Links: July 29th, 2018

1. The left need to get over their IQ phobia.

2. Rachael Maddow recently claimed the White House transcript of the Trump/Putin press conference was deliberately manipulated to exclude the question of whether Putin wanted Trump to win. It turns out that this was more of a technical glitch. The translator spoke over the question so the transcript picked up one and not the other.

I think this is a totally reasonable mistake for Maddow and friends to make. Sometimes you think you caught somebody shading the truth, but you didn't. All that's left is for them to admit their mistake. Because it would be pretty wrong to leave your audience thinking the White House manipulated things when they didn't, right?

3. A Chinese man was herding sheep and found a dinosaur.

"Previously, we thought all of these advanced sauropods originated around 160 million years ago and rapidly diversified and spread across the planet in a time window perhaps as short as 5 million years,' said University College London paleontologist Paul Upchurch, a study co-author. 

'However, the discovery of Lingwulong means that this hypothesis is incorrect and we now have to work with the idea that, actually, this group and its major constituent lineages originated somewhat earlier and more gradually,' Upchurch said."

This reminds me that science frequently gives us the best answer, but the best answer is often not very probable.

4. New in Someone Somewhere did Something: cop shaves homeless guy to help him get job. It seemed to be with the homeless guy's consent. Even better!

5. Chic-fil-a opening in a Toronto near me. I wonder if there will be protests.

6. Related: 5 Radically Conservative Fast Food Companies. Warning: it may ruin your favorite place to eat.

Also, are they really "radically conservative?"

Tread Carefully

I recently claimed that an educated guess is about as good as we can do for the abortion issue. We don't know what gives a creature rights or dignity, so nailing precisely when the unborn obtain these qualities is really hard. And while this position doesn't give you that full feeling of knowing exactly what you believe, in the end it's better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

This is all well and good for our theoretical beliefs, but what about practically? What should we do when we have to make a decision both morally and legally?

The answer is to do what we always do in these situations, tread carefully.

Ethically, you want to have an abortion as early as possible. Waiting any longer than necessary puts you in escalating moral danger of murdering an innocent child.

It isn't clear when is too late to have an abortion, but I would put take any mid-late term abortions off the table completely. The stakes on the issue are too high. And then for any early term abortions I would seriously consider if it's really necessary, and think about alternatives also.

That's what the usual rules of morality entail in situations like this. What about laws?

Criminal laws always give the accused the benefit of the doubt. We don't throw a murder in jail if we think he probably killed someone. We need very high confidence. I think that's because if there's a massive moral cliff ahead of you (like killing a baby or prosecuting an innocent) the normal obligation is to, again, tread carefully. I think that's what we should do here.

Since we don't have very high confidence until late in the pregnancy, that's the only time it's morally acceptable to legally prosecute it. Any earlier and we're doing something clearly awful to a woman or doctor in response to something that only might be bad.

I make these two cuts pretty neatly for convenience. After 3 months abortion is immoral and after 6 it should be illegal. But if I were considering an abortion myself, I would look more deeply at prenatal development and make a messier judgement.

Despite having a high degree of uncertainty on when life begins, one can zone into far more specific stances on what to do practically. This would also close up the canyon that lies between pro-life people and pro-choice people. If we were debating whether abortions should be illegal at 5 months or 7 months, we'd just get along a lot better because the degree of overlap in beliefs is much larger than what we have today.

Links: July 27th, 2018

1. Trevor Noah told an unfunny joke one time in 2013

2. I don't think it's a weird libertarian thing to notice Every Law is Violent. So maybe law shouldn't be used on plastic straws.

3. >>>

"My definition of a free society is one where you can spend a day not thinking about who's running the country."

Mostly a lot of Trump bashing, but a good podcast with Sam Harris none-the-less, David Frum, and Andrew Sullivan.

4. Election betting odds. In 2018 Republicans will probably hold the Senate. Dems will probably take the House. And we'll probably have a new president in 2020. But none of the above are clear-cut.

For more on why prediction markets beat polls, read this study or listen to Robin Hanson more.

5. A short video with the very interesting Bret Weinstein, The Phenomenon of Left and Right, the first in a series of videos.

6. Tweet of the Week:

pic.twitter.com/FDLIZsjPEm

— Queen Jynx (@Chartoc) July 22, 2018

Links: Russiagate edition

1. Politico's What we know about Russia's election hacking is a good primer.

2. It's time for a little perspective on Russia. Because the U.S. has totally never interfered with the elections of other nations.

3. Is Russiagate a worse scandal than Watergate? Anyways, the left may not be paying enough attention to the controversy.

4. Russia not ranked a high priority problem by Americans. But immigration, current leadership, and non-economic issues were ranked high. Also notice gun/control was an important issue for about a month. I wonder why.

5. Some people have read Russian "interference" "meddling" and "hacking" to mean that actual voting systems were hacked such that votes were miscounted in a Jack Bauer-esk conspiracy. It should be noted that that's not what happened, and by exaggerating an already serious issue to 100, you're making the issue easily dismissed as a vague and unbelievable conspiracy theory.

It's important to be clear about what exactly we mean when we say Russia "hacked" the election. Russia persuaded and influenced through highly funded social media campaigns and Democrat e-mail leaks. That isn't trying to minimize the issue, it's simply not trying to exaggerate it.

