Blergblahblahblergderp

The past couple of weeks, have been punctuated for me by friends asking 'have you heard of Jordan Peterson?' indicating that they have either just heard of him, or they have just become concerned that he is something they need to take seriously. In most cases, the question has not been one of curiosity, but seeking reassurance. That no reasonable person would credit Jordan Peterson. Or perhaps just that they are not the only person blindsided by his rise in popularity.

If you are concerned about the rise of JP, I would suggest you relax, and no need to 'research' what he's all about. You won't like him. He is riding a market opportunity though, by and large created by the popular conventional wisdom of the left.

I offer my shitty synthesis of what you just need to take note of, and meditate on.

1. To argue badly for a cause is the same as supporting the opposition.

This talk by Van Jones, whom hopefully is more likable than JP opens with the words "I think Liberals have a very hard time understanding their role in creating a market for Trump."

2. You probably can't demand empathy if you don't yourself extend it.
3. Empathizing is really, really hard, easy to mistake with projecting, and few people are good at it.
4. Oppression, tragically, is never as personal to the oppressor as it is to the oppressed.
5. Most oppression is a bi-product, an oversight.
6. The world as it is may be flawed, but that doesn't mean it came to these flaws arbitrarily.
7. Popular and egalitarian movements will be defined by the lowest common denominator.
8. Just because you won't let a psychoanalyst put you in a box, doesn't mean you don't behave as if you are in that box.
9. Be skeptical of anyone telling you who you are, but remember also that you are not the final authority on who you are. If it were so, you'd never have met a liar.
10. If you can't entertain dissenting opinions, you will be doomed to live a life under the foot of people who can.
11. It's a poor idea to lie to yourself. Take inventory of any vindictiveness or desire for group membership, and status within a group that may be motivating your righteousness.
12. When Bertrand Russel said 'The trouble with the world is the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt' it was an apolitical statement.
13. You will probably never meet someone 10 times your height, but it is possible to meet someone 10 times your psychological size and it's much harder to spot them coming. So brace for the greater variance.
14. Having everyone accommodate your problem into irrelevance is not only inefficient but does not actually fix your problem.

There, there's plenty of thoughts to feast upon and digest. I could do so myself and perhaps emerge a better thinker and advocate of whatever, and it doesn't require watching hours upon hours of JP lectures trying to force down your distaste to extract some granules of valuable criticism.

On Sexual Harassment

Consider this



In Conjunction with this


and admit that sorting out sexual harassment is going to be tricky. Perhaps impossible. Let's hope not, however any optimistic belief that avoiding sexual harassment is 'simple' and that people are being stupid and obstinate in the face of obvious answers like 'just don't do it.' is counterproductive.

Last night I attended two social functions. At the first, some douche turned up. Within a 30 minute period he demonstrated no capacity to 'read a room' just to be clear there was no sexual harassment perpetrated. The guy was simply inept at knowing when to just fucking shut up, when his jokes, suggestions or comments were falling flat. When he left the room, discussion actually turned to how to get rid of him, and failing that, how it might be possible to ditch the party and reconvene elsewhere.

At my second engagement, a friend of mine hugged me too hard and too long. This is not a problem for me, because I am physically larger than my friend so they can hug away I'm not going to get creeped out or feel insecure. But it happens, and I don't think I was being sexually harassed. A social norm was being transgressed as to how long a hug should last.

I bring up these two examples just because they came up within 2 hours of each other as examples of quite ordinary and commonplace behavior.

And thus, even though it's done the rounds, videos like the first one annoy me, and it's always a popular message: 'it's simple stupid!' whenever there's an issue that prompts sufficient self-righteousness. However this popular message annoys me.

Here's what the 'it's simple stupid!' camp is assuming away:

1. that people communicate indirectly.
2. that some people are not competent at reading social signals.
3. that there is a large overlap between acceptable behavior, and harassment based on the desirability of the individual to another individual.
4. that people are incompetent at expressing themselves in manners that are always acceptable.
5. that there are people in the world with a fear of rejection, that behave in incongruous ways both encouraging and discouraging potential suitors.
6. that there is mental illness in the world.
7. that there are people who are socially awkward.

