Techno-optimism is a cloak for selfishness

I was chatting yesterday about techno-optimism. My position was that techno-optimism is foolish enthusiasm.
I found the article below this morning, showing that I'm not the only one who thinks so.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/why-growth-cant-be-green/
 We might have seen good technological progress in the recent past, but that's more likely to have been 'low-hanging fruit' than a sign of endless progress to come.
'Study after study shows the same thing... that there are physical limits to how efficiently we can use resources. Sure, we might be able to produce cars and iPhones and skyscrapers more efficiently, but we can’t produce them out of thin air. We might shift the economy to services such as education and yoga, but even universities and workout studios require material inputs.
Once we reach the limits of efficiency, pursuing any degree of economic growth drives resource use back up.'

We've all studied calculus at school, right? That's explained to us as taking a very small slice of a graph and showing that for very small slices of the graph that line can be modelled as a straight line. The gradient appears to be steady for small bits of the graph. This is true even for exponential changes.
So it might be that progress gets exponentially more difficult, but we've only had professional scientific research institutions for such a short period of time that it looks like we're making steady progress. Or it might even look like progress is accelerating, because we funded research more than we did at first.
But now that we fund it less, in an age of austerity and lack of respect for science or investment in the future, and it's getting harder to make progress, we can rationally expect progress in many fields to become dramatically slower.

I know the example of medical research best.  When we first started discovering how the human body worked, the advances came fast, and they were important. We discovered that a whole category of compounds could kill bacteria; we discovered that cortisol, just one drug, could massively affect the body, reducing inflammation and helping recovery in over-inflamed conditions such as allergies and auto-immune disorders. But we know those drugs now. There's a book's worth of detail to cover, but pharmaceutical companies are creating slight variations on existing drugs in the hope that the new molecular structure will have slightly improved properties... and in the cynical ploy of patenting something new and marketing it as the best option even though the out-of-patent drugs are as good, or negligibly worse.
Medical progress simply will not be as fast again... or as fast with the same level of investigation. We are now in the realm of needing to personalize treatments, of understanding the phenomenally complex systems that biology creates, and working out how to achieve the effects we want without terrible side effects in some part of the web of interlinked processes. We need therapies, targetting multiple systems in real time and with feedback on progress, possibly targetted to specific areas rather than taken as a pill that lets the drug go wherever the body can take it. We need to excise bad DNA and replace it with functional DNA. These are not one-off drugs. These are complex treatments based on even more complex understanding. It won't be simple.

Sure, techno-optimists usually talk about computing and consumer goods and extrapolate to climate change and other areas. Maybe it's because the physics of computing is simple... or that physics, as a discipline is simple and clean compared to biology. Yes, we have made faster and faster computer chips. But we already know the theoretical maximum for silicon-based computing speeds. We know there is a limit. We know that scientists are working hard to find alternatives.
That doesn't mean that geo-engineering our climate will be easy. That's a strange leap of faith. It's like saying that because a toddler has already learned to walk, which is four or five times as fast as crawling, and is on its way to running, which is four or five times as fast, it will be travelling at 100 mph by the time it's 10 years old, crossing continents in a day as a teenager and visiting the moon for the weekend in middle age.
We can just about imagine that happening. The toddler could learn to fly an aeroplane very young and cross continents, and we, as a species, might establish a lunar base within its lifetime, where tourists can go.
But those achievements are not as simple, or as guaranteed, as the progress we have already seen. They are vastly more complex. And if we carry on with this simple extrapolation, we can expect our toddler to travel to Mars in a month within its lifetime. These seems less likely, and is certainly not a reasonable conclusion based solely on its progress in learning to walk and run.

There's another problem with techno-optimism. It's the cop-out option: it's driven more by the desire not to have to do anything, or worry, rather than a rational assessment of probability. But even if these things were probable, that doesn't mean that we should rely on them. Many optimists point to economic growth: growth has happened in the modern world, so we should rely on it, and take out debt, and promise pensions, based on the understanding that future generations will magic away it all with their enormous wealth. And yet relying on consistent growth for our models is what caused the financial crash: the Black-Scholes model was a good model, but only if used sensibly, with good data. People used only data as far back as the previous crash.
We have already seen twenty years of static wages; young people are now likely to be poorer than their parents. We have cut back on investment in infrastructure and research to fund pensions and tax cuts, and we expect growth will simply happen, because it always has. Because life will find a way.
Life does indeed find a way, but we might not like it. Like the humans on Easter Island, or the woolly mammoths, or the dinosaurs, we could be racing to a future in which the path 'life' chooses for us is not to have life; to be replaced by something that can survive in the mess we leave behind.

Maybe that's ethically acceptable. Maybe we do have no obligation to preserve anything for the future, or improve the future. But if that's what we think, we shouldn't pretend we're doing the future a favour. We shouldn't claim that pushing debt and problems to others because we hope they'll be better able to deal with them is anything other than selfish, lazy and self-interested. Even if it is efficient, a virtuous person would take the problems of the moment on and never dump them on someone else.

What do you debate?

