The inspiration for this post was reading No, seriously. Root Cause is a Fallacy, by Will Gallego, especially:
Let’s start with some understanding behind the appeal of root cause. The thinking is that you want to get to the underlying problem, starting at where it begins, rather than treating the downstream effects. I can appreciate resolving deeper underlying issues rather than “treating the symptoms” when problems large or small crop up. Our systems are complex. It’s very tempting to look at a singular part in an effort to simplify our understanding and achieve resolution..
My take on why the 26 phrases are considered dog whistles (main objection only):
Racist or Xenophobic: Community Violence, Urban Violence, Urban Crime, Black-on-White Crime, Tough on Crime, Law & Order, Food Stamps, Anti-China, Islamic Terrorism, Illegal Immigrants Promotes interests of corporations and the rich: Job Creators, Tax Cuts, Big Government (as a criticism), Increase Military Spending….
1. A coded message communicated through words or phrases commonly understood by a particular group of people, but not by others. Merriam-Webster.com … 10. An ”intriguing tool of hermeneutics in which you can accuse anyone of saying anything even if they didn't say it because you can always hear the dogwhistle if you yourself are a canine with hypersonic hearing.” Steven Pinker, quoted in “Steven Pinker Beats Cancel Culture Attack”
Which got me thinking…How do we know what someone means when they say something? How do we know what they’re thinking of when they say things? Or, even harder, what unconscious cognitions are behind their words?… Can words be true, valid, useful, insightful, demeaning and hurtful all at the same time? If so, how do we deal with it? What counts as evidence that certain expressions are dog whistles? What counts as definitive evidence?
Confident and optimistic? The machinery will tilt towards images of success and triumph, but not dwell on them because no preparation is required for what may come. We already know we can handle whatever is thrown our way, and it will be good.
Grievance involves feelings of deprivation, shame, humiliation, impotent anger, and being the victim of injustice. Grievance demands payback. Deep grievance demands big payback and may not be satisfied until the payback is proportionate to the harm done. Which may take forever.
So if I were to walk a random 10-acre area in Houston and San Francisco, which city would city would be more dangerous for me personally, considering only violent crime rate and crime density?
Note the governments of Britain, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden had previously supported gender-affirming care for children. But they reconsidered in light of new evidence that such care could sometimes be harmful. American activists know about this evidence as well but many have chosen to dig in, not yielding an inch. However, this post is not about the merits of gender-affirming care for children. It’s about why people and policymakers persist in old ways of thinking and doing despite evidence that the old ways are suboptimal or worse.
Something to ponder: is achieving some of the Moral Good now better than achieving more of the Moral Good later? Given that increasingly later is increasingly uncertain, at what point of later/uncertainty should one just say “screw it” and commit to action? (The answer, as always: it depends).
In other words, if carrots and sticks change the behavior, then the person has at least some control over the behavior, which is another way of saying: if one is able to engage in goal-directed behavior (e.g. approach carrot, avoid stick), one is responsible to some degree for one’s actions and the outcomes of those actions…That’s where “stigma” comes in. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “stigma in the context of health is the negative association between a person or group of people who share certain characteristics and a specific disease, including mental illness”. And per the voluminous literature on stigma, a common stigmatizing stereotype associated with mental health disorders such as drug addiction is that people are responsible for their condition.
According to John Kelly of Mashed Radish , the word “hassle” may have originated from a blend of words that represent small, intense repeated actions, such as haggle and tussle or harass and hustle. To call something a hassle is to say it requires an annoying amount of time and energy while engaged in a series of small, intense actions. For example…
Then again, false equivalence is much more than a matter of flawed reasoning or cognitive bias. Comparisons reflect an understanding of how the world works, what leads to what and over what time frame. A problematic comparison may stem from empirical error, logical error, or both. But people rarely hold themselves to some scientific standard of accuracy. Sometimes a comparison is made to serve a larger point and it’s not really advancing the conversation by nitpicking minor errors.
Ok, so fear of getting caught deters crime more than fear of the legal consequences after getting caught. That makes sense, given that the former is a more immediate concern than the latter. But then, if getting caught were never followed by serious consequences, it would cease being a threat. Consequences still matter.
I would have thought there’d be a closer relationship between type of government (e.g., democratic versus autocratic) and perceived freedom of choice and control. True, a greater percentage of US and Canadian respondents reported high levels of freedom, but more than 40% of respondents in China, Iran, and Myanmar reported high levels of freedom as well. And not even a quarter of the Japanese respondents felt substantially free. Obviously, perceived freedom of choice and control has other feeder streams than form of government.
The pattern is quite clear: at the country level, higher support for emancipative values is associated with greater trust of people of other nationalities. And the lack of trust of other nationalities is associated with lower support for emancipative values. I’m not claiming a causal relation, though the pattern does make sense: if you distrust most of humanity, you probably don’t care much about human rights in general.
The World Value Survey (WVS) has recently completed its seventh wave of data collection, covering 58 countries over the period of 2017-2022. This series of posts will highlight some of the findings. I’ll use the same subset of countries in each post. In this post, I’ll focus on what the WVS calls “emancipative” values, as in emancipation from authority. Emancipative values emphasize freedom of choice and "involve priorities for lifestyle liberty, gender equality, personal autonomy and the voice of the people." (World Values Survey, 2022).
And then there’s the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 as “a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected”. Per the Declaration’s own preamble: “… the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people…[and] it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law”.
Whataboutism (as in "what about…?") is the practice of responding to an assertion by raising a point or question that expresses a counter-example, which appears to delegitimize the initial assertion. Some examples…
In this post, I’m using Wikipedia’s definition of robot: “a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically”. In this sense, a self-driving truck may be considered a robot, as may smaller machines within the truck, including those that look vaguely humanoid.
Of course, with additional tinkering Optimus may eventually be able to handle office plants, assuming their watering needs are predictable and programmable. But why must a plant-watering robot look humanoid? Ideally, form follows function and it’s hard to see what function is served by making a robot cute. Except to get people to fork out $20,000 because they just must have one.