Never Overlook The Costs Of Being Creative

 

Creative people are almost like a different animal to the people who aren’t creative. If you’re not a person for whom your creative output is your passion – in music, in writing, in art, in filmmaking, in sculpting, or whatever – then you just won’t be able to fully understand someone who is. You’ll never get a sense of that drive, that passion and that exhilaration that rushes through the veins of someone with a creative passion. There is something about being creative that requires understanding and empathy and a connection that uncreative people just don’t share – they don’t have a radar for it, and therefore the time you spend on your projects will often be a cost for them because they can't possibly love your ventures as much as you do.

I'm so blessed that my wife is supportive of my creative endeavours - it makes such a positive difference. It helps that she is creative too, and smart, and very talented. By the way, if you're single, and you sense that a prospective beloved is highly supportive of your artistic endeavours - don't let them slip through the net. On the other hand, if you're passionate about your creativity, don't be yoked to someone who isn't. If they are not passionate about your work, they are not passionate enough about YOU!!!

For that reason alone, there is responsibility on the creative person too. The world is a better place if creative people are selective about their pursuits, because to do something really well is going to take up a lot of your time and effort while you master your craft. You probably don’t have as much to give the world as you think; you are highly unlikely to make a financial killing as recompense for your effort; and those combined costs will be felt by those closest to you as well - so approach with caution, because artistic indulgences are full of opportunity costs.

I’ll talk about writing, because that’s the one I know best. There are well known maxims that writers should always adhere to: like, write about what you really know; only write when you have something to say; and write authentically (be yourself). Bearing the above maxims in mind, it’s rarely sensible to allocate time to writing unless you have the utmost conviction that your writing session will tick the above boxes, especially if you’re writing non-fiction. When I was a professional gambler, the key to making a living was in being very selective in what to bet on; knowing when not to bet is the supporting wisdom in knowing when to bet in order to make a living from gambling. If you apply that wisdom to writing, you’ll find you’ll spend more time not writing than feels natural (or possibly even comfortable), but that is the pearl of a great price.

To see why, let’s take an extreme example. Suppose Jack, a writer of non-fiction, decided to spend 8 hours writing every day for the next 20 years. There’s just no way that he’s going to produce 8 hours of high quality writing every day. That point would be true of any amount of writing time one allocates arbitrarily. But if you only write when you believe you have something to say, you reduce the chances of wasting time on writing things that aren’t really worth reading.

Finally, if you are thinking of becoming a writer, be really strict with yourself with an honest critical appraisal of your credentials. Have you thought things through sufficiently well that your extended thoughts on a page are potentially edifying to a wide audience? And if yes, can you articulate them in a way that’s fresh, interesting and engaging? If the answer isn't 'yes' to both questions, then maybe think again about whether you should be subjecting the world to your musings. Because you have to remember that the cost to the world of your being a bad writer or artist or songwriter is not just your bad work, it is the good work you could have been doing, but never did. If the answer to both questions is yes, then great, I look forward to what you have to offer, and  thank you for what you've given the world so far.   

7 Things I'd Recommend You Buy

 

As this Blog is general and varied enough to enable me to cover anything I want, I thought I’d do something a bit different and make some consumer recommendations for you. Most consumer purchases are a matter of taste, but there are a few things I’ve purchased over the years that I think are so good and beneficial, and I’ve been so impressed with, that I would recommend every home should have one. I’ll even put them in a hierarchical order.

(Pictures of the top six above, and hyperlinks below)

7) Mekeet Silicone Toilet Brush and Holder

Just a small item this, but it’s much better than the standard toilet brushes, because the soft silicone bristles don’t hold the dirt so much, and seem to clean better.  Thanks to Sam Bowman for this one.

6) Vintage Wall Mounted Bottle Opener with Cap Catcher

Simple and efficient for hosting parties: whip the bottle top off and in the receptacle it drops. Thanks to Julie Fitt for this one.

5) Bardinet Grenadine Syrup

The best kept secret out there - Grenadine is like a superpower syrup that makes every other fruity drink taste amazing (non-alcoholic or alcoholic). I only hope in disclosing this information that there isn't a demand surge that leaves a shortage for our parties!

4) Joywell Sofa Armrest Organizer, 6 Pockets Remote Holder

Fits nicely over the arm of your sofa or chair and has 6 generous slots – 2 extra large (handy for your smart phone) and 4 medium size (for remote controls).

3) Halfords Digital Wheel Tyre Inflator Pump Electric Air Compressor

Such a useful thing to carry in the boot of your car. It’s a handy device to pump your tyres with rather than queuing and paying at a petrol station. And if you get a flat tyre or slow puncture on your travels it can be used to get you to the nearest garage.

2) Shark NZ801UK Anti Hair Wrap Corded Vacuum Cleaner

Such an awesome vacuum cleaner, it almost….almost…makes hoovering quite enjoyable! This is the Bugatti Veyron of vacuum cleaners; it purrs like an engine, it has headlights, great variable suction, and corners like a dream, turning left and right with the utmost smoothness and elegance. And if that isn’t enough, it also has a neat Powered Lift-Away to turn it into a smaller unit for your stairs, behind furniture, shelves and other nooks and crannies. I hope my wife doesn’t read this blog post – she’ll insist on doing all the hoovering.

1) John Lewis & Partners Natural Collection Hungarian Goose Down 3-in-1 Duvet, 13.5 Tog (4.5 + 9 Tog)

The most enriching of all my purchasing tips. A bit more expensive this one, but well worth the cost. I’d strongly recommend everyone goes goose down for their sleeping arrangement. We spend nearly a third of our lives in bed, and there’s no better way to do it than with a goose feathered duvet (I'd recommend that it's at least 90% goose down). It’s gorgeously cool and breathable in the summer, and warm and snug in the winter!

The Absurdity Of Quota-Based Discrimination

 

After just reading an article about Coca-Cola possibly not coming down hard enough on a shameful 'Be less white' element of a training session (assuming this is factual), I was reminded of a headline last year that the BBC is going to spend £100 million of taxpayers' money on increasing diversity on TV. On Facebook at the time, I made a comment that BAME individuals make up nearly 23% of screen contributions, but only 14% of the UK population - and that it's a shame the BBC thinks this is a good use of taxpayers' money, given that BAME people are already more than well represented relative to their ratio of the total population. Amazingly, I was told that that kind of sentiment plays into the hands of the 'white lives matter' brigade. Alas, this is the nature of the beast these days - even a valid statistical observation of a television network's demographic is easily met with accusations that you're not really on the side of BAME folk after all.