I could probably go on, given time. But I can't be bothered spending it. The first video is using levity to address a phenomena that we should really quite reasonable expect.

Whenever there is a huge public outcry about sexual harassment, there are going to be a middleband of men that are horrified at the prospect of creeping out or disturbing or making any woman feel unsafe and yet are worried that they have done just that through plain old incompetence, perhaps by holding a hug too long, or perhaps trying to win over strangers through attempting an ill-advised joke.

The too-long hug, could be creepy, could be a creep getting trying to get their kicks by pressing a woman into them so they can feel their erection. I would guess somebody socially awkward would likely do the old 'asses-out' hug for feer of their genitals making their presence known to the other party, but I suspect in most cases the too-long hug is a form of indirect communication that is attempting to say 'I like you' while immediately gauging the likely response of the other by trying to hold that hug.

Or consider the term 'Love Triangle' if you've heard of it, then I guess you need to reconcile whether love triangles are a myth or whether it may allude to a real social phenomena. I guess formally it would have to refer to some kind of situation where Brad likes Jenny, who likes Greg, who like Brad. But I would guesstimate it commonly occurs without any sexual orientation obstacles where Brad likes Jenny, Jenny likes Greg, Greg isn't interested in Jenny, but all three of them work in the same office, perhaps even the same department. Jenny may groom herself with attracting Greg in mind, she applies makeup and selects outfits and perfumes that she feels enhances her appeal. And they do, just to Brad, not Greg. Brad similarly grooms in order to impress Jenny, but Jenny while polite and professionally friendly to Brad, considers him a sexual non-entity. The trouble for Jenny is, while she is ostensibly trying to narrow-cast to Greg, she is broadcasting much of her message about sexual availability.

Firstly, nothing in the love-triangle scenario would absolve Brad of sexually harassing Jenny. Particularly in a professional work environment. Equally, nothing would absolve Jenny of sexually harassing a not-interested Greg, but thanks to sexual dimorphism in our species and the statistical realities of sexual harassment, Greg is less likely to be bothered by Jenny than Jenny by Brad. Understanding that, Brad in theory could discern that Jenny dresses not for his benefit but Greg's. He could for example read body language that is narrow cast, establish a baseline and notice Jenny only teases her hair when talking to Greg, not himself etc.

But while he could I personally can't argue that he should or every other man on the planet. For one thing, most of my friends don't appreciate it when they catch me reading their body language. The second is that it is a costly solution in terms of time and energy to address failures in what is quite normal human interaction. What Brad needs to understand is the difference between flagrantly unacceptable behavior, and when quasi-acceptable behavior becomes unacceptable through repetition.

The working material, being the general population of the world are going to, like me, have probably fucked up making ice-cubes in a tray at some point. We are talking about people who, like me, have locked themselves out of their house, or their online banking account. Let us give ourselves credit that we will probably fuck up navigating social dynamics at some point, let alone the much higher risk and less practiced sexual dynamics.

I have no problem with the pursuit of an ideal or even improved world for women to live in, I am frustrated by people thinking that it hasn't thus far been accomplished for lack of the simplest efforts of self restraint.

Try, out of curiosity, this thought experiment: Go to some social media account, if necessary a directory of phone contacts or some such. Find the 14th person on the list you know, and I guess gender doesn't matter but if it might to you, select the first friend from the 14th that is compatible with your orientation. Now imagine that tomorrow they approached you face to face and said 'Hey, I am in love with you, I want to spend lots of time with you, all the time I can get, have regular sex with you and plan a future together, how do you feel about me?'

Would it freak you out if you received such a proposal from them? I looked at my account, and I'd have to say while I wouldn't be freaked out, I would be quite uncomfortable to try and devise the best way to reject her.

