Drives me nuts

Note: This post involves the absurd internecine disputes within the objectivist movement. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, or if you just don’t care, ignore the rest of this post and go check out Garfield minus Garfield, which is my favorite existentialist cartoon project on the web. If you don’t care for existentialist cartoons or objectivism, then… well, then I’ve got nuthin.

Screed after the cartoon.

So I came across this today. It’s a post by Diana Hsieh, laying out the particulars of some mailing lists she runs. They’re mailing lists for Objectivists (is it possible to double-capitalize a letter?), but ONLY for REAL Objectivists. Because, you know, the movement is so big and unwieldy and so widely influential that it’s really, really important to draw a very fine distinction about who can and who can not be admitted to any particular No-Homers Objectivist club.

Yeah, I’m probably one of the Non-Objectivist objectivists that these lists specifically exclude. I used to work for an organization that gave her scholarships and philosophical training, and I’ve actually spent time working and associating with some of the most prominent, intelligent, and articulate libertarian (hisssss… hisssss…) defenders of free-markets and free societies in the country.

But my frustration isn’t about me being excluded from her mailing lists. Really, I’ve been excluded from lots of mailing lists; being bumped by a bunch of people supposedly committed to empiricism and intellectual rigor for ideological apostasy is OK. I’m not hurt by it. It’s like getting kicked out of the chess club for playing chess.

But… there’s a list dedicated to activists.  She includes an activism requirement for list membership, which is fine. She even says that, “arguing with people already substantially familiar with Objectivism in online forums does not qualify as activism.”

You bet it doesn’t!

But then why limit the list to self-described big-O Objectivists? What drives me completely freaking nuts is that Diana says the lists, “All aim to help promote Objectivist ideas in the culture at large.” Apparently, by only admitting people in the culture writ small. I like miniatures and models as much as the next geek, but I don’t want my ideas, my debates, or my movements to be small and petty.

It’s a list dedicated to figuring out how to advance contentious ideas in the world at large, but it’s limited to a tiny subset of people who all agree. Let’s learn new things by talking amongst ourselves! Let’s build a movement within our walls!

Ugh.

Now, my point here isn’t to hash out the particular disagreements that Diana has with particular people or organizations in the movement. I agree with some of her assessments and disagree with others. I share some of her frustrations and wholeheartedly agree with some of her condemnations. I disagree with others. For the most part, I find the excessive, petty partisanship tedious and counter-productive.

And sad.

Faith & Reason

Timothy Sandefur has a fantastic post up on faith, reason, epistemology and political liberty.

The opponents of evolution education are not disputing the facts of any particular scientific conclusion—that’s why they don’t do experiments, or publish research. What they are want is “equal time”: equal time between religious dogma and science—between faith and reason—between provable theory and unprovable assertion. The basic principle they are seeking to establish is the equivalence between the approach of reason and science on one hand, and the approach of tradition and mystical revelation on the other—and that means, between the careful, precise process of science on one hand, and the emotive utterances of religious authorities on the other. They want to snatch the mantles of respectability that science has earned, and wrap it around the pronouncements of their prophets.

What would this equivalence mean in practice, if it were followed consistently? For one thing, it would mean the end of political freedom in America. Political freedom demands a skeptical populace, open to dissent and reasoned discussion; it is incompatible with the intellectual attitude of authoritarianism, dogma, and enforced tradition.

It is deeply unfortunate that even otherwise outstanding defenders of science—even many scientists themselves—are willing to accept that compromise. Unable or unwilling to defend the reliability of reason, they hang it up with their lab coats when they leave for the day. They understand that one cannot operate a particle accelerator on faith; that one cannot interpret a fossil by asking some prelate to pronounce on the issue in Latin; that one cannot predict how a medicine will work by consulting a 5,000 year old scripture. Yet when it comes to the nature of reality, let alone morality, they are willing to defer to just these things. As Coyne writes, “Accepting both science and conventional faith leaves you with a double standard: rational on the origin of blood clotting, irrational on the Resurrection; rational on dinosaurs, irrational on virgin births.” While these scientists apply the tools of reason to everything from the atoms to psychological reactions, they are willing to accept the baseless claims of religious authorities on equal terms. They turn off the skepticism just when it matters most. And that is all that religious authorities demand of them.

If science is ever destroyed, this will be why. It will be because the defenders of science opened the city gates from within to the forces of unreason, admitting them on the terms of this false equality.