I'm going to reiterate two points I regularly make, and then invite you to join me at an intriguing place you might not have considered before. First the reiteration:

Point one
Artificial disadvantage lowers overall quality. I don't care about the skin colour of people making television programmes - I care about equal opportunity to express talent, and I care about quality. And there is no question that quotas lower the quality - in fact, they can't fail to lower it overall, because people are being selected for reasons other than their ability. Talent and competence are two of the best forms of discrimination. Besides, people are much friendlier to discrimination than they let on. Humans tend to discriminate against others based on ethnicity whenever they choose a life partner, because they habitually choose someone who is ethnically similar to them. And when we do choose a life partner, we are literally discriminating against every other person on the planet.

Moreover, it doesn't occur to many people that artificial disadvantage probably isn't actually that much of a good thing for those benefitting from it at the surface level. Ultimately, in the long run, it can't be good for a person to know they have been selected for reasons outside of the criteria for which they have always desired to be selected. Trying to artificially create diversity for diversity's sake almost always leads to sub-optimal outcomes, especially if consumer demand is not driving the thing being consumed.

Point two
We should pretty much always start with the basis that as long as it imposes no unfair cost on anyone else, then everyone should be able to discriminate against everyone else, and everyone else should be able to discriminate against us. And anyone who disagrees with that ought to come up with a pretty good exception to the rule. Moreover, despite what they say, nearly everyone behaves as though they believe in this principle. This is where both the right and left need to take notice. Many on the left need to understand better that most unequal outcomes are not the result of unfair skews in the system; and many on the right need to understand better that equality of opportunity will be easier to attain, and bear more societal fruit, if there are fewer instances of capitalising on unmerited advantage.

I support fair discrimination, but that doesn't make me anti-anybody, because I support your right to fairly discriminate against anyone you want. To make the point even clearer, I'm a writer, but I support your right not to socialise with writers, hire writers or dine with writers - but that obviously doesn't make me anti-writers.

We don't choose our tastes or feelings, and so our actions are good if they satisfy our tastes or feelings and do no unfair harm to anyone else. Under that condition, if Bob doesn't want to date African women, and Sue doesn't want to hire white men, then it is perfectly rational for them to do so. Of course, I'm wholly opposed to harmful or unfair discrimination, not just because it is ethically wrong but because it imposes other externalities on society too. When racist Roy opens a pub and puts up a sign outside saying 'No Muslims' he's announcing that if a Muslim tries to come in for a drink he's going to call the police and ask the taxpayer to subsidise his bigotry (you could also add that the Muslim is making a demand on the taxpayer by trying to enter a pub to which he's disallowed entry, but I think that would be a step too far). Consequently, an optimum society is one in which the law makes no imposition on who Roy can serve, but also where Roy becomes a better person and makes every customer welcome.

Now for the really intriguing point
Suppose I open a theatre and insist on hiring everyone on merit, irrespective of skin colour or ethnicity. If a cast of mine has majority white or majority black representation, then so be it, I’ve hired on merit (to the best of my ability). It sounds like some people are trying to say that I’ve imposed costs on would-be actors by not hiring them based on skin colour or ethnicity. But it's not obvious what costs you think I am actually imposing on them. Besides, if I'm imposing a cost on would-be actors by not hiring them based on merit, are you imposing a cost on them by not opening a theatre? If you're not imposing a cost on would-be actors by failing to open your own theatre, how am I imposing a cost on them by opening a theatre and not hiring them? Under both scenarios they are not getting hired, but at least I'm doing 'something' for would-be actors by opening a theatre.

If not hiring would-be actors constitutes a societal cost, then both of us are equally guilty. If it doesn't impose a cost on society then your objection makes no sense. If there is only one theatre in a town, and that theatre owner is discriminating against people he doesn't hire, then everyone is refusing to hire actors for a performance they want to act in, but only the theatre owner is affording some people the opportunity to act in the theatre.

Also – you’d presumably think it’s ok for an actor to refuse a role in a play because he wanted to discriminate against the theatre, but why then do you think it’s not ok for the theatre to refuse a role for someone on the same grounds? You may think it’s obvious why the two situations are different, but with a little thought you’ll soon find that you can’t easily justify the difference.

As I often say, we've got no chance of making important changes to the world unless we get our own heads sorted out first. In fact, if you are given 25 years to sort your head out and change the world, you should probably spend about 24 of those years sorting your head out, and the final year trying to make large-scale positive changes in the world. It's not easy to come up with a system in your head whereby you have a reliable framework for knowing what you should believe on any number of issues. For example, take discrimination, and think when your intuition says it's ok and when it's not. It's presumably ok for a heterosexual male to discriminate against other people by only marrying one woman. It's ok for a car salesman to discriminate against the guy who can't afford to buy his BMW in favour of a customer who can. And presumably if you're casting for a play, or hiring workers for your firm, it's up to you who you recruit. Some people don't actually think such freedoms should exist, but let's ignore them - no reasoning is likely to get through to them.

I personally think people should be pretty much free to do what they want if they are not imposing any tangible harm on others, so I don't really have many (any?) situations where I think we shouldn't be free to discriminate. If you find you do, what you have to do is take a case where you do think the discrimination is unjustified and compare it to the cases where you don't, and see what you think are the key differences. Are they different in any way that's relevant? If not, they are probably not instances of unfair discrimination.

For example, actors are allowed to discriminate against directors. I'm sure no one disagrees with the proposition that actors should be free to take any role they want. If Robert de Niro had two films to choose between, and he chose to work with Martin Scorsese over Steven Spielberg, no one thinks that's wrong. I'm sure no one has a plausible objection to the idea that actors can chose which directors they work for. And if that's true, it seems plausible ethically to say that Scorcese can choose to cast Robert De Niro over Tom Hanks if he wishes. Actors are different to directors, but are they different in any significant way that undermines the ethical proposition that each can discriminate against the other if they wish? I see no reason why they are. From this we can probably infer that in any competitive industry where competence and talent and skills are primary, it's ok to discriminate fairly.

Some argue that people who have a lot more bargaining power than others are better candidates for having tougher discrimination laws imposed upon them. So tenants deserve more power than landlords, and employees deserve more power than employees, that kind of thing. But I've never been convinced by that line of argument. In a rental arrangement landlords have more at stake than tenants, and employers have more at stake than employees. Employees and tenants need only find another job or apartment, whereas employers might lose their whole business if it becomes insolvent and landlord's their entire property if they default on their mortgage payments. Or consider that Joe the plumber strikes it lucky and ends up dating Michelle Pfeiffer. Joe can't bear to live without her, but Michelle Pfeiffer has many other viable options. Michelle Pfeiffer has significantly more bargaining power than Joe, but few would suggest that she should be forced to stay with him. The argument for justified coercion because of more bargaining power is a highly dubious argument.

