal. After all, I still have more than half my life ahead of me.