Sandefur articulates the conflict between reason and faith and deftly illustrates why the conflict matters. It’s an absolutely excellent piece.

The following, in particular, illustrates the fundamental incompatibility between faith and reason,

Then there is Miller himself, who insists once more on his right to have his reason and eat it too. “What science does require is methodological naturalism,” he writes. But why does it require that? That commitment is not an arbitrary postulate—it is an epistemological position, imposed on us by the nature of knowledge and of reality. Miller recognizes this when he acknowledges that “[w]e live in a material world, and we use the materials of nature to study the way nature works.” But of course he then flies to a higher strain—by assuming, without any evidence, that there is some other kind of world in which we also live (a world which, if it is immaterial, by definition has no interaction with our own and would therefore be inaccessible to our knowledge). He, arbitrarily and without foundation, asserts that there is some other world, which he arbitrarily and without foundation asserts can be known by some other method—a method which he arbitrarily and without foundation asserts is religious knowledge. These are three separate assertions about reality which he is willing to endorse not only without reasons, but without even acknowledging the need for reasons. And this he amazingly calls “honest and open empiricism”!

If there is one point in which I disagree with Sandefur, it is only in a matter of emphasis. He says, “It’s the fact that these two ways of knowing are and always have been, incompatible by their nature, and that those who pledge allegiance to both are either dishonest or simply wrong.” I think “simply wrong” is by far the more common cause. Sandefur’s point is deeply philosophical and very few scientists are deeply philosophical. Those scientists who do explore philosophical issues, who attempt to reconcile faith and reason… well, they’re guilty of some pretty deep evasion.

Faith as an epistemological tool is indisputably useless, but the common conception of faith is so inextricably tied up with the particular social structures that we (in the West) call religion, that it’s easy to forget that faith has any political or epistemic content at all. There is a large part of the Western public–into which I think many scientists fall–that reserves its faith for what they consider to be decidedly un-epistemic pursuits: communal confirmation of moral intuitions, ritual ceremony, and personal reflection/meditation.

I don’t think any of those actually are un-epsitemic, but I can understand a perspective (even if I don’t agree with it) that considers science and resaon to govern a kind of exteroceptive knowledge and faith to rule in a proprioceptic (or maybe kinesthetic) world. “Reason is for the external world, but my faith is personal,” is a common sentiment. And of course, to the extent that faith is a private avocation, then I follow Jefferson’s dictum, “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

But to the extent that issues of faith are public, then as a polity we must choose how to resolve conflicting claims. The standard on which we should rest, the ultimate arbiter, should resolve to reason.

President Obama

On April 16, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote the following from the Birmingham, Alabama city jail.

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

Today, Barack Hussein Obama II will take the Oath of Office. Just 46 years ago, the most prominent black man in America was jailed for seeking simple justice. In the space of merely two generations, the most prominent black man in America becomes the 44th President of the United States.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. — “I Have a Dream“

Today’s inauguration represents the culmination of tremendous change and is a testament to the hope and dedication of all the millions and millions of Americans who have ever fought for equality, justice, and liberty. This moment is deservedly historical and Americans are right to be proud, but it is not the culmination of our struggle.

I hope to see more victories like this one. I hope to see the fight against intolerance, ignorance, and injustice continue apace. The first woman President. The first Native-American President. The first Jewish President. The first homosexual President. The first President to embrace sane economic policy.

We will wake tomorrow and today’s problems will persist. Our economy is stagnating, our debt is rising, growth is slowing, discrimination still exists, intolerance and ignorance remain, and we remain the target of barbarous thugs. The struggle continues.

Liberty is not seperable; it cannot be parsed into races, sexes, or categories. We cannot slice our freedom in two, extending “personal” liberty while trampling “economic” liberty. We cannot secure our borders by violating the rights of citizens, and we cannot pursue happiness if we are shackled by rising deficits and growing debt.

The struggle for the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a struggle against ignorance, prejudice and corruption. The extent to which we cherish reason, respect individual rights, and punish graft and theft, is the extent to which we succeed.

Here’s hoping for more victories.

Logic fail…?

Jeff Atwood posed a question,

Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, you met someone who told you they had two children, and one of them is a girl. What are the odds that person has a boy and a girl?

What’s your answer?