In asking the BBC to over-represent, we would be asking them to judge people not on talent or merit, but on skin colour or ethnicity. I remember watching The Apprentice last season where there were at least 7 BAME candidates at the start of The Apprentice as part of the total 16 candidates, which is a 43% BAME representation in a population where 14% of the UK population is BAME. Clearly the BBC is overly-politicised, and loves virtue signalling, but all this showed is that statistically if many of those BAMEs were in there for a diversity box ticking exercise (and statistically it looks like at least 5 of them must have been), then some people are being unfairly discriminated against on the basis of traits that have nothing to do with merit. Now alright, you may say that The Apprentice isn't that important to you in the grand scheme of things, but if you endorse unfairly discriminating against people (in this case non-BAME people) then sooner or later you’ll end up with scenarios that you really do dislike.

Consider this. Suppose you’ve written your best ever novel, and you’ve poured your heart and soul into it, and you’re so pleased with it, but your agent tells you that they are not going to go with it, they are going to go with what you (and her) consider to be an inferior novel because the publisher needs one or two more BAME authors on their books. Tell me truthfully that you could just swallow that with alacrity! The reality is, you’d be outraged from the pit of your stomach, however you reacted outwardly. 

Intuitively I think a good rule of thumb is roughly this; if in a Rawslian-type 'veil of ignorance' scenario we are unwilling to apply a law equally to everyone, then we shouldn't be willing to apply that law to anyone. I'd be surprised if anyone can think of an exception to that. Similarly, granting freedoms to a subset of the population group that you’re not willing to grant to the entire population strikes me as a bad thing. That's why I think individuals should be free to discriminate fairly however they want, but the government should be compelled to treat everyone the same before the law.

Consequently, as everybody agrees we should be free to date who we like or go to any shop we like, it seems reasonable that no one should be forced to hire, serve, or rent a room to someone they don't like. If we always support policies or systems that increase overall utility, then it's virtually certain that any random person selected from the population will be better off than they would be under a system that decreases overall utility.

On The Dunning-Kruger Effect

 

Anyone active on social media will know how flooded society is with absurd, half-baked, ill-conceived theories about how the world works. Our culture is awash with people’s outlandish misunderstandings about faith, politics, economics, the climate - you name it. It’s not just alarming that these views and beliefs veer so far from facts and truth. What's more alarming is that the people subscribing to them do so with the utmost confidence, and not even a flicker of doubt as to whether they are wrong. 

There is a phenomenon that explains this: it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is basically people’s inability to identify their own inability in rationalising a proposition. Ironically, of course, because the effects of the Dunning-Kruger effect create blind spots that stop people seeing the error of their ways, those most in need of understanding the maladies of the Dunning-Kruger effect are the ones who are least likely to be persuaded by the redress.

What happens with the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people who know only a little about a subject are still too uninformed to realise how incompetent they are, and those who know a lot are the only ones who realise how enlightened they actually are. How this plays out is that it’s the people who most need to learn how incompetent they are that speak with the most confidence, and those who are most expert are the humblest as their prodigious knowledge informs them of how much more there is to know, and how complex the world really is relative to what thy think they understand. This graph wonderfully illustrates the problem:

People start ignorant and know that they know nothing (the bottom left) but then learn a bit about a subject and their confidence skyrockets far too prematurely. This peak is called Mount Stupid, and it is the point at which they are most likely to spout the most nonsense, and join misguided groups associated with hostile atheism, false religions, extreme left or right wing politics, and climate change alarmism, and groups of that kind. Once people get a bit more enlightened, they move down Mount Stupid towards the Valley of Despair. This is where confidence diminishes as knowledge increases – we begin to realise how little we know, and march on upwards along the Slope of Enlightenment, trying to master a subject. Those who reach the Plateau of Sustainability are the ones who can speak with the most justified confidence, as they have the most knowledge.

Alas, it’s those standing at the top of Mount Stupid who shout the loudest, and who dominate our political discourse and our media. It’s the people on Mount Stupid who tell us that belief in God belongs in the Dark Ages; it’s the people on Mount Stupid who think the gender pay gap is unfair and lobby the government to take action; it’s the people on Mount Stupid who obstruct people trying to earn a living because they are convinced there is a climate emergency – the loudest and most confident are the most ignorant.

Here's a reality check: it takes tens of thousands of hours to become an expert in something, and even thousands of hours just to know an awful lot. It takes those thousands of hours to learn that when you’re an expert you still know relatively little compared with what there is still to know. Most people haven’t spent thousands of hours on any subject; and most of the knowledge of the people shouting from Mount Stupid amounts to seeing a few articles online, a few comments below it, a meme, the odd video, Tweet, and maybe a book or two. Those on the Dunning-Kruger peak of Mount Stupid really have no idea how little they understand these subjects.

A further call for epistemic humility is in the fact that the majority of what we know and believe comes from other people – we rely on others by trusting their expertise and by trusting the discipline of their field too. If you only kept things that arrived solely on your own personal experience you would hardly know a thing. Think for a moment about the many things you are quite ‘sure’ are correct and see how much of that knowledge you have first hand experience of. Do you know any of the texts in the Magna Carta or the surveys in the Doomsday Book? Can you close your eyes and visualise the fine details on any of Blake’s Great Red Dragon paintings? Have you ever been to Easter Island? Have you ever seen anyone perform a segmental resection on a tiger or an elephant? Did you know that the album cover on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon features the dispersion of light as it travels through a triangular prism? Will you ever physically prove that light being scattered by the prism would produce different visible colours, or will you trust the experts? Will you ever measure the electrostatic force between a nuclei and electrons, or will you just trust the experts that solid objects are made up largely of empty space? I'll bet some of you know that if a DNA molecule is to successfully circularise it must be long enough to bend into the full circle with the correct number of bases which puts the ends in the correct rotation for bonding to occur. But you've probably never observed the difference between the 'axial' stiffness and 'torsional' stiffness of the molecule. 

Those are just a few random and unconnected thoughts about how complex the world is, and how, because of the totality of possible knowledge out there, every single one of us in an amateur when it comes to most things. All of those statements above pertain to true realities in the external world, and I don’t doubt that you could find evidence to demonstrate their validity. But those verified facts are the result of years of hard work from experts in their fields (and of course their great many progenitors too). Most of the people speaking the loudest on Mount Stupid would do well to climb on down, master the subjects on which they pontificate, and come back with better ideas, more humility, and much more respect for the complexity of the subjects on which they think they have informed opinions.