As with so many ideas, this one was triggered by someone else's opinion article. Laurie Penny, a respected and sensible journalist, was moved by her recent experiences to explain that joining bigots for a debate shows them too much respect and gives them a platform that they do not deserve.

https://longreads.com/2018/09/18/no-i-will-not-debate-you/

In this, she's right. But isn't it interesting that she writes 'I will not debate you'? When I was young I debated ideas, and I still like to. I might even debate about a subject. But I tend not to debate people. Is a person a proposition?
"Spending money now will grow the economy so much that the young will pay off our debt and thank us."
"I find that debatable."
That makes sense. That's because there's a proposition which is debatable. But could you say the following?
"Donald Trump"
"I find that debatable."

It's nonsensical. Or rather, it's nonsensical if we use 'debate' the way we should (and by 'should', I mean with the meaning it always used to have, the meaning that makes most sense and the meaning I prefer). Verbs usually take as their object the target of the verb. I open the door, not the hinge, even though without the hinge I can't open the door. I run the distance or the route, not the ground, even though I can't run without the ground to run on. I debate the subject, even though without an opponent there is no debate.
But nowadays we don't debate an idea. We debate someone else. It says a lot about what we focus on as a society. The idea is not the idea! The idea is to enjoy the conflict; to focus on personality and victory or loss. Debate is about scoring status points, humiliating the other person and making people want to be on the status-winning side, not the humiliated side. Ideas and logic are a minor way to do this, not the focus. Society is focussed on style, human interest and status, not ideas and reason.
Laurie Penny reinforces that approach by misusing the word 'debate'. Perhaps next time she refuses to allow a shift in normality that would make a bigot's ideas acceptable she can also refuse to allow a shift in usage that makes a focus on emotion and status more reasonable than a focus on reason.


As I read her well-argued, and otherwise hugely insightful piece, I was also struck by the assertion that debate, in the modern format of point-scoring status-seeking and humiliation, is macho. That's an easy thing to say: it's easy to imagine two male loudmouths on television sniping at each other whilst saying nothing of substance. Because that's what our television debates mostly are.
But is that macho? I understand that patriarchy, for feminists, is a great and nebulous force behind a lot of evils in the world. I even agree that a lot of what we might think of as masculine behaviours are bad, especially in the modern, civilized world. But I also think that we need to be careful about ascribing every problem to our favourite enemy; if we're wrong, not only will people be less inclined to believe us when we're right, but we'll also miss another enemy, which will carry on happily.
Yes, men love to show off and gain status. But I can definitely think of macho men who scorn intellectual pursuits and think that poncing around in a debating chamber isn't very manly. I can also vividly remember the macho respect I got at school for never engaging in insult-trading, but being ready to beat up people who actually attacked me. It is girls who are stereotypically the ones who engage in status warfare, humiliating others and enjoying wars of words and PR.
I don't think it's right to say that modern debate is just another symptom of patriarchy and it's yet again men and men's instincts that are to blame; or that women in general would do it all better. The focus on status and humiliation is a deeply human, not male, drive. It's the worst side of our psyches, but it's in all of us, and it's brought out in all of us by the society in which we live. After all, without the ability to sell products as statusful in some way, most advertising would be worthless.
If we conflate capitalism (or our version of it) with macho culture, we're mislabelling the problem. As the Iranian activist Masih Alinejad said 'in all religions and in all societies, first they come for the women'. It's not that sexism is the driving force; it's just the first type of oppression to emerge.
No doubt sexism and neoliberalism intersect, and dumping all the problems of the world on sexism's door might help motivate women to change things... but it will motivate them to change the wrong things. If we want to do good, we should be sure we're aiming to do the right good, and the best good.

Ms Penny later in her article goes on to deride Bannon's approach to debate as like the host of con-artists and scammers out there. It's utterly immoral; she rightly says that his lack of integrity is part of his ideology. I understand where women are coming from when they look at the mass of oppressive forces in the world, overlapping and reinforcing their effects, but I also think that the best commentators make sure they don't mix things up. If women start to think of men, and maleness, as being the same as having a complete lack of integrity, they also start to lose the goodwill of those of us who regard a stubborn devotion to principles even in the face of society as quite a male thing. Men are good at disregarding social rules. That is a male thing. But social rules can be wrong. If you have a principle behind you, and you go about things in the right way, your maleness is good.

 I've already said that I hate a lot of what we might call stereotypical masculinity. But I am a man, and I won't be made a scapegoat for all the evils of society. That's what the Conservatives are for.

The global problem of free dinners

Imagine you, I and a random third person find ourselves the sole members of a dining club. This club has massive endowments and gets £3 million of income a year. It has two rules: we can spend the income on 3 dinners a year and any member can invite new members to join. 2/3 of members must agree for the rules to change.

                 What will happen?

                Well, perhaps you and I agree that we want more dinners. Together we vote to make it daily, which still £2,700 a day for dinner. And then we both invite a few friends, so that we can have massive dinner parties at fancy restaurants every day. Our lives have changed enormously.

                But the third person invites some friends too. And they invite some friends. After all, they’re all full members now too. Our 30-person dinner parties begin to happen at less and less fancy restaurants. I dig into the endowment to fund mine, and without that cost coming from the income, your expensive dinners and the dinners of all the other people are funded for a year or two.