Jeff’s posts on the question generated thousands of comments. Many, many people simply refuse to accept the answer. The correct answer is that the odds the person has a boy and a girl is 67% (two-thirds).Most people argue strenuously that the correct answer is 50%. After all, the sex of one child doesn’t affect the sex of the other child does it?

Jeff poses the question as an illustration of two things: our inability to process probability and our inattention to detail,

This problem, although seemingly simple, is hard to understand. For cognitive reasons that are not fully understood, while our intuitions regarding a priori possibilities are fairly good, we are easily misled when we try to use probability to quantify our knowledge….

The key thing to bear in mind here is that we have been given additional information. If we don’t use that information, we arrive at 50% — the odds of a girl or boy being born to any given pregnant woman. That’s true insofar as it goes, but it’s the answer to a different, much simpler question, and certainly not the answer to the question we asked.

Our question contains additional information:

1. The person has two children.
2. One of those children is a girl.

But rather than pose additional information, the question hides information. The question as it’s usually asked masks the nature of the problem and relies on the listener’s natural inclination to analyze problems in context and arrive at a conclusion that makes sense in the real world.

The solution to the problem runs like this:

Say there are 100 couples. They each have a child. 50 will have boys and 50 will have girls. Each couple then has another child. Of the 50 that had boys, 25 will have girls and 25 will have boys. Of the 50 that had girls, 25 will have boys and 25 will have girls. The final breakdown will be: 25 each of Bg, Bb, Gg, Gb (uppercase indicates the older child).

If we know that the person has a girl, that leaves only three possible child combinations: Gb, Gg, Bg. Two of those combinations (67%) have a boy.

If we ask the question, what are the odds that any given couple will have a boy and a girl, the answer is 50%. (Bg, Gb) If we ask what percentage will have a boy, the answer is 75% (Bg, Bb, Gb). If we’re told that one child is a girl, that removes 25 couples from our pool (the 25 Bb couples have no girls). If we ask, of those remaining (Gg, Bg, Gb), how many have boys, the answer is 67% (Bg, Gb).

“But!” Say the doubters, “Shouldn’t we eliminate the artificial distinction about which child came first? Gb and Bg are functionally equivalent! The combinations for gender are: BB, GG, and BG. We know the person has a girl, which leaves GB and GG, so 50%! Birth order does not matter!”

This argument rages in Jeff’s comments, and as Jeff points out, that’s the answer to a different question. That’s the answer to, “A person has a child, that child is a girl. What are the odds that his next child will be a boy?”

Sure, that’s not the question that was asked, and so we can say that many people don’t listen. But that’s not really fair. The question is kind of silly. It’s a pointless abstraction that pretends to divine the listener’s mathematical intuition, but it does that by deliberately obfuscating the problem.

For example, we could phrase the question this way:

“Suppose you meet someone. This person tells you that he has flipped two coins. What are the odds the the person has both heads and tails? What are the odds that the person both heads and tails if we know that the person does not have two heads?”

It’s not phrased that way because that makes it look like a logic problem. The question as asked is designed to elicit “incorrect” answers. It does that by relying on the ability of the listener to make sense of the world.

If we ask the question as first given, the average listener places the question into a familiar, real-world context and imagines a conversation with another person. In the real world, if someone says to you, “I have two children and one of them is a girl.” The natural assumption is that the other child is a boy because why else would the person phrase it that way? If he had two girls he should have said “I have two children, both girls.” If he does have two girls but still says, “one of them is a girl” then he’s being deliberately evasive.

Why does it matter? It matters because context matters. The point of logic is to make sense of the world. If we’re writing a computer gambling program, then we need to be sure that we understand probability distributions and game theory. In that context, abstraction is appropriate. If we’re having a conversation in the lunch-room at work, then we need to emphasize a different set of essentials.

No problem exists as pure abstraction, there’s always a context and that context is always relevant. Whether that context is a deck of cards, a set of coins, a lunch-room conversation, or your neighbor’s money, we can’t solve real-world problems by ignoring context.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The always fascinating and inspiring Ayaan Hirsi Ali:   (HT Kirk Petersen)

http://www.kaltura.com/index.php/kwidget/wid/o6hvweea0w

A short biography is here. It’s worth a read.

Her auotbiography, Infidel:

“I am Ayaan, the daughter of Hirsi, the son of Magan.”

