So I’m listening to the Gonzales hearing and some senator has sidetracked the discussion onto the subject of internet gambling. He, with Gonzales’s agreement, asserted that it is vital to outlaw internet gambling because they functioning as unregulated banks and are thus perfect vehicles for money laundering, terrorist financing and tax evasion.

Now perhaps he just meant that given we outlaw internet banking it is important to shut down easy financial transactions with the companies. This seems to be a reasonable position. However, it’s an insoluble problem of our own creation. There are simply too many otherwise law-abiding US citizens who are and will continue to engage in internet gambling and their will always be offshore bank accounts and other means for them to do so. This flow of relatively innocuous money will disguise any genuinely criminal money being laundered or tax being evaded.

Of course we could easily eliminate the problem entirely by simply legalizing internet gambling for properly licensed companies. This would bring all those cash flows into a regulated system as well as allowing us to institute protections against problem gamblers, e.g., laws that require internet gambling entities to stop people from playing after they’ve lost too much money in a given time period or receive some sort of notification that this person is a problem gambler. Also it would bring us in line with the WTO guidelines.

But no, that would be far too rational for the US to ever do.

I feel my last post needs a bit of clarification.

I was not and never have been arguing that the landowner has a just cause while the gardeners demands are unjust. I don’t think those distinctions are particularly meaningful or helpful. There are only better and worse choices nothing else.

Admittedly I do get pretty frustrated by the hypocrisy of the people demanding to use other people’s land to garden. As if they wouldn’t cry bloody murder if someone broke into their house and took their shit to give to people in the third world. Even if it was only their old LPs that they never ever play anymore. Short of bums and monks everyone in this country buys into the notion of private property and should at least understand why people feel upset when others take their shit without asking. If these people are willing to take the same attitude about what it’s fair for people in the third world to demand of (relatively) rich people like them as they do of even richer people I will eat my laptop. Even in berkeley and SF everyone I meet seems to believe that American’s come first.

The real point of my post was twofold:

First to point out that if your goal is more community gardens then the approach the people in both of these incidents have taken is extremely irrational. Whatever you thought of Horowitz’s behavior down in LA the best way to make sure other property owners would be likely to allow people to plant gardens on their property would have been to leave with the minimum of fuss and bother. This would make future property owners think they too could let people use their vacant land without fear that it will cost them.

In fact what would be best is for the community garden movement to create a set of standards about always trying to ask for permission first, always leaving without a fuss and so forth to reassure landowners. Just like the standards that govern camping (leave the place cleaner than you found it) and other groups who want to use other people’s land it is in your interest to reassure them that you won’t become a pest.

Secondly to argue once again that demanding particular things other people have that you want and using political or PR pressure to get them is not a good way to achieve public good in the long term. The reason so much of the modern world respects private property is because it leads to efficient economic development. Knowing that you own a particular piece of land and that shifts in public opinion won’t take it from you encourages you to develop that property. Allowing communities to just gain control of pieces of property arbitrarily and capriciously because they decide they want it (especially if it ends up costing the owner money) ultimately harms everyone in the long run.

Ultimately we do take from people to serve the public good. It’s called taxes. However, by being predictable and fairly distributed taxes allow us to take people’s money without as large a harmful effect to economic development or as much resentment. I think we ought to be doing a lot more for the public good so we ought to raise taxes. If you think more public gardens are worth the cost (whether to temporarily rent empty lots or to buy lots) then you should be lobbying for higher taxes and city programs to do just that.

If you aren’t willing (in general) to lobby and fight for higher taxes so we can buy these gardens with public money it seems you are tacitly admitting that the benefit from these gardens is not generally worth what they would cost. In other words they are only worth it when you make someone else pay the cost.

So whether or not the property owners were acting as perfect saints I am criticizing the behavior of many of the gardeners and their supporters for acting against their supposed long term interest. I am also rejecting the underlying idea that it’s reasonable to demand specific people or companies give charity for the public good. Instead we should ask what general policies are good and take from people in a fair uniform manner in order to support those policies.

So a couple days ago the SF bay guardian ran a story about a vacant lot in the city that people in the neighborhood had turned into a garden. The newspaper expresses bafflement that the property owner, upon visiting from out of town, demanded that the garden be removed and refused to discuss leasing the land. Though the article wasn’t clear on whether there was any offer to lease the land at fair market value.

