Bagged Milk in Canada is Patriotic Ridiculousness

I like the way Canadians will rationalize for their milk in a bag. If you haven't heard, in Ontario milk comes in a bag. It's really an Ontario thing, but they treat it like a Canadian thing.

Anyway, milk in a bag doesn't make sense. You need to always have scissors around to snip the corner of the bag, buy and keep a container in your fridge to put the bag into. Putting liquid in a floppy plastic bag is ridiculous.

Still, Canadians make believe it's a better way of doing things, even though they don't put any of their other liquids in bags. One of the ways they make believe is they'll say that there's a coating inside the bag that keeps the milk fresh. Okay, could you not put the coating in a different container? It keeps milk fresh but none of your other liquids?

Or they'll say that it's easier to handle, because the container has a handle and you don't have to lift this heavy 2 liter jug. Okay, could you not just buy milk in 1 liter jugs with handles? Rather than 2 liter jugs or cartons?

Or they'll say that the milk keeps longer in a plastic bag. Really? Even though once the plastic is cut the milk is unlidded and exposed? Have they ever compare expirations? Or are they just believing whatever assumptions they have to in order for bagged milk to make sense?

Or they'll say that it's more environmentally conscious. Is it? Did they do the research? Did they do it before they had their conclusion or did they always believe milk in a bag was better because that's what they grew up with, and then do the research later to justify it.

I've lived in both Ontario and the U.S. and observed both of their milk systems. It's not even a contest. But Canadians have said these things to me, and I don't think it's because they have anything close to good arguments. What it really is is they have their way of doing things, and it's a part of their Canadianness, and they don't want any other culture coming in telling them a better way. Even if it actually is better. Some people think that's patriotic, and good, I think it's screwed up.

Death and Life

While the world is catching pokemon in Pokemon Go, I'm thinking about my recently deceased uncle; uncle Ted.

I didn't know him well, but my dad always enjoyed his visits. Through my dad, I mourn the loss of my uncle, because to lose a brother is painful.

I am separate from my brothers now, and I'd hate to see one go. As we get older, death will creep all of us. And when one does, it means I'm not far from ending my life either. My dad already wrote on Facebook, "see you soon brother".

I wonder what that feels like. When you know your time is up. It's probably like the rest of us, we fool ourselves into thinking death doesn't exist most of the time, but then in moments of contemplation, when something in life gives us pause, we realize. And then we ask, what have we done? And the answer: nothing. And then we ask, what could we do differently? And the answer: nothing.

Some people fight the notion of death by really DOING something, and DOING something means finding something others regard as impressive. It means making your mark. But this is fooling yourself. And then you get upset when someone calls into question your DOING of something, because they're trying to take away all you have, your fantasy.

Tolstoy's book, A Confession left an impression on me. It asks, "Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?" For most of us the thing we do that will last longest past our deaths will be our kids, but they'll end too. In a couple generation, your mark will fade and fade, until it can't be seen.

So my dad will leave us soon. And I will be the generation after that. I think that as he nears the end he grows aggravated and depressed over how he has done things. He didn't hold relationships well. He has done things that he regrets.

I don't think I'm going to be like that. I've thought hard and honestly about what's right. I've rejected what everyone around me thought was acceptable, and accepted what everyone around me rejected. Because the truth doesn't change. I don't think I would have accepted slavery 200 years ago. And I don't accept political authority now. I try very hard to debunk my strongest beliefs, because I don't want social beliefs, or expressive beliefs, or beliefs that make me feel good. I want true beliefs. And for some reason, when I think about life and about death, I feel okay because my beliefs are the way they are. My mind isn't fragmented into a lot of little parts based on a dozen different labels I want to adhere to. It's all one, and it works together, and when I find a shard that doesn't fit, I discard it so I can keep feeling whole.

The Plain Reason Torture Works

It seems like torture should work.

When someone won't talk, torture makes the cost of not talking high. Incentives make them talk.

But what if they lie?

Make the credible promise that more torture will happen if their information doesn't turn out, or contradicts what you already know. Incentives make them tell the truth.

Is torture not incentive enough?

Turn the torture up a notch. Now they have more incentive to talk / tell the truth.

So it seems like torture should work based on deductions from normal assumptions we have about human beings and how they respond to incentives. This is the plain reason torture works.

So why do a lot of people deny that torture works?

One possible reasons is historical data. We have tortured. Did it work? I'm sure there's data out there and maybe it turns out the other way. Data on these kinds of issues tends to be messy anyway, so it ought to take a lot of clear data to undermine the plain reason torture works.

Most people; however, are not informed on the data. So I suspect most people think torture doesn't work because they think torture is unjust. There is a suspiciously high correlation between the belief about whether torture works and whether it would be unjust even if it doesn't work, even though the neither answer informs on what the other answer should be.

People often rationalize for why what is deontologically moral also happens leads to good results. It's like anything they believe to be morally right cannot have any costs whatsoever.

A reasonable person might say, torture works, but we shouldn't do it unless it's really important because torture is just a really bad thing to do to someone, even an enemy. I think that's how we would normally navigate the moral domain in our own lives, and so that's the guide public policy should probably follow.

Gun Death Rate Over Time

When I google how many people guns kill, I get a lot of pages like,

Epidemic: Guns kill twice as many kids as cancer,

or

Guns Kill More Americans Than Terrorists Do

Which I'm sure are both true. But cancer don't kill many kids and terrorists don't kill many Americans.

