On Melbourne's Waves

I'm going to take Ghandi's advice and be the change I'd like to see in the world, specifically: I'm going to make clear from the outset that I'm speculating on limited data that I have. This is speculation. Opinion. I do not know for a fact whether this is the case, and that should shape your confidence in accepting my interpretation. 

I feel that is important to make clear, because everyday I awake to greater clarity that we are living in an age where people hold incredibly consequential beliefs having never bothered to investigate those beliefs. I also had the tremendous privelege to work on a nationwide longitudinal survey for some 8 years speaking to thousands of Australians during the Julia Gillard years where I was able to observe for myself, that the press is incredibly influential in shaping people's opinions. There are an alarming number of people who outsource their opinion forming wholesale to the Editorial staff of their local tabloid paper.

There's a line in 2014's 'Pride' said by Bill Nighy in his role as Cliff:

I don’t believe what they say about

us, Lee. Why should I listen to

what they say about them?

Which I feel confident, is a statement of incredibly uncommon sense. It defies confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. These I suspect is actually how news is scrutinized - what we want to believe. 

Thus I am simply attempting to form my own opinion by making sense of the data, I received, which was all publicly available. 2020 has not impressed me as to the role and function of journalism, appearing to me as a kind of middle man that actually diminishes value. This is probably how I would satire the function of the press as current:

1. source appears in live public press conference. Source: 'I disagree with my opponents position because of X'

2. Journalist at press conference asks question of source. Journalist: 'If you had a million dollars to give every person in this city, when could we expect it?'

3. Source answers question. [no matter how irrelevant or transparently motivated the journalists question, the content of the source's answer is almost always irrelevant no mater how rational, reasonable or data backed.]

4. Front page headline/leading news story of headline's publication/channel: '[Source] SAYS YOU'RE A CUNT WANTS TO RUIN YOUR LIFE!' 

Chomsky is known for his concept of 'manufacturing consent' I these days am feeling much 'manufactured dissent' and it reminds me of the Gillard years. The press is impressing upon me some kind of industrial scale Iago to the general public's Othello. Things didn't work out for Othello. (The Iago I'm referring to is not the parrot from Aladdin.)

So with all that, I'm doing the same thing as much of the press that I read. Constructing a narrative. I am not an epidemiologist, I do have a bachelors degree in Economics, I don't have privileged access to the data.

I was prompted somewhat to write this because of a talk I listened to by Nicole Gurren on the very separate subject of Housing Affordability. It's a good example of narratives being constructed with no reference to any data, no factual basis and dominating the conversation - specifically housing affordability is best solved by > increasing the housing supply by > slashing the project approval red-tape. We tend to accept things, because we've heard them. I'm sure I could lose consciousness before I ran out of examples of this phenomenon.

The First Wave

Australia's first wave was worst in NSW, next worst in Victoria, where Victoria whose capital city Melbourne, has a population greater than that of the nation of New Zealand, and statistically on a per capita basis Victoria outperformed NZ up until the Cedar Meats outbreak which for my speculation is an important data point.

That's skipping to the end of the story of the first wave. My father was working in Mongolia in a climate-disastrous fly-in-fly-out arrangement, when Covid-19 was just an epidemic in Wuhan China. He flew back to Australia on a flight via Beijing where everyone was wearing face masks on the plane but took them off to eat their in flight meals. He flew back to Mongolia a fortnight later, Wuhan was locked down, Beijing was being locked down. By the time he was due to fly back to Australia, he could no longer travel via Beijing, he had to take a route from Mongolia to South Korea, transfer from one Airport to another in Seoul, then fly home.

My mother reported to me that their dinner group of friends from Shepparton one of Victoria's regional centers were unwilling to come to the dinner party my parents were due to host, owing to my father's travelling from Asia. My mother and I were of a consensus that they were being paranoid hypochondriacs. My attitude for the next week or so was 'Don't people remember SARS? Swine Flu?' 

Then South Korea had it's outbreak, and the WHO declared a pandemic. We discovered for the most part, most conuntries had no real plans in place. It all felt very reactive. To the credit of the leadership at every level of government in Australia, it appeared our leaders got briefed up very quickly. This was the bizarre week were time compressed, and we began to go into lock-down. Each day, the risks we were taking the day before seemed callous and stupid to me, so I should say the risks I'd been taking.

I had no idea if I was already Covid-19 positive, that was the main thing. I could have been asymptomatic, it was already here. I could be inadvertantly killing grannies just by breathing air. 

This was for me, the story of the first wave. We knew almost nothing, some seized on this to go into upbeat denial, or defiant denial, conspiracy theories. Those people are still around, though I assume there's an increased chance in my state, that some of them may now have caught Covid-19, and may have been confronted for the first time in their lives, that an objective reality exists.

There was a contingent I knew of that were overcautious. They didn't leave the house, they washed everything they touched, they disinfected their bananas before peeling them. They left as little as possible to chance, these are the people so desperate to survive, you wouldn't want to wake up in one of Jigsaw's games chained to them.

I feel that the first wave is largely forgotten, or that we have not yet found the time to reflect upon it. The first wave in Victoria was the rich man's wave, the middle class wave, the upper-middle-bogan wave. It was waves of people being disgorged from planes returning from ski trips on Italian slopes, Aspen-Colorado slopes. People returning from destination weddings and cruises. Holidaymakers. International holiday makers. Taking long haul flights across the Pacific Ocean, the South-East Asian Island Chains, the Indian Ocean, breathing recycled air and then walking straight through customs and out into the community.

I recall looking at the Department of Health's daily Covid updates during the first wave, once I had actually learned the nature of the situation, seen what was happening in Italy and New York and subsequently accepted the counter-intuitive seriousness of a tentative 2% mortality rate aerosol spread respiratory disease. The best represented demographic for case numbers nationally was females 20-29. Something like 7% above males 20-29 and 30% bigger than the third largest age-cohort.

My prejudice instantly kicked in, and I was all like 'it's those fucking hipster-bali tourists getting their cheap flights to Osaka and Tokyo via Jetstar. Those incredibly venal twenty-something women that think they are broadening themselves...' Unlike the WHO who transparently archive their situation reports it's a bit harder with the Australian website but here's one from late May that is the statistical picture I referred to and am referring to. You can see in the bar graph bottom middle the demographic breakdown. Anyway, I noticed my own prejudice kicking in, no doubt agitated by tourism Japan's add campaign specifically targeting young women to come live their Samurai experiences in 'authentic' Japan, oh how it bugs me... and caught myself. 

The most probably explanation for this demographic phenomena was that women, particularly young women are most at risk of community transmission because they are no doubt over-represented in jobs like Nursing, Waiting, Receptionist... proud of myself at having arrested my tertiary educated, Murakami reading specific misogyny and gotten to what was no doubt the truth, my rationalization soon deflated. 

That narrative doesn't square with the data being presented, in the first wave there was little to no reports of healthcare workers contracting it. The great success of the first wave if anything was that our healthcare system avoided becoming the hotbed of transmission and fatalities like Northern Italy and New York. Indeed, I can recall things I thought about in the first wave - one of which was during the panic buying epidemic, I actually thought about the prospect of people invading my home for toilet paper in a supply shock driven breakdown of society. Another was my being drafted into a medical career I never wanted simply because the doctors and nurses were dying off and I eventually would be forced into a medical school basic training draft, much like my Grandfather was called off to fight Germans and Japanese interrupting his dreams of being a con-man or doing a dentistry apprenticeship or something.

There was also a complete lack of news coverage of restaurant outbreaks, or hospitality industry outbreaks, or event outbreaks. To date, I don't think there's been any community transmission that has taken place in a Supermarket. 

Thus, I conclude the Victorian, and Australian wave stories are stories of demographics. The first wave was the international holiday demographic. People who can demonstrably take time off work to go overseas for a couple of weeks.

I distinctly remember as Victoria's first wave was winding down, and there was (what I considered then) irrational agitation and public pressure for the restrictions to be released even as the Cedar meats cluster was ballooning, I was riding along a trail feeling constantly frustrated by the demonstrable lack of public understanding of 1.5m physical distancing that I the very concrete sentiment formed in my head 'If we have beat this thing, it is not owing to Victorian public.'

The first wave was manageable because it was among a demographic of people that are largely retired and wealthy, who have no income to lose that isn't rent from property they own, or dividends from shares. Or they were young people, who may feel like battlers, but lockdown for them meant they could no longer go on Tinder dates, a demographic that has some 80% of their social contact invested in the 3 people they take their break with at their casual jobs while they go through Uni. A demographic that sublets the room in their sharehouse for 6 weeks while they go to Japan, New York or Berlin to get authentic food for their Instagram stories, and cheap good quality cocaine to tell their friends about in the break room.

This is a demographic that Jobkeeper and Jobseeker are sufficient to secure. I suspect there's a high correlations between taking month long cruises and being retired, and possibly a high correlation between taking international trips over the (Australian) summer and having a job that can be tele-commuted, or school or University course. I suspect there's a correlation between taking international trips, having a salaried office job with paid annual leave and being able to telecommute that job.

The carriers of the First wave might visit their family once a month, or once every two months, or their family live scattered across the world, where they have taken various roles as social media monitors for firms in different cultural hubs. It's the wealthy, in other words, who on aggregate don't spend much time in their community as they are time poor cash rich. The elderly retirees go travelling to alleviate boredom and 'spend the kids inheritance' where their children were/are preoccupied with their self-diagnoses of 'social anxiety' as an excuse to only interact regularly and in close proximity with 1-5 friends. The demographic that sees pre-drinks as mandatory prior to a party, but showing up to the party that necessitates the pre-drinks is not mandatory.

The state and federal government shut down the key contact point for this internationally jetsetting demographic - school and work, and with that, their social lives and communities naturally shift online. They put up the welfare payments to prevent civil unrest (for the most part) and we rode out that first wave. Bringing us to...

