We Love it That Two (Count’em) Two Cartoon Dimensions Pretend to Describe Complex Political, Racial and Economic Systems

When you last purchased a car or a phone, it was probably an important purchase for you, so you considered many aspects of the product, including cost, function, aesthetics, performance and many other things. When we deal with complex things, we are rightfully motivated to carefully consider many such dimensions. Most of us dig deep into these many factors before making such purchases. The same thing occurs when considering a long-term romantic partner. Most of us will consider dozens of factors before settling into such a relationship. In fact, if we failed to do such a careful analysis, our friends and family would consider us to be reckless. Complex issues demand complex and nuanced analyses.

We don’t use this same degree of care when it comes to evaluating the types of politics. Instead, we jam all the possibilities onto a one-dimension line containing endpoints of “left” and “right.” We do this despite the fact that people are complex and they fall into many dimensions of political attitudes. If you were to gather 100 random self-declared “Conservatives” into one room (or 100 “Liberals” or 100 “Libertarians”), you will have a rich diversity of thought, and you’d starkly see this, if only you take the time to get to know these people. For some reason, however, we are willing posit a simplistic binary single-line political analysis, despite the rich multi-dimensional complexity of political thought in the U.S. This lazy shortcut invites us to talk in cartoons. It invites us to talk about “those Conservatives” or “those Liberals” with hubris.

David Nolan is one of the many people who sensed a big problem with this left-right way of thinking. He offered a two-dimension chart that capture much more complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart Many others have offered more nuanced (and I would argue, more accurate) ways to characterize political outlooks of our 300+ citizens, but the traditional and highly inaccurate one-dimensional (Left-Right) still dominates the political and journalistic landscape. We seem to prefer simplistic over accurate.

We’ve got the same problem with many other categorizations we blithely make. I resist categorizing people in terms of “race,” because long experience has proven to me that the way a person looks has very little to do with who they are. Using immutable physical traits as a proxy for one’s a stereotyped content of character often wildly inaccurate. When I evaluate a person for character, I consider many factors, dozens of dimensions, such as the “Big Five”:

• openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious) • conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless) • extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved) • agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/callous) • neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)

I consider manny other dimensions, including creativity, credibility, grit, acts of altruism, credibility and intelligence, and intelligence can be broken into many sub-categories. For instance, Psychologist Howard Gardner argues that there are multiple types of intelligence, such as:

  • Musical-rhythmic and harmonic
  • Visual-spatial
  • Verbal-linguistic
  • Logical-mathematical
  • Bodily-kinesthetic
  • Interpersonal
  • Intrapersonal
  • Naturalistic
  • Existential

Gardner’s declaration that these are separate intelligences is controversy in psychological circles. That said, these traits that he describes are some of the things I consider when evaluating another person, regardless of any “race.”

There are dozens of other dimensions I might use when evaluating any other person, but many people are willing to divide other people into “white” and “Black,” as though this is a meaningful way to evaluate another person. Making these “racial” distinctions is as absurd as embracing astrology--using a person’s birthdate as a proxy that persons personal character. To me, it seems bizarre and absurd to divide people into colors. That said, I live in a country where far too many people are enthusiastically willing to judge each other on this single simplistic dimension of “white” verses “Black,” despite the fact that this binary is an even cruder measure than the American political spectrum because it’s not a spectrum at all. It is a switch that is flipped from “white” to “Black,” with nothing in between, even though millions of “inter-racial” people exist. What a bizarre stilted binary, on so many levels! How is it possible that this racialized way of dividing people has any intellectual or political traction in modern times?

Here’s another popular binary: socialism versus capitalism. Many people are content to jam complex economies into one of these two boxes despite the overwhelming complexities and nuances of all existing economies. As though libraries are not filled to the brim discussions of the complexities of every economic system, where not a single real life system is declared to be purely socialist or purely capitalist.

I’ve been thinking about these false and limited ways of thinking for a long time. I was reminded of this issue when listening to The Portal, Eric Weinstein’s excellent podcast on Schrodinger’s Cat and the false-binary ways the many people find acceptable for discussing numerous social issues.

Why are we so willing to self-limit the way we think about obviously complex issues? Is it laziness? Gullibility? Social Pressure? We urgently need to reconsider our willingness of categorizing these complex issues, because our one-dimension cartoons are poisoning our ability to talk with one another.  This cartoon-talk is destroying our democracy.