In the first scene of Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a child of 5, sitting on a grass mat. Her grandmother is teaching her to recite the names of her ancestors, as all Somali children must learn to do. “Get it right,” her grandmother warns. “They are your bloodline. . . . If you dishonor them you will be forsaken. You will be nothing. You will lead a wretched life and die alone.”

Thus begins the extraordinary story of a woman born into a family of desert nomads, circumcised as a child, educated by radical imams in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, taught to believe that if she uncovered her hair, terrible tragedies would ensue. It’s a story that, with a few different twists, really could have led to a wretched life and a lonely death, as her grandmother warned. But instead, Hirsi Ali escaped — and transformed herself into an internationally renowned spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women.

The break began when she slipped away from her family on her way to a forced marriage in Canada and talked her way into political asylum in Holland, using a story she herself calls “an invention.” Soon after arriving, she removed her head scarf to see if God would strike her dead. He did not. Nor were there divine consequences when, defying her ancestors, she donned blue jeans, rode a bicycle, enrolled in university, became a Dutch citizen, began to speak publicly about the mistreatment of Muslim women in Holland and won election to the Dutch parliament.

But tragedy followed fame. In 2004, Hirsi Ali helped a Dutch director, Theo van Gogh, make a controversial film, “Submission,” about Muslim women suffering from forced marriages and wife beating. Van Gogh was murdered by an angry Muslim radical in response, and Hirsi Ali went into hiding. The press began to explore her past, discovering the “inventions” that she had used to get her refugee status. The Dutch threatened to revoke her citizenship; the American Enterprise Institute offered her a job in Washington. And thus she came to be among us.

There’s also this great interview,

What are you working on next?
A book called Shortcuts to Enlightenment. It’s [about] waking up the prophet Muhammad in the New York Public Library and having him have a conversation with Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, and John Stuart Mill. It’s a philosophical novel.

From her site,

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Dutch parliamentarian and outspoken defender of women’s rights in Islamic societies, is at risk from a variety of extremist threats in both Europe and the United States. She has needed constant security protection since her life was first threatened in 2002. Up until October 1, 2007, this protection was provided by the Dutch government.

Now a permanent resident of the United States, Ms. Hirsi Ali must raise her own funds to oversee the financing of her costly—but necessary—protection. In response to the numerous private citizens who have expressed interest in helping Ms. Hirsi Ali fund her security detail, the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust has been established.

For more information, visit ayaanhirsiali.org/security.html

Bias?

I don’t often like to get into the media bias debate. I think it’s both incredibly silly and incredibly obvious. Of course reporters have biases. Reporters need biases. How else do you distinguish relevant facts from irrelevant ones? How else to decide what to report and what not to report?

“Objectivity” as it’s used in the context of journalism is a vacuous concept. Not every side to every argument is worth hearing. Not every argument makes sense and not everyone who argues is honest, capable, or even moderately intelligent. When reporting on Obama’s victory, for example, there’s no point or purpose in asking the KKK what it thinks. Their opinion is dumb and doesn’t count. Is that biased? You betcha. But it’s good bias.

The point is that some biases are better than others. I’d rather have journalists whose bias led them to be skeptical rather than gullible. I prefer bias in favor of science and fact rather than fear and emotion. As for political bias, I’d prefer a bias in favor of some actual understanding of economics and public choice theory–but that might be asking too much. And I’d much, much, prefer journalists who challenged conventional wisdom, rather than journalists who simply shilled for their favorite candidate.

Chris Matthews fails all of the above.

http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/eyeblast.swf?v=e46Ueu6USU

His job? Since I’m sure MSNBC would disapprove of him actually accepting money from the Obama administration, I think he’s probably more of a volunteer.

Gender, Sex, and Choice

An article by Hannah Rosin in The Atlantic about transgender children.

Since he could speak, Brandon, now 8, has insisted that he was meant to be a girl. This summer, his parents decided to let him grow up as one. His case, and a rising number of others like it, illuminates a heated scientific debate about the nature of gender—and raises troubling questions about whether the limits of child indulgence have stretched too far.

It’s tough reading; the stories of these kids are full of anguish and loneliness, hurt, despair and above all else, a maddening confusion that seems as bewildering as it is devastating. At the heart of the article is a discussion of treatment. In particular,

A recent medical innovation holds out the promise that this might be the first generation of transsexuals who can live inconspicuously. About three years ago, physicians in the U.S. started treating transgender children with puberty blockers, drugs originally intended to halt precocious puberty. The blockers put teens in a state of suspended development. They prevent boys from growing facial and body hair and an Adam’s apple, or developing a deep voice or any of the other physical characteristics that a male-to-female transsexual would later spend tens of thousands of dollars to reverse. They allow girls to grow taller, and prevent them from getting breasts or a period.

