My fiancee mocks me for my inclination to collect and archive horrible exemplars just because they are so unbelievably bad. She probably has a point about my bookmarks of awful woman’s dresses but at least in the case of science journalism it’s actually useful to notice the way in which it’s bad as that tells us something about the underlying cultural biases that give rise to it. Or that’s just bullshit to justify this new sequence of posts because I couldn’t resist sharing just how bad this sort of reporting is.

The article that motivated this new series was this doozy that amazingly tells us that, “moderate happiness may be preferable to full-fledged elation.” This might make some sense if the study was warning that elation often presaged a crash while moderate happiness was more sustainable but it’s nothing that reasonable. Rather the article ‘warns’ us that:

“The highest levels of income, education and political participation were reported not by the most satisfied individuals (10 on the 10-point scale),” the authors wrote, “but by moderately satisfied individuals (8 or 9 on the 10-point scale).”

The 10s earned significantly less money than the eights and nines. Their educational achievements and political engagement were also significantly lower than their moderately happy and happy-but-not-blissful counterparts.

We are further warned that the most happy people tend not to get the best grades in school. Now if I had confidence in these results (see below break) this would be an interesting result but the idea that this shows we should be less happy is so deeply confused it boggles the mind. In fact it’s such an absurd conclusion that I wouldn’t have believed the article was really saying it, much less that the actual researcher endorsed it, if they hadn’t hammered the point home.

The data indicate that happiness may need to be moderated for success in some areas of life, such as income, conscientiousness and career, Diener said.

….

All in all, Diener said, the evidence indicates that happiness is a worthy goal for those who lack it, but the endless pursuit of even more happiness for the already happy may be counterproductive.

Great so your telling me that I should give up on that whole being crazy fucking happy thing so I can be more anal retentive about cleaning my room and earn more money for my own benefit. This is so brainfucked I can’t comprehend it. These are probably the same people who object to living (voluntarily) in the matrix because it would make us all really poor (no physical goods). Sometimes I boggle that people like Dennet can deny the existence of experiences then I run across something like this that reminds me just how deep the physicallist fallacy runs in our society.

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It vaguely grates on me the way Obama seems to happily pick up votes for being a black man while pushing the idea that the election should be color blind. Now this on it’s own doesn’t really bother me. If Hillary was the black man and made this sort of claim I would dismiss this remark as the kind of calculated misdirection required for a black man to become president. After all if you fail to publicly reject the idea of racial solidarity you may scare off the white voters. I don’t like the idea of racial solidarity any more than I like other forms of solidarity (all suffering should be given equal weight) but I understand the need to take cynical positions to be elected.

But it’s the tension between this kind of necessary realpolitik and Obama’s idealistic schtick that really underlies my dislike of him. The truth is that getting elected in a democracy requires either extreme stupidity/lack of independent thought or cynical misdirection. If this blog is anything it is a chronicle of the ways in which a thorough logical examination of the situation can diverge from the shallow first impressions. Even if you disagree with me about everything else I write it is extremely unlikely that you both about politics and don’t violently disagree with popular wisdom about some major issue. How much more surprising would it be if an intelligent thoughtful candidate with access to raw data and expert assistance didn’t conclude the electorate wasn’t bat shit crazy about free trade, immigration, global warming, gasoline taxes, smoking regulations, molestor tracking/punishment, drug laws, needle exchanges, prison rape, genetic engineering, desirability of abortion or some other issue.

The truth is that any candidate who tried to honestly discuss their views wouldn’t last a week. There is no coherent policy attitude that wouldn’t deeply offend a majority of voters on some position. It may be possible to be elected without telling outright lies but only by convincing yourself of ridiculous beliefs or engaging in deliberate misdirection. The juxtaposition of Obama’s acceptance of racial votes with his oratory about color blindness (whether a direct contradiction or not) is just one example of why the trifecta of idealism (i.e. honesty), intelligence, and electability is fundamentally unattainable.

Obama essentially doubles down on the cynical/stupid divide with his idealistic message and criticism of washington insiders. I’m quite sure that Hillary Clinton is a smart lady who clearly understands realpolitik and is willing to take the cynical steps necessary to get elected. Obama’s idealistic message forces me to either accept that he is the sort of idiot who honestly believes the voter’s preferences matter more than good policy (and lets his own views be bent accordingly) or believe that he is a charming psychopathic liar.

I might vote for Obama if I thought he was the later but if that’s the case he lies too well to get my vote. If I had to guess I would say that on some level he really manages to believe in his idealistic message and the combination of double think and faith in popular wisdom this requires means he certainly isn’t the candidate I want on the democratic ticket.

But I’m feeling silly today so I couldn’t help posting a screenshot of this screwup by the MSNBC editing staff.

The original page is here but they have probably fixed the problem by now. Then again you would have thought a big news organization like MSNBC would have had enough editors to never let this happen in the first place. I suspect someone was leaving their job and wanted to do something funny before they left. They deserve to have someone notice their work.

So Sharon and I have decided that we want Sharon to wear a red dress for the wedding, probably with a pair of long black gloves. The problem is that it’s damn hard to find the right sort of dresses.

We both like the really shinny fabric (some kinds of silk, Taffeta, satin) like you can see in this dress. However, most dress tops are really boring and often actively unattractive (what possible sort of fashion sense could make you think it’s a good idea to try and imitate a garbage bag to cover your breasts or worse your whole body). We both really like the nifty asymmetrical one-shoulder sorta look like you can see here but we both want something shorter (knee length…though shorter isn’t out of the question). Maybe something asymmetrical or loose on the bottom or maybe just a nice slender dress with the one-shoulder look but even just finding anything with the right sort of top that isn’t made in an awful pinkish red or is floor length seems to be damn difficult.

