Incentivised To Be Outraged

 

People are naturally incentivised to persist with the pursuits that give them income, status, virtue-signalling and influence (call those four things z). Consequently, there are numerous cases in the UK where the demand for some cause or ideological agenda exceeds the supply, and where it becomes prohibitively unattractive for the person to desist, even when supply actually exceeds demand. The formula is roughly this:

If x diminishes, so does y’s ability to obtain z (income, status, virtue-signalling and influence). Therefore, with ever-diminishing x, the category definition of x must enlarge to fill y’s demand for z

You can probably see what I mean when I give examples of x, but it may not be an obvious way to think about the world for everyone. So, here are some:

Racism
Sexism
Misogyny
Economic injustice
Unjust inequality
Unfair discrimination in the workplace
Hate incidents
Climate alarmism and fears of doom

Off the top of my head, these seem like the obvious ones. If we call all those things x, then we know they exist in small quantities or in meagre degrees in the UK, but they are nothing like the narrative the y groups would have you believe. So, to keep the agenda alive, and justify continued institutional or tribal existence, they try to convince you to tool up because we are fighting against giants, when in reality, in a civilised place like the UK, we are mobilising tribal groups to confront foes that now survive mostly as ideological phantoms. 

Not All Cultures Are Equal

 

It’s blindingly obvious that not all cultures are equal. If forced to live somewhere, I’d wager that virtually all my readers around the world would rather live in Switzerland than Somalia, or Norway rather than North Korea.

If it’s blindingly obvious that cultures are unequal; and if it's blindingly obvious that not all societies are equally successful, flourishing, or desirable places to live; then it’s also blindingly obvious that the migration of cultures into other cultures is going to cause problems if the migrant cultures have values and attitudes that are unfriendly to the majority of the citizens of the cultures above them.

I can even show you this formally. Readers who weren’t reading my blogs back in 2013 might like to know about my two blogs on John Harsanyi’s amnesia principle (see here and here), because Harsanyi’s work is compelling, and speaks into so many ethical considerations. Harsanyi’s amnesia principle (which was later developed by John Rawls in his ‘veil of ignorance’) posits that a fair social choice requires decision-makers to choose society's rules as if they have complete amnesia about their own personal status, abilities, and position in life. By removing self-interest and knowledge of one's own identity, individuals rationally select policies that maximise the average utility across all members of society.

It’s strange, then, because virtually every citizen of the UK knows this is a problem in our own country, yet the majority of UK citizens are choosing to live as though it isn’t happening, or that it is happening but they don’t want to appear bigoted or racist by challenging it. Of course, as we are seeing with Piddington, the former group soon becomes incensed and galvanised when it happens to them - and that would likely be true of both groups if they became more directly affected by it.

So, think of this in terms of the proposition that not all cultures are equal. Imagine an equal probability of being anyone in the society’s population, where the utility of a model like this is the expected value of the outcomes - that is, the sum of probability of outcome times utility of outcome, meaning the utility of an equal probability of living any life in the society is the average utility of the society. Harsanyi contended that the best society is the one with the highest average utility - that is, a rational, impartial observer would prefer whichever social arrangement maximises this average utility, giving rise to average utilitarianism.

Therefore, an optimal immigration policy must also be a sensible benchmark for social progress, in that it must navigate between the errors of per capita utility and total utility models in who it encourages to come into the country, and which polices it enacts upon arrival (with people often arriving illegally).

If human flourishing is the ultimate measure of a society’s success, then we must accept that the cultural frameworks generating that flourishing are not interchangeable, because culture dictates the boundaries of social trust, civic cohesion, and economic success - and some cultures are better than others, and some individuals are better than others. An immigration framework that pretends all cultural systems yield equal social utility is not being compassionate - it is being wilfully blind to the mechanics of societal breakdown.

And I say all this as a global citizen who is tolerant and respectful of all human needs, from whichever country or culture. And I write this to show too that not all of these kinds of arguments are coming from what is lazily written off as the ‘far right’ (see my YouTube video on this here) - specifically to contend that a prudent immigration policy must acknowledge that welcoming those whose cultural norms undermine the very social capital that produced our prosperity does not expand utility - it comes with the danger of systematically diluting it.

On The Fine-Tuning Argument

Regular readers might be shocked to learn that out of 1500+ articles on various platforms, I’ve never devoted a single blog post to the fine-tuning argument. I’d say my two principal reasons for this are as follows:

1) My primary issue with the standard model was stated in the 2012 blog post Why Intelligent Design Fails As A Theory as follows: 

“We say the universe looks fine-tuned because our conceptualisation of fine-tuning has been attributed to the patterns we observe in nature. But don't forget concepts of fine-tuning didn't begin as cosmological observations; they began with concepts related to the adjustment of parameter models within engineering, and the electromagnetic spectrum, with low-end frequencies of things like radio waves, and the high-end frequencies of gamma rays. Fine-tuning is a human conception, and to call the universe fine-tuned for life is rather like claiming that our legs are designed for trousers because they fit in so well.” 

2) I have my own variation on the fine-tuning model, which takes a more expansive interpretation of God’s creation, as outlined in my book The Genius of the Invisible God (and as seen in blog posts like The Mathematical Bias Theory: Why There ‘IS’ a God – in 20 Steps 

But I want to write an article now, because fine-tuning arguments for God are interesting (and ultimately compelling at the deepest level, as per my number 2 above), and they have gained lots of popularity with the rise of online blogging and podcasts – it’s just that so many misunderstandings are uttered about them (from both sides) that you’ll do well to stumble upon a genuinely enlightening conversation about them.