Our willingness to think in terms of these cartoons would seem like an obvious problem for anyone willing to stop and think for even a few minutes, but many of us continue to embrace these cartoonish ways of thinking unabated, perhaps following the lead of our news media, social media and politicians. How can we convince people to stop and smell the nuance? How does one effectively declare that The Emperor has no Clothes in such an intransigent social environment?

Continue ReadingWe Love it That Two (Count’em) Two Cartoon Dimensions Pretend to Describe Complex Political, Racial and Economic Systems

Eric Weinstein Explains the Relevance of Schrodinger’s Cat to Abortion and other Issues with Limited Multiple Choice False “Solutions”

"The Portal," a newish podcast by Eric Weinstein, has become a favorite of mine. Eric has a knack for recasting commonly discussed social problems in head-wrenchingly new ways that suggest solutions. I invite you to listen to an episode or two. I think you'll be hooked too.

The first 10 minutes of Episode 35 is a good example of how Weinstein reconceptualizes a problem. He begins by discussing the conundrum of Schrodinger's cat. Is it alive or dead? But not so fast! Why are there only two "solutions" offered? Especially where neither of these "solutions" captures the complexity of the situation? Weinstein offers his own interpretation of this "super-position" problem: Asking whether the cat is "alive or dead" improperly attempts to lock us into an over-simplistic binary, a false dilemma. This is not the end of Weinstein's thoughts on superposition, but only the beginning. He then turns his sights toward many thorny social problems, all of which tend to be (improperly) presented as having only two (or a few) possible answers. Take, for example, abortion. The following is a transcript I created of a part of Weinstein's discussion:

The Portal – Ep 35 May 21, 2020

Eric Weinstein:

I've come to believe that we are wasting our political lives on [ ] superposition questions. For example, let's see if we can solve the abortion debate problem right now on this podcast using superposition, as it is much easier than the abortion problem itself. The abortion debate problem is that everyone agrees that before fertilization there's no human life to worry about, and that after a baby is born, there's no question that it has a right to live. Yet pro-choice and pro-life activists insist on telling us that the developing embryo is either a mere bundle of cells suddenly becoming a life only when born or a full-fledged baby the moment the sperm enters the egg. You can guess my answer here. The question of "Is it a baby's life or a woman's choice?" is agreed upon by everyone before fertilization or following birth because the observable in question has the system as one of the two multiple choice answers in those two cases.

However, during the process of embryonic development, something miraculous is taking place that we simply don't understand scientifically. Somehow a non-sentient blastula becomes a baby by a process utterly opaque to science, which has yet has no mature theory of consciousness. The system in utero is a changing and progressing superposition tilted heavily towards not being a baby at the beginning and tilted heavily towards being one at the end of the pregnancy.

But the problem here is that we have allowed the activists rather than the embryologists and developmental biologists to hand us the "life versus choice" observable with its two terrible multiple choice options. If we had let the embryologists set the multiple choice question there would be at least 23 Carnegie stages for the embryo before you even get to fetal development. But instead of going forward from what we both know and don't know with high confidence about the system, we are instead permanently deranged by being stuck with "Schrodinger's Embryo" by the activists who insist on working backwards from their political objectives.

So does this somehow solve the abortion issue? Of course not. All it does is get us to see how ridiculously transparent we are in our politics that we would allow our society to be led by those activists who would shoehorn the central scientific miracle of human development into a nutty political binary of convenience. We don't even think to ask, Who are these people who have left us at each other's throats debating an inappropriate multiple choice question that can never be answered?

Well, in the spirit of The Portal, we are always looking for a way out of our perennial problems to try to find an exit. And I think that the technique here of teaching oneself to spot superposition problems in stalemated political systems brings a great deal of relief to those of us who find the perspective of naive activism a fairly impoverished worldview.

The activist mindset is always trying to remove nuanced selections that might better match our world's needs from among the multiple choice answers until it finds a comical binary. Do you support the war on drugs? Yes or no? Are you for or against immigration? Should men and women be treated equally? Should we embrace capitalism or choose socialism? Racism: systemic problem or convenient excuse? Is China a trading partner or a strategic rival? Has technology stagnated or is it in fact racing ahead at breakneck speed? Has feminism gone too far, or not far enough?