Of course, the practice has it’s detractors. And it’s certainly hard to cringe at the attitude of one parent,

“He’ll just basically be living life,” Jill explained about her (natal) daughter. “I already legally changed his name and called all the parents at the school. Then, when he’s in eighth grade, we’ll take him to the [endocrinologist] and get the blockers, and no one will ever know. He’ll just sail right through.”

Sail right through. Sure.

She can be so cavalier about the future happiness of her child because she knows exactly why her child is confused. It’s because although her child’s sex is female, in his mind, his gender is male. This parent and people like her believe that gender is determined, their kids are hardwired to see themselves as a particular gender, regardless of what their bodies might indicate otherwise. Describing the history of one of the kids that the article focuses on,

She insisted on peeing standing up and playing only with boys. When her mother bought her Barbies, she’d pop their heads off. Once, when she was 6, her father, Mike, said out of the blue: “Chris, you’re a girl.” In response, he recalls, she “started screaming and freaking out,” closing her hand into a fist and punching herself between the legs, over and over. … When Chris turned 11 and other girls in school started getting their periods, her mother found her on the bed one night, weeping. She “said she wanted to kill herself,” her mother told me. “She said, ‘In my head, I’ve always been a boy.’”

The hormone treatment seems to be successful. “According to Dr. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, the psychologist who heads the Dutch clinic, no case of a child stopping the blockers and changing course has yet been reported.” At a transgender convention, the older transgendered wish they’d had the chance, and the younger ones (the 10 year olds) look forward to it.

The problem, of course, is that even when life is horribly, wretchedly complicated, sometimes it’s even more mystifying than we thought.

But about a month after that, everything began to change. Chris had joined a softball team and made some female friends; her mother figured she had cottoned to the idea that girls could be tough and competitive. Then one day, Chris went to her mother and said, “Mom, I need to talk to you. We need to go shopping.” She bought clothes that were tighter and had her ears pierced. She let her hair grow out. Eventually she gave her boys’ clothes away.

Now Chris wears her hair in a ponytail, walks like a girl, and spends hours on the phone, talking to girlfriends about boys. Her mother recently watched her through a bedroom window as she was jumping on their trampoline, looking slyly at her own reflection and tossing her hair around. At her parents’ insistence, Chris has never been to a support group or a conference, never talked to another girl who wanted to be a boy. For all she knew, she was the only person in the world who felt as she once had felt.

Chris’s parents didn’t purse hormone treatment. They went to an opponent of early hormone treatment, Dr. Zucker. Now chris seems happy and adjusted. Her childhood was difficult, but she’s grown and is making her own choices. Dr. Zucker,

explains gender dysphoria in terms of what he calls “family noise”: neglectful parents who caused a boy to over­identify with his domineering older sisters; a mother who expected a daughter and delayed naming her newborn son for eight weeks. Zucker’s belief is that with enough therapy, such children can be made to feel comfortable in their birth sex. Zucker has compared young children who believe they are meant to live as the other sex to people who want to amputate healthy limbs, or who believe they are cats…

Dr. Zucker treats children with a kind of hyper-Freudian therapy:

They turned their house into a 1950s kitchen-sink drama, intended to inculcate respect for patriarchy, in the crudest and simplest terms: “Boys don’t wear pink, they wear blue,” they would tell him, or “Daddy is smarter than Mommy—ask him.” If John called for Mommy in the middle of the night, Daddy went, every time.

Such rigid gender roles seem archaic and absurd to a modern liberal ear, but Zucker’s therapy reports results. The participants in this therapy don’t actually believe what they’re saying to their kids, they’re just trying to mold them. Which, really, is exactly what the parents who begin hormone treatment are trying to do. In both cases, the parents are trying to impose an identity on the child, either in an effort to make the gender match the sex or vice-versa.