The Second Wave

I have opinions about the second wave that I would acknowledge upfront, mainly to get them out of the way. I feel, quite strongly that they are wrong to fixate on. Specifically:

• Almost certainly the state government (The Andrews Government) made the wrong decision, aka a mistake in allowing our quarantine hotels to use private security firms to maintain the quarantine, when the Australian Defense Force (ADF) had been pledged as available to oversee this task by the Federal Government.
• The initial reaction to the outbreak of community transmission that would become our second wave, of locking down specific postcodes was doomed to failure (emphasis in my opinion) because the outbreak had been traced back using genetic sequencing and through positive Covid tests to the Quarantine Hotels, a set of data that told me, that if people who literally 'had one job' couldn't be trusted to contain the virus, then some 100,000 people in a set of suburbs with incredibly porous, arbitrary and conditional (eg. 'essential' workers could leave the locked down suburb) boundaries - if this was page one in the 'suppression strategy' playbook that whole playbook can be thrown away.
• The lockdown of the public housing residential towers was a fucking nightmare for all involved.

I believe it wrong to fixate on these, because the quarantine hotels using private security worked perfectly right up until it didn't, this is the kind of mistake leadership has to be able to make if we aren't to live in a 'demeritocracy' (quoting myself there) ie. we ostracize anybody who isn't perfect despite having nothing but imperfect alternatives. 

It also, creates a problem of hypocrisy for people agitating for early or immediate reopenings on the grounds of damage to the economy. Because that would be the exact line of reasoning to use private security firms instead of ADF personal. The ADF are government sector spending, spending that I assume goes on whether they are training on a military base way out Woop-Woop somewhere or guarding the corridor of a Hotel. 

Whereas, the Hotel's repurposed for quarantine are private sector extracting government funds to offset the lost tourist trade owing to the lockdowns, I would be amazed if part of the decision the Andrews government made wasn't informed by an essentially identical but specific argument about the need to protect the economy by not using ADF personal and instead paying the Hotels to hire private security, Hotel managers that in part or accross the board stuck to the old economic paradigm of maximizing profit by having marginal costs = marginal revenue. In layman's terms, to cut every corner possible without losing the government contract to keep international arrivals in 14 day quarantines.

As to the 10 postcode lockdown, my harshest criticism would be my usual suspect of making a decision that disregards ordinary human psychology. Particularly the propensity for people to feel it is unfair, like if the news said their were 40 active cases yesterday, and you were one of 10,000 people living in a suburb that was now locked down and you shared a supermarket with a suburb that is not locked down, most people aren't going to adopt the 'take one for the team' mentality but gravitate towards the 'why me? it isn't fair. I didn't do anything wrong' mentality. 

In my experience most people lack the cognitive empathy abilities to overcome prisoners dilemmas, tragedies of the commons. When they are thinking 'I'll escape to my beach-house/cousin's house/visit my mum interstate.' I doubt any sufficient number pause and think 'I probably don't have Covid, but this is exactly what someone with Covid is thinking right now in this suburb, and they are going to flee the lockdown and that's exactly how this will spread...' 

So while it was doomed to fail though, I don't think it was pointless. Governments everywhere are observing governments everywhere trying to figure out a) what the best approach is and b) the best approach they can afford logistically and politically.

The suffering under lockdown, is somewhat mitigated by the knowledge we now have that locking down postcodes doesn't work. From now, anybody who tries this in the event of an outbreak, is 100% liable for escalating the situation, because they had every opportunity to learn from the Victorian example.

Getting to the Residential Towers. I've had the fortune to have friends that lived in towers like the ones that were placed in the most severe lockdown nationwide. They have been described as vertical cruise ships. Having an outbreak in one of these towers is just a fucking nightmare. Locking them down in quarantine is a fucking nightmare. It was the right call. I saw the people demanding on humanitarian grounds that they be released, and though I'm sure they are well intended, non of these demands gave me the impression the people advocating had any fucking idea what they were talking about. 

Which brings me to what I interpret to be, the real story of Melbourne's second wave, again a story of demographics. Because the question is: Prior to the introduction of mandatory quarantine in designated hotels for international arrivals, planes were just disgorging carriers out into our community, we had a prominent news story of a Doctor that flew back in late Feb/early March feeling sick with flu-like symptoms that saw some 60 patients at his clinic before he bothered to get tested and test positive. Including two patients at a nursing home in Malvern. Why didn't this complete lack of quarantine and self-isolation protocol result in the kind of numbers we saw in the Melbourne second wave?

The crucial thing, by my synthesis is the demographics of who got infected. About a week ago, it was confirmed that a quarantine security guard that was infected, infected her housemate an aged care nurse this only explains 2 cases at one facility, which is unsurprising because it's very direct.

What came out in the wash, in dribs and drabs over the past 6 or so weeks are the headlines that get buried in the dumpster fire that is the media coverage of the daily press briefings. Things like the hotel security being hired via Whatsapp and paid $18 an hour (the current national minimum wage is $19.49 per hour, or $740.80 per 38 hour week, which x2 is $1480 where the current unemployed benefits stand at $1124 per fortnight) so guess who's taking that job? People who really have to.

It also trickles out, that people were getting tested after one shift at one work sight (where in Australia you are instructed to self-isolate until you get your test results) and then doing some uber-eats runs after the test, then going to work at a different job sight.

I was fortunate enough to have a friend testify to her direct experience of working as a nurse, having to pick up rosters at quarantine hotels and then hospital wards and working across multiple sites. The media and government appears to have uncovered this also in their inquiries.

The ADF were brought in to door knock and make sure people who had tested positive were self-isolating, apparently 1 in 4 people weren't at home when they had tested positive and been instructed to self-isolate for 14 days. I suspect the natural response when hearing a statistic like this is moral outrage.

Let's try and exercise cognitive empathy though. The above screenshot is from the aforementioned in the pre-ramble talk about Housing Policy Red-Tape. The slide appears thus far into Nicole's talk if you can't read the screenshot it says 'Healthcare workers living in group households 2016 - source ABS...'

from the transcript: 'This is just a map of our low-paid healthcare and social assistance workers who are living in share group households in 2016. I hope they’re not still living in share houses now, but work also by my lab shows that the informal rental market is alive and well right now in the middle of the pandemic, similar to the remarks that Emily made at the start of this evening’s talk. Much of that stock, unfortunately, is overcrowded and some of it is downright dangerous.'

So the second wave, the crucial, to me, characteristic is that we basically got the first wave spreaders under control, because they were wealthy people who can telecommute their office jobs, have leave entitlements, have relatively secure housing etc. I described it all above. We got them under control through hotel quarentine, then we introduced them to a different demography...

A demographic that works in essential services - nursing and security, for near minimum wage, with little job security, no housing security etc. People who can't afford to take sick days, people who needs so badly to earn $365 above the Jobseeker payment a fortnight, that they will work full time standing in a corridor telling people to get back in their rooms for 38 hours a week over the next best option of doing whatever the fuck you want all day for $1,124 just $365 less.

It also appears to turn out, that the kind of person that takes this job has a large family, a large family that might have religious observances and large family gatherings, possibly language barriers, almost certainly a greater sense of felt filial piety. This low income, low job security, low housing security demographic appears to be the crucial difference in the second wave, they stand in stark contrast to the demographic of the first wave.

Just going by the 10 postcode lockdown, and the public housing tower lockdowns, the second wave was very much a North and Western suburbs wave, whereas in our first wave, the 'hot-spot' was squarely in the South and East, particularly the Mornington Peninsula. For those unfamiliar with Melbourne, the South and East are the well-to-do suburbs, the North and West are the working class.

Would you be willing to bet the farm, that a similar analysis of ABS census data for Melbourne won't show that the Hotspod, super-spreader suburbs aren't characterized by Low-income aged care and security workers correlating with low home ownership rates, in informal share-houses, room share etc? That it will turn out that the people that lift your Nan in and out of bed and change her diapers, are incredibly well paid homeowners from small families with tertiary educations and are just incredibly selfish pricks?

This is what the data screams to me, and it frankly, must be ignored. Because nobody likes to discuss why it is that we pay a Fund Manager $120,000 a year plus bonuses to underperform an index fund as they allocate Superannuation, or a Social Media 'Expert' for a Boutique Interior Design business is paid $50,000 per year with 20 days annual leave and 8 days sick leave benefits, but someone, who if they fuck up cost the economy $6 billion a week, is paid $18 an hour and can't legitimately get their name on a lease.

We know plenty of fund managers are well compensated to lose money. We know plenty of social media experts are well paid to... well it's hard to tell whether they are doing anything at all. And we know, that if someone does quarantine security right, they can save us $6 Billion dollars over... 8 weeks and counting. We know an aged care worker, if they turn up to work sick can kill any and all of their residents.

That's the market, and the economy we are supposed to be in a rush to reopen. I'd also suggest, that because there's likely to be a high correlation between working an actually hard but essential job for minimal compensation and being a first or second generation immigrant, that many people don't wish to discuss this narrative because of the inevitable racist vitriol that will be directed at the people willing to work harder than us at work worth doing for people unwilling to pay them a cent more than they are obligated to.

To be clear, I'm not anti-immigrant. I'm anti-slum lords, I'm anti-corner cutting old economic paradigms of how to profit off government tenders. As I infer from the fact that the quarantine hotels appeared to in many cases shirk their obligations to clean and feed the tenants. 

If somebody screws up their one job, when they are hired at $18 an hour via Whatsapp and provided no training, I'm not angry at them. I'm angry at the recruiters and the management.

Certainly, certainly the decision to not use the ADF and to instead use private security was a catastrophic fuckup. Was it however an error of commission or omission? It appears, and it makes sense to me, to simply be an oversight. An act of commission would require evidence, including testimony surfacing where somebody advocated for private security - I'm agnostic, waiting for such evidence to appear.