Anyway got any ideas?

I dunno if it is a good idea from a technical point of view but Antarctica has the wonderful property of having no (permanent) residents and thus, unlike Nevada, no NIMBYism to block any disposal site. It just seemed strange to me that the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) specifically forbids this sort of disposal. I agree such a disposal system should be approved and managed by some international body but if not Yuca mountain this seems like the only place that will work even if the transportation problem makes it less than ideal.

As an aside Yuca mountain is a perfect example of the problems of representative government, and I think one of the best real criticisms of the electoral college system. It’s also a perfect illustration of the fact that you must be dishonest or stupid to win the presidency. I mean it’s obviously much riskier to keep the nuclear waste sitting in unsecured pools besides the reactors than it is to deposit it in Yuca mountain but you can bet anything you like that anyone who stood up and said this would lose Nevada.

Maybe there is some way to pay off the people in Nevada to take the waste repository. Ohh and before anyone asks I wouldn’t have any problem living 90 miles from it myself.

Apparently teachers were tricked into giving students a bunch of electric shocks.

The interesting article about the science of moral judgements in the New York Times also had a really excellent remark about the way our society is responding to the issue of global warming I wanted to share.

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

I think this is spot on. As I’ve been saying for a long time the tendency to view global warming into a personal moral issue is a monumental mistake. For starters by moralizing the environment we immediately alienate a great many people who might have joined an attempt to solve an economic and engineering problem. Surely global warming is an issue that has moral consequences (like any other) but by associating it with the idea that we have a moral duty to live more simply and repudiate consumerism you not only ensure that people with other moral views aren’t inclined to join up but you also create a sort of righteous indignation that interferes with compromise and creates animosity. I mean if global warming had been presented as a pragmatic concern I doubt we would have seen the same extent to denial and resistance to what is ultimately an extremely technical scientific conclusion. However, because global warming was used as part of a sermon to lecture the public about their evil consumerist ways it inspired a strong bitter backlash.

It now appears we are almost past the hurdle of global warming skepticism but nevertheless the moral attitude toward the environment continues to create problems. For instance consider this selection of posts for blog action day. Following the usual formula for personal moral advice these posts tell people what simple sacrifices they could make to use less energy, recycle more and otherwise be more environmentally friendly. What could be wrong with this?

Well everything. For starters by making the issue into one of personal morality we’ve implicitly adopted the idea that environmental solutions must be sacrifices because we don’t give moral credit for things that we want to do anyway. In our personal lives this tends to result in nothing worse than wasted effort but by encouraging this idea we create an environment where the best solutions (those that require the least sacrifice) aren’t properly favored. Also, just as we tend to unreasonably view Mother Teresa as a better person than Bill Gates so too does moralizing environmental choices skew our praise toward useless sacrifice. There is no good reason whatsoever to try and minimize the total volume of waste you produce but because we have moralized environmentalism we end up stupidly glorifying people who carry their trash around with them. Even individual choices to conserve energy aren’t very useful as they lower the price of oil based fuels for others.

If people just wanted to waste their time like this that would be one thing but the real problem arises because the public only has a limited willingness to sacrifice for the environment. After all if I sort my recycling and turn the thermostat down at night why should I have to pay a tax on gas too. It’s bad enough that turning the environment into a personal moral issue uses up people’s willingness to sacrifice on inefficient solutions rather than the needed national fixes but it even creates antipathy for useful economic fixes. So long as it’s an engineering/economic problem the idea of trading emission credits seems perfectly reasonable but the moment you start viewing CO2 emissions as a moral harm the idea that you can purchase indulgences starts to rub people the wrong way. In fact I’ve seen more than a few environmentalists objecting to carbon credits on this basis.

Unfortunately I don’t have the slightest clue what we can do to unmoralize the environment at this state.

There is a great article over on the New York Times about recent psychological studies of moral impulses. Perhaps the most interesting point in the piece was the observation that people’s emotions strongly demand they make distinctions they can’t rationally justify and appear not to really be rationally justifiable at all but that individuals with damage to the relevant emotional centers in the brain revert to being utilitarians. This is interesting because the sort of unjustified moral antipathy toward things like consequence free incest, using parts of an American flag as a bathroom rag or directly (as opposed to indirectly) killing one to save others bear a great resemblance to the moral judgements of earlier ages we now repudiate. It’s the same type of disgust we have at consequence free incest that makes others demonize homosexuality or (at least in the past) interracial marriage and the same distaste we might feel at using the American flag to wipe toliets still gives rise to laws against insulting the prophet in much of the muslim world.

Now the only reason we shouldn’t toss moral philosophy out as useless is that we believe that by formulating simple unifying theories about what’s moral we can refine our judgements. In other words moral theorizing only makes sense if you believe that by rational considerations we can identify and discard the sort of things we now recognize as moral superstitions (like objecting to autopsies). Yet if we know that the same unjustified instinctive reactions that demand punishment without deterrent value or cringe at pure hedonic pleasure are responsible for the misguided morals of the past surely these sorts of emotional pulls must be discounted in our moral theorizing. Given the further evidence that people fall back to being utilitarians once the misleading effect of these emotional reactions has been swept aside it would seem that utilitarianism is the only real candidate for a good moral theory.

In other words if we believe in moral philosophy at all and join with the rest of society in rejecting many of the odious moral notions of the past we must explain what caused these prior moral beliefs to go bad and avoid applying the same methods in the present. If the scientific work shows that what the beliefs we now find objectionable had in common was their grounding in this emotional part of the brain this gives us good reason to discount these emotions as a basis for our current moral theories. If science also tells us that in the absence of these misguiding emotions we end up being utilitarians then it seems we must either repudiate moral philosophy as a reasonable inquiry or accept some form of utilitarianism.