What If Price Robots Could Read Our Mind?

 

Let me start by planting a scenario in your head. Jack and Jill go to the supermarket an hour apart, and they see some pineapples for sale for £1 each. Jack really loves pineapples and would willingly pay £2 for each one. Jill likes pineapples but would only pay £1.30 for each one. Both Jack and Jill each buy three pineapples, and the supermarket takes in £6 of sales. If there was a magic price-setting robot that could adjust the price of pineapples to exactly the most that each customer would willingly pay, then it would charge Jack £6 for three pineapples, and Jill £3.90, meaning supermarket sales of £9.90 rather than £6. In the real world, the supermarket doesn't know in advance what Jack and Jill will each pay, so they both get charged £1 per pineapple, even though they'd both willingly pay more.

Now picture a new scene: this time it’s the year 2045, and the price system is structured rather differently. Whereas once upon a time we would all expect to pay the same price for a pineapple on a supermarket shelf, or a music album on Amazon’s website, these days, in the year 2045, the basis for what individuals are charged for all goods and services is based on their own past consumer habits. In other words, just as the products Amazon shows us in the suggestion bar are based on past consumption, prices too may be dynamically adjusted based on how much we are thought to value something.

The current price system is built on an imperfect approximation of a weighted average of revealed preferences in society. But it does mean that we all get different value for different things. This is revealed in the prices we are willing to pay, and the levels of consumer surpluses enjoyed. That’s why a healthy economy caters for Tom’s love of Star Wars, Dick’s love of model railways and Harry’s love of snooker. Each may hate the other person’s favourite thing, but prices account for all the information signals, as individuals look to maximise their own utility, and are a best approximation of how much to charge for something.

The downside of the price system for suppliers is that there is an awful lot of consumer surplus out there (the difference between the price you’d pay and the actual price), which means prices do not accurately reflect individual demand curves. This may possibly change in the age of the Internet and its concomitant ‘big data’ programs, algorithmically designed to track our every move, purchase, taste and interest. An algorithm that can have a much better idea about our demand curves can tailor bespoke prices for individuals. This may mean that a Star Wars retailer would offer their merchandise to sci-fi geek Andy for a higher price than it would Harry the Star Wars-hating snooker fan. In fact, this is happening already is some areas of retail. There are data mining devices that can evaluate your desire for a holiday (if you’ve visited the page multiple times in a day for example) and adjust its prices accordingly.

While this will probably never be an exact science, as individual utility gathering will be difficult to determine with precision, I can well imagine a time in the future when the majority of prices are much more closely aligned to what people are willing to pay. And while this will benefit suppliers, it will no doubt eat into our consumer surpluses, and therefore reduce the amount of value created in society - that is, unless a very adaptive human psychology can keep us one step ahead of the game.

The 'Evil' Priming Of Greta Thunberg

 

In a rare moment of emotional masochism, I just watched the documentary I Am Greta. A popular view about Greta Thunberg - perhaps the most popular view of all - is that she's a young hero, bravely speaking up against climate injustices in the world, and that she's about to go on to be one of the most significant voices of her generation. It's a view that I think is both dangerous and reprehensible.

Don't get me wrong. Under different conditions, the story could be quite a powerful one. Schoolgirl galvanises millions of people to form an allegiance in fighting one of the world's biggest problems, and even the politicians stand up and laud her. If it was for a cause worth fighting for, with an agenda based on reason and good arguments, we could all stand up and applaud, possibly even gush with admiration at such a seminal moment for a teenage champion and underdog.

But we can't, and we shouldn't, because what is happening with the cult of Greta is bad and perverse (for further reading on this, see here and here). In fact, watching what's happening to her, and observing how a mass delusion is leading her so far off course, engenders such a level of disgust and revulsion in me, that I actually suspect the Greta phenomenon might be tapping into something quite evil.

If that sounds too extreme, here's what I mean. There are two kinds of evil that plague societies, which for simplicity I’ll call the manifestly evil and the subtly evil. Everyone knows the manifestly evil – it’s the evil that upon reflection nobody has any trouble identifying as evil. Examples of which would be political agendas behind Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge and modern day North Korea. But there is another kind of evil that goes unnoticed and unchallenged by most of the masses - the subtle evil of bad things purported to be good things. I believe that the radical left’s extreme economic policies, and the climate change alarmism of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion fall under this category - they are abjectly dehumanising entities.  

Now there’s no question that in terms of intentions and moral response, the manifestly evil acts are a lot worse than the subtly evil ones. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Hitler is an all round more repugnant human being than John McDonnell, Paul Mason, Elizabeth Warren, George Monbiot and Naomi Klein (although two caveats: 1: the ideologies they espouse can very quickly turn into manifestly evil regimes - it's only a matter of scale; and 2: under the wrong conditions most people are capable of far more evil than they would wish to acknowledge).

Regarding the profiling of Greta Thunberg - I want to be clear here: it’s not manifestly evil that a group of unbalanced extremists are politically grooming a scared, paranoid, obsessive-compulsive young girl with Asperger’s to be the poster-girl for their cult of delusion. But it may be subtly evil to exploit a vulnerable teenager in this way. It may not contain murder or torture or overt cruelty, but it contains many of the defects associated with moral wrongness, like manipulation, grooming, falsehood, delusion, scaremongering, civil disobedience, narrow tribal agendas and the hugely damaging ‘unseen’ effects of only looking at costs (and ignoring benefits) and trying to demand over-simplistic solutions to extremely complex problems. If not manifestly evil, the cult of Greta is plagued with manipulations, falsehoods and delusions that clear the ground for greater evil to manifest itself, while at the same time damaging a vulnerable child with paranoia and brainwashing.

Something that really strikes home about the past couple of generations is how they unashamedly lack gratitude for the monumental human achievements of which they are beneficiaries, and how so immeasurably better off we are compared with our ancestors. People in the Western world live in the most privileged time of any humans who have ever lived, yet they go around bemoaning the fact that their world is so utterly terrible. Anyone who goes about their business with almost existential ingratitude is barely awake, in my view, and is quite unbalanced and deluded. 

There is, to my mind, a subtle evil about that kind of mentality when it is used to scare the youth of today into an intense lack of gratitude, an entitled arrogance, and an abject failure to apply a proper balanced perspective to the world. Given the harm that such brainwashing has done to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people over the last 150 years, don’t be too quick to dismiss the idea that there might be something a little evil about the conditions that created the cult of Greta!