An act of omission, an oversight squares up with other facts - like it was fine for the first wave, the Government appears to have learned 'as it goes' that people were testing positive and still going to work/refusing to self isolate because of economic pressures, and they made adjustments like offering payments and getting the test result turnaround time down. 

Think if you will, of Covid like fire, and the South and East suburbs, for Socio-economic reasons are like wet green foliage, tertiary educated, home-owning, white collar workers with declining birth rates. The North and West are dry tinder stacked on oily rags swept up against old newspaper collections, job insecure, housing insecure first and second generation migrants with large intersecting families, religious observances and community events with high birthrates and multiple siblings. Suppression might work out East, down South. 

Not West and North though, once the fire was there it went up in flames quickly, and we failed in our obligation to protect the vulnerable. Even if ultimately absolved of responsibility, these essential workers are going to have to live with 'to make rent I wound up killing 2 people/6 people/12 people.' for the rest of their lives.

These people aren't thought of victims though if you pick up a paper. The victims are cafe owners, gym owners, restaurant owners, landlords both residential and commercial, event coordinaters, footy fans etc. The real victim is the Economy.

The too oft escaped algebra of Covid however is that transmission rates increase quickly, it's non-linear, and it takes a relative age to bring them back down. It takes 15 minutes of exposure to aerosol droplets of Covid-19 to catch it, about 4 days for symptoms to show up, and 2 to 3 weeks to recover, and some 2% of people don't recover.

Now this suggests, that the way to handle outbreaks is to lock down movement and contact fast, and release these measures gradually. Fast in, slow out. This runs counter to public sentiment, the situation needs to escalate to scarily close to out of control before lockdowns are acceptable, then as soon as numbers appear to taper or start decreasing, the public demands to know when restrictions will be eased.

If you think of this behavior as an individual, it would be like a person testing positive refusing to isolate until they have given it to at least two other people, and then demanding to leave isolation the moment their fever reduces rather than after they are deemed non-contagious and recovered. Given that in a community, there will be many people who never contract the disease, perhaps the better analogy to the body would be the hands and knees agitating for release, because all the symptoms are in the lungs, head and toes.

I actually know the 3 degrees of separation between myself and George W Bush, it's possibly just 2 degrees of separation with a middle man that could be cut out. Given that he's (as of writing) a living President and all the living Presidents know each other, I have 4 degrees of separation which is to say, I know a guy who knows a guy who's dad knows George W who knows Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Donald Trump who certainly knows Mitch McConnel and Nancy Pelosi and I have 0 influence over any of them. I have little enough influence over people I know directly, it's a lot of effort to get them to turn up to one of my exhibitions or even respond to an email.

I have little enough influence over myself, when it comes to procrastination, eating right, exercising etc. I often don't follow my own advice.

Except that san travel bans and movement restrictions, it's possible that a virus I have could infect past and present leaders of the free world. Through collective incompetence I could play a role in the death of Jimmy Carter. Some resident of Wuhan whether they were a floor mopper in a Wet Market selling Bat soup or a lab technician that fucked up protocols (we'll probably never know who patient 0 was) hospitalized UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and infected Brazil's President Bolsanaro. 

This is a virus, that can get into clubs I never could. Yet, I live a lifestyle to-date more secure against Covid than the Prime Minister of England, The White House and President Bolsanaro. 

I also feel, now that the curve is flattening in Melbourne's second wave, that the public does not consider the position of the state Premier and the respective position of the press, particularly tabloid newspapers like the Herald Sun. 

The newspaper can and has agitated and riled up the public for quicker easing of restrictions, they've been heavily critical of the Premier's Roadmap out of lockdown. Now I imagine that if the Premier capitulated and released lockdown measures so people in Metropolitan Melbourne could have dinner parties of 5 people, and travel across town and stay at their beach house etc. and cases were stable for a whole week before, hypothetically, spiking again into a new outbreak of triple figure daily cases, and the stage 4 restrictions were put back in place...

I don't see the Herald Sun running a front page apology 'We were wrong, Gov was right.' I don't think they'd take any responsibility for their editorials. I think they wouldn't even blink before they blamed the premier for backflipping on his roadmap and coming out of lockdown too early. I can't imagine them saying 'well after criticizing him for not being conservative enough to post the ADF on the quarantine hotels, then urging him to be optimistic about releasing restrictions, it seems we don't know what we are talking about and have failed to inform the public and serve the public interest.'

That's my interpretation of the data available. The First Wave could be referred to as the 'First Class' wave and the Second Wave the Second Class. It's a story of demographics and vulnerabilities, one that echoes around the world on multiple scales.

Aziz and Louis

Though there are certainly more pressing and topical topics to talk about, in the spirit of recreational speculation, I want to talk about the intertwined tales of Louis CK and Aziz Ansari. Two high profile personalities that got #metoo-ed. I feel it worthy of talking about, because in my experience I'm surprised to find how few people are sympathetic to my take on both cases.

So as to not rehash the cases, I'll just link to Aziz' and Louis' if you need to familiarize yourself. In short my position is: Too harsh on Louis, too soft on Aziz. Speaking of course about the court that has had the highest jurisdiction throughout the #metoo era, which I tentatively assume has run its course, adaptations have been made and society returns to a status quo.

What prompts me to revisit this so 2017 of subjects was quite an incidental prompt. I guess during my local lock down I had binge-watched the US adaptation of the Office, and then followed the showrunner's into their next production 'Parks and Recreation' which stars Aziz Ansari who gets second billing after Amy Poehler. Louis CK guest stars in a recurring role in that series as a police officer and love interest to Amy's character, having some scenes with Aziz Ansari. All serving to remind me of the parallels and contrasts of the two men's cases. (perhaps more consequentially, that Amy, Aziz and Louis have their agent, Dave Becky in common).

The second coincidental prompt was receiving an unexpected message from a friend, informing me that they had had to block a mutual friend of ours, and was letting me know on the off chance they attempted to reach them via me. I actually don't know the details or background or context there, I know almost nothing at all, beyond what was asked of me which I shall respect, and wasn't asked of me which I also respect. For example, it left me in a position where while I find the scenario in the abstract quite plausible I have to extend a presumption of innocence. This was somebody communicating to me their personal boundaries, not calling for me to doff my shining armor and ride out on a crusade with them.

But for me, left with the context I have, it functioned as somewhat of a vindication of a social phenomena I observe, but don't see commented on that much: In brief, hypocrisy. With a little more detail, people who say all the right things in public, but who's private conduct contradicts their professed values. It's wide spread, and well established, for what to my nearest guess has been at least a century, been referred to as 'lip service' and the behavior I'm confident is documented in texts at least as old as Machiavelli's 'The Prince' probably the writings of earlier Romans and Greeks, and I would not be surprised if it gets addressed in old testament scriptures and the earlier Hindu texts, Hammurabi's code, and there's some Sumerian cuneiform tablet somewhere in a museum or yet to be excavated from Iraq bitching about sycophants, though I personally am not going to bother to check.

Contemporary to when I'm writing this behavior is referred to as 'virtue signalling' and the linked article does I feel justice to the merits and pitfalls of its use, I tend to think of virtue signalling as analogous to mansplaining - both are definitely a thing, but owing to a general incompetence at diagnosing the phenomena as and when they occur, it is more often used as an Ad Hominem to shut down a speaker, virtue signalling from the right/mansplaining from the left.

While not innocent of virtue signalling, Louis is more often guilty of 'vice signalling' and there is a particularly well argued podcast (actually as this podcast is published in 2019, David McRaney may have removed Louis CK as an example) that makes the case his career is based on exploiting the psychological phenomena of pluralistic ignorance.

Here is an excerpt from podcaster David McRaney's book: 'You Can Beat Your Brain' which may be an alternate title from where I most likely heard it in his book 'You Are Now Less Dumb':

When the comedian Louis CK reveals to his audience that he sometimes thinks his children are assholes, that they are not exempt from the normal frustrations he feels towards adults, he mass-produces an epiphanous sigh night after night. His audiences suffering from pluralistic ignorance, realize in later conversation that their private thoughts about their own children are in fact the majority opinion. It is simply taboo to say it out loud.

That's pluralistic ignorance and how you can make a comedy career out of vice-signalling. So for every time Louis portrayed himself as particularly wise and a particularly excellent parent in his show 'Louis' there are 15 examples of him conveying himself as variously a creep, a pervert, superficial, with sexual hang-ups, stupid, irresponsible and a fuck-up. Louis was famous for talking publicly about his personal practices of masturbation. Less so, but it's there, for actively engaging in lies and deception etc.

Now by comparison, what, if anything has Aziz Ansari built his career out of? That's where I was finding it interesting to consider how intertwined the two men's careers ended up being. Prior to watching Park's and Recreation in full, I had kind of noticed that Aziz' show 'Master of None' was heavily inspired by, if not a rip-off of Louis' show Louis. (Again given Dave Becky is both men's agents and gets producer credits on both shows this is hardly surprising)

Setting that aside for a moment, the characters Aziz Ansari plays are in essence, just caricatures of himself in most cases - Tommy Haverford, the superficial government employee preoccupied with what other people think of him, swag, social media, being baller, clubs, ebonics... basically trying to be relevant and with it, while also feeling entitled and possessive of beautiful women. A character who is bad at stuff, but after shit goes wrong will turn up and say the right things.

Or Randy Springs in the movie 'Funny People' the hack comedian that is clueless about women, misogynistic to boot. Now while this role probably made no impression on nobody as near-nobody saw the film, I single it out because in one of Aziz Ansari's taped comedy specials, his whole final act is 'what would a special look like if I actually was Randy Springs?' and he does like 20~30 minutes in character as Randy. When not in character as Randy, Aziz Ansari's material is generally commentary on: R. Kelly, Kanye West, Social Media, Food trends and Pornography. Personally where Aziz shines the most is actually drawing on material from his chubby cousin - roughly analogous to the Ricky Gervais Show's podcast drawing most of its material and legs from Karl Pilkington.