The Educated Guess

Last week I suggested an educated guess about abortion and when life begins. I suspect this is uncomfortable for many people.

As I already pointed out, the stakes are high on this debate. On one end we could be depriving women of their rights to their bodies. On the other, we could be murdering infants (or the moral equivalent thereof). So should we really be making an educated guess about a matter so important?

Yes.

Because in the words of Bryan Caplan, I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

The current debate is filled with people who are precisely wrong. They think they know exactly when life begins, but they can't justify it in the least. On the other hand, I navigate various shades of grey. We don't know what exact conditions qualify a being for the moral and legal protections we give people. So we should educated ourselves of the unborn's stages of development, and use our intuition to make a guess.

So then what do we do about policy? Our legal system needs to make firm rules, can we do that based on educated guesses?

Yes we can. As I'll explain in my next post, what we do morally as well as legally within the rhealm of uncertainty is tread carefully.

Faith without Discernment

Some religious people want to tell me to have more faith. For them, faith is about believing something is true, digging your heels in, and never looking back. This kind of faith is seriously confused.

You've heard that faith without works is dead. I'd say that faith without discernment is lost.

What are you going to have faith in? Which ancient text? Which religious leader? Which church and which doctrine? You need to discern these things before faith can even get off the ground. This idea is lost on the religious, who insist that we have faith in whatever they happen to be oriented toward.

Christians might say that Faith is the evidence of things unseen, but that doesn't mean faith shouldn't have evidence behind it. It means the kind of evidence isn't empirical.

Evangelicals might say that the Holy Spirit guides us into faith. Fine. But does it guide us in and through reason or against it? How do we discern what is the Holy Spirit and whether it's what we should be listening to?

Remember that the faith of Abraham included reasoning that God could raise Isaac from the dead.

Even the religious agree there's a such thing as blind faith, but blind faith can't just mean the faith of the other guy but not yours. As soon as you start thinking about the difference between blind faith and true faith, you're looking at discernment in one form or another.

It might be uncomfortable to upend your religious beliefs and subject them to discernment through reason, but it's also wise. Going through your whole life living a lie is a tragedy. If you want to do good in your life, believing the truth is a good start. And if your religious convictions really are true, this process of questioning will only make them more solid.

Nothing I say is against faith, but it is against a cheap kind of faith. Instead, I recommend a more vested form of faith. One that is more careful with each step, not so fragile to competing arguments, and embedded in wisdom.

Keep your Eye on the Uterus

To me, popular abortion rhetoric is unnecessarily appalling. The Pro-life people call their opponents baby-killers and the pro-choice people accuse their opponents of opposing women's rights. This isn't productive, and it certainly isn't pretty.

What can we do better? Well, lets start with intellectual empathy.

It is true that if the thing growing inside the mother (X), is morally equivalent to a born baby, then  mothers who abort are morally equivalent to murderers.

But if it's true that X is not morally equivalent to a born baby, then to prevent abortion deprives women of the fundamental right to their bodies.

Pretend like you're on the other side, or at least pretend like you're uncertain for a moment. These points only imply that the stakes are high either way, but it doesn't help anyone decide whether X really is morally equivalent to a baby. So why should it persuade anyone?

A better way is stop focusing on what your view implies, and instead maintain focus on the crux of the dispute. Keep your eye on the ball. In this case, the ball is the uterus. The more similar X is to a born baby, the more pro-life we should be. The less similar X is to a born baby, the more pro-choice we should be. Because all current theories about rights or dignity and who deserves them are vague at best, I don't think we can do better than an educated guess.

Here's the thing about educated guesses. The more educated they are, the better the guess will be. Not only will the education on the development of X move people toward a more accurate view of abortion, it'll help clean up this vile and ugly debate.

How are Trump's Haiti Comments Racist?

It isn’t. Let me explain:

I think what’s going on is a lot of partisan people have this very thick mental folder of things trump said that prove he’s racist. The problem is that when you pull out any single example from this folder, its very ambiguous evidence of racism. That is, racism could explain it, but so could a million other things.

You can build one of these folders with anyone, and about almost anything. Obama is anti semitic. Why?

-Don’t you remember when a picture was taken of a smiling Obama next to known anti-semite louis farrakhan?

-Don’t you recall when Israeli spokesperson Ran Baratz pointed out Obama’s antisemitic response to Israel’s Prime Minister?

-Then there was the time Obama was “flattered” when Hamas compared him to Kennedy.

-And then of course the Washington Times reported that Obama’s refusal to veto an anti-Israel U.N. billas the most anti-semitic thing to happen in all of 2016!

It took me 20 minutes to dig up these examples, so imagine how much I could pack into this folder if I were deeply biased against Obama. And if you ever decided to get into the weeds with me over one of these examples, I could draw on all the others to help solidify my conclusion. One example crumbles under scrutiny, but once we’re trained to see a pattern, we can’t unsee it. So we read “overtones” and “dog whistles” into even crystal clear language to force the dots to connect.

People get trapped in this cycle of referring back to a folder of examples in order to justify all subsequent accusations. Giant leaps of logic become easy inferences. Reputation justifies the accusation, the accusation justifies reputation. It’s a self-attesting system of beliefs. Each of them individually can’t be justified.

But when you’re already sold on the whole bundle, even a stupid pocahontas joke looks like an overt racist slur.