Which brings us to the case of David Reimer. David was born a boy, but a botched circumcision destroyed his penis. His parents saw a profile of John Money, a psychologist who argued that gender identity was a purely social construct. Under Money’s guidance, David was fully castrated and his parents raised him as a girl. Money reported the case as successful and published his results to much acclaim, but that was a lie. As Rosin notes,

Reimer had never adjusted to being a girl at all. He wanted only to build forts and play with his brother’s dump trucks, and insisted that he should pee standing up. He was a social disaster at school, beating up other kids and misbehaving in class. At 14, Reimer became so alienated and depressed that his parents finally told him the truth about his birth, at which point he felt mostly relief, he reported. He eventually underwent phalloplasty, and he married a woman. Then four years ago, at age 38, Reimer shot himself dead in a grocery-store parking lot.

For more on David Reimer, There’s John Colapinto’s 1997 story in Rolling Stone. Wikipedia here. Book here. More here.)

It took 25 years for the failed experiment that ultimately cost David Reimer his life to be fully discredited. Hormone blocking has been performed on pre-teen adolescents for less than 10 years. The simple truth is that we don’t know what adulthood will bring for these children.

In all this discussion of transgendered children, queers, and he-shes, there’s only one thing that’s really taboo: individual agency.

The debate is torn between two positions. Gender is either a social construct or it’s biologically hardwired into the brain. The possibility that it could be both, or some different combination of the two for any given person is unthinkable. I suspect that introducing individual agency into the debate would shake too many shibboleths. The above quote above, comparing the transgendered child “to people who want to amputate healthy limbs, or who believe they are cats…” is only a partial quote. It continues,

, or those with something called ethnic-identity disorder. ‘If a 5-year-old black kid came into the clinic and said he wanted to be white, would we endorse that?” he told me. “I don’t think so. What we would want to do is say, ‘What’s going on with this kid that’s making him feel that it would be better to be white?’”

The idea of a doctor giving a 10 year old child drugs to lighten the color of his skin and alter his facial features so that he could pass as white is almost impossible to imagine. It is simply understood that racial heritage is always and everywhere a significant and necessary component of identity. It is also understood that racial identification is absolutely non-optional.

We have completely accepted the idea that individuals are no more than the sum of collective interests. We are no longer individuals, we are black-lesbian-atheist-democrats, white-transgendered-wiccan-environmentalists, and Asian-male-catholic-republicans. Our identity is now defined by a trailing list of categories to which we have been assigned. Whether that assignment is made by society or determined in utero by a combination of hormones, we are sure that whatever the mechanism, we should submit to the identity to which we have been assigned.

So the question is now, “What should Brandon be?” Rather than, “What does Brandon want to do?” Rather than treat Brandon’s gender as a part of an emerging identity that he can shape and create as he grows, his gender is treated as a fixed and determinate given. It is not something that he designs, but rather something that his parents, doctors, and psychologists must divine. If he’s a “boy” then he should play with trucks and guns and have a penis. If he’s really a “girl” then he should wear dresses and play with dolls, suffer hormone treatments, and off goes his willy. But why can’t he be herself, whatever that is?

It is too easy to believe that David Reimer’s story is a caution about the dangers of social conditioning, and that therefore, the biological determinists are making sound choices for their children. But the real lesson in David Reimer’s story is that these decisions are far too intimate, far too personal for anyone other than the affected individual to make. David Reimer’s story is a caution against authoritarianism. The tragedy of David Reimer’s life is that the opportunity to shape his identity was stolen from him.

These children are in pain. They are undoubtedly troubled. But they don’t all suffer from the same condition. For some the problem is social identity, as one parent said, “We call it the disorder we cured with a skirt.” For others it might lie deeper; a fundamental issue with self-identification. For some it will be a temporary phase while others will battle with questions of gender and sexuality for the rest of their lives.

Childhood is difficult. Growing up is hard work, and it’s largely work that the child needs to do on his own. If Brandon wants to be called Bridget, then call him Bridget. Buy him dresses, use the feminine pronoun, but don’t foreclose on the idea that she might decide, on her own, to go back to he.