It is easy to see why someone might be offended to find people using their land without even asking permission, especially if they demanded you let them continue instead of apologizing. However, what reason, other than pure indignation, might the property owner have to reject the lease? After all she isn’t using the land so even a below-market lease would benefit her and the gardeners would benefit as well?

Well perhaps the incident at the South Central Farm in LA provides an explanation. Now whatever you feel about the ultimate decisions of the landowner in that case and the ill-will that built up between the protesters and the landowner it is clear that having community gardens on his property cost him a great deal of money. While UC Berkeley’s status as a semi-public entity makes the situation a bit different you can see the same effect at people’s park. The longer a community, at least in places like SF and Berkeley, uses your land the more expensive it is to use your own property.

If the problem is vacant lots get a law passed about upkeeping them. If community gardens and other public spaces are really that important raise taxes and have the city buy the land. Also the more one demands that property owners let you garden their land the more incentive you give them to turn you down. The very fact that a petition was signed to continue this garden shows the landowner that in ten years when people have grown attached to that garden it will be very expensive to kick them out.

So discussing one of my favorite books (Permutation City by Greg Egan) it dawned on me how to formulate a (limited) form of an argument I’ve long found convincing. I will, of course, assume that there is an objective fact about whether certain items have experiences and that people do and tables do not, i.e., rejecting Panpsychism.

In any case take the (far too) widely assumed thesis of strong AI, namely that any two processes that execute the same calculations will have the same experiences. For instance any computer that simulated the human brain would have all the same experiences as that person. Note that this is much stronger than merely saying we could build some machine that simulated the human brain and had the same experiences as it tells us that it doesn’t matter how we simulate it.

Now in order for this thesis to make sense we must have some notion of when a certain physical device implements a given calculation. Of course the natural way to phrase this is in terms of some kind of counterfactuals. However, this means that we would need to buy into a substantive notion of physical cause. There would need to be an extra meta-physical entity that somehow makes one description of the actual events in the universe the ‘true’ laws that really support counterfactuals while other predictively equivalent ones are wrong. Note that being a Lewis style realist about possible worlds is not sufficient either as you would need to believe that the closeness relation was somehow real/had metaphysical backup as well.

In fact if we are Humans about causation it seems that there is no hope for us. Since there is no (objectively) privileged statement of the laws we can transform any actual result into a computation. If we want to conclude that the decay of an atom implements a certain calculation we just decide what the output of the computation should be (say 1) and pick an equivalent (in our world) formulation of the physical laws that says (assuming the atom did decay) the atom decays if and only if the output of the computation is a 1. Obviously if we want to break up some complex computation into many small pieces we surely can. In particular we can interpret the random thermal motion of a table to be the simulation of a brain.

Now perhaps you will try to object that simple descriptions of the laws are somehow privileged. Even if so it seems you still need some fact which makes them objectively privileged. If all being simple amounts to is that human beings take a certain attitude toward them you haven’t gotten very far. It would appear that the very intuitions that motivate the strong AI view, namely that there isn’t extra spooky non-physical facts that determine what events cause experiences, is undermined as the very position sees to require we have these non-physical facts about what the ‘right’ way to write the physical laws is.

Probably this argument has been made in some form before but it occurred to me today and I’m stalling on my math.

So here is an interesting write up of a study claiming that in the developed world the amount of work done by men and women is equal. Now I don’t really take this study that seriously. In fact I don’t believe there is really any fact of the matter about who works more, it is all going to depend on how you choose to count. Though this should give you good reason to be skeptical of anyone who thinks there is an obvious clear cut answer to the question, especially if it is just based on personal experience. Frankly the whole idea that who spends more time working matters seems pretty absurd. When I spend an hour thinking about math that surely is not equivalent for me to spending an hour doing the dishes.

However, this survey made me wonder how it is that people can consistently hold the position that having children is a large net positive but that staying home and raising the kids is just as big a contribution to the relationship. Perhaps this is a useful fiction to have in relationships but it seems you must admit that one of the following claims are true:

1) Time spent caring for a child is overall less bad than time spent working. 2) The value in having a child doesn’t actually consist of time with the child or anything like that. It is merely the abstract benefit of having had a kid. 3) Having a child is a net negative.

Now one could view 2 as an escape route but most parents will deny that they are just in it for the totally irrational pride from having had a child, i.e., they would claim that they would lose out on most of the benefits of having children by just pawning them off on a nanny. Yet if this is true and having a child is a net positive it must mean that given a choice between spending time caring for a child and spending the time at a normal job plus getting paid you would prefer to spend the time caring for the child.