The Dubious 'What Has The EU Ever Done For Us?' Meme

 

For obvious reasons, this meme above has been doing the rounds recently - purporting to offer a Monty Python-esque rhetorical look at how we've benefitted so greatly from being in the EU. It's a remarkable creation, because pretty much none of the proclamations on the list actually do offer a net benefit to our being in the EU, and the few that do point towards being benefits that would require a lot more unpacking before a robust conclusion is reached, making the list almost entirely superfluous.

To show why, I've grouped them into my perceived categories of error, and highlighted them in the following way:

Category 1 Yellow - Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc Fallacy: in these cases: Since Y (outcome) followed event X (the formation of the EU), Y must have been caused by X. It almost certainly would have happened anyway, especially with the technological advances we’ve made.

Category 2 Red  - Irrelevant, this is one for markets to solve in accordance with their own domestic political legislation, not the EU.

Category 3 Blue - Not a benefit at all because it’s a bad policy, or at the very least one that falls under number Category 1, and probably would have been introduced domestically if good.

Category 4 Green - Too vague to be meaningful, and/or no attempt to justify net benefits in a cost-benefit analysis to determine which aspects of the policy are good and which are not.  

(Some have two colours where both apply)

The ones un-highlighted, I've left for comment – they are:

• The right to work in the EU

My comment: Sorry, no, that’s slippery. You can’t create something like the EU, tell us we have a right to work in it, and then claim it as a benefit. People should have the right to work wherever they want

• 3 million jobs

My comment: No, this fails to understand the basics of economics. Jobs are a cost, not a benefit. Plus if you create the EU and it's a net bad institution, then the jobs are providing less value than if the workers would doing more productive things. The opportunity cost of EU jobs is probably through the roof, like it is with green jobs.

• Single market, with no export charges or red tape

My comment: Indeed, but the whole world should be a single market with no export changes and as little bureaucracy as possible.

Final comment: I think the best things about the EU involve connectivity and collaboration for the mutual benefit of EU citizens – things like mutually established healthcare across Europe, visa-free travel across Europe, co-operation on counter terrorism intelligence, the European arrest warrant, and investment and collaboration in science – where we make ourselves stronger by working together and cooperating for shared progress. 

Alas, most of the so-called benefits listed on the viral document are embarrassingly weak - and the creator needs to think a bit harder.

 

A Covid-19 Armchair Summary

The responses to Covid-19 from various subsections of society have been fairly predictably representative of society as a whole. If the whole UK population was represented by 100 people, then the reaction to Covid-19 would read something like this (feel free to suggest a more accurate breakdown – this is only a rough guess):

-  8 people are so terrified of Covid-19 that they have been conditioned to think that avoiding Covid-19 is the most important thing in the universe.

-  45 people are following most or all of the rules with alacrity, taking one or two reasonable risks here and there.

-  45 people are highly sceptical about the responses to Covid-19 and believe the decimation of our economy and well-being has been a bad error, but they are reluctantly following most of the rules.

-  2 people are so paranoid and sceptical about Covid-19 that they think it’s little more than a global conspiracy to control us like a Dystopian nightmare.   

As is usually the case, not being a man of extremes, if one person’s mind could be represented as a weighted average of those views, I would probably have sympathy with him. One thing we should all agree on is that in a world full of trade-offs, the Covid-19 situation is a highly complex nexus of considerations, with no easy answers.

One thing seems fairly non-contentious, though: if the NHS had significantly more capacity (that is, if the people likely to need the NHS if they caught Covid-19 chose to risk catching Covid-19 by living a more purposeful, active life), then within reason, with the use of PPE, and in conjunction with some obviously sensible restrictions prohibiting major crowds, the majority of people could have lived and worked according to their own risk calculi, and most of the catastrophic damage to jobs, businesses, the economy, human well-being and relationships could have been avoided. That's a very complex and wordy argument to lay out in full, but I feel fairly sure it's largely true. The NHS workers have done a fantastic job with the odds stacked against them, but through no fault of their own they don’t have the funds, capacity or resources to cope with the kind of scenario I laid out above.

Given the foregoing, I’m also quite sceptical about the wisdom of lockdowns – not just because of the obvious damage they will do to society (and especially in the longer term), but also because it’s possible that the pre-lockdown activity spreads the virus more prominently as people take more risks and socialise more and take greater risks knowing they are soon going to be in lockdown. Then again, there have been some ridiculous contraventions of the law (and general wisdom) with large scale gatherings, without which the situation probably would have been much less severe. These fools make lockdowns much more likely to be imposed on the rest of us.

Perhaps to be the kind of society that definitely doesn’t need a lockdown, we would need a human system that’s capable of assenting to a complex top-down Covid-19 directive that significantly helps stop the spread, but one that’s also capable of facilitating complex bottom-up local incentives connected to social and familial needs, relationships, jobs, businesses and human well-being - and it’s clear we don’t have anything very close to that optimal balance (again, because it’s a very hard balance to strike).

It’s also impossible for any individual mind to ingest the full range of costs of Covid-19, and of associative government policies, because it’s just too much information to comprehend. The lost income, the thwarted behaviour, the cessation of activities that can’t be done online, the social declension, and the effects on well-being and mental health are too multifarious to be absorbed by a single brain - so it’s likely that in making policies to protect us from Covid, politicians and health experts are overestimating the benefits of these policies and underestimating the costs. 

Again, through no real fault of our own, what we also certainly don't have is the sophisticated central intelligence to deal with the fact that Covid-19 poses different threats to different people, and the fact that its existence means very different things across society, as people juggle all kinds of priorities and decision-making. And it should be acknowledged too that not all the economic damage is caused by government-mandated lockdowns - there are many workers and consumers who have chosen to stay at home more and not risk much exposure to infection.

I'm sorry to disappoint any readers who may expect more, but I don't have any grand-slam wisdom about Covid-19 that can act as a panacea against the perceived wisdom of the so-called experts. Something as epistemologically intractable as Covid-19 just makes me inclined towards Ecclesiastes 9:17, which says that "The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouts of a ruler of fools."

I do, however, think it is remarkable and alarming how so many people have pushed the narrative that all that really matters these days is avoiding Covid-19, and that no other goals are worth considering if they don't wholly espouse the absolutist position of Covid-avoidance. It's also outrageous to me that our political elite has made virtually all of its decisions without even a flicker of a justification for why these decisions are better than the alternatives. They have acted all the way through as though the alternative consideration doesn't even need an acknowledgement, let alone an argument as to why an alternative model is a preferred one.