The Intersex Society of North America says it succintly,

In cases of intersex, doctors and parents need to recognize, however, that gender assignment of infants with intersex conditions as boy or girl, as with assignment of any infant, is preliminary. Any child—intersex or not—may decide later in life that she or he was given the wrong gender assignment; but children with certain intersex conditions have significantly higher rates of gender transition than the general population, with or without treatment. (ISNA)

We don’t think we can ever predict, with absolute certainty, what gender identity a person will grow up to have. What we can predict with a good degree of certainty is that children who are treated with shame, secrecy, and lies will suffer at the hands of medical providers who may think they have the best of intentions and the best of theories. (ISNA)

For most of us, our gender, sex, and sexuality are defining parts of our identity. For some of us, however, one or some or all of those aspects of life matter less, or are more a source of confusion and turmoil than markers for a stable identity. If confusion does reign, then trying to force a decision is bound to be disastrous. There’s no reason to assume that for all people and all children that a person’s gender must match their sex, or that their sexuality should be determined by either.

One of the parents in Rosin’s article says, “the biggest sex organ is not between the legs but between the ears.” That gets it exactly wrong. The sex organs are what they are. The brain is an organ of choice, volition, ideas, and identity. Nurture those characteristics and let adults decide how their sex organs should look.

Virtual Murder

Following up on yesterday’s item about virtual theft is a story about virtual murder in Japan. (Again, from Eugene Volokh.)

Like the theft, this virtual murder was accomplished through the use of real-world force.

A 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher’s sudden divorce from her online husband in a virtual game world made her so angry that she logged on and killed his digital persona, police said Thursday.

The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old office worker when their characters were happily married, and killed the character. The man complained to police when he discovered that his beloved online avatar was dead.

Volokh argues that,

Had she engaged in the “virtual killing” from her own account, by using a feature of the game that made such action possible, or even exploiting a bug in the game that made such action possible, it seems to me that this would just be an interesting extra twist in the game’s narrative. Such action should be dealt with by whatever mechanisms the game’s operators provide (perhaps including expulsion of the misbehaving user, if the operators view such conduct as misbehavior), or at most by a breach of contract lawsuit for violating any user license agreement terms — not by the real-world criminal law.

One interesting aspect of this is the amount of harm caused. In the virtual world (Maple Story, in this case) it should be possible for the administrators of the game to restore the dead avatar to life. In which case, the harm inflicted by the virtual murder amounts to at most a few days lost playing time. (And as it happens, Maple Story is free to play.)

This is a great example of the kind of issues that in-game, virtual courts could help resolve conflicts. The game has officially sanctioned marriages, creating invitation and reception mechanisms and even going so far as to reward the marrying couple with wedding rings. But the game did not provide a mechanism for divorce. The AP story is thin, but it seems as though some in-game mechanism to resolve disputes may have mollified the virtual wife.

Again, these cases are currently oddities only because the amounts of money involved in the disputes is still small. But the value of virtual goods will continue to rise, and as they do, these cases will become more common and more serious. (Maple Story is free to play, but players can purchase in game currency and special items by buying Nexon cash with hard currency.)

One absurdity: Maple Story prohibits “same-sex” marriages. Presumably because they think it would be wrong for two 12 year-old boys to virtually marry. Unless one is pretending to be a girl of course. Then it’s OK.

Virtual Law

From Eugene Volokh at, well… at Volokh.com

A Dutch court has convicted two youths of theft for stealing virtual items in a computer game and sentenced them to community service….

The Leeuwarden District Court says the culprits, 15 and 14 years old, coerced a 13-year-old boy into transferring a “virtual amulet and a virtual mask” from the online adventure game RuneScape to their game accounts.

“These virtual goods are goods (under Dutch law), so this is theft,” the court said Tuesday in a summary of its ruling….

Now this might sound odd — why should the legal system police “virtual theft,” especially since the ability to steal, defraud, and the like within a game may be an important part of the game? But things become much clearer when one reads the longer story, from Radio Netherlands Worldwide:

The culprits, who cannot be named due to their age, kicked, hit and threatened their classmate with a knife before the 13-year-old gave in and transferred the Runescape items, an amulet and a mask, to his attackers’ online accounts.

He makes the point that in this case real harm was done and so the ruling isn’t really all that surprising or notable. But he also says, “I continue to think that generally speaking the law shouldn’t prohibit purely in-game “theft,” “murder,” “rape,” and so on.”

I wonder.

Virtual economies are growing ever larger and more influential. The exchange rate for World of Warcraft gold (based on some admittedly back of the envelope calculations) is somewhere around 2.8 cents per gold piece, which means that one WoW gold is equal to about half a Yen.