Frankly I think the real answer is 3 and we just have irrational beliefs about the matter. Though it could also be 2 and we just aren’t willing to admit that we just like knowing we have reproduced.

I think I’ve finally managed to sort out my position on the Imus matter and the social treatment of racial insults. This should be the last post on the matter.

I agree that as a policy matter/broader social concern racial slurs have a different status than other insults. The pervasive nature of prejudice and the mistrust that it has left behind make it particularly important to demonstrate that society rejects discrimination and prejudice. To address the plight of overweight people or other groups who haven’t been subject to organized oppression we need only minimize the number of insults and hurtful behaviors. On the other hand, both to ward off the spector of racism and start healing racial mistrust it is necessary that society clearly indicate that it doesn’t find racially charged insults or racism itself acceptable.

Thus I think it is good and proper that Imus’s use of the phrase ‘nappy headed hoes’ received widespread notice and condemnation in the media. It is also good that Imus apologize for this remark and had he not apologize he most certainly should have been fired, whatever his intent or state of mind was when he made the remarks. Letting remarks like Imus’s pass without comment would send the harmful message that our society was okay with people expressing racist attitudes (even if none are it issue in this case). However, the offended outcry and Imus’s apology clearly indicate that our culture doesn’t view racism or racial slurs as acceptable behavior and we should not confuse showing disapproval with punishment.

Generally we believe that punishment should be proportional to the badness of the act not the harm it causes. Pragmatics mean that our laws don’t always live up to this standard#1 but surely we think that if five people built illegal fires in the woods taking exactly the same precautions against fire they should all be punished equally even if one of them got unlucky and started a forest fire. So certainly if Imus didn’t know “nappy” was a racially charged term he surely should not be punished for it’s use (not only would it be ‘unfair’ it would have no deterrent effect) . However, even if he did use “nappy” knowing it was a racial slur it was ‘merely’ used to insult some individuals not to advocate racial prejudice. Certainly his action seems no more hurtful, mean or insensitive than what people seem to think (but I can’t vouch for) he has said about gays.

My position is that it is good to call extra attention to racial slurs and to demand apologies thus making it clear our society will not tolerate racism. However, things like demanding that Imus lose his job or starting organized boycotts are simply punishment for punishment sake. It is not necessary to demonstrate that we believe the false moral claim that insulting people because of their race is essentially (it is worse pragmatically) worse than doing so because of their sexual orientation or any other kind of unnecessary infliction of harm. Moreover, this sort of further demand, unlike the practice of giving people the cold shoulder when they make racist comments or just raising a fuss, has little deterrence value because no radio personality would have made these comments if they thought it would create this level of controversy even if they had a locked in contractual guarantee that kept them from losing their job. Furthermore, it is this sort of leakage from the (correct) position that we need to make it crystal clear that we don’t approve or racism to the view that we need to show we are serious by harshly punishing people who act for racial motivations that I worry saps the will to deal with meanness and cruelty more generally.

[1]: For instance our inability to determine if burglars took proper care to avoid causing anyone’s death means we have to have a law that makes anyone who causes a death during a felony guilty of murder. Noteably, however, many people find the cases like this, say where the getaway driver gets convicted of murder because his accomplish decides to kill someone, disturbing. We at least try to ameliorate this unfairness by clearly publishing these laws so people know that the infraction (burglary) is actually more serious than they may have imagined (the punishment is that for burglary plus a chance of a murder conviction with probability proportional to the likelihood that you kill someone).

So the metropolis light transport algorithm is a Monte Carlo method for rendering images that works by mutating the path the light takes and weighting it by appropriate probability factors. I’m wondering if anyone knows if this can be used to do efficient rendering for small scene differences. That is having a prerendered high quality image and then efficently rendering the difference image between that and the same scene with extra objects added.

For instance if you have a mostly static room with figures (possibly with light sources) moving around in it could you do the following: First prerender the empty room using lots of computational resources. Then to render the room with people in it or whatever use the metropolis algorithm on ONLY THOSE PATHS THAT INCLUDE THE NEW OBJECTS. Now use the metropolis algorithm in two different ways. In one way we computer the contribution to the overall image of those paths impacting the person in the new scene. In the other we subtract the appropriately weighted contributions of those paths intersecting the person but mutated/calculated as if they were not there.