Covid-19 is serious, but for most people, the avoidance of it is not the most important thing above all else - we just don't have the central intelligence to facilitate those complex human needs and preferences. And nor will it turn out to have been worth pursuing Covid-19 avoidance at all other costs. I have little doubt that that will turn out to be right, although I have somewhat more doubt than anyone or any group really has enough wisdom and foresight to have got us through the crisis very much better. So I think we should adopt a humble, forgiving spirit of pulling together, and encourage each other with kindness and grace wherever possible.

Writer's Update: Preparing For A New Perspective

Having enjoyed the time-out in 2020 for my awesome wedding, fabulous honeymoon and below average DIY projects, I’m back to editing the books. Focusing on just one book has been helpful. It’s not as much fun, as I love the variety of multiple forays, but present James thinks future James will be glad I was more singularly focused.

Recently, my wonderful wife gave me some sage advice regarding my writing (this is especially pertinent for writers of non-fiction). She said: "Prioritise the book that only you could write". Yes, how right she is. It's great advice for all writers, so we can protect our time and allocate those precious writing hours to the projects that we were born to write. This gentle nudge brought me back to a particular project I'd been dabbling in for years, about God's Genius. Although I'd had lots of fun writing about all kinds of subjects - because let me tell you, there are few things more liberating than the luxury of knowing you're free to write about absolutely anything you like, and that there are no artificial constraints on you - I figured that it was unlikely that anyone else would be writing exactly the kind of book I'm writing about God and Genius, so that was where I should return and focus for now. It's going well.

One of the perpetual joys about the Christian journey is that a relationship with God is forever invigorating the mind with fresh and exciting perspectives. In fact, one has about the same inevitability of discovering profound new truths every day as a man walking on a beach has of finding new grains of sand. There are so many conduits through which God can speak to us; through prayer and scripture, through direct revelation, through friendships and relationships, though our own inner thoughts and reasoning, through our life experiences, and through the multitude of great writers out there, that it's almost impossible for a devoted heart and a dedicated mind to fail to find new treasures every day.

If you want some good Christian philosophy, Kierkegaard is one of my favourite Christian thinkers – a rare brilliance not seen in many writers. Pascal had it in patches, so did Dante, and Milton, and Blake. Shakespeare had shadows of it in another, different, sense, as did Proust, and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky had it in a different way, still. But at his best, Kierkegaard takes us into some deep theological contemplations that are unequalled in any writer I've read. Yes, sure, Kierkegaard is flawed (aren’t we all?), with some inadequate expositions (especially around subjectivity's relationship with truth and morality), but in writings like Works Of Love, Fear and Trembling, Either/Or and Sickness Unto Death he tapped into a way of thinking that has, in my view, rarely been surpassed. 

Of course, in a fallen world, the flaws and the genius have an inextricable entangling - you can't have the latter without the former. For as Blake shows wonderfully in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for the genius, his flaws are very much a part of the brilliance, acting as a counterpoise. What is it he says: improvement makes the straight roads, but the crooked roads are roads of Genius – which, even in itself is a conflicting expression of brilliance and flaw. 

Finally, here's a piece of advice to end with. In life, I'd say there are only three necessary things we should be doing:

1) The things we are compelled to do.

2) The things we have to do.

3) The things we do for fulfilment.

The things we are compelled to do are things related to morality and ethics, like being good citizens and doing what is right. The things we have to do are things related to survival and proprietary, like eating, drinking and wearing clothes. And the things we do for fulfilment are things like being creative, learning, building relationships, distilling pleasure and finding purpose. Alas, so many people do things for reasons other than those three. They do things to court cheap status, or to follow a trend, or to beef up their public persona, or to appear more intelligent than they are. Spend your time doing the necessary things and not the expedient things and you'll give yourself the best chance of a blessed and authentic life.

Three Dimensional Left & Right Wing Politics

I've written before about a widespread misunderstanding of the complexity of left and right wing positions (like here). Today I want to try to visualise those complexities with a 3D graph representation. When people talk about left and right wing, they really shouldn't be making their statements without defining the type of left and right they mean, because there are (at least) three considerations that need to be made: economic left and right, social left and right, and collectivist vs. individualist left and right.

Consequently, I think a more accurate measurement of socio-political society would be a 3D graph like the one I have pasted below, with the Z axis determining a place on the spectrum of collectivism (top) vs. individualism (bottom), the Y axis determining a place on the spectrum of economic left and right wing, and the X axis determining a place on the spectrum of social left and right wing too.

As you can see, I've put a red dot to determine where I would stand, generally speaking: economically right wing (because markets are the primary driver of prosperity), individualist (because liberty and freedom are the primary drivers of progression), and socially left wing (because I believe in togetherness, kindness, tolerance, inclusion, and helping the most vulnerable).

(It's only supposed to be an illustrative model - it's obviously not a fine-detail representation).

Now even if you can get people that far so they think about different types of left and right wing, there's something interesting that plays out in people's perception of left and right wing politics - something I began to think about a bit in a little more depth after I heard Douglas Murray introduce the proposition (although Douglas Murray's consideration was fairly general as he didn't break down the categories of left and wing). The proposition is this. If you start from a fairly moderate position on the social left-to-right spectrum - say somewhere perceived as near the middle - you find that the shift to the extreme right (a fascist dictatorship) is a shorter journey than the shift to the extreme left (a communist dictatorship). It looks something this:

Social left and right spectrum:

Far Left -------------------------------------------------Moderate-------Far Right

In other words, once you veer away from the moderate position to the right, there aren't many perceived steps to take before you fall foul of a dangerous, totalitarian collectivist mentality. If you get brainwashed into Islamic fundamentalism or extreme ethno-centric nationalism and xenophobia, the walk from relatively intolerant moderate to a 'send all immigrants home' or 'Death to all kafirs' mentality isn't that far, because once you tap into a hateful collectivist mentality you are already in touching distance of the kind of extremism that dehumanises people and sends masses to their grave.

But things aren't the same with the walk to the far left: the journey is much slower, and much more Machiavellian. It ends with the gulag, but there are many more steps in between, because shifts to the left disguise their maladies in a more insidious way. They might start with virtue signalling, like endorsing redistributionist policies, bogus missions to save the planet, safe spaces and extremist rallies promoting what has recently been coined 'wokeness' and 'cancel culture', and end up mirroring the dystopian nightmares portended by Orwell, Huxley, Burgess and Bradbury - but they will take more time to be found out than those steps to the right.