Yet that is direct communication delivered verbally. It isn't an arm thrown around my shoulder in an act of presumed familiarity, it isn't groping my arse on a dancefloor at a party. It isn't sending me photos of genitals to my phone without solicitation. But I suspect, a lot of people would be really uncomfortable with this direct communication, they would perhaps not like being burdened with the information of someone confessing they are in love with you. I also suspect, you like me don't want to live in a world where that level of directness is what is required to engage someone in a possible romantic relationship.

There is a desirable level of ambiguity to be navigated as two people feel eachother out. Miscommunication is bound to happen along the way. Sometimes it may have unfortunate outcomes in terms of some guy or girl feeling heartbroken and disappointed, and sometimes it may have unfortunate outcomes in terms of someone getting harassed or assaulted.

To be clear though, as a guy, I don't have much experience of what it is like to be routinely sexually harassed. I know the fact is that it is pretty bad out there for women. But nobody, nobody is helped by denying there is some ambiguous middle ground where some harassment will likely have to be endured, and some transgressions forgiven. And guys are going to have to accept that it's likely to be a judgement call made by individuals within the situation. This means some guys that had no intention of ever hurting, assaulting, harassing or even making a woman uncomfortable are going to go down for sexual harassment - because in the end intentions don't matter so much as the effects.

The reason I take that stance is because even if you say 'look hugging a woman because she's your friend is fine, that's not sexual harassment.' A bunch of sexual predators are going to take any inch offered by definitions of behavior that is acceptable and run a mile with it, until they feel it's okay to masturbate into a restaurant pot-plant in front of someone because she's your 'friend'.

I am pessimistic that sexual harassment can be eradicated, that it could just be solved with straightforward education and checking your privilege. That the line can be drawn on any surface that isn't running water. That we'll ever live in a world where Greg can wink and it's not harassment but Brad can't wink without creeping someone out.

My point is not that women are responsible for their own harassment, though take it that way if you must. My point is that the material we have to work with in solving this problem, is very low quality stuff. We can only go backwards by pretending that minds are carved in marble, not squishy grey matter that forgets where it parked the car.

On Voting

I don't particularly ever wish to go viral, nor any idea or suggestion of mine to go viral. Namely because I do not view myself as qualified to generate a sufficiently considered idea to have its upside sufficiently outweigh its unintended consequences.

But if there were one idea I could come close to wishing would catch on it's this decision rule: 'vote for the candidate who spent the least on their campaign.'

Before I elaborate... build a case for why I'd want this idea to catch on, there's some obvious caveats and qualifications - namely that you might have a case where you have an establishment corrupt person and a truly horrific independent who couldn't get funding because their platform is essentially 'I feel like Hitler never had a bad idea' or something, in which case a voters primary duty - to vote for the lesser evil - should supersede the simple vote for who spends the least. Beyond not being so hard and fast to exempt one's ethical duties, this decision rule is very much a limited 'take back democracy' campaign that would not run indefinitely. If it got widespread enough and thus candidates were incentivized into a 'race to the bottom' on campaign spending, then at some point regrettably you might actually have to look at, and weigh up policy again to decide how to vote. Perhaps the nominal end point would be when a Democratic government actually passes campaign finance reform legislation in favor of public interest.

Anyway, here's why I'd ostensibly like this idea to catch on.