So, let me try to produce something that proves to be worth my while writing, and (hopefully) worth your while reading.

The first thing to say, about point 1 is that, obviously just because fine-tuning is a human conception it doesn’t mean it’s not true. Every description of reality is filtered through human concepts; we have no other means of apprehending the world. The challenge has always been to determine which ones illuminate reality and which merely project our assumptions onto it.

And there are really two distinctions at play here:

1) Conceptual distinction: Fine-tuning is a human-imposed category and may not describe reality itself. 

2) Anthropic objection: We observe a life-permitting universe because only in such a universe could observers exist. To use an analogy, a creature can only awaken in a house compatible with its existence, but it does not follow that the house was built for that creature. Similarly, observers can only exist in universes compatible with their existence. Having established that, we are ready to move forward. 

How fine tuned does the universe appear to be?
It’s true that the universe appears to be exquisitely fine-tuned. The parameters that govern the laws of physics are set within an extraordinarily narrow band, enabling the existence of complex structures. Take the cosmological constant, which dictates the rate of the universe’s expansion: if it were slightly stronger, the universe would have torn itself apart almost instantly. Conversely, if it were just a bit weaker, it would have collapsed back in on itself before any meaningful structures could emerge.

The potential range for the cosmological constant, based on our understanding of physics, is immense. Yet, for complexity to arise, it must fall within a minuscule fraction of that range - approximately one part in 10^120, as the argument goes. This figure purports to represent how finely balanced the value must be within its possible range for a universe capable of forming complex structures. The odds of the cosmological constant being fine-tuned to 10^120  are so staggeringly small that it's difficult to comprehend. But if you imagine the entire observable universe filled with grains of sand, with each grain representing a possible value for the cosmological constant - then picking the one correct grain of sand by chance would be far more likely than achieving the necessary fine-tuning.

However, some people are not convinced that this is a good indication of a created universe. One of the most common objections to fine-tuning is the claim that we can’t say that the cosmological constant is rare as we only have one example of it taking on a value. But this gets probability wrong. By that logic, we could never identify any single observed outcome as improbable, because every outcome only occurs once.

No, we say something is probable or improbable as a ratio of favourable cases to total possible cases. That’s why we can say it’s highly probable that it will rain in Norwich at some point in November 2026, but highly improbable that lightning will strike every house on my road at precisely 12:01pm on November 25^th 2026.

What the objectors miss is that the rarity of the cosmological constant actually does arise from theoretical models of physics, which define the space of possible values it could take. These models establish the vast range of potential values and demonstrate that the subset compatible with complex structures is incredibly narrow. The rarity is not inferred solely from observing our universe as a single hit, but from the theoretical framework that defines the range of possibilities. Similarly, planet Earth only happened once, but the improbability of Earth-like planets can be evaluated by comparing the total number of planets and the conditions required for a planet to support life.

Consequently, then, the vast improbability of the cosmological constant is determined by comparing the tiny range of life-compatible values to the total theoretical range - and under that probability estimate, it is remarkable. Now, if it were possible that you could randomly choose one grain of sand somewhere on Cromer beach without my knowing which one and leave it in its place, and the next day I went to the same beach and found your grain of sand on my first attempt, you’d have good reason to believe I had some inside knowledge. Similarly, with the cosmological constant, there is a good reason to suppose that those initial conditions were specially selected by a God who knows what is required to create life in this universe.

And let me conclude by saying that the oft-proffered multiverse objection; that the fine-tuning of this universe could be explained by the existence of a multiverse - each with different physical constants - does not remove the explanatory challenge, it merely shifts the very same problem along to an even bigger problem of why there is a multiverse with the capacity to generate such a vast array of universes, each with different physical constants. Such a multiverse would require its own precise conditions or fine-tuning to generate a vast array of universes with varying physical constants.

For a multiverse explanation to succeed, it must generate a sufficiently vast ensemble of universes, with a distribution of constants that makes life-permitting universes unsurprising. However, if there’s no guarantee of equal probability across the range, the multiverse might need vastly more universes to achieve the same likelihood. The improbability of such a multiverse-producing mechanism might itself approach or exceed the improbability of fine-tuning in a single universe. And if the multiverse did indeed confer equal probability across the range, that would also require its own precise conditions or fine-tuning to generate equal probability.

Whichever way we cut the cloth, fine-tuning is astounding, and remains strong evidence for God the cosmic mathematician, but only when conducted in the right way. The reason is that the argument is not really about improbability alone. Improbable things happen all the time. A random arrangement of Scrabble tiles is improbable, but so is one of Mozart’s symphonies or one of Shakespeare’s plays. The difference is that the latter exhibits an identifiable structure that intelligence is known to produce. The real question is whether an outcome displays a recognisable pattern that points to intelligence in a way that augments basic fine-tuning arguments, which is what I’ve attempted to present in my works The Genius of the Invisible God, and The Mathematical Bias Theory.

The big failing of most fine-tuning articles I’ve read is that they underestimate the extent to which fine-tuning is unlike ordinary improbabilities because it concerns not an event within the system or an improbability within a set of probabilities, but the architecture of the system itself. We are dealing with the mathematical conditions that make a created system possible in the first place.

So, to put it in one simple line, it is the reasoning that says: behind the cosmic mathematics stands a cosmic mathematician.