Or you can read, Guns are now killing as many people as cars in the U.S., which can be more accurately titled, "cars are now killing as few people as guns in the U.S." Car death accidents have fallen, gun violence is flat according to the data cited by the exact same article. But the article never tells you that.

Real life, gun violence has gone down significantly since the 90s, that includes homocides, suicides, and accidental deaths. Suicides hopped back up since 2010 but not to where they used to be. Homocides has been flat since a massive decline in the 90s.

Abstinence vs. Celibacy

I was thinking today about the debate between whether birth control should be promoted to teens, or if celibacy is a better way to go like conservatives would like. Because the two are somewhat in conflict with each other. The more contraception is being promoted, the less celibacy there will be. So, safe sex or no sex?

I think that given the normal range of realistic choices the normal teen is going to go through, celibacy is just not an option. No sex is a really hard sell for a species that has been really good at reproducing, and is taken by some very strong natural urges to produce. So for the majority of people who are going to have sex well before they're going to have a family, promoting contraception is going to be far more effective.

There are conservatives groups out there where celibacy works really well, but they're fringe. And I think the conservative view is letting the best become the enemy of the good. Sure in a perfect world (for a conservative) everyone will stay celibate until they're ready for marriage, but in real life they're creating more unwanted pregnancies by fighting against birth control advertisement / access.

For conservatives: peer out of your bubble where abstinence works so well, do you really think the other teens are going to go celibate? When you see some 17 year old with a kid don't just judge them, know that you had a hand in that.

22 pushups for the Vets

I know someone who is doing 22 pushups every day, and posting it to Facebook to raise awareness for the 22 veterans a day who commit suicide. I have several problems with this.

• The excuse of "raising awareness"
  
  I'm suspicious of anything for the cause of "raising awareness". What they're doing makes much more sense as a means to attention grabbing. Giving pretty much any % of your income to a cause is guaranteed to do more good than raising awareness. And most of the time you're raising awareness for something people are already aware of. Did you already know that veterans are a lot more likely to commit suicide? I sure did before anyone started doing pushups.
  
  Raising awareness is probably better than nothing, but very very close to doing nothing at all. So incurring costs to raise awareness is likely motivated by other than stated reasons, even if subconsciously.

• Raising awareness doesn't fix anything.
  
  Awareness by itself just makes people feel bad about a problem, not solve it. Naturally you want raised awareness to lead to people actually doing something about the problem, but in fact what happens with these sorts of things is it just leads to more people raising awareness.
  
  So you do pushups on Facebook for the veterans and then tag 3 friends who now have to do it too. Now quadruple the people are raising awareness. This is great if you have a secret motive of getting people to do pushups, but I don't see it doing much for the veterans.
  
  And if there's a substitution affect than raising awareness can be worse than doing nothing. It used to be that showing you care meant doing something about it, but if you can show you care for cheaper then you just may do pushups instead.

• The "X people a day" illusion
  
  You can make anything sound big by citing how often it happens a day because there are so so many people in the world who could possibly do it! 62 people a day move to Nashville. 20,000 people a day visit Hawaii. There are 2 new contestants are on Jeopardy at least every weekday.

• We think there are a lot fewer veterans than there are, so we intuitively do the wrong division
  
  There are 21.8 million veterans, 7% of the entire population of the U.S., out of those 22 committed suicide today. This means the 22 a day is out of, take another believable number - 1 million, then the degree to which being a veteran is leading to suicide is being severely miscalculated.
• Misinterpretation of the statistic
  
  If your concern is about how many people are becoming veterans, then you'd want to cite how many veterans are committing suicide. If your concern is about how many people are committing suicide, then you wouldn't put veteran suicides in a special category.
  
  We may think that veteran suicides are especially tragic because with them, we think we can identify the reason for the suicides; the trauma of war. Other categories of suicide almost certainly have trauma related reasons, but we don't know exactly what they are whereas we can imagine the bombs going off and the friends being lost.
  
  The trauma of war doesn't even seem to be what's causing the disproportionately high rate of veteran suicides. according to the LA Times the rate of suicide is, “…slightly higher among veterans who never deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq"
  
• The last thing is the vets aren't heroes.

Myself and the Rationalists

Since I was about twelve I've wondered what's wrong with me. More recently the question evolved into what's so different about me.

I don't think I've ever found and answer to that question. But among the people who call themselves the rationalist community I've found that the same ways of thinking that set them apart also set me apart.

What's a shame is I've never met a rationalist person in real life, and barely communicated with them online. But they like to talk ideas using the internet as a forum, and I get this eureka moment when I read their output, like that's exactly what I've been thinking and nobody else gets it.

Like, in my early 20s it seemed obvious to me that the main political parties are more tribal than policy oriented. Why? Because their long lists of policy likes and dislikes have nothing to do with each other, but strongly correlated. Why should pro-choice people also want higher taxes? The only reasonable answer is that there isn't some thread of consistency or foundational assumption to all their correlative beliefs, they're just different types of people who socialize over shared beliefs.

When I tried to explain this to normal people, they didn't get it. And then I find out that rationalist type folks talk about this a lot.

I think it may just be a highly cerebral anti-social personality that sets me and the rationalists apart.