At that rate of exchange, it’s common to find virtual items with significant real-world exchange value. If in-game theft or fraud robs a person of significant real-world value, I’m not sure that should exist outside the scope of law. Right now, the issue is complicated by terms-of-service agreements that generally prohibit selling virtual items for real cash, but such restrictions are not universal. At some point (sooner than later, I think), virtual fraud and virtual theft will rise to a level of actual harm that will be impossible for real-world law to ignore. I think the question of jurisdiction will be particularly interesting, as will be the development of virtual courts and virtual arbitration.

The largest virtual game worlds make for fascinating social laboratories. Since the worlds are essentially completely planned economies under the control of autocratic rulers with god-like powers, it’s especially fun to watch them struggle with the classic problems of a managed economy, like inflation. Friedrich Hayek would have loved World of Warcraft.

He’d have been a Gnome Tinker, of course.

Also, check out The Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University.

Smart & Principled

Todd Zywicki and Orin Kerr have a couple of interesting posts up at Volokh on how voters measure intelligence.

Zywicki muses about the possibility that there’s a tendency among some people to equate glibness with intelligence,

Some thoughtful people simply have a tendency to confuse intelligence with the ability to be glib, or more precisely, to bs. And I think that is much of what it comes down to–if Palin doesn’t know the answer to a question, she just isn’t that good at making something up. Biden, by contrast, is a master bs’er, as his debate performance exhibited. As a general rule, the less informed he was about the answer to a question, the more assertive he was in answering it, such as his extraordinary answer about the legislative role of the Vice-President. It is clear that he had not the slightest idea what he was talking about, yet he just plowed ahead throwing out assertions with rhetorical flair. Classic bs. Even on issues that were supposedly in his area of expertise, such as the Constitution, he wasn’t even in the ballpark of being correct. Hoven picks up on Biden’s whopper of answer about kicking Hezbollah out of Lebanon, but it is pretty much the same thing–aggressive bs covering a complete lack of any clue what he is talking about.

He makes a good point. It’s more important that an ignorant executive be cautious than decisive. On that score, Palin is the only candidate in either ticket that seems even mildly conscious of her own ignorance. When foundering in ignorance, Obama reverts to platitudes, Biden makes stuff up, McCain suspends his campaign, and Palin asks for clarification.

Kerr points out that it’s really not so much about how intelleigent the candidate really is, it’s about how much the candidate agrees with us.

…. we often end up filtering these questions through the lens of how much they agree with us. Politicians who agree with us are necessarily intelligent. After all, they have the raw candle power and the judgment to see that we are correct! And politicians who don’t agree with us are presumed to be much less intelligent: They either lack the candle power or judgment to “get it.” These sorts of intuitive judgments mix together with some of the more objective evidence (academic pedigrees, great writing or speaking skills) to form our judgments of a candidate’s intelligence.

But really, isn’t the intelligence debate a little silly? No matter how intelligent a person is, it would be impossible to master every subject and every issue that a President would face in his term of office. The range of knoweldge is simply too diverse. That’s why a President has advisors, experts in specific fields who offer advice and counsel.

Identifying those experts and weighing their counsel is the primary job of a President. And those decisions are the primary product of the President’s principles. Those principles are much more important to the health of the nation than the President’s college grades, SAT scores, or oratorical skills.

The question in this election, as in every other, is whose principles (to the extent they are identifiable or consistent) are better?

Where McCain has identifieable or consistent principles they seem to be a mish-mash of fuzzy and indistinct notions like Western American independence, anti-intellectual populism, and the virtue of stubborness–with a smattering (but just) of limited government federalist republicanism.

Obama’s principles, where they’re identifiable, are more coherent. Obama appears to be a fairly straightforward progressive. He’s adamantly redistributionist, authoritarian, statist and anti-republican.

For me, the true test of principles are the extent to which they actually make life better, as opposed to the extent to which they claim to make life better. The extent to which principles are grounded in reality is the extent to which they are good principles. The extent to which principles hie to abstractions and float freely detached from reality is the extent to which they’re not only wrong, but actively counter-productive.

In McCain’s case, because his principles are sort of haphazardly assembled and largely incoherent, the chance that he’d actually apply good, effective principles as President is essentially random. In Obama’s case, that chance is even smaller. While Obama’s principles are coherent and largely consistent, they’re also almost entirely wrong.

So that’s our choice. It’s not a choice between Goofus and Gallant, or between Change and Different Change, or between smart and dumb. Our choice is between random and wrong.