In other words we would have both light and anti-light being added to our image. The anti-light being the contributions that the paths through the object would have made if it hadn’t been there while the light being the contribution of paths that do go through the object. Is there some reason this approach wouldn’t work or wouldn’t be more efficient? In particular would it be too hard to compute the bias that restricting yourself to only these certain paths creates?

Maybe it is also possible to do this with other rendering algorithms but it seems like it would be really hard to make work right. Anyway do any of the graphic people out there know if this would work? Also is this essentially the advantage you get if you use metropolis to do animation by allowing mutations in time as well?

Alright my last blog entry was probably a stretch. I couldn’t resist including that bit about the Enzyte commercial even if it didn’t tie in very well to the whole Imus thing. So I wanted to reexplain what I think of the matter.

The reason the whole Imus controversy bothers me is because it reminds me of incidents like this one where a 10 year old was prosecuted (in Britain) for calling another student ‘a nigger.’ The fact that a student might be prosecuted for making fun of other students doesn’t really bother me but the clearly selective nature of the prosecution is bothersome (though I’m not suggesting the situations are equivalent).

Basically my problem with the whole situation is that racial slurs, while packing a great deal of punch in one package, aren’t the only, or even always the worst ways that you can insult and hurt someone. Sad as it is Imus could have probably caused the basketball players more individual pain and suffering if he had gone through their lineup and ripped on each one individually about their looks, or their school performance or whatever else they were sensitive about. Sure there may be particularly reasons to want to clamp down on racism but it bothers me the way people’s response seems so binary. Had Imus picked on male athletes every day in horribly hurtful ways his show would probably never have been pulled no matter how much psychological pain he inflicted.

Similarly what is so absurd about getting so upset about one kid calling another ‘nigger’ at school is that (unless this was part of a continued pattern of racial insults) schools let much worse insults slide all the time. I fear that by viewing racial slurs as being a totally different kind of act than general mean spirited disrespectful insults rather than as two points along the same continuum we implicitly okay making insulting those groups who are not yet protected. I mean what is it that makes it perfectly okay to gleefully joke openly on the radio about male prisoners getting raped but joking enthusiastically about female prisoners getting raped is totally off limits? I can’t say which direction the cause goes but this attitude that somehow there is a special sort of hurt or insult that starts to happen once their are enough politically sympathetic people who share the pain with you is deeply disturbing.

Additionally it would seem that the whole race issue here is a red-herring. As far as I understand Imus claims that he didn’t know about the racial overtones of the word “nappy.” I have no reason to doubt this claim, I certainly did not know and unlike the whole ‘macaca’ incident there is no good reason to doubt his story. Yet, despite what Sharpton tried to claim the notion of a racist statement divorced from intention is simply absurd. We don’t hold non-English speakers to account for genuine misunderstandings about the meaning of offensive words. The real offense in using a racial slur comes from knowing that it is a slur and using it anyway. As far as Imus was concerned ‘nappy’ might have just been an insult about their hair.

Yet this leaves us with ‘hoes’ as the motivation for all this sudden action against him. Yet ‘ho’ simply does not have nor ever had the same sort of status as a racial slur. In particular ‘ho’ is generally regarded as a word like ‘asshole’ that is applied to people based on them behaving ‘badly’ not some sort of smear that applies to everyone with certain properties. Moreover, unlike most racial slurs men can in many situations call women ‘hoes’ in perfectly inoffensive ways.

In fact accusing people of being ‘hoes’ is bad for totally different reasons than using a racial slur is bad. The problem here is not that you heap your scorn on women but that you reinforce the idea that sexual promiscuity makes women bad. Yet, if this is true than Imus’s remark is one of the least harmful remarks that one might hear on the air about the subject. For all he is offensive and crude he is less harmful in this way than the proper conservative commentators dissing on Britney for being promiscuous or any of the panoply of programs that repeat the social attitude that being a slut is bad.

If we are going to seriously worry about the demonization of women’s sexuality then, unlike with racial slurs, it is the women themselves who use this word to really diss people for sexual promiscuity we should come down on the hardest. People like Imus who use this word just to be insulting are just spring-boarding off a much more pernicious and deeply entrenched pattern of social behavior not doing some great harm.

In short the whole situation smacks of moral righteousness applies with blatant disregard for consistency or any larger picture. Imus may be a dick but kicking him out on this business is bothersome the same way it would bother me if I found out some serial killer was finally brought to justice because he kicked someone’s puppy and that made people finally get mad.

