Oct 26 meeting – Can violence and torture be eliminated?

No one likes the idea of violence and torture.

We all wish that we can live happily with everyone else, sharing with others, enjoying the diversity of opinions and difference in life styles.

Pacifist refuse to join the arm forces to participate in violence against mankind.

Gandhi and King  promote non violent means of bringing about change and topple existing power structures in society.  Moral outrage is the peaceful path to a more equitable community.

Can we imagine a day when everyone in this world possesses the moral compass in them to do the right thing without the threat of violence and punishment?

We have progressed a long way from the cave man days when it is everyone for themselves.  Life may be solitary, brutish, and short and might is right.

Our present day society thrives on co-operation through separation of labor, trade, specialized expertise, and spreading of ideas.

Something as simple as artificial light or simple pencil and paper will be impossible to have if we go back to the cave man’s solitary existence.

However, our interdependent society is vulnerable to free riders taking short cuts to the fruits of labor by others, destroying the incentive to cooperate and properly share the resulting bounty.

Whether it is the shop lifter that takes the merchandise without paying, the burglar that steals what others have acquired, or pirates who plunder valuables from legal trade, all these destroy cooperation if allowed to go on.

For the free rider, violence is too easy a tool not to use to threaten their victims and make a quick getaway.

Participants in an orderly cooperative society are completely side swiped by the threat of violence. The existence of free riders quickly stalls the incentives to cooperate and to invest in the future.

There may be talk of letting the free rider come to their moral senses but ultimately, most people will conclude that their society need a force that can control this violence.

If we cannot morally persuade free riders to take on their responsibility, then for the good of society, we must have a force strong enough to stand up to these free riders and put them to justice by putting them in jail or worse.

Incarceration is a form of violence.  It is forced on someone against their will by brute force both as a deterrent and to isolate them from society.

Civilized society is where we all give up violence and agree to be bound by the justice system with the government being the only agent legally able to threaten violence to those who do not obey the law legislated by the majority.

Will there ever be a day when the moral influence is so pervasive that we can eliminate free riders from our society?

That the abhorrence to violence is so deep that no free rider is able to get past the suffering of their victims?

Seems unlikely.

Then we have the international scene with varying value systems and cultures, a collection of nations with no binding constitution and each nation valuing their sovereignty over the welfare of other states.

Each state has their violence machine, their “defense force” to deter other states from free riding against the first state’s interests.

Free riding and the violence often used are so destructive to our cooperative society that we have to prevent it and the only effective way to do so is by violence.

So might is right but under the cover provided by the might we agree with each other to cooperate and flourish.

What about torture?

If our government is already empowered to forcefully commit violence by incarcerating offenders as a deterrent,  should it not also be empowered to torture against known offenders to gain information?

Sam Harris posed the example of a carjacker being caught by the police.  There is a baby in the car that was hijacked and we need to know where the car is but the carjacker is not cooperating.  Should the police use torture to try to get the car location from the carjacker in order to save the baby in the car?

There are those who say that torture only produce useless information but can we convince the distraught mother that we should just wait for the carjacker to cooperate when ready?

If we agree that stronger persuasive powers are necessary in this case, then should we apply the same tougher persuasions to suspects who may be plotting acts of terrorism against our society?

Sept 28 discussion – What is it that we should not know, tolerate, or be available on the internet?

Knowledge is power.

So in a free society, all information should be freely available, shouldn’t it?

The first thing that comes to mind is the caveat that we should not be free to cry “fire!” in a crowded theater causing panic.

So, nothing that can create panic.

Panic, by definition, is not a logical response. How will a whistle blower know whether the information about to be disclosed will cause a panic?  Will it cause a bigger panic if the disclosure is delayed?

If there is fire in the theater, should the public not know?

What about detailed videos showing how bombs and weapons are made? We have gun control in most societies and yet we spread information on how to make illegal weapons from everyday available materials?

Should it be in the same category of control as the fire arms themselves?

On a personal level, we have genetic testing now that can predict from our genes whether we are likely to have certain diseases and the approximate age of onset.

Some prominent scientists have opt outed of knowing about diseases that have not cure when they take these tests.

Is that hiding their head in the sand or is it better to not know about something that we cannot do anything about?

Is it good to know when we will die?  Our retirement financial planning is heavily dependent on how many years our nest egg has to support us.  Wouldn’t it be great to know we can spend more per year because we are not going to live as long as we all hope for?

What about researching in viruses and diseases?  The more we know about them, the more we can develop vaccines and ways to handle them.

What if during the research, the researchers find a way to have something like the deadly Ebola virus airborne, making it even more dangerous than it currently is?