Much as I might resist it, it is rare for me to write a blog post and not think of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in some way, on this occasion it's his aphorism 'The opposite of success isn't failure, it's name dropping.' and it's amazing how much and nearly how uniquely Aziz drops the names of his celebrity friends into his shows - or maybe it's just Kanye West... the only comparison I can think of is Eddie Murphy in his special Raw dropping the name of Bill Cosby who called him up to tell him what comedy was all about, and then dropping the name of Richard Pryor whom he called after getting off the phone with Cosby to tell him Cosby had told him what comedy was all about.

Then there's 'Master of None', where Aziz plays what... a fictitious version of himself 'Dev Shah, a 30-year-old actor, mostly following his romantic, professional, and personal experiences.' who is obsessed with food and food trends (In one scene he meticulously researches where the best taco truck is) struggles with race and racism (He and fellow ethnic-Indian comedian both read for a sitcom and ask the question why they can't have two Indian cast members in a sitcom) who is somewhat emotionally immature (leading to jealousy and a breakup that catalyzes the second season's opening in Italy) but constantly virtue signals, particularly about how millenials need to appreciate their elders, like the episode that shows the backstories of his father and his friend's father respectively, or the episode in which he helps his girlfriends Grandma bust out of her nursing home and go to a red-sauce Italian restaurant where Aziz again learns to appreciate his elders and a revivalist food trend.

The only vice signalling Aziz does in his career is act like a petulant child when he doesn't get his way. The rest is all about him realizing how hard it is for POCs, how hard it is for women, how we take the elderly for granted, name dropping and how all over the social media game he is.

Louis CK by contrast generally plays a guy who is awkward with, and lacks confidence around women, often crossing definitive lines like locking up his romantic rival in Parks & Recreation in order to try and win back his ex Leslie Knope. Having an extramarital affair in Blue Jasmine without letting his mistress know she is a mistress. Even when playing himself in Louis, it's mostly him fucking things up, being unpopular, alienating himself... and there's a scene where he is depicted as having a habit of asking out all the attractive young wait staff at the comedy club on dates until he is told to stop. Then he reluctantly goes on a date with a fat waitress who gives him a serve about why he won't date her just because she's overweight.

Louis tends to depict himself in unflattering ways, or having things explained to him by characters wiser than himself, where Aziz falls back constantly on 'you know I've learned something today...'

So if you haven't guessed, prior to the respective #metoo incidents going down, I held Louis and Aziz in very different esteem. With Louis being a very honest creep, world-class possibly generation defining comic, a talented director and editor, an innovator, writer and actor of some promise. By contrast my views of Aziz Ansari haven't changed much, Aziz feels like somebody I've known since adolescence, in my high-school I would have disparaged him as a 'try-hard' someone desperate for relevance, consumed with what the right shoes are, what hair cut is in, what bands to be listening to, what parties are going on and what drugs the other kids are taking.

I regard him as a competent hack, easily caricatured into a Kenny Bania archetype, his success is undeniable but he's tapping into a market I don't personally identify with and speaking to a life experience I don't share... you know one that gives a shit what Kanye and the Kardashians are doing, and consults Yelp reviews to decide where to eat.

Probably in my opinion, Aziz' best work would be his book 'Modern Love' which I actually thoroughly enjoyed, and kudos to him for stumbling across something in the zeitgeist worth addressing. However, even there, like my friend said of Bradd Pitt in any role, it's actually easy to imagine numerous candidates that would have been better handling the subject - Alain De Botton, Helen Fisher, Esther Perel, Brene Brown, Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis... they didn't, he did, so kudos to capitalism. Aziz' personal interests still detracted from the book, like discussing his need to sample Ramen places when he visited Japan to research his book, he can't seem to resist reminding me constantly how cloyingly desperate he is to be accepted, to be esteemed by youth culture.

Aziz and I probably only have an inborn suspicion of guys who wear fedoras in common. A trend that has probably passed us by now, as fedora fans became self-aware of the fedora meme and have now abandoned this reliable warning sign to not get entangled with them.

But then there's the similarities between Louis and Aziz - they both tend to play caricatures of themselves, Louis overlooks the questionable conduct of Woody Allen and pays homage to him in his work/arguably flagrantly ripping him off, Aziz overlooks the questionable conduct of Louis CK and pays homage to him in his work/arguably flagrantly ripping him off. Both men you can dredge up clips of them making articulate arguments in support of feminist positions, Louis is far more candid about his hypocrisy generally, owning it, and then both men manifest to varying degrees conduct amounting to prioritizing their personal gratification over the comfort of women and objectifying women.

The similarities though diminish once you look at the respective behaviors from professional and legal frameworks, in which context Louis' conduct is objectively worse. Aziz' conduct is in the context of a date between consenting adults and he pleaded quite plausibly, incompetence. It was a date where he was horny, and assertive to the point of being pushy and dismissive of the wishes of his sexual partner. Louis asked female colleagues, including subordinates to watch him masturbate, and called them while masturbating. It's been a while since I reviewed what is established fact and what is alleged, but he also in conjunction with his manager appears to have tried to cover up his misconduct or particularly apply pressure to Tig Notaro to drop the subject... Louis also relatively quickly offered a mea culpa, utilizing his intelligence to apologize competently, it is also alleged that he sought out a number of his victims years earlier than the 2017 expose piece in the New York Times and apologized to them for his conduct.

So generally what I come across in the commentary on these two cases is that most commentators state unequivocally that what Louis did, in terms of his sexual misconduct is wrong. And the consensus around Aziz was that what he did, amounts to a bad date.

I would extend a benefit of the doubt to both men, since it can't really be proven that they genuinely failed to consider or were oblivious to their ability to apply pressure/stress to the women in order to obtain their consent. Which is to say, incompetence not malice.

It is harder to extend this charity to Louis, because it is hard to imagine the community context in which an individual would think 'here's what is a nice gesture, ask women to watch or listen to or otherwise witness you masturbate.' it doesn't convene with any of my experiences of being a heterosexual man. This isn't a fantasy expressed and validated in locker rooms or boys dorms on school camps. It stretches credulity that someone would assume that conduct is okay, or within normality. But then again, the internet is a large place with many forums available.

Here though, I want to detwine the two individuals and essentially get Louis out of the way.

Louis' Case

I feel my main point of contention with my perception of how most people view Louis CK is the para-legality of it. I don't have any answers, I suspect there aren't any answers. I'm aware we cannot even say that the legal system in any jurisdiction I'm aware of, is consistent.

What often gets lost with Louis CK I suspect, is the timeline, or a clear understanding of his timeline. The most recent cited allegation in the article that had effectively earned Louis' conviction in the court of public opinion prior to it being published in 2017 was from 2005. His 5 accusers all testified to sexual misconduct occuring between 2002-05. Louis gets divorced in 2008, he is a guest star on Parks and Rec. in 2009, and has his breakout comedy special that year. He first came to my attention with a 'who the fuck is that guy' in 2011-12 when I saw him appear alongside Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Ricky Gervais in 'Talking Funny' on HBO.

The article detailing the allegations against him cites that he actually privately contacted two of his victims some years later and expressed his remorse and apologies. Keeping in mind, there's no disparity here between public offense/private apology, it was private-private.

Now all of this could be revised through further allegations indicating Louis' misconduct was ongoing right up until or beyond the article's publication in 2017. But there's as of writing no evidence this was the case.

What I suspect is at play in Louis CK's case is an offense against the 'Just-World Hypothesis' the intuition that bad things happen to bad people and good people are rewarded. That in a situation where there is a largely unknown male comedian and an unknown female comedian, and locks the door takes off his clothes and masturbates in front of the female, it is not supposed to be the male comedian that goes onto to have the breakout career and the female to remain in obscurity. The fairy tale goes that the innocent victim rallys through adversity and becomes the funniest comic in the world and the male perpetrator winds up selling fruit barefoot on the side of a road.

It may also insult the common intuition of the halo-effect. Most commonly expressed as our inability to see beautiful people as stupid, in Louis case, revelations about his sexual misconduct stress our ability to understand how it could be completely independent of his artistic abilities. It at the very least appears to certainly be the case that many people can't find a bit about air-plane travel funny anymore because Louis likes to take all his clothes off and masturbate to completion in front of women. I've also heard reports of people unable to enjoy Billy-Jean when it comes on the radio anymore because Michael likes to lick the butt holes of young boys while their parents sleep down the hall. I've experienced this conflation somewhat myself, I used to love Pate as a kid, until I found out Pate is goose liver paste, these days though, I mostly don't eat it because it went out of fashion, it's never put out at parties. I suspect, that I no longer care and if someone served me Pate, which increasingly, is likely to be home made, I would eat it.

In short, people like Tig Notaro, learned something distasteful about Louis CK that changed their opinion of him. Then everyone reacted.

I do believe there is a 'there' there. There is something like Louis stole his career by obfuscating facts about himself that may have changed things. I don't know what you do about that though.

Consider, as a hypothetical, that you are CEO of a company, and one day your HR manager approaches you and informs you that your 54 year old CFO Cheryl apparently used to steal cars for joyrides as a teenager, even crashing one into a pole. She never got busted though, and doesn't have a criminal record. Do you summon her to your office and revoke her access to the office parking, for concern for the other employees cars?

I feel probably not, unless there's some compelling reason to believe Cheryl still steals cars and goes on joyrides, and I'm not sure there's a compelling reason to believe Louis CK would resume asking women if he can jack off in front of them 12 years after the last time he is known to have done so. There are reasonable grounds to suspect he wont, like the lack of any recent victims willing to join the 5 named in the article, the fact that he got divorced, and that as his misconduct disappears his career takes off, indicating that he may have gotten his life and mental health somewhat together.

There's also an absence of professional assessment, even professional speculation as to what could have been going on with Louis and others who exhibit this kind of behavior. Is it about domination or humiliation? Is it a rationalization of avoiding an extra-marital affair through some self perceived loop-hole?

