May, 2009

life — 2 Comments
28
May 09

Hands in the machinery

There’s a lot of truth in Matthew Crawford’s article The Case for Working with your Hands, although although the attempt towards the end to link it to the financial crisis is a little clunky. His general points about the value of manual work still stand, particularly where he implies1 that the education system in a modern economy is little more than a delivery system for office workers. The best shot comes towards the end of the piece, though:

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make.

The “visceral experience of failure” is not something that people enjoy facing, but it’s essential to experience it for exactly the reasons that Crawford describes. Those who haven’t been through that aren’t the sort of people I’d trust, but unfortunately wealth and power tend to protect you from the impact of those those experiences – you might experience failure, but you won’t necessarily experience it viscerally. In the information economy, this is multiplied by the fact that the distance from failure is increased; Crawford suggests all students should learn a trade before they begin work, but it would perhaps be simpler (if less politically acceptable) to simply hold people accountable for their actions.

And now I’m going to plaster a wall.

politics / religion — 1 Comment
24
May 09

Like swatting flies

If rational debate is an airplane, then religious discussion on the web is a flock of birds right in your jet engine. This is partly the nature of religion and partly the nature of the web, and my general rule that nobody ever had their mind changed by debating their views applies. Having acknowledged that, I will now attempt takeoff.

Your attitude towards abortion will be largely determined by a single factors: your view about whether a foetus constitutes a full human person, with all the rights that go with that. If the foetus does not possess the right to life – or possesses a circumscribed right to life – then abortion may be morally acceptable. Unfortunately if you do believe that the foetus possesses a full right to life, then you’re unlikely to be convinced by somebody who doesn’t share that belief, as illustrated by a savant going by the name Diogenes1:

I see nothing wrong with swatting flies.

Let’s say that you have a different opinion. You think the lives of flies are sacred, and therefore you think that swatting flies is grossly immoral. You hold this view with the utmost sincerity. Unfortunately for you, I’m making the rules. And I say:

* You can’t refer to fly-swatting as “murder.” That would be “hate speech,” inciting others to violence.
* You can’t interfere when I swat flies.
* You must contribute to the purchase of fly swatters.

Now, with those ground-rules established, let’s begin a civil discussion of the morality of swatting flies. There’s no need for anger, recrimination, or name-calling. We have a sincere difference of opinion. Let’s– oh, wait, excuse me a moment [thwack!]– find some common ground.

This seems straightforward enough on the face of it – clever enough for some approving comments and links from other blogs – yet the analogy exposes the most basic problem with a “pro-life” position that abortion is murder.  Let’s say that I do believe that flies are sacred, and that swatting them is essentially murder. If I was sitting in front of Diogenes trying to have this discussion, and he started to swat flies, wouldn’t I be obliged by my beliefs to stop him? Equally, if somebody proclaims that they believe that abortion is murder, and is fully aware that murders are being regularly carried out in their vicinity, don’t they have an obligation to go out and put a stop to it as soon as possible, no matter the risk to their own lives?

Yet presumably Diogenes – and the vast majority of pro-life advocates – take no such action, and in such a case, there appear to be two possibilities. The first is unpleasant to contemplate: that the person who sincerely holds this belief but fails to act on it is a coward, a hypocrite and (in their own eyes, at least) an accessory to murder. I don’t think that everybody who holds this belief is such a character, however, so the second possibility seems more likely: that they don’t actually believe that abortion is murder. If the latter is true, the inevitable conclusion is that they don’t in fact believe a foetus is a full person.

Circumstantial evidence suggests that this is the case: take for example one of the commenters on Diogenes’ post, a fellow named Exaudi nos2:

All we would have to do to end this argument about flies is to line the dead ones up on the side walk in front of the establishment that brought on their demise and after the pile gets pretty deep, I think the common ground would be found.

This is a common trope on the anti-abortion side: if only people were aware of the true nature of abortion, they’d all come out against it, and therefore it’s acceptable to publicly exhibit the process and results of abortion.3 Now I have a problem with the idea of exhibiting corpses in public, especially for political purposes, and it seems that most people share this feeling: I wouldn’t, for example, suggest that we pile up the corpses of victims of traffic accidents to make a case for more cycle paths.

Exaudi nos’ suggestion implies that either he believes that it would be acceptable to do such a thing, or that he doesn’t believe that an aborted foetus has the same status as a corpse. If it’s the former, one has to wonder why he doesn’t propose such tactics for other political campaigns – but if it’s the latter, then the only conclusion we can draw is that, if he believes that an aborted foetus does not possess the same status as a dead person, then he neither believes that a live foetus possesses the same rights as a live person.

  1. I really, really hope that pseudonym is meant to be ironic. [↩]
  2. “Hear us” for those of you who skipped Latin class and/or aren’t Catholic. [↩]
  3. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that anti-abortion campaigners enjoy posting videos that graphically show aborted foetuses, but some of them do seem to take a certain grim satisfaction in it. I won’t link to any videos, but they’re easy enough to find. [↩]
technology — No Comments
20
May 09

God complex much?