Opening the door for it to be used by terrorists and dictators?

The counter argument is that we deal with it every day.

We warm ourselves by the campfire that can also burn us in an uncontrolled fire.

We have sharp knives and power tools that can easily hurt us but we use them as productive means for our tasks.

Even the atomic bomb, which some of us would rather we never have the knowledge of, is a product of knowing about atomic reactions and mass energy relationships crucial to modern physics.

Once we know it, there is no turning back.

Basic research is fundamentally different than the design process for everyday products.  Rather than working towards an end product in design, research is about understanding of a material or concept.  There is no prior way of knowing where research will lead. The products come later with the new found understanding.

To know where we shouldn’t go, we first have to know what it is. By then, the genie is out of the bottle.

So, what is it that we should not know?

Summer musings – changing public perceptions

Have a look at this Dilbert comic strip from June 2000.

Being an electrical engineer myself, I sympathize with the Dilbert’s nerdiness, kind of Charlie Brown plus extra nerd.

However, things have changed since the year 2000.

The fastest production sedan today is the Tesla Model S, an all electric vehicle with the famous “insane” mode that will accelerate the car from 0-60 mph in 3.2 seconds.

For those not familiar with these numbers, this is acceleration in the exotic car territory.  Only special cars costing hundreds of thousands of dollars can do this.

This week, Tesla announced that they have improved it some more with the “ludicrous” mode which will allow the car to now accelerate from 0-60 mph in 2.8 seconds.

Who cares, you say.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors as well as Space X and Solar City, said that his first question on his first date with a girl friend is to find out what she thinks of electric vehicles.

A very Dilbert like approach.

Elon added that these days, the reception is decidedly better than before.

There are those who think that spending effort in getting great acceleration times is juvenile and detract Tesla from building better battery electric vehicles.

However, there is no doubt that the public perception of electric vehicles is well captured in the Dilbert comic strip in 2000 but Tesla cars are now written in luxury media as well as the environmentally conscious ones.

Some time between 2000 and now, it is gradually becoming desirable to have an electric car.

For years, engineers extol the virtues of lower energy cost, zero emissions, silent operation, and low maintenance of battery electric vehicles.  The public, though, seemed to be concentrating on range anxiety, danger to pedestrians of a quiet car, high initial cost of buying one etc.

It is the glitz and glamour of a fast car with a big computer screen that finally got the attention of the early adopters and maybe these initial user numbers will eventually convince the larger conservative public to look at the advantages of electric cars rather than concentrating on minimizing the shortcomings.

Public perception is not changed merely by logical arguments but also through trend setters that take chances.

Our evolutionary experiences likely favour following others rather than rely on our own judgment, especially in areas where we do not feel we have knowledge in.

In today’s intricate technical world, that is pretty much everything new.

Political Correctness, part 2

Next Thursday, July 2, we will be revisiting the topic of Political Correctness.

We had a cafe discussion on this four years ago.  When I searched through the previous blogs, it came up and still seem quite on topic.

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We decided then that political correctness is the intermediate stage of a power and influence change.

It is the awkward stage when some of us is trying to bring consciousness to the rest of the group of built in bias that we have not noticed before.

At the same time, it can also be taken to extremes to avoid offending someone who may just be overly sensitive.

The gender equality movement resulting in the change in terms like chairman, to chairperson, and eventually “chair” characterize the move from a default male position to a gender neutral position.

Change is unsettling and political correctness can be the skeptical retort of those believing that a change in words changes nothing.

Did the change from “chairman” to “chair” help the gender equality cause?  Or is it a reflection of the progress of that cause?

Do politically correct terms jog our consciousness of built in bias in our language and attitudes, or is it lip service to a political movement that is too trivial to take issues with?

Is it a derogatory or complimentary term?

Is being politically incorrect just being rude and insensitive to others feelings?  Or is it telling the truth as it is without the pretense of saving face for the other party?

June 18th discussion – Democracy and demagoguery

Next Thursday we will be discussing democracy, the process of allowing the majority opinion to rule over the minority.

I think most of us will agree that cooperation among the human species is beneficial to our progress and superior to a solitary existence while seeing the other humans as threats. Order is needed for this cooperation especially in areas of disagreement. Hobbs’ idea that a monarch imposes an order is still better than the solitary individual sums it up well.

Democracy is merely the next step in forming that ruling order with a better way of selecting that order.

Who can argue that this ruling order should be chosen based on the majority’s preference?

In our modern form of representative democracy, we choose the representative that we send to our central legislative body to make the rules that bind us.  Sounds like such a good system that makes us wonder why Churchill lament that democracy is the worst system except for the rest.