Most critically, is society in any further danger? The implicit answer has to be no. Because unlike Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Ron Jeremy no criminal charges were brought against Louis CK.

Bringing us to the problem of the barbarity of going paralegal - they misconduct appears to have stopped over a decade ago, so how does Louis demonstrate he has learned it is wrong, if he learned it was wrong and stopped way before the public found out? He offered an apology and took a big and immediate hit, but he wasn't handed a sentence, or parole period. A bunch of people basically disassociated themselves from him.

I don't know what the basis is for the concept of a 'statute of limitations' probably simply to make the legal system feasible, more practical than ethical, but I'd argue that one potential basis for a statute of limitations would be the pointlesslessness of incarcerating or otherwise impeding someone for behavior or conduct they have already demonstrably ceased. This argument may be captured in the 'Litigation of a long-dormant claim may result in more cruelty than justice.'

All that really was outstanding at the time of the article's publication, was that Louis CK did not disclose his misconduct himself. He didn't speak to them when Roseanne Barr raised them in the public domain, he didn't speak to them when Tig Notaro found out and took issue with him.

I would fault him for this, and I would fault him for the sexual misconduct, but to find out ten years+ after the misconduct has ceased, I'm not sure what to do. The obvious thing seems to be to pay damages to the victims, which can be worked out privately. The injustice of that is that for a woman who is sexually assaulted by her shift manager at Burger King, her assailant can't pay them between $200k~3 million like Louis CK can. But that's the risk Louis took in a situation entirely of his own making, women don't get to choose their offenders.

In terms of addressing systemic sexism, misogeny and sexual misconduct including men's violence against women, that won't be resolved through the public shaming and black-listing of individuals like Louis, but the people that employ him like FX (Disney) and his agent Dave Becky etc. Tig acquits herself well in that regard because as soon as she heard she sought clarification in order to immediately dissociate herself, whereas throughout the #metoo wave and through the Brian Epstein saga, my impression overwhelmingly was that most entities only dissociate when public opinion renders the association untenable commercially.

What I find cruel, is that Louis basically can't undo what he did. At the time that his conduct became general knowledge, I'm not sure what he could do apart from pay some damages with interest, I perhaps unfairly adopt the perspective of a sentencing Judge, that just doesn't see the point of sending this person to Jail as they appear to already be rehabilitated and that materially the incidental fact that they went on to exponentially increase their net worth, again assuming private settlements are to be made was unwittingly in part working for them.

Tig's concerns appear to be that she was used in a kind of 'feminist washing' pr campaign by Louis CK. I can understand the concern, it's even plausible, I just suspect it isn't provable and particularly when you consider it in conjunction with the evidence that Louis CK promoted other comic talents he liked through his vehicles like Todd Barry who gets featured in segments of 'Louis'. It is plausible that Louis, a decade on from when whatever motivated him to jerk off while women watched, was just a fan of Tig's work and wanted her to succeed. At this stage it's probably safe to say, that Tig successfully avoided being used in the way she feared Louis intended.

Then there's comedians like Hannah Gadsby, that appear to represent the camp that never is the appropriate time for Louis to start working again and he should basically be banned for life. There's probably some harsh conservative deterrent argument to be made, but I personally cannot by into the theory, nor the epistemic constructivism to get behind it. I suspect that like is observed in the parts of the world where thieves get their hands cut off, that thieves keep cropping up, and in the states where murderers and mentally handicapped people get executed that people keep killing and the day after Louis CK's 'I love you daddy' film got its distribution cancelled and Louis' voice over work got recast that Steve still thought it was a good idea to follow Jenny into the supply room and block her exit while he jacked off.

It's possible that Louis' actions cost the world another Hannah Gadsby, Michelle Wolf, Nicki Glaser, Mindy Kaling, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Roseann Barr, Tig Notaro, Ali Wong etc. but it would still overwhelmingly be indirect. As in, it would be a hard burden of proof to reach that Louis' conduct was motivated by seeing his victims as competition and choosing to destroy them psychologically in order to eradicate the competition. It appears far more simple to interpret that Louis was motivated by egocentric sexual and personal hang-ups, and viewed his victims as objects not as competition.

Attention is ultimately scarce, in that way Louis' capacity to continue to perform draws on a limited resource. But there's no real substitutes in comedy. Dennis Leary is no real substitute of Bill Hicks, Joe Rogan is not a substitute for Bill Burr, Sandi Toksvig is not a substitute for Stephen Fry, Hannah Gadsby is not a substitute for Louis CK and in every case vice versa. I can understand theatres not wanting to book Louis CK, or streaming platforms not wanting to carry his content, but these are all individual choices, that people can be free to disagree with.

I recognize that under certain ideologies, the idea that Louis CK could 'come back' and even out earn Hannah Gadsby in a year or two could pose an existential threat. It's even likely that Hannah Gadsby will never earn in her lifetime as much money as Louis CK lost.

That zero-redemption policy leaves us in a place however where neurotic guys who struggle with their own sexuality are expected to do their best to cease to exist, they can't rehabilitate and they shouldn't be allowed to perform in their competency what society most values about them.

I guess what I'd be saying, is that I completely understand an individual like Hannah Gadsby arriving at the conclusion that art cannot be separated from artist and that she never wants to see Louis CK perform again, but she nor any interest group should be deciding that for anyone else.

It's taken legal systems a long time to learn to be humane and civilized, and it's only just getting there like now, as in now, now, some parts of the world have cracked the case and have more humane justice systems that also coincidentally produce better results. I personally do not need my pound of flesh to gratify my blood lust, or personal indignation.

I actually suspect, that I don't need the legal system of my country to intervene on my behalf to prevent me from having people that offend me, drawn and quartered in the public square. I get why we moved beyond that, but I am often left with the impression that most of my neighbors do need that intervention, they aren't sure why we can't just burn witches at the stake if a child dreamed they were copulating with Satan.

Bringing us back to...

Aziz' case

Everything with Aziz is in the context of:

"In 2014 he self-identified as a feminist, saying his girlfriend has helped influence him. Ansari also incorporated an episode about feminism titled "Ladies and Gentlemen" in Master of None. In an interview in 2015, he spoke about the episode's meaningfulness to him saying "I thought it was interesting that this is happening, yet so many people are unaware of it. And the problem is people aren't talking about it. What I've learned, as a guy, is to just ask women questions and listen to what they have to say. Go to your group of female friends and ask them about times they've experienced sexism at their job, and you'll get blown away by the things they tell you." (from his Wikipedia page, link inserted by me to synopsis/review of the episode)

You can read/revisit the Babe.net article if you feel a need to.

And then Aziz addresses it in his 2019 comedy special, which I have not watched owing to lack of interest, but the pull quote is from Aziz' wikipedia page:

"If this made not just me but other people be more thoughtful, then that's a good thing, and that's how I feel about it."

And much like Louis, this would probably benefit greatly from a clear timeline, which would go something like 2014 > self-identifies as a feminist, 2015 > releases book 'Modern Romance' featuring chapter on Buenos Aires, Argentina and the impacts of Machismo culture, among other in depth exploration of sexual politics, 2016 > Wins some Emmys for Master of None season 1, 2017 > releases Master of None season 2, goes on bad date. 2018 > Wins Golden Globe award for Master of none, girl from date tells story of date to Babe.net.

So Aziz' conduct occurs after his successful career, at the arguable height of his celebrity power (he could still become a Republican POTUS) having presented not just an onscreen persona in Dev, but his personal public persona. Keep in mind how upset people seem to be over Ellen Degeneres not living up to her 'be kind' public persona.

It's the sacking of Troy, and Louis CK is Achilles, or Hector, whatever side you want to identify with. I don't care, the point is Louis is going out day after day and being all like 'Imma gonna kill you! You are my enemy' except in this case it was 'I'm a nuerotic guy with low self esteem and sexual kinks and I talk a lot about masturbating and my obsession with young attractive women and how they are physically repulsed by me!' and then Louis gets outed in the media, Achilles kills Hector (or Paris kills Achilles) and a large community reacts with 'we assumed you were joking this whole time.'

Whereas Aziz Ansari is more like 'Hey Trojans, I'm a horse yeah, bring me inside your city gates it will please your gods.' which is to say, Aziz Ansari identified as a feminist, incorporated it into his creative output and interprets a request to slow down as moving to the couch and pointing at his crotch to request a blowjob. The recount of the date and Aziz' conduct might be inaccurate, it's not like there were no mitigating factors like the conduct of his date doing a lot to imply consent or at least mislead as to her willingness to participate in the sexual activity.

Just to my knowledge, Aziz has never given an alternative account (he may in the 2019 special I have not watched) particularly anything to the effect of 'I didn't say that thing about a glass of wine moving us to the second date' or 'I never said anything like "seems like you don't hate me"'

Even if his date feels validated after discussing it with numerous friends that his conduct constituted sexual assault, that doesn't mean her feeling is in anyway validated by law nor would meet the burden of proof to make a case.

The thing that bothers me about the Aziz Ansari case is in direct comparison to the fallout for Louis CK. I admittedly haven't dug into the media monitoring data, it probably remains true that Aziz' profile has never been as large as Louis CK (in line with their respective earning power) and that does 99% of the explaining why Louis recieves so much more criticism and resistance to resuming working than Aziz does. The other mitigating factor is that I assume, people feel visceral implicit differences between somebody using their power as a celebrity to pressure someone into being penetrated in the context of a consensual date, and somebody using the power of seniority or their role to pressure someone into consenting to watch them masturbate in the context of a workplace.

Analogous to the outrage felt over a women being murdered by a man who is a stranger, versus being murdered by her husband. Even if people never intelligibly articulate it, the respective public reactions imply that nested in the collective unconscious is an idea that either a) the offense is diminished by her choice of spouse or b) women remain the property of their husband or father or both.