A similar thing is true with the economic spectrum of left and right, it looks similar, as does the collectivist-individual spectrum, but perhaps more like this:

Economic left and right spectrum:

Far Left-----------------------------Moderate------------Far Right

Here the shift to the right involves mostly positive things like a freer market, more liberty, greater freedom of ideas, but you only have to champion those qualities a bit more passionately than the moderates and you're soon accused of being a heartless capitalist with no concern for the poor and needy. This is a misconception, of course - for as anyone well versed in economics will know, a freer market, more liberty and greater freedom of ideas are the primary qualities that benefit the poor and needy - they are the answers to most of the problems the economic left are trying to solve.

On the other side, the creep leftwards, if unchecked, will end up with the old Soviet Union or the modern day Venezuela, but along the way it will present itself as a benign, good-intentioned striving towards social justice and the narrowing of the so-called 'unfair inequality' gap. Like a Trojan-horse, the collectivist, authoritarian dogmas that produce murderous far left ideologies more easily creep into public discourse than the authoritarian dogmas that produce murderous far right ideologies. We appear to have a more acute radar to the dangers of extreme right wing politics, which seems to mean undue suspicion of right wing economic sentiments, which are really a synonym for increased growth, progression and a higher standard of living for all.

And with the collectivists versus the individualists, we find that collectivists on the social left and the right want to demarcate everyone into groups as the primary identifier and pit one group against each other through tribal factions based on power and class, and deny that competence and intelligence and hard work and creativity play the primary role in successes. Moreover, what's often unnoticed is that it's very difficult to align yourself with a group (race, ethnicity, political, regional, national) and not want to be in conflict with others, because tribalism is built on a 'them vs. us' mentality, and is hundreds of thousands of years old in our evolutionary legacy. And as those who've read it will know, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, perhaps better than any book, explores how the totalitarianisms of both the left and the right are cut from the same cloth of impulse.

Luxury Government

 

You may have heard of a phenomenon called Wagner's Law (which I've blogged about before), which observes that with increasing economic growth we generally see a rise in state expenditure. Or to put it another way, the richer a country gets, the more it can afford to splash out on luxuries like government, and state-funded projects our forebears could have scarcely afforded.

What's driving Wagner's Law is that capitalism has made people rich enough to be able to afford more government and more public services - and with a more complex, more diverse range of competing forces, we can afford more state regulation and better public services, as long as they are not inefficient and not best left to consumer choice.

But there is also the phenomenon called Gammon's Law (after Max Gammon), which follows a predictable pattern whereby increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production, where the more resources a system swallows up, the less efficient it becomes in terms of production per unit of investment. Pretty much any big centralised institution falls foul of this - schools, health, taxation, the EU, the church - when it gets so big it passes through the efficiencies of economies of scale and gets so inflated that it begins to suffers from diseconomies of scale (see also the Dunbar number), and will show a pattern whereby increased input produces decrease quality of output.

What muddies the waters even further is that there is much overlap between the social, political and economic landscapes, especially regarding human motivations. Humans are incentivised by a complex range of aspirations; material well-being, safety, self-preservation, community, purpose, status and tribal affiliation. So it's not always easy to say that economic freedom is an exclusively 'right wing' trait and redistribution is an exclusively 'left wing' trait, because all humans are motivated by a complex interaction between those and the other factors.

Moreover, we all have stronger ties in serving our closer family, and weaker ties with the wider community, and it is inevitable that human motivations, in large part, begin locally and extend outwards as we have more to spare. That's why, even in a country that sees continual economic growth and raised living standards, more parochial issues related to social standing, status and self-preservation can make people sound as they have missed some of the story. Similarly, those who proclaim that everything is ok and that the market and science can take care of all our problems are also living outside of truth.

Although bottom up driving forces are usually superior to top down central planning, they are not always, because local iterations in bottom up dynamics are not often sufficiently collectively ordered enough to deal with large scale problems or major changes in the status quo (like a war, a pandemic or a big natural disaster). However badly we may think the government has handled the problems created by Covid, there would have been many more problems and deaths if society tried to manage purely by the invisible hand of the market.

On the other hand, despite the raving left's dumb lament that Covid has handed more power to the capitalists, it has been evident that when people have had to live in restrictive times, it has taken businesses with enough scale and size to be able to quickly adapt to the changing needs and demands of the population (supermarkets, Amazon, Royal Mail, tech companies). The government has done a lot of harm to small business by forcing them to close while the big players hoover up the custom, but it takes big players with a capacious business model and prodigious infrastructure to be able to service a nation in crisis.

That's why in previous writings I have been keen to point out that the motivational factors in the left and right wing bifurcations extend far beyond principles of economics - they extend to qualities like motivations for togetherness, kindness, tolerance, inclusion, and helping the most vulnerable - and neither the comprehensive free market approach of the economic right nor the comprehensive socialist approach of the economic left satisfies the full gamut of human needs and motivations.

Once people rightly frame left and right wing into the three considerations that need to be made: economic left and right, social left and right, and collectivist vs. individualist left and right, they will begin to learn that the contributions of right and wing mentalities are both necessary to strike the right kind of balance in a thriving society. As always, we'll need the right balance of freedom and restriction, individualism and collectivism, risk and safety, self-determination and redistribution - you name it, there'll be a balance to be struck.

I suppose the socialists will never be very keen on markets, because they are primed to only see the concentrated faults and miss the more thinly spread benefits. And I suppose free marketers will always have a bit of a blind spot towards the community and solicitous-based nature of socialism because they rightly abhor the economic illiteracy and crass hypocrisy that underlies it. 

Is God 'Pulling' The Universe With His Genius?

Readers familiar with this blog are probably familiar with the genius Kurt Gödel, and his incompleteness theorem, which shows that any finite system of axioms is insufficient for proving every result in mathematics, and that any formally mechanised system in which a categorical set of axioms exists cannot be captured in one grand slam rationale without leaving a brute residue of incompleteness.

I mentioned this because I saw an interesting quote from Kurt Gödel that I hadn't seen before:

“I believe that mechanism in biology is a prejudice of our time which will be disproved. In this case, one disproof, in my opinion, will consist in a mathematical theorem to the effect that the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.”

This caught my attention because it got me wondering if that's right in a similar way to how my biased random walk theory might be right. While Gödel isn't denying evolution happened, he seems to be friendly to a kind of Intelligent Design: that the evolution of intelligent life forms in the time since the big bang is not mathematically likely unless one assumes a vanishingly unlikely set of initial conditions with a cosmic mathematician as the source of it.