But how is our representative chosen? How are our political leaders chosen by their political parties to enter our narrowly defined ballot at voting time?

Why all the polling for public opinion when our leaders are supposed to lead rather than follow the masses?

The core of democracy is to let people have what they want.  To be chosen as our representative and our leader, they have to respond to what we want.

We therefore have this circular relationship where leaders cannot lead too far ahead of the masses and ideas need to be simple or simplified enough for it to catch on with the masses.

Worse still, the masses are vulnerable to emotional responses to fear, pride, envy, and a long list of other cognitive dysfunctions.

This is when demagoguery comes in.

While the word in its original meaning is just to listen to the people, it now describes the practice of taking advantage of the crowd’s emotional reaction for political gains.

Though the First World War may be seen as feuding among the royal families, the Second World War has a solid democratic base.  The leaders of Germany, Italy, and Japan were either elected or widely supported by the people.

It shows how the masses can be persuaded to embark on a course of action that is both ruinous to themselves and others.

The Wikipedia entry for demagogue is

A demagogue /ˈdɛməɡɒɡ/ (from French “demagogue”, derived in turn from the Greek “demos” = people/folk and the verb “ago” = carry/manipulate thus “people’s manipulator”) or rabble-rouser is a political leader in a democracy who appeals to the emotions, fears, prejudices, and ignorance of the lower classes in order to gain power and promote political motives. Demagogues usually oppose deliberation and advocate immediate, violent action to address a national crisis; they accuse moderate and thoughtful opponents of weakness. Demagogues have appeared in democracies since ancient Athens. They exploit a fundamental weakness in democracy: because ultimate power is held by the people, nothing stops the people from giving that power to someone who appeals to the lowest common denominator of a large segment of the population.

What can we do to rectify this?

A meritocracy based system over the simplified one person one vote?  How do we define the merit system and can we always trust the expert to do the best for all of us?

Search for the elusive benevolent dictator?

More education for the masses? Perhaps against their will? How much can we stuff in their brains before voting age?

Have a Senate like body of sober second thought to provide checks on the masses? How do we choose senators to the satisfaction of the masses?

Other ideas? or are we doomed to live with demagoguery in our democracy?

What are some examples of demagoguery in modern times?

Zero tolerance………

War on………

Terror…….

Evil…….

Pro life, pro choice

Should we always be vigilant when issues are simplified to a black and white dichotomy?

Can the masses be engaged without rousing their emotions?

Meeting on compulsory draft

We had our meeting on Thursday on whether modern society should have compulsory military service for its youth.

Shula said that historically, the Greeks saw war and fighting as an art form that one should train and be good at.  So military service for the ancient Greeks was social participation as well as pursue of a glorious career.

Rafi said that the compulsory draft is a social engineering exercise where youth from all social classes are brought together in one place and put through discipline and routine.  It exposes participants to how the other parts of their society exist. It also shows them how military discipline works in the rapid flow of command and action.

All thought that it is a good idea to put youth out of high school through some form of structure while they contemplate what to do next.  Maybe not training for war but perhaps the national guard for helping battle forest fires, natural disasters, and other situations where local forces need extra help.

Eva is skeptical of authoritarian structures which always seem to be flawed in some way in their directives.  It seems inescapable that authorities misuse their power once they have that power for a while.

It seems that countries that have compulsory military service are either the ones facing existential threats like South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel, or else countries that have a tradition in doing so.

]Therefore, it will be difficult politically to institute a compulsory service for youth as national guard or peace corps as the program cost and lost of a few years of youth is too much for a democratic society to accept.

If the program is not compulsory, it will not attain the social engineering aspects of universal participation or become an option of last resort for unemployed youths.

Rafi also pointed out that nowadays, there are more in the military playing a support role rather than a real combat role.  Therefore the dangers of being in the military service are not as severe as one would think.

Surprisingly, there was not much reaction that the draft will affect how citizens feel about going to war. Perhaps war is always preceded by a built up of local emotions that dominate the decision making process.

Rafi mentioned that part of the justification of having a strong military and the draft in Israel is to back up its negotiation position.  The readiness of the military machine and the draft behind it is as much useful in its psychological effect as its lethal killing effect.

Therein lies the lesson that peace is maintained by force against those who want to take advantage of the pacifists.

May 21st meeting- Is the draft good for democracy and citizenship?

The military force in Canada and now the United States are made up from voluntary participants instead of drafting young people of a certain age through a compulsory military service rule.

The ancient Greeks thought that military service is part of a citizen’s duty.

They argue that it is every citizen’s duty to protect their society and the United States had a history of compulsory draft to maintain their military might.