In all of these cases, there's an entire industry built around writing articles that involve replacing conversations that might progress towards answers and agreement with simple multiple choice political options that foreclose all hope. And in general, we can surmise when this has occurred because activism generally leaves a distinct signature where the true state of a system is best represented as a superposition of the last two remaining choices that bitterly divided us, handed us by activists.

So I will leave you with the following thought. The “principle of superposition” is not limited to quantum weirdness, and it may be governing your life at a level you have never considered. Think about where you are most divided from your loved ones politically. Then ask yourself "When I listen to the debates at my dinner table, am I hearing a set of multiple choice answers that sound like they were developed by scholars interested in understanding or by activists who were pushing for an outcome?" If the latter, think about whether you couldn't make more progress with those you love by recognizing that the truth is usually in some kind of a superposition of the last remaining answers pushed by the activists.

But you don't have to accept these middlebrow binaries, dilemmas and trilemmas. Instead, try asking a new question: If my loved ones and I trashed the terms of debate foisted upon us by strangers, activists and the news media, could we together fashion a list of multiple choice answers that we might agree contain an answer we all could live with and that better describes the true state of the system? I mean, do you really want open or closed borders? Do you really want to talk about psilocybin and heroin in the same breath? Do you really want to claim that there is no systemic effect oppression or that it governs every aspect of our lives? Before long, it is my hope that you will develop an intuition that many long-running stalemated discussions are really about having our lives shoehorned by others into inappropriate binaries that can only represent the state of our world as a superposition of inappropriate and simplistic answers that you never would have chosen for yourself.

Continue ReadingEric Weinstein Explains the Relevance of Schrodinger’s Cat to Abortion and other Issues with Limited Multiple Choice False “Solutions”

“Race” is Like Astrology

The concept of using "race"--physical appearance--as a proxy for character is as absurd as astrology. I'm well aware that people look different from each other, but the concept of "race" is scientifically baseless. The concept of "race" embraces the logic of astrology: shoving individual people (each of whom is complex) into a handful of simplistic superficial categories and then drawing conclusions that are evidence-free (or often, contrary to evidence) based upon these unwarranted simplistic cartoon-like categorizations. The concept of "race" should be constantly ridiculed the same way that intelligent people ridicule astrology. Any attempt to classify another human being by "race" or birthdate is a lazy ham-handed anti-scientific and pernicious claim that one knows what it is impossible to know--the complexity of that human being--without investing time and effort to get to known them. That is the point of Morgan Freeman:

This enormous flaw with the modern use of the concept of "race" is a conceptual hole so vast that one could easily drive a truck through it. Yet the concept of "race" is rarely attacked at the root.  The first racist act is categorizing people by dividing them into simplistic categories such as white or Black. Without this first move, racism would be impossible.  What is especially distressing is that this widespread exuberant willingness to mis-categorize people into simplistic categories is embraced by both White Supremacists and those who claim to be seeking social justice by embracing critical race theory. These two groups are now in complete agreement that we can somehow know people merely by looking at their physical appearance.

There is only one way to get to know a person, and that is to take the time to learn about them, one by one, by talking with them, getting to know what they've done with their lives, reading about them or watching them interact with others. Complicating things, people change over time, so getting to know who they are requires non-stop effort.  Getting to know someone else requires careful consideration of real world facts and this takes considerable and concerted effort. Taking the time to get to really know other people before casting judgment on who they are is incompatible with making snap judgments but, as we are increasingly being tuned by social media, we are increasingly people who insist on making snap judgments.

Every day, "race" arguments wildly launch off into a thousand directions like fireworks. The basic premise of most of these arguments is the incoherent concept of "race," a concept so completely and irrevocably broken that most of these discussions are a waste of time before the discussion even begins. Imagine the time we could save--time we could redirect to working on solving the immense social problems that are very real indeed (many of them correlated to the physical appearance of groups of people)--if only we cut off most discussions of "race" at the root by calling out the invalidity of the concept of "race."

I will be writing more on this emotionally-charged topic in coming months. At this point I should make two things clear.