That is to say, in a 14 billion years old universe, biologists tell us that random genetic mutations plus natural selection explains the life we observe. So, the consideration taps into algorithmic information theory (like the notion of Kolmogorov complexity) and tools from complexity theory to study if the biologists’ explanation is consistent with the 14 billion year old age of the universe - and in terms of the timeframe a computational problem like biological life requires - whether this problem possibly even requires exponential time. If a problem requires exponential time, then any algorithm for the problem requires at least (roughly) 2^n time units where n is the number of bits describing the initial conditions of the problem.

So if Gödel is right, then this is the biased random walk I've been writing about for all those years, where the algorithm(s) in nature's blueprint were set up by God to give rise to evolution in a timeframe far more remarkably fecund than the mere 14 billon years of the age of the universe. If evolution requires an exponential amount of time to achieve the complexity of life we see after a few billion years of space expansion, then it required far more time than the ordinary polynomial time with which physics measures the cosmic story.

I'm quite a visual thinker, and I keep picturing an idea of the cosmos being pulled rather than being pushed, and that perhaps that's true of everything significant about Christianity. If we consider that biased random walk, where the algorithm(s) in nature's blueprint were set up by God to give rise to evolution in a timeframe far more remarkably fecund than the mere 14 billon years of the age of the universe - you could say the universe is being pulled by the mathematical structure that exists in the configurational search space of the universe's mechanisms, and was already implicit in God's creative blueprint.

In addition, now consider the narrative structure in the Old and New Testaments. We can't think of the Old Testament except through the lens of how it culminates in the New Testament. In fact, by Genesis 3:15 we have already seen the whole summary of the story, from creation, to the fall, to salvation through Christ. Rather than the Old Testament pushing towards the New Testament - as Christ is the Creator of the universe, then the New Testament superseding the Old is not like a development towards improvement, it is more akin to the notion that the improved state is already implicit in God's mind, because it is older than creation. Hence the New Testament is not just pulling the Old Testament forward - it is, in a sense, also pulling everything that follows it forward to the culmination of God's grand plan. To that end, God's created word has the same model as God's created universe. 

The foundation of my hypothesis can be found here:

The Mathematical Bias Theory Redux: Why There Probably ‘IS’ a God – in 20 Steps

Dense Populations

I’ve seen several articles recently in the mainstream media, including one from the BBC and one from Sky News, questioning which countries have had the best and worst Covid-19 policies thus far, where this information is being distilled by considering things like number of deaths, population density and herd immunity. But both articles neglect to consider this properly, because they talk about population density as if it's the same thing everywhere you go. It isn't.

Interaction rates differ from place to place once you stop thinking of population density as merely population divided by area, and herd immunity differs from place to once you consider the different dynamics of interaction and exposure. Herd immunity must, by its very nature, bring about different percentages of immunity in different areas of the land.

Frequency of interaction depends somewhat on population density, but not comprehensively. It's an error to merely calculate density by dividing the population by area. Adding 50,000 square miles of uninhabited fields is not going to have a radical effect on the Covid mixing effect in terms of population divided by area, despite causing a reduction in overall population density. And at the same time it has no tangible effect on the average density from the perspective of any one individual.

 

Further Reading: The Absudity Of The 'UK Overcrowdedness' Myth

 

 

 

 

The Absurdity Of 'Hate Crimes'

I have faith that most people in the UK can see how ridiculous, foolish and damaging the SNP’s prospective ‘hate crime bill’ is – it deserves repudiation at every level. There are actually a lot of interesting elements to consider on the complex subject of ‘hate’, but nothing in the bill gets close to engaging with them.

 

Consequently, this is a post-it note summary of what I think is the general problem. There’s a lot of hate in the world; and hate is unpleasant, and should be challenged and corrected whenever it is reasonable to do so. But once you start trying to criminalise it, things get problematic, because of two principal reasons:

 

1) It isn’t illegal to hate

2) It’s nigh-on impossible to define hate as a legal entity

 

There are no rigorous ways to define justifiable or unjustifiable hate, because people are complex, so are our feelings, so are our ideas, and so is the world that surrounds us. What about if you hate Donald Trump, or Extinction Rebellion, or Islam – are those expressions of hatred candidates for hate crimes?

 

Some people use the term ‘inciting hatred’, but what does that mean exactly? The UK Law defines the offence of incitement to hatred as “when someone acts in a way that is threatening and intended to stir up hatred” But that doesn’t help much, as different people feel threatened by different things. And ‘stirring up hatred’ is, as we’ve discussed, equally ambiguous. If it is not illegal to hate, then why is it illegal to stir up hatred? If someone feels threatened by a negative Tweet or by an abusive rant against Communism on their blog, who decides when a negative Tweet or rant is too much? The mechanics behind ‘hate crime’ logic are built on folly.

 

Moreover, it hasn’t slipped my attention that quite often the people shouting loudest against so-called hate crimes are the people who appear to me to be more hateful than most. Nor has it escaped my attention that the people shouting loudest against intolerance are quite often far more intolerant than the average citizen. It's difficult to take these people seriously: they are like butchers holding up signs against the evil of eating meat.

 

More generally, I think we should be very careful about the way we are suppressing opinions, no-platforming people, and pandering to the snowflakes and the supine easily offended reactionaries. Here's the thing - and this is a variation on Carl Jung's "Fool is the precursor to the Saviour" epigram - in order to say things of importance you have to take risks, you have to be courageous, you have to risk offending, and you have to make challenges to ensure that there is no false security or complacency in consensual opinion. In other words, to be profoundly right, you have to be prepared to be profoundly wrong, a fool, an outcast, even a disgrace sometimes. You have to be free enough to be able to say what others might also be thinking but haven't yet said.

 

Finally, as I said in a previous blog post:

 

"A society that puts people in gilded cages and encourages them to lock the door from the inside is not only fostering an environment that suppresses speech, it is fostering an environment that suppresses thought as well, because we do lots of our best thinking from talking and sharing ideas and hearing feedback. A society that makes people craven about speech makes people craven about ideas, because it keeps a lot of our best stuff locked away in the safe space of our cranium - unexpressed, and therefore unfulfilled.

 

Seek the truth and you will never be afraid to hear anything, because you can't lose: if something offensive or heterodoxical comes along, it is going to be evaluated through your robust truthseeking lens - and if it adds any value by way of a corrective you will modify your view to an am improved state, and if it merely reinforces your view stronger, you will have an even more robust opinion, and a better defense of it. You have to be free to explore ideas and express them, because it’s only by expressing ideas and talking about them that we have a full capacity for learning. You have to be free to offend, and free to speculate in bold ways, and your children will pay a big price for attempts to stultify that."