However, the US military role in the world is no longer just defending US soil from foreign attack.  The Vietnam War effectively turned the population against the notion that their young people were drafted to defend their country.

Even the military was having doubts about recruits that were forced in and started saying they rather have an army of willing fighters rather than those just marking time until they can leave military service.

For the society as a whole, not having military draft tends to put the military at a further distance from the average citizen.  Not everyone will personally know someone close who is or have served in the arm forces and experienced the impact of military conflict close within their ranks.

Does this delegation of duty to a voluntary military make the citizens more apathetic to decisions to deploy our forces?

One can’t help but think that citizens would be much more engaged if the government’s military decisions affect everyone’s family in some way if there is military draft.

Perhaps such a society will be more pacifist from citizens not wanting their loved ones to go to war.

There may not be a case for the draft under normal circumstances but are there unusual circumstances when the country should force its population to fill the ranks of the military if the voluntary force is not enough?

What about conscientious objectors to war.  Should their unwillingness to participate in any war or killing exempt them from the draft?

How do we balance personal freedom to choose against the welfare of the state that we belong to?

Meeting on “why abortion debates are so polarizing”

We had our discussion this Thursday about polarizing issues. Rather than reporting on the discussions themselves, here are my thoughts from the points raised in the discussion.

First and foremost, we have to recognize that we get drawn to sensational and exceptional extreme scenarios.  Media headline writers know this and use it to full advantage to draw eyeballs to their publications.  While it draws our attentions, these extremes positions are rare and do not help with the majority of the situations which tends to be between the extremes.

Propaganda uses the same technique.  Name calling, mockery, parody anchors our mind with images and take advantage of our emotional self for fast simple decisions without bothering to look at the nuanced data that do not all support these decisions.

Both sides of the argument feels compelled to resort to the same tactics, using more fire power from seasoned campaign specialist tasked with winning the battle.

It is like a mudslinging fest in an election. Each candidate focuses on winning the election at all costs.  Someone is bound to win the battle at election day but the penalty is long term voter apathy and distrust of the system. The war for citizenship and involvement loses every time there is such an election.

The opposing sides can’t help themselves but to demonize their opponents.

This is hardly the original intent of the democratic parliamentary system and our concept of free society and free speech.

We need to change the way we discuss issues in a democracy so that we preserve the essence of constructive dissent, ability to accommodate other points of view, and learn from those who disagree with us.

Let the birth of a better idea take preference to winning an argument.

There are also more than two sides to an issue.

Our reductionist training in analysis wants to boil down every issue to a for or against decision when the world is much more complex than that. Reducing complex situations associated with polarizing issues such as abortion to a simple decision misses the context of the situation.  It is the reason why both sides of the debate are able to come up with specific narrow examples to support their extreme views.

We need to move away from the debate format that push towards a winning and losing side and adopt a discussion format to search for a solution that encompass more of the consideration and satisfy more parties concerned if not all.

Compromise to handle the reality of the situation.

This flies in the face of a life of ideals and principled existence.

Do we not teach our children to always be good, never lie, ….etc?

The fundamentalist continues to claim that principles or words from a holy book cannot be compromised and has to be taken literally……all the time.

It is an idealistic stance that is constantly tested by reality.

It is easy to see that anytime there is more than one rule or principle, there will inevitably come a situation of conflict where one of the rules will have to be broken.

When the Nazi police knock on your door looking for Jews hiding in your cellar, you will either have to lie or let innocent people be hurt. Rules come with exceptions.

So how do we address the different positions in the abortion issue?

Rather than looking at the preservation of freedom on one side and the sanctity of life on the other, maybe we should look at the bigger picture including other parties involved.

Instead of the mother’s freedom to choose, should the fetus, the father, the society have some consideration?

Instead of insisting on life starting at conception, should we consider human life as an evolving entity starting maybe even before conception?

The Catholic church do not allow contraception.  Perhaps it is interference with God’s will that is more at stake here than the consideration for the embryo or fetus?

Rather than looking at what positions will be best to win the debate for our side, maybe we should be looking at the underlying source for the disagreement.

If compromise and understanding the other side is the way to conduct our lives, is everything negotiable ?

Here, unfortunately, we have to make a U turn.

While we all have different belief systems and we are trying to live peacefully with people with other belief systems, there are underlying foundations of a democratic society that cannot be compromised.

One example of this is equality, another is protection of the law against murder and other personal violations.

However, we must be careful that we keep this set of democratic principles small to allow a pluralistic society without trampling on the freedom of those who don’t hold our views.

The issue of abortion rest crucially on whether the fetus should be given the freedom to be balanced against the mother’s and that is why the issue is so controversial.