The BBC reports:

Mr Page said the less data companies like Google were able to hold the “more likely we all are to die”.

We hear many statements like this as Web 2.0 slouches towards technotopia to be born, and the more we hear them, the more we should question them. Certainly technology provides us with a huge range of benefits, but claims like the one above don’t do anybody any favours, particularly when they are so transparently self-serving. By happy coincidence, apparently, Google’s desire to monopolise your data coincides with Google’s desire to save your life!

The fundamental problem with people working in the technology sector is that they believe that societies can be fixed in a similar way to software. If only we had the data, Mr Page laments, we could save more lives. We”ll have a hard time demonstrating a causal link between the length of time Google keeps data and lives saved, but that may well be the case; the question is whether our lives are worth the price we pay for that data.

But wait! you cry, you can’t put a price on peoples’ lives! Unfortunately you can, and we do, and that’s the entire basis of public health initiatives of all kinds. So the social cost of permitting Google to keep our data for as long as it damn well wants must play a role in our decision-making, and we shouldn’t let technology (and particularly technology companies) determine our policy decisions. Out in the real world, problems are more complex than the data allow.

music — No Comments
19
May 09

In the interests of Youssou N’Dour

Intrahealth had a great idea:

Global non-profit IntraHealth International sees the use of open source technologies in medicine as a revolutionary step towards better health care in Africa and other developing regions. To that end, they have created IntraHealth OPEN. In much the same way that a musical piece benefits from collaboration and a sharing of ideas, IntraHealth believes that open source technologies can create better medical systems that will save lives.

First up – a Youssou N’Dour remix album. I loves me some Youssou, so I couldn’t resist downloading the stems and throwing them around, and neither could several other people. This lead me to discover that there are about 3 million open remix competitions floating around the net, which means hours of fun beat juggling. Now it’s judgement week – all the entries are up at the Intrahealth OPEN Remix competition, so why not pay them a visit and vote for your favourite entry?

If you want to give Youssou a helping hand with his budding music career, you should probably vote for the Black Mountain Re-Installation. Okay, so we’re languishing in 64th place at the moment, but it’s not as bad as it appears, so Vote Black Mountain! This is a bass-heavy rubadub, and in order to get the full health benefits of the remix, your computer will need to have some decent speakers…

wordsperminute — No Comments
16
May 09

Words per minute #16: Harrison on Grief

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone.
He’d put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he’d hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there’s your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

- Tony Harrison, Long Distance II

Uncategorized — No Comments
12
May 09

The limits of the possible

thetrack

  1. I’ve been without internet for a couple of weeks, which has been great. For all the goods that the internet delivers – and those goods are unmistakeably rich – there’s too much garbage out there to make it worth too much of your time. Ruthless cropping of RSS feeds, avoidance of anything resembling Twitter, radical scepticism about any claims made on behalf of the internet1 – these must be your watchwords. They are mine, at least while I’m in the garden with a spade.
  2. I’ve discovered that I find my own views quite boring and obvious, and you are free to agree with this. What this means in practice is that my writing has been constrained by my low tolerance for those views, which means that I never quite manage to write the posts that I think are quite important, the posts that help me to develop those views into something more worthwhile. This leads me to admiration and envy of those who do manage to get their thoughts out more effectively, and more importantly manage to make those thoughts engaging even when they aren’t necessarily saying anything particularly interesting.
  3. Ironically one of the main things to remember about the internet doesn’t concern the internet at all. It’s this: almost nobody’s opinions are formed through discussion. With rare exceptions, pretty much everybody forms their views mainly through cultural osmosis – absorbing the views of those around them – and to a lesser extent personal reflection on that osmosis. The mix varies depending on the individual, but you’re unlikely to find many people who can state with confidence that their views were honed in the cut and thrust of debate. We’ve been tricked by tricky Greek philosophers who used the dialogue form to communicate ideas, assuming that dialogue was the way in which those ideas were developed. Doubtful.
  4. My conclusion from this small insight is that the role of the internet – and particularly the web – as the new public square is both trivially true and dangerously false. It’s true in that the web does to some extent reflect the public sphere, and dangerous in the sense that in fact it shapes the public sphere more than it should, acting as an amplifier for any view in sight, whatever its worth. It’s trivial because most people remain themselves in whatever public square they happen to be in, and the majority of people are neither particularly well-informed or particularly articulate in their views; and it’s of course false because the web – for all its capacities – is not in fact a public square.
  5. None of this means that I’m going to post more regularly, or post anything more interesting.
  1. Until such time as the internet has the capacity to make claims on behalf of itself, anybody claiming to speak on its behalf is asking for trouble. [↩]