                But they keep on inviting more friends. You start to tell everyone not to invite more friends to the club, but everyone hates you. It’s their right to invite friends: why should they be the last to the party, knowing only the person who invited them, when they could bring just a few more members and be the centre of their own little party? It’s your fault, for wanting expensive dinners and for voting to make this boon daily rather than thrice-annually. It’s my fault for digging into the endowment. You and I and our friends should stop enjoying dinners and our vast expenditure would stop. The endowment might even grow again and we’d have the full £3 million of income to spend on everyone. Soon enough there might be a pound or two for dinner for everyone!

                Does that feel a bit unfair? A bit silly? Of course you and I would vote to restrict membership as soon as we could. We’re not stupid enough to leave free money open to everyone. We’d want to limit the number of members because every new member reduces the income the rest of us enjoy. The problem is that having a friend join the club is a greater benefit a member than the loss of income is a problem. It matters to have your friends join you for dinner; you’ll happily have slightly less expensive food for that.

                So the incentive for everyone is to invite their own friends and not let anyone else invite theirs. As founding members, we inevitably get to enjoy expensive dinners while the club fills up, and we inevitably get to invite our friends, because there’s so much capacity at first. So later members will always be able to criticise us for having got our way and for not wanting to share what we enjoyed.

               

                If the situation sounds familiar, it’s because this is an extended metaphor. Welcome to the industrialized world. Industrialization allowed us to use the world’s resources much better than previously. We became rich, and industrialization spread. Now the whole world is consuming resources the same way and there are too many of us on the planet. But population control is not an option because everyone has the right to make their own family.

                Yet every new birth, with its claim to planetary resources, diminishes the claim of everyone else already alive. There’s an externality that no-one pays the price for. Everyone wants their own happy family, their own private party at the world’s expense, but it must be paid for somehow. Why not limit new members? When they’re only potential people, they’re not being harmed by being excluded from the club.

                True, all us new members, young people who haven’t yet had children, might find it unfair that we don’t get to do what our parents did. But that doesn’t mean that we should merrily carry on into oblivion.

Intranspection - trolling and transphobia

The president-elect of the students’ humanist association has been forced to resign because he was accused of transphobia. He wasn’t transphobic; he was merely judged by the members of a free-thinking organization who refused to engage with free thinking.

The fact to grapple with is that some people do not have the traits of the gender to which we would normally assign them.

That gives us three options:

1. We can choose to ignore them, or regard them as dysfunctional in some way.
2. We can re-think our assignation of these strict gender categories and assign them a different category.
3. We can question the association of these strict groups of traits with gender categories.

I, Germaine Greer and this president-elect choose number 3. The trans movement chooses number 2. Bigots and idiots choose number 1. But the trans movement refuses to accept the possibility of a third option. For them, rejection of their opinion means that you must choose 1. It’s a straw man fallacy; a failure of understanding and imagination, and a refusal to engage or communicate.

                I am happy calling a trans-man a woman. I am happy for women to be macho, aggressive, passive, sporty, intellectual and so on… have any set of interests they choose. Of course, I dislike macho, aggressive people so I might still judge someone for displaying bad traits, but not because those traits become more disagreeable when your crotch is different.

                By promoting option 2, which is unnecessary if you believe in option 3, and by not acknowledging anyone who chooses only option 3, the trans movement is implicitly denying option 3. It is telling us that we should keep our strict definitions of masculinity and femininity, because that’s needed in order to let people pick the other one based on which they identify more with. That is a socially destructive thing to do: those strict straightjackets are restrictive and pointless even if you get to choose which one to wear. I’d rather be called transphobic.

                Of course, there might be a good argument for supporting option 2 as well as 3. Maybe it does add some value somehow. I don’t know, because no-one will discuss this: the debate is shut down by assuming that anyone who disagrees with the ‘2 only’ position wants option 1. 

This problem with the trans movement is just one example amongst many of what is happening in wider political debate, especially on the left of politics. There’s a stubborn insistence that there are only two categories of thought: evil, or exactly what the doctrine is. If you disagree, you’re an outright fascist or a 5^th columnist. And the growth of trolling has made this worse: trolls mimic open-minded discussion, saying provocative things to waste time or inflame their victims’ emotions. So much so that perfectly reasonable behaviour is now warned against as trolling; a bit like a religion, believers in current lefty doctrine are inoculated against improving or changing their ideas by being coerced into believing that any engagement is the devil at work. It could be a troll, but doesn’t have to be; there’s another failure of imagination.

1. Someone disagrees with you and is evil.
2. Someone agrees with you.
3. Someone disagrees with you and is right/ requires you to build on your own ideas to justify them.

Yet again, the third option isn’t acknowledged. Building on your own ideas is hard work, and if you’re a pseudo-intellectual who doesn’t have a coherent set of beliefs, being forced to explore them fully might feel worryingly difficult. I can understand that being forced to confront one’s own inadequacies when the troll isn’t being examined at all can feel unfair, but that’s the price we pay when we’re the ones to advance ideas and proposals. As long as other ideas get the same criticism, all is well.