I do not identify as a feminist, for reasons that I have explained many times but is highlighted by the case of Aziz Ansari - because it costs men nothing to be feminists. The one and only criteria for a man to be a feminist as near as I have been able to determine, is for men to say they are.

Where Aziz gets off lightly, is in not-being expelled from feminism having demonstrated a comprehensive cynicism. Unlike the criminal charge, I feel that case is incredibly easy to make.

The timing of Louis' comeback should essentially be left to Louis and whatever audience remains him, and dissenting opinions being free to dissent should not attempt to encroach or de-platform Louis. Aziz on the other hand, his comeback should be essentially contingent on creating a new non-hypocritical persona. That his experience may have prompted to think that maybe the scope of feminism reaches into how he conducts himself on a first date suggests that maybe feminism's membership threshold is too low.

One thing I take away from the whole Trump, Bryan Kavanaugh and the Christian single-issue voters is an impression of the Christian conservative voter base. The fact that they don't care about the conduct of these men, just that they are on team Pro-Life diminishes Christianity to mere tribalism, in-group loyalty. The tolerance of these men's conduct invalidates their belief system as a moral authority.

Aziz poses the same threat to feminism as a whole. How feminists react to Aziz' cynacism and hypocrisy says things to me about the movement in general. And yes, there's no amazon queen to make decrees of feminism, but there are informal consensus and champions that get more oxygen than others. It makes feminism look like 'We hate Louis because he won't grovel, he won't kowtow and pay lip-service, we are okay with Aziz because he pays lip-service.'

It moves from a movement I might actually identify with of 'we object to the treatment of women, we are equal in dignity and this conduct falls below our dignity as living feeling beings' to one I have no sympathy with of 'all we care about is solidarity, you're with us or against us, get the fuck out of the way of my will to power! Nietzsche ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuulllllllllles!'

I suspect, owing to phenomena like preference falsification, the market will fall inline with my expectations - Louis will get richer, Aziz' earning power will never recover.

I reserve the right to change my mind, once I have good reason to on both men. Further allegations, criminal charges etc. that substantiate that Louis has not in fact changed at all and has even become worse would be sufficient to change my mind. As would any evidence that Aziz Ansari can be taken at his word, or has learned or changed in some way. In Aziz case however, the great struggle is given the level of his hypocrasy, I'm not sure what would actually constitute that evidence, nor what a realistic time-frame is.

If Aziz was truly influenced by Louis CK, I guess something compelling would be if Aziz adopted a persona more in line with Louis' one of vice-signalling, similar to Kevin Hart, of basically presenting himself as 'yeah I'm a guy who's really insecure and would say anything, anything to get laid.' That may just cut it.

Insufficient Compassion Redux

I know of some of the limits of my empathy, I know where it is hard for me to adopt an experience. This post is pandemic focused, human behavior focused, it's my attempt to grapple with the frustration that arises when I look at my fellow man* uncomprehending of their behavior.

*or an impression of my fellow man, while trying to make sense of the data, yes, numbers can make me angry at humanity.

It's a redux because I've looked at this before in my attitudes toward the anxious in one of my unexplained most popular posts I've ever written, which itself was a follow up to another inexplicably popular post.

Who I struggle to identify with, and thus feel compassion for are people I've lived my whole life around and never understood, such that I don't even have a name for them. An inadequate shorthand might be 'extroverts', but I am really referring to a kind of social contact addict. Emphasis addict, in terms of a compulsive behavior, a need to socialize.

I think I am in part finding myself deficient in empathy, sympathy and compassion because I am encouraged not to be. What I notice about myself, is that if say, I saw two people in a pandemic lock down greet each other on the street and then exchange some crystal meth for cash hand to hand, while I wouldn't think it was great, I would understand: here is a person so compelled by meth, they will risk all to get it.

But seeing Joan and Susan walking along a trail together gossiping fills me with rage. In my rage I probably ask myself the exact question that I need to, albeit I treat it as a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one: 'can't you forego an opportunity to exchange trivial gossip about your mediocre existences?' noting how condescendingly judgmental this is, the key part of that question is the 'can't you forego' part and the question becomes rhetorical because the answer is probably 'no they can't.'

Thinking of middle aged women's need to find a way in person to discuss the exact same shit they can discuss over the phone (are you noting how little I can control my expressions of antipathy? because I am) as in the same category as people whose dependence on substances, or behavioral addictions (like gambling or porn) that generally break up marriages, result in bankruptcy and homelessness, correlate with crime and criminal records and shave decades off peoples lives, is probably alien.

But until the advent of a respiratory pandemic, there was nothing to really challenge a notion of 'I can quit whenever I want' regarding catching up with friends and family. Indeed compared to the addictive behaviors that leave somebody alone and in the dark like video games and gambling, regular human contact was really held up as the yardstick by which mental health is measured.

To be clear, while I feel I cope with isolation well, what this generally translates to is that it sometimes takes me months to notice the negative effects of prolonged social isolation cost me. I can also surprise myself with how much I enjoy social contact. This is why I would specify if I could some unknown subset of people that have to see people even though they know it's wrong.

Maybe they don't know it's wrong, perhaps some upbeat denial is at play where some circuit in the brain fires and they say 'well when the Premier says we are in lock-down, he doesn't mean the traditional Sunday family dinner is cancelled.' I don't know.

What I do know is what it feels like to try and quit something you are addicted to and immediately find your mind rationalizing ways to get that. I'm aware of the extinction burst that comes with a change in behavior. I know it's hard, I just don't identify with the set of compulsive social behaviors.

The temptation of course is to view the behavior as selfish, malicious. To an objective degree, the breaches are selfish and malicious, the gains are enjoyed by the individuals making the breach and the consequences of outbreaks inflicted on other more numerous people. But the explicit conscious maliciousness is an easy bad assumption to suspend.

Harder for me to comprehend is having a different personality for example. Author Adam Grant for example has a book called 'Give and Take' where he breaks people into three categories of 'Giver' 'Taker' and 'Matcher' but in an interview he did with Sam Harris he raised the interesting idea that personality research may be considering adding 'Selfishness' to the Big-5 or OCEAN model - presumably to become the Big-6 or OCEANS. (If you enjoy taking mechanically transparent self-assessments, you can assess your own giver-taker-matcher preference here.)

What is interesting to me, is the idea that some people are actually wired not to think of others. This I see more in the attitudes expressed typically in the form of 'these restrictions are an infringement on my human rights!' you know, the universal human right to kill your parents, my parents, grandparents etc. This person can't comprehend what quarantine, isolation, restrictions on movement and least significantly mask-wearing, are all for; all that is apparent is the immediate imposition on them.

Running counter to this is the variation in context. It appears easier in this context to be selfish if you are young, but living out in the affluent Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne during this pandemic, I'm not sure this holds. There's plenty of examples of people in the high-risk age categories being selfish if they happen to have a holiday house down the coast, or if they have legal training, or if they need their hair highlights done because they can't stand to look at their grey hairs in the mirror.

It also presumably takes two. For every selfish person that leaves a lock down area, under the assumption they are probably okay, there's the friends or relatives, or perhaps even clients, waiting to great them on the other side. This isn't a situation where some dude who knows he is HIV+ but just doesn't do condoms has unprotected sex with a bunch of unwitting partners also into bare back. These are connections between two parties both consciously rolling the dice.

It's also data I just don't have. Tasmania's outbreak earlier in the year could attribute some 80 cases to one wedding. Early in Victoria's second and most major wave the public got anecdotes that large family gatherings were in play. Since Victoria's outbreak we see other states around Australia lowering their restrictions on gatherings from 50 back down to 10.

Both my impression and feeling is, that outdoor gatherings will wash out to be an almost non-factor in the spread of the virus. The BLM protests do not appear to have substantially contributed to spikes in transmission, workplaces and schools on the other hand have been.

Which gives you another huge context that appears to be the more significant factor - economic insecurity, and it's possibly no small coincidence that Melbourne's community transmissions took off almost in lock-step with the federal government's clawing back the welfare allowances they'd made at the outset of the global pandemic. When somebody get's tested, and goes to work in defiance of instructions to self-isolate, and even when people test-positive and go to work, I can be totally empathetic to the mindset that is doing that - this is a person under extreme financial duress.

Where I have the crucial insufficient compassion though, is the people that aren't doing it for financial duress.

It's these people that are the alien lizard people to me. I keep thinking about this party I was at, where I only really knew the host, and I was trying to get to know strangers, find someone interesting to talk to. This guy in the group I was standing in started talking about some pub he drove past on the way back from the great ocean road and when he saw it he knew that one day he wanted to stop and have a drink there. Conversation turned to dream pubs along the great ocean road to stop and have a beer at, and I walked away because I couldn't handle it. I'm to date, not ready for that to be my life, even though most days my primary occupation is trying to decide what to eat for lunch.

There are people it seems, that this is their reason for being. They work hard, in order to accomplish the mundane. (Curiously I get more furious at people who work hard to do the mundane in a foreign destination, more so than the people who want to head down to Robe or Port Fairy on weekends, the pandemic has at least relieved me of this rage.)

Then there's the people I do from time to time remind myself to think about, which are those that depend on dating aps, and dating. Plenty of people use them, but usually the objective is to get off them as quick as possible. In my own collisions with dating apps I myself was conscious of the psychological drawbacks of apps like Tinder, but I did meet one person that was using it genuinely to just meet interesting people, like socially over romantically.

I know people though for whom the dating scene is some form of self-medication, their behavior describes more to me an addiction than an enthusiasm. While I've shared many of the perpetually dating's frustrations with the romantic market, it's still outside my experience to just date anyway. I'm very all or nothing, preferring my own company to bad company. That probably hits the nail on the head, I have insufficient compassion for people who cannot abide their own company.