A) As I hope I've made clear, "race" is a irretrievably flawed pernicious concept. I believe that the concept of "race" should be thrown in the dustbin of history and we should all enter a new post-racial era. Unfortunately, other people continue to believe in the reality of "race." This idiotic willingness to divide complex people into simple colors makes racism possible. For this reason, I fully acknowledge the existence and destructiveness of racism. Many people mistreat others based upon physical appearance. To do this is unfair. It hurts people, sometimes badly, sometimes leading to deaths. Racism oppresses entire groups of people and has done so systematically over long stretches of time, through the entire history of the United States and many other places. Wherever we encounter racism, we should attack it vigorously in two ways: socially (by calling it out publicly and condemning those who mistreat other people in this way) and through the use of the legal system (e.g., through civil rights laws).

B) The concept of "race" itself is bad science, and this problem needs to be pointed out whenever discussing racism. Every single time.  Even young children know that "race" makes no sense but we socialize them to think otherwise. To fail to point out the absurdity of the concept of "race" whenever discussing racism will lead to more of the same. We will never be able to solve the "race" problem as long as we assume that there is such a thing as "race." One way to do this is to consistently put the word "race" in scare quotes, which is now my habit.  Every time we discuss "race," we need to call out that the the casual, unthinking idea that there is such a thing as "race" is reckless and dangerous. We need to constantly call out that it is impossible and destructive to judge other people by the use of immutable physical appearance. It is, indeed, as insane as believing in astrology, phrenology or palm reading. The unthinking use of the word "race" is utterly unscientific and destructive, even when used by well-intentioned people. The concept of "race" is a mental virus that hurts people and most of those who are infected are unable to see that they are infected. To use "race" uncritically (or "critically," as is de rigeour among the Woke) is to succumb to the banality of evil--unthinking destructive acquiescence to bad ideas.

In sum, racism exists because millions of misguided people believe in the incoherent and unsubstantiated notion of "race."  It will take great effort to break this bad habit because many well-meaning people who are (oftentimes heroically) fighting racism refuse to jettison the concept of "race."  Until large vocal swaths of society simultaneously and consciously embrace both A and B (above), racism will tear us apart.  I'm not optimistic.

Continue Reading“Race” is Like Astrology

A Giant Leap Backwards for Humankind: What the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture Thinks About White People

What would you think if a Fortune 500 Corporation Human Resources Director walked up to a podium and announced the following to a big crowd: "Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared.”

Say what?

Assume further that this HR Director then announced that the following are the “common characteristics of most U.S. White people most of the time”:

  • White people are self-reliant;
  • White people are independent and they highly value autonomy;
  • White people use the Scientific Method, with objective rational linear thinking, cause-and-effect relationship and quantitative emphasis;
  • White people delay gratification and follow rigid time schedules.
  • White people believe the ideal social unit is the nuclear family of father, mother and 2.3 children;
  • The children of white people have their own rooms and they are independent;
  • White people believe hard work is the key to their success and they believe “work before play”;
  • White people plan for the future by delaying gratification and they follow rigid time schedules.

Upon hearing this list, you would strongly suspect that you were listening to a white supremacist or that you had unwittingly stepped into a time warp that threw you back 200 years. Upon reminding yourself that this is actually the year 2020, you would conclude that this big corporation should be sued out of existence based on civil rights violations for creating a hostile work environment for its Black employees.

Unfortunately the source of these words and ideas is a webpage of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, a Smithsonian museum supported by U.S. taxpayers. Here is separate image of the “Whiteness” infographic. 

How does one even begin to articulate the many problems with these ideas?  How should concerned people respond when false information is being used to divide us. What is the solution when a public museum dedicated to African American history mocks the words of Martin Luther King?

I write this article fully acknowledges that racist conduct can still be found in many places in 2020 and that this bigotry should be dealt with aggressively through civil rights laws and social condemnation. We must condemn all real instances of racism, but we must simultaneously question the foundational concept of "race" from which the possibility or racism sprouts.  In short, anyone who wants to eviscerate racism needs to fight a two-front war. NMAAHC's "Whiteness" page doubly fails to fight this two-front war on racism.

Advocating that we should treat people differently based on skin color (as NMAAHC is enthusiastically doing) is throwing gasoline on our racial fires. The "Whiteness" page is stunningly divisive and it is factually unhinged. I would no more expect NMAAHC to be teaching us to be racist than I would expect the American Museum of Natural History to be teaching us that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and that modern humans co-habited our planet with the dinosaurs.