Staying up late doing my grading I ran across paid programing for Enzyte the ‘natural male enhancement.’ This wasn’t just the normal suggestive ‘Smiling Bob’ commercials. This was an undisguised barrage of comments telling men they were too small. After the attractive female host had chimed in to say that it’s only politeness that keeps women from complaining about the size of men’s cocks she shared the statistic that 60% of women feel sexually unsatisfied so that only attention would realize she hadn’t directly claimed it was as a result of small size. Then, as if this wasn’t enough, they ventured out to interview the ‘man on the street’ and showed clips of many attractive women explaining that small cock wasn’t as good. Imagine what the reaction would be if they had aired a similar commercial for breast implants! Luckily I believe in communicating about sex enough not to be particularly affected by the Enzyte commercials, but the constant lack of real nerds and the high standards of looks for men in commercials certainly added to my anxiety when I was younger (and probably still do).

There is every reason to believe that commercials and the media are just as bad about inducing anxiety in men as they are about women. In fact, far from being immune to this sort of material the fact that men aren’t supposed to care about their looks likely increases the harm. While women can turn to their friends for suggestions about style, have socially acceptable options to improve their appearance and receive semi-regular reassurance from the men and women in their lives men have none of these cushions. Men are given the message that style should be innate and effortless and they either have it or don’t and hence feel uncomfortable about trying to change their look. Despite this many of them still worry about whether they are attractive/appealing enough to girls (whether in looks, humor or cock size) but are expected to keep these concerns to themselves.

I could continue but my point here isn’t to establish that men are being screwed or anything like that. Rather my point is that popular blowback against media has amazingly little to do with the actual harmfulness of that media and much more to do with the cultural status of that kind of complaint. The reason pretty models on TV get so much shit is that it is culturally encouraged for women to openly admit worrying about their weight and acceptable for them to bitch about it. On the other hand the Enzyte commercials get no blowback (regarding this point) because it isn’t okay for men to admit to be concerned about penis size and few people who were bothered by the commercial would be willing to admit it.

In fact I would advance the hypothesis that once some type of comment or media portrayal is susceptible to this sort of broad cultural blowback it isn’t that big of a deal. It is when an attitude is so deeply ingrained that people don’t question it or when a group has so little power their protest isn’t noticed that these sort of media attitudes are going to be most harmful. When no one thought twice of casting the girl and the secretary and the man as the boss it was harmful. Now it isn’t anywhere near as bad.

The upshot of this long post is that I’m totally disgusted by the societal response to Imus’s insults. Imus isn’t a very nice guy and has a history of insulting all sorts of people but when he called the member’s of a women’s sport’s team “nappy headed hoes” everyone went ballistic. Hell the anchor on CNN was so disturbed she even dropped her journalistic objectivity to complain about how horrible the situation was. Apparently much of the reason people are getting so upset is that these are young girls who have done nothing to deserve being insulted like this.

All the people who are demanding Imus’s head go on about how he has gone to far this time or that this was somehow a particularly hurtful. This is total BS (it was probably hurtful but no more than any other insult). Whatever the eytymology of the word hoes when it is used without context that says they really mean ‘whore’ it isn’t that offensive. Hence the reason people can use it to describe their friends without horribly offending them. Also despite Sharpton’s apparent confusion on the subject racism is a matter of belief or intent and you can’t conclude that someone made a racist comment while claiming you don’t know about their beliefs or intent. It is entirely plausible that Imus was unaware about the particular associations with ‘nappy.’ I know I was.

The truth is that Imus is in trouble this time because he did something which is socially acceptable to jump on someone for doing. I won’t regret the loss if they decide to kick Imus off the air. However, I’m very bothered by the way advertisers and others are pulling ads from Imus because he finally hit one of these magical third rails but kept their advertising with him all the time he was insulting people generally.

These sorts of socially approved areas of criticism very much bother me because they undermine good decision making about media behavior. If we saw the portrayal of skinny women on TV as just another aspect of the way that everyone likes to watch attractive, rich, personable people and the advertisement of beauty products as just another example of how commercials tend to encourage anxiety it might encourage more reasonable comprehensive attitudes. The net effect of looking at it the way we do is that certain sorts of material are appointed as politically sensitive or off limits and we look the other way about everything else.

In short I’m far more worried about the groups Imus might insult that haven’t been politically appointed as non-insertable than those who have been. They are the ones who are most likely to be seriously hurt.