1. It is underpinned by something that should be verified, and I believe, has been verified through analysis of at least the United States electoral process. But the finding I believe was that the best predictor of policy is actually not campaign promises or even party ideology but campaign contributions.
I would expect this to be the case, just through pure reasoning. Chomsky does better reasoning than I can, and furthermore actually reads up on this shit, but the picture gets scattered across a bunch of sources, so please accept (but still apply critical thinking) my shitty synthesis.
Basically there's a threshold at which campaigning for public office gets so expensive that you lose your democracy - you move from 1 person 1 vote, to 1 dollar 1 vote. An unfinanced candidate simply cannot win office. If a candidate finances themselves through small contributions from many people, and campaign donations are a better prediction of the policy outcomes than campaign promises by candidates, then in effect the *real* election is the fundraising campaign - and that's best case. Inflate campaign costs out of the reach of small contributions and you have disproportionate representation for those who make greater donations.
The wealthiest people are legal people aka corporations, and corporations are almost exclusively tyrannical in structure. There is in principle not much difference between your preferred candidate accepting 'donations' from a dictator like Kim Jong Un, and a corporate executive. They are both tyrants that preside over a domain that can have conflicting interests to the public at large.
Rationally you would expect campaign 'contribution' or 'donation' to be a euphamism for 'investment' in that given a CEO can also just plain vote, their incentive to move from 1 person 1 vote to 1 dollar 1 vote is to get disproportionate representation. This can even work when they donate the same amount to both candidates, because the candidate is faced with the dilemma of refusing the donation and thus accepting a disadvantage. Hence on some issues it's possible to get no representation from either candidate.
The other point that bears emphasis is that campaign contributions being a better predictor of policy than campaign promises. If a tyrant desires a piece of policy that is universally unpopular - say reducing the minimum wage - then their interest is in having the candidate that represents them get elected, not to convince the public that the policy is a good idea. They can come to a private understanding of the conditions of the donation, and then have the candidate campaign on entirely unrelated issues. eg. you might vote for the 'Marriage Equality' candidate platform because you care about equal rights and their donors are indifferent, but the same candidates intention to deregulate minimum wage is never really featured in their campaigning.
So the rationale becomes pretty basic, the less campaign expenditure, the less compromised your candidate is, the more representative your vote is likely to be.

2. It's simple! The decision rule requires no education beyond being able to identify which of two integers  is the lower number. Someone can adopt the rule with no need to educate themselves into critical thinking, economic theory or even civics. Much like a managed index fund is for many the best way to invest in shares because one simply owns the whole market, needs to know nothing about finance, pays lower fees and achieves higher returns than most managed funds, a voter who uses this simple decision rule doesn't need to pay attention and process any information apart from who spent the least. A simple, objectively verifiable fact.
Democracy is a popular, egalitarian ideal and that means a decision rule needs to be simple, to be applicable at the lowest common denominator of analytical ability and like an economic model produce a better outcome across the population, not necessarily in every discrete case.
While the benefits of using a simple rule are to me clear, the adoption of such a simple solution I realize is wildly optimistic, given that most people are not empirical and sadly persist in the conceit they are smarter than they have already demonstrated themselves to be. There is a wealth of data to indicate that low-cost index funds have outperformed the vast majority of fund managers for years, but lay people still persist in paying high fees to numerous managers who routinely under perform the market - thus I expect most people will still think themselves up to the task of analyzing minute chunks of second hand information as to a candidates policy platform to determine how to vote in their own best interest.
You could have already thought that this rule would have meant Trump over Clinton, given that Trump spent less on his campaign, but you'd be wrong. It would mean Sanders over Trump which is actually incorrect again, because for the office of president it would be Johnson over Trump and Sanders (and I don't know which of the million republican primary candidates was the poorest, but it probably would not have been Trump).
The outcome of any one election is not the point of the decision rule though, although it could produce better outcomes for the public at large, the real beauty is in the incentive it provides. Namely if this was how voters voted, it would incentivise candidates to not take campaign contributions. Both Trump and Obama won their primaries and fans largely because they weren't taking large ticket donations. Then the tragedy (particularly for the Obama campaign) they welcomed with open arms the compromising money in the Presidential campaign because the donations tend to follow votes and not the other way round. Another way of thinking about that is that your preferred candidate gets privatized by virtue of being likely to represent their constituents.
It would free candidates from the obligation towards donors and free them from the donor treadmill - a public office holder after the fact of the election cannot bite the hand that feeds them, because they have to consider their re-election, career, retirement and the future of their party.
If en masse, having your campaign budget expand becomes a liability to you getting elected then candidates obligations move from fulfilling the promises on which they were financed, to fulfilling the promises on which they were elected.