It is demonstrably false that people are born color-coded such that others can determine their personalities, habits and skills by noticing their skin color. That's because immutable traits of individuals, such as skin color, do not determine personality, resilience, aesthetics, capacity for empathy, intelligence, aspirations, parenting skills or any of the other human traits discussed on the NMAAHC "Whiteness" webpage. Skin color doesn't  dictate content of character any more than the many other things over which we have no control, things such as eye color, hair color, whether we have six toes, our birth date or the types of bumps we have on our heads. Constricting the way we evaluate people by using an Overton Window of black versus white  uses the exact same flawed approach used by astrology and phrenology, which also proclaim content of character by reference to equally irrelevant observations.

Many of the human traits listed on the museum’s website ("work before play" and "rational thinking") are demonstrably not true of many “white” people. Many of these same traits are compellingly true of (and embraced as valuable by) many successful Blacks.

NMAAHC's suggestion that we bifurcate people into "white" and "black" is based on an enormous falsehood. There is no meaningful way to distinguish who is white and who is black, because we are all varying degrees of brown, we are all from Africa (and see here) and we are all interrelated.Trying to determine who is more closely related to whom by physical appearance is often counter-intuitive:

By analyzing the genes of present-day Africans, researchers have concluded that the Khoe-San, who now live in southern Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of the human family tree. The Pygmies of central Africa also have a very long history as a distinct group. What this means is that the deepest splits in the human family aren’t between what are usually thought of as different races—whites, say, or blacks or Asians or Native Americans. They’re between African populations such as the Khoe-San and the Pygmies, who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before humans left Africa.

Nor is there any meaningful basis for declaring that there is any unified "white culture" or a unified "Black culture." No people of any color all think the same. Not even close. No person has been authorized by all whites or all Blacks to speak on their behalf.  Not even close. "Race" is a stunningly unscientific concept.

There is more genetic diversity within a “race” than between "races.". Further, "there is no homogeneous African race" and "there is more diversity in Africa than on all the other continents combined" (see graphic under this title here) . As reported by National Geographic in an article titled, "There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label,"

[W]hen scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of different races. In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”

Continue ReadingA Giant Leap Backwards for Humankind: What the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture Thinks About White People

Questioning the “Political Spectrum”: To What Extent Are Political Parties Social Clubs?

According to this article by Hyrum Lewis ("Our Big Fight Over Nothing: The Political Spectrum Does Not Exist"), the political "spectrum" is primarily tribal. Lewis states that many of the respective policy positions in the platforms of each of the two main political parties are not glued together by overarching consistently applied principles. These conclusions of Lewis run counter to the writings of George Lakoff, who (in his book, Moral Politics) argues that Republican positions derive from the metaphor of a "stern father," whereas the Democrat positions derive from the metaphor of the "nurturant parent." To the extent that Lewis is correct and that Lakoff has overstated his case, this is an inconvenient fact for those of us who claim that our political stances are completely principled, not adopted as the result of social pressure. Here are a few excerpts from Lewis' article:

In the essentialist theory, ideologies are unchanging, transcendent principles, while parties are evolving social organizations that can be “captured” by the ideologies. In the social theory, by contrast, ideologies don’t capture parties; parties capture ideologies—that is, they redefine them. Once again, research supports the latter: what is considered “right-wing” or “left-wing” is simply whatever the Republican and Democratic Parties happen to stand for at a given moment. Left-right ideologies are tools of self-delusion—they let us indulge the fantasy that our partisanship is principled rather than tribal, i.e., that there is some noble ideal connecting all the distinct and unrelated issues that our party happens to support. But essentialist predictions do not hold up to reality. . .

An alternative to this essentialist theory is the “social theory” of ideology, which says that distinct political positions correlate because they are bound by a unifying tribe. If the right-wing team is currently in favor of tax cuts and opposed to abortion, then those who identify with that team will adopt those positions as a matter of social conformity, not because both are expressions of some underlying principle.

... Public opinion polls further reinforce the point, showing that left-right ideologues often switch their beliefs to conform to the tribe. In the past decade alone we’ve seen self-described conservatives go from being anti-Russia to more pro-Russia, strongly pro-trade to strongly anti-trade, believing that personal character matters a great deal in politicians to believing that it matters hardly at all, staunchly interventionist in foreign policy to staunchly isolationist. Where is the “essence” behind all of this variation? It doesn’t exist. The views associated with left and right are constantly shifting for social reasons that have nothing to do with essential principles.

Continue ReadingQuestioning the “Political Spectrum”: To What Extent Are Political Parties Social Clubs?