I will not be able to settle the abortion issue in this blog but these are more thoughts on changing the way we discuss our disagreement to aim more at understanding each other rather than trying to win.

Ambiguous thoughts for a challenging, complex, but interesting world.

April 30th meeting -Why is the abortion debate so polarised?

This coming Thursday at the Ideas Cafe, we will discuss the polarizing nature of the abortion debate.

There are strong opinions and ethical stands on this.

The advocates have marked the battle lines as either pro-life or pro-choice.

Why is there no compromise, no middle ground?

On the pro-life side, there is no possibility of sacrificing a life for anything; even if it is the life of an embryo just after conception.

For the religious, there is the unmovable authority from the church to ensure there is no room for discussion.

On the pro-choice side, freedom is fundamental to human flourishing, life without freedom having to live under someone else’ rule is a life not worth living.

Very noble ideals on both sides.

But reality intrudes.   

Should the life of the mother be intentionally endangered just to preserve the life of the unborn?

Should a woman be forced to carry an embryo to term from the results of being raped?

Should parents abort embryo’s because it is either an unintended pregnancy or decide that they cannot handle the future with an embryo that is known to have severe deficiencies?

What about parents who want to select the gender of their next child?

Or just people careless with birth control?

My guess is that most of us are uncomfortable with the two extreme ends of the opposing positions of this debate and yet the debate tends to be all about the extremes.

The extremes grab our attention but it also divides us and steer us away from fruitful discussion of real life situations.

The desire to win the debate takes over in preference to solving issues.

But how do we compromise on the concept of life itself with all the rights that we normally attribute to each human life?

How do we balance the rights of the embryo against the rights of the mother or parents?

Pro-choice groups have argued that just because there is enough material in your local lumber and hardware store to build 10 houses does not mean that there are ten houses there.

So to attribute full rights for a human to a cell just after conception seems an oversimplification.

On top of which, how do we balance the potential future of an unborn versus the adult parents already third way through their lives?

Messy compromises.

The utilitarians think we should maximize utility and happiness and leave us with the concept but keep well away from the messy details.

Rather than get drawn in to the heated debate about abortion itself, I think it is interesting to discuss how our thought process gets hijacked by these polarizing debates.

Is it because the extreme positions appeal to our emotions and moral sense?

Is it because we don’t want to get into the messy detail compromise in between?

Is this not completely against what we should be doing?

April 9th meeting – mourning and griefing

The Buddha said suffering is an integral part of life.

It is difficult to see someone going through the process of losing a loved one. The stages of denial, rage, feeling of unfairness, before the final acceptance of the reality of the lost.

Some falls into deep depression and suffer irreversible damage to their psyche in this process.

Yet, in the cool gaze of logic, it is inevitable that the joys of childbirth, union in marriage, or building a good friendship, will inevitably end in breakup, divorce, or death. Parting is an inevitable end to any relationship.

There is no relationship that last forever without some form of parting that leaves the survivor to mourn and experiencing grief.

The atheist and philosopher Sam Harris wonders if we develop a drug someday that will instantly remove all the suffering and grief of a surviving member in grief, should we offer it to relieve the suffering?

For a lot of us, the answer may be no.

Eliminating the grief may relieve the suffering but it seems to take away the significance of the relationship lost. How can we mark the significance of what is lost if we feel nothing of losing it?

Is there no other way to acknowledge this lost without the sadness and possible depression that follows? Do we really need to sacrifice in order mark this? Is it worth damaging the future of another life to show the importance of something in the past?

Should we refuse anti depressants that will help us come out of the depression?

In looking at pain killers as a parallel, we may be hesitant to take painkillers for just any pain.  No only are there the possible other negative side effects to our health, but we may also want pain as a signal of any internal hurt or healing of our bodies.

So perhaps we do not want to take the wonder grief relieving pill because we do not want to mask our grief through the pill. We want to know when we are truly through the grieving process.

But the medical advice on pain is to deal with it early. Take pain medication at the start of a headache to sooth and relax or else we end up taking much more medication later on. Pain causes stress in our bodies and shortens our lives. Enduring pain as a form of mental toughness is not what the doctor ordered.

Perhaps we have been accepting grieving as an inevitable part of ending a relationship because there is no other option up to now.  If we do have that wonder drug, we can move on with our lives that much easier.

The future is where we should concentrate in.

Not so fast.  We are shaped by our past and our identity is tightly tied to our memories.  Start with a clean slat and we start as a newborn orphan.

Can we have it both ways?  Have a significant past without suffering for it?

Have deep relationships without feeling its loss?

Life without suffering?