In my own case, if left alone and without contact it can get pretty dark. There was a 3-month period in my early twenties I spent bouncing from hotel room to hotel room, city to city, country to country where I had to force myself to leave my room and actually explore the countries I had put on my itinerary to visit. It wasn't until I hit Europe and started staying in hostels that I realized it was the effects of prolonged loneliness that had killed me. But I have to use that experience to imagine someone who goes that dark from two days, or a week of solitude not months.

A stark example for me, of the struggle to cross an empathy divide was this opinion piece plugged by a queer radio show I've been following on social media for like a decade and keeps me in touch with a culture that appears completely out-of-touch with me. I don't think 'Coronogamy' is going to go viral as a meme, and I'll brazenly confess I read it out of a morbid fascination as it's likely that the author is aware but I don't infer just how many heterosexual people out there struggle to find a partner and how tone deaf complaining about being confined to one partner comes across. (it's in the top-three most annoying things about people in open relationships). And it's worth noting the author is doing the right thing, they are just exhibiting without irony a complaint about a contraction of privileges as equivalent to some form of oppression.

Are there elderly people with diabetes that just can't help but see their grandchild who attends a school shut down for an outbreak? I don't know, these are the human stories behind the numbers that are missing.  It may well be, that the people cheating in order to visit a partner, or have casual sex, or host an Air BnB party, contribute close to fuck all of the community transmissions.

And yeah, there's people who only turn 18 once, and that is happening in 2020, and people who turn 21, and people who are turning 90 which takes 90 years to achieve and could be dead before they see their family in the flesh again. These the sympathy and compassion comes more readily. Even teenagers that are getting that cocktail of hormones and physical and brain development that tells them it is time to fuck, I feel compassion for. I didn't have to contend with a pandemic at my sexual peak, and I don't see fucking as a human right nor did I really get around back then, but to be denied access to flirting? Yeah that would have sucked, like being sent to an all boys Catholic school would and does suck.

So it just boils down to that subset of extroverts or whatever, that just have to get out and see somebody. These are the people I have insufficient compassion for. it's life long as far as I can tell. The thing is, I don't even know. I don't know what it feels like to need to throw a street party with five households meeting in a driveway for drinks. Is it obliviousness or is it a deeper itch? Am I looking at them the way they look at me when I pull my mask down to eat nuts on my way back from the shops, and the way they don't look at me when I have no mask at all and am running around the streets?

It's interesting times, I can see why 'may you live in interesting times' is a curse. I try to practice stoicism and I see it all as analogous as getting pissed off that today is also not the day everyone learns how to drive properly. Where I'm really being tested is that each transmission both prolongs the existing measures and threatens harsher ones.

The Three Great Illiteracys

I thought I might channel Chairman Mao fully aware of the gross incompetence and ineptitude of this leader, possibly history's only leader more Trumpy than Trump.

Obviously the world is unlikely to ever consist of renaissance people, with the average person being a foremost expert in virtually every field of knowledge. Even one person accomplishing that has probably become a door that has closed behind Leonardo Da Vinci, simply because it is now incredibly hard to be an expert in any one domain.

But recently I've been thinking about three particularly consequential illiteracys that are widespread. In no particular order:

1. Economic Illiteracy
2. Psychological Illiteracy
3. Rational Illiteracy

The other two could be considered just a subset of Psychology, but they are large enough I feel to warrant their own attention and focus. I do want to flag, I'm not an expert in any of these fields, nor am I talking about expertise, just basic literacy. In the same way that I can speak Japanese, and even read and write some, but could not defend a doctoral thesis in Japanese. So when I say 'illiterate' I am appealing to behavior that substantiates people not understanding at all.

Economic Illiteracy

I've been aware of this for the longest, because economics is really really consequential.

Monetary policy, Fiscal policy, Target Inflation, Money Multiplier, Full Employment, Externalities, Subsidies, Tariffs, Quotas, Labor markets, Wage Efficiency, Underemployment, Overemployment, Free Markets, Consumption Tax, Money Illusion, Tobin Tax, Speculation, Investment, Comparative advantage, Malthusian Trap, Surplus, Deficit, Current Account, GDP, GNP, Interest, Rent, Inflation, Money...

The perplexing thing is, I suspect a general survey of the public would prove that while they know how to use it, few would know what 'money' is and yet in my locale economic 'performance' is what people vote on. Debates can rage about the public sector debt, and I suspect beyond 'debt is bad' and 'well how are we going to pay for it?' little more is extracted.

My feeling is, well documented, functioning democracies are a relatively recent phenomena. With enough time for historians to put their hooks into the 20th and 21st century, what the public vote for will be hard to make sense of unless the sensemaking opens with 'the average voting citizen in the domain of economics was little more than a serf in the field.'

The illiteracy isn't so surprising, what is alarming is how consequential it is. Economics is a wretched science because of the propensity for those governing to lean in the Economists doorway and helpfully suggest 'you know if you could find a mathematical proof that we shouldn't tax corporations and should tax poor people that would be great!' or 'you know if you could find a way that the workers could control the means of production and we could seize the assets of the wealthy that would be fantastic!' So it's really good that Economic policy is something debated and voted on. You don't want to leave this stuff to backroom dealings. But given how long and how continuously some countries (like mine) have been debating economic policy, the illiteracy is alarming.

What comes to mind is an anecdote from my year 7 (freshman year junior high for Americanas) homeroom teacher that explained how bullies scammed him as a kid. It was probably not this currency but it works with our currency where the dollar coin is physically larger than the two-dollar coin, almost every currency I'm aware of has a bizarre analogy to this. Two big kids once pointed out that his coin was small, and their coin was big, and he wanted the big coin right? and these generous kids were willing to swap his small measly coin for their big shiny coin. Presumably he figured out at the milk bar the astonishing fact that the big coin bought far less lollies than his small coin.

I observe roughly the equivalent of this swindle going on all the time, and it's often no more sophisticated than the big kids telling people what to vote for, and the little people being like 'well, he's wearing a suit so seems legit.'

Understanding what you are voting for is important, and numerous examples come to mind. I want to focus here on the import of economic systems for what you believe in. Most of my friends are well-meaning and left-leaning. They want the environment protected, climate change addressed, reconciliation and a treaty, world peace and justice for all. Very few of my friends really go full tilt at doing their bit to achieve these objectives. This isn't even in the domain of basic hypocrisy, like tweeting about the melting of ice caps while you are away on the other side of the world to attend a formula one race and eating some delicious wurst.

I mean considering what you value vs the economic consequences for people dedicated to what you value. Where, even for the task of impeding unsustainable logging practices that have received special exemptions from environmental protection legislation, the people doing the logging are often paid and paid quite well to turn up and log the forest, with jobs secured through heavy tax subsidies or government funding. The protestors, just to have sufficient time to obstruct the logging, often far away from where they live generally have to be retired, unemployed or underemployed. Plus they have the commute.

The activists might actually enjoy broad public support, at least as far as lip-service, and they put the hours into $0 budget campaigns to try and raise public awareness of what is actually going on. This is getting up at 6 am to hang banners over the freeway overpasses to try and make commuters aware. They also, if their mission is to protect Native Forests, Old Growth Forests and Endangered species habitat tend to have to handcuff themselves to bulldozers, or live in trees for days, because forestry can't actually be reversed once the damage is done.

Bringing us to the arrests and legal fees. Saving the forests and the animals is generally laudible and anti-compensatory. It is in economic terms extremely costly for the people who do it. Furthermore, and this is foreshadowing, the people who are the activists are not insane. Their rationale for undertaking such huge personal costs is I believe generally sound. It may be predictive of high levels of anxiety, bouts of depression etc. But these people are not crazy, and while likely to know other dirty hippies willing to go to the bathroom in their pants while chained to a bulldozer, they will be generally commended for their efforts by their broader community.

While they are not earning money, often spending money, and at risk of fines and legal fees etc. They are also not saving money, nor investing money which the people not protecting the forests are doing. Due to the interest compounding, activists are probably foregoing hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetimes protecting trees and animals that most people actually want protected.

But we'll vote out our government because petrol is 12c higher per litre, as if they can control that, or vote in our government because they cut unemployment from 3.8% to 3.6% without realizing the 10,000 jobs created involve delivering take out food on a bicycle to people in the middle of winter.

The main beef I have with my actual activist friends, the ones supporting worthwhile causes backed by solid scientific investigation, is that they also often neglect the economic incentives. The price points of caged vs free-range is really just tip of the ice berg. Reducing Eco footprints through eating local seasonal produce, or using ground based transport at three times the price and 10 times the travel time result in real economic disadvantages.

My personal stance is that the economic incentives need to be right, I'm in the attitudes-follow behavior camp, my activist friends are in the behavior-follows-attitudes camp. Many of them are also economically illiterate. The general economic illiteracy also poses the largest obstacle to getting the economics right.

If you want an accessible example of having the economy based headlines blown open, I recommend starting here.

Psychological Illiteracy

It was when the Victorian Premier fronted the press to announce a 10-post-code lock down to try and contain the community transmission outbreak that the idea of psychological illiteracy really crystallized for me.

The mini-lock down plan to me was instantly an exercise in futility. If security at a quarantine hotel can't get it right, then tens of thousands of ordinary citizens had no chance. The moment it was announced there was a need for a Chief Psychology Officer to step forward and say, 'for this to have any chance of working I need to address the people that are already thinking maybe I can go stay at my cousin Terry's place for six weeks...'

I thought 'we just know too much about human psychology.' These types of issues do get addressed albeit in Op-Eds with hindsight bias, and people who write op-eds are frankly garbage people, just get a blog and be honest about how little insight you have. Comedians actually do the closest job to having official psychologists, the thing about comedy though is that it's disarming because whether you are supposed to take their observations about the human condition seriously is disarming.

The pandemic example is just something that makes it clear to me though. I actually need to make a mental note for my series on heuristics that 'any solution that requires voluntary compliance (people doing the right thing en mass) is no solution at all.'