3. There's also a potential for much needed reform in Journalism. If campaign contributions are better at predicting policy outcomes than campaign policy platforms, then journalistic coverage of politics needs to be focused on the fundraising rather than the campaigning if they are true to their mission of informing the general public.
Adopt this simple decision rule and suddenly the only information voters care about aren't the talking heads promising policies they apparantly have no intention of fulfilling, but who is spending what and where that money is coming from.
The United States is well set up, because they have to declare donations and it's all a matter of public record. My own country Australia under the Westminster System, I believe has a less admirable legislation as regards disclosing donations - but it should be noted that the press in the US does an abysmal job of covering and disseminating this most crucial information to the public at large.
Even in a country like Australia though, the necessary information is available to cover the expenditure on campaigns by proxy - media monitoring is already in place to estimate advertising costs based on the numeracy and frequency of ads on broadcast mediums and online. Organisations like Getup! even have the infrastructure in place to distribute 'How to vote' cards that just list candidate by campaign expenditure.

4. It's a massive massive massive time saver. Think about it, when someone says 'Have you heard about what Dutton said on Q & A last night' you can say 'I don't care.' There's only one thing you need to know, so you can skip all the mental taxation of trying to determine whose policy reflects your best interests, especially if the proposed policy is not that predictive of actual policy.
It's fucking SIMPLE! I can't emphasize this point enough, there is just so much fucking pure white noise in public discourse picking over the minutiae of candidates policy and history and all this shit in what is a tragically optimistic overestimation of the influence of discourse and our ability to disseminate our best ideas. Here is something where you can just say 'vote for the candidate who spends the least money and if enough people do THAT then they'll learn to stop taking money.'
Take just one example as an illustration. Just one.
Should you vote for a candidate that supports Capital Improved Value basis for land tax or Site Value? If you don't immediately know, then here's what you need to know - Capital Improved Value basically means the better condition the structures sitting on your land are in, the more land tax you have to pay, whereas if you were to demolish any structures then you would get a reduction in your tax obligation. CIV based land tax favors land banking and speculation, whereas Site value encourages development and optimal usage of the property. Land banking artificially reduces the supply of housing, thus putting upward pressure on land prices, hence CIV is pushed for by Real Estate lobby groups and land bankers, it allows development estates to drip feed supply of new housing as well on the outskirts while reducing the amount of funding local councils receive...
blah blah blah, there's more I could extrapolate on, the thing is with the decision rule you don't actually need to know any of this shit. It means you will probably vote for the candidate that received less money from any Real Estate, Property Development or Land Banking lobby groups.

5. Worst case: The next election we wind up electing a chaotic mess of independents, all grossly under-qualified with very narrow domains they actually care about (one may have campaigned on the single issue of raising Highway Speed limits, another on being Anti-Duck Hunting) but the game as it stands, is broken. An incoherent government would have to come together to compromise and actually think through problems as shit arises and they would have no reciprocal obligation to do anything for any group beyond the interests of their constituent voters.
Historically in Australia, minority governments (like most recently the Gillard Government) have been much more effective than majority governments in passing legislation because they are forced to negotiate and compromise.
The monsters on both sides are the ones running slick campaigns and then quite transparently not representing the people who voted for them.
Yes, there's some chance that en masse we elect a dysfunctional incoherent mob of unqualified independents who send us back to the pols early, and then there's a chance the 2 party systems of the world pull off a 'we told you so, it's one of us or nobody!' but if you hold fast to your resolve, eventually under game theory the competent parties will have to adapt their game to representing voters rather than donors.

I really can't believe how I managed to write so many words over something so simple, I doubt this decision rule is an original idea on my part, and really it becomes similar to government by lottery which I am not adverse to and that certainly wasn't my idea. I just hear this kind of no-analytical-abilities-required solutions rarely, if ever, discussed for all the lengthy discussion of our broken democracies.

So I guess, if you want my vote don't take any more fucking money than needed to register.