There have been some public campaign successes that have employed psychology, most notably the 'if you drink and drive, you're a bloody idiot' which I'm told completely shifted public attitudes to drink driving.

I singled out these three illiteracys because I feel them to be genuine failings of public education. Kids need confirmation bias and prisoners dilemmas drilled into them so they understand what everyone is doing by the time they finish primary school.

Like anybody should notice immediately when someone has just gone and looked up evidence to support their claim, rather than actively disconfirm it. 'confirmation bias' should be taught in combination with pointing to kids much like 'stranger danger'.

The number of adults I've met (and for that matter, have been) that don't understand the grieving process when it hits them is concerning to me. The amount of time people waste not learning from a string of toxic relationships about attachment theory is alarming. Sex-ed appears to have gone backwards, given how popular it is with the kids these days to not wear condoms, but in certain regions where HIV is not the leading cause of death, teaching kids attachment theory, implicit memory and to avoid dating people who present behavior consistent with the dark triad would be good next priorities.

I'm aware of psychology's dark history. Even recently, it has been hit by the replication crisis. But things like the former soviet's symptom criteria for sluggish schizophrenia including being critical of the government and writing critical books. Then there's all the nastiness of gay-conversion therapy and having homosexuality and trans-identities in earlier Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals.

There's a degree to which I can appreciate that some groups will view an embrace of psychology like a marketing campaign for the new Ku Klux Klan, my personal experience is more in line however with people avoiding psychology because if you aren't diagnosed then your life is falling apart because people are just arseholes.

Like Economics, psychology has been prone to someone darkening the door of the researcher and saying 'could you declare my political opposition insane? great, thanks.' or 'I want to scape goat Timmy, could you come up with something like "Acute Timmy Disorder"? great, thanks.' But where Galileo was looking through a telescope observing the rings of Saturn in the 1600's and a century or so later bacteria was finally being observed through a microscope, the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology has only emerged in the last 30 years or so and had little time to be used to draw robust conclusions about what is psychology and what is storytelling; sequencing DNA also for nature-nurture debates to actually enter robust territory are all very very recent.

Which means, many of us have lived through the period where alchemy transitioned to chemistry, and witchcraft transitioned to biology... just in this case it's the transition from storytelling of Freud and Jung to an actual empirical science.

We simply know too much to be enacting public policies that we do. But when I say 'we' it isn't the general public. In fields like development, teaching a remote community in an underdeveloped nation to wash their hands is a simple thing that can have a huge impact on community health, so too having a basic grasp on grandiose narcissism could spare organizations so much human suffering. 'We' is any collective where large numbers of the members assume they are normal and rational and everybody else thinks like they do, and just 'act irrationally' any group described by that stands to benefit from psychological literacy.

I once had a work colleague that I suspected of having near as I could guess, a histrionic personality disorder. She was so sexually aggressive, and so emotionally unstable I adopted my own Mike Pence like rules to just never ever be alone with her. I was possibly paranoid, but really I used to speculate on whether my employer actually had a duty-of-care to protect its employees from personality disorders. It is going to be much rarer that a histrionic type enters a workplace and files a string of trumped up allegations, and or forces a bunch of turnover through sexual liasons, but much more common will be a grandiose narcissist type talking their way into a management position and tanking the company, or an anti-social type singling out a vulnerable and isolated employee and bullying them mercilessly. That should be a duty of care I suspect, and literacy would help.

I would be clear that I am not calling for people with mental health issues, and personality disorders to soviet style be rendered outcasts from society. It's just that psychological illiteracy among other costs, mean that people can be trying to navigate life un-diagnosed and without treatment. This is often a situation in which everybody loses.

But psychological literacy is by no means confined to the extremes. The real payoff is avoiding bad solutions to social problems that disregard that what we are often working with are people. Ordinary psychology is not understood, hence people's frustration at non-compliance in a pandemic, a general inability to empathize with anyone we don't identify with already, confirmation bias, availability bias, substitution, motivated reasoning, personality, double standards, double binds, false dichotomies, irresponsibility, shame spirals, sexual harassment, de-individuation, risk-homeostasis, projection, transference, normalcy bias... all have been manifesting in extremely relevant ways under the global pandemic, and these are features, not bugs in human psychology.

What I would love is to be put out of work as an armchair psychologist. Where my rudimentary understanding that arise from a hobbyists interest in psychology are not the best understanding that has ever been conveyed to somebody. I believe like all professions I've encountered that professional clinical psychologists are going to be mostly mediocre to incompetent. But if the public is completely illiterate, it puts us in a really weak position to shop for good psychologists.

Rational Illiteracy

I myself am mostly illiterate in this department. I'm pretty sure I couldn't write a syllogism if my life depended on it. I am not a rigorous thinker but a slobbering dog of a thinker.

But again, when I think of the Premier's press briefings in our latest outbreak, fielding ho-hum questions from our ho-hum press, I actually admire his ability not to address those questions with 'look, we are dealing with a population that largely believe conspiracy theories, that the world is flat, that 9-11 is an inside job, that 5G spreads Coronavirus, we have people in our society that think Climate Change is a Hoax and that the President of the United States is the Absolute Monarch that rules over America. We have people that found "Inception" confusing, and people that think David Lynch movies make sense. We've had 50-60 years of good times for humanity, and in that time our market has encouraged the notion that it's basically okay to believe whatever you want. That's what we are dealing with, and if the first wave was small and we quashed it quickly, it was probably luck, not skill.'

I have it (not personally) from Jonathon Haidt that the education system is yet to succeed in teaching critical thinking. Daniel Kahneman stresses the point when discussing all the cognitive biases and fallacies that nobody rises above them.

But how would I put this, in terms of rational illiteracy... Okay let's hope you and I agree that slavery is wrong. Now, these days, the way most people impress me with their concept of rationality plays out like this. 'Is tossing a coin, a reasonable way to arrive at a conclusion?' and we say heads: slavery is a-ok, tails: slavery is bad.

We toss the coin, if it comes up heads then you and I agree that tossing a coin is not a reliable path to knowledge. But if it comes up tails, the methodology is sound.

The legitimacy of the methodology is often determined by it's ability to arrive at our pre-determined conclusions, and this is what passes for rationality to most people.

Like testimony of personal experience can be regarded by some as a reliable path to truth, provided that truth is the truth of the Risen Christ, and not the truth of Mohammed's encounter with Gabriel or vice versa, in which case obviously their testimony can't be trusted, but you should trust mine...

I have actually done quite a personal journey into new-age mysticism, and many of my dirty hippy friends are often surprised that I can converse with them about Tarot, the multiple Astrological Zodiacs, various mythologies and spiritual practices etc. I taught myself to speak woo. The sticking point is that I regard much of the new-age framework as irrational. Not useless, just irrational.

I feel that's a good aim for literacy, to just have people who hold irrational beliefs to concede they are irrational. For too many though, recognizing a belief is irrational is tantamount to not believing, so the irrational belief of primacy becomes their irrational belief that they are rational.

Again, a kid should not graduate from primary school without being able to tell an argument from an assertion, and to know that empiricism trumps rationalism, they should maybe know Carl Sagan's rule of 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' and the clarifying addendum 'ordinary claims generally require no evidence', perhaps Hume's principle of 'A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence'

The evidence that overwhelms me is the Covid case numbers, now very much live in my neighborhood and very much defining this year. Regardless of who wins the US election Time's 'Person of the Year' is going to have to be patient 0, I digress. I see behavior that suggests that people who work in professions exempted from the lock down appear to have made the irrational inference that they are also exempt from catching the virus.

I had an argument with my mum about using my disposable mask more than once, that to give credit the irrationality is subtle. The irrationality was the fear that after going to the shops my mask would be coated with Covid, which my understanding of what has generally been said about masks all year is that they function to keep the covid on the inside of the mask, not on the outside of the mask. Rationally this makes sense, otherwise we should be worried about touching any patch of our skin and shaving our head down to the scalp when we arrive home. If pieces of fabric across our mouths got coated in the virus to such an extent as they posed a real risk of transmitting the virus to us when we touch them, then mask wearing would be a disastrous policy response. We all wear them to ensure the asymptomatic carriers don't cough or sneeze the virus out.

I guess the biggest evidence of widespread irrationality are conspiracy theories. People believing that the mask wearing is some attempt by the government to control the public. Well it is, I guess, an attempt to control the public from spreading the virus and overwhelming the healthcare system. But if the government was lying, and under no pressure to avoid removing civil liberties, rationally they would be better off to declare that masks were completely ineffective and that the virus was much deadlier than it is. That would arrest the spread and drive down case numbers much more quickly.

I guess the flipside of rational literacy might be emotional literacy, and generally there's much more enthusiasm for teaching our young about emotions. My inkling is that the characterization of emotions, and 'being emotional' is fixated heavily on an idea that boys in particular are taught to repress their emotions and live in an emotional straight jacket.

I have had to learn myself the hard way what emotional competence actually is. I'm not an expert and I'm not proficient, but for me in practice being in touch with my emotions is central to my ability to act rationally. Emotional competence is explicitly the ability to recognize and identify your own emotions as and when they arise. To realize I am angry, or upset, or afraid, or stressed, when I am.

Rationalization is often the illusion that we are rational when we are in fact acting upon our emotional state (our affect) that we are not aware of. My own journey lead me to noticing that many of the people who let their emotions out, as in, having very visual emotional displays are often completely out of touch with their emotions, and unable to process emotions as information.

Kids in the grips of sour grapes or sweet lemons provide transparent demonstrations of emotional incompetence leading to irrational beliefs, adults are less transparent but often not much improved.

here though, teaching primary school kids to point is less of the concern, we are generally much better at spotting irrational emotion driven behavior in others, like when Mike is jealous of the attention his assistant Dwight is getting as sales-person of the year. Where rational literacy comes in is pointing to the self and acknowledging that we are being irrational.

I feel like admitting we are/were irrational once in our lifetime is probably above the average.