Robin Hanson, Proudly Fighting the Good War Against Baby Girls

A recent issue of The New Atlantis features the article “The Global War Against Baby Girls,” by Nicholas Eberstadt, on the epidemic of sex selection. In countries that value the lives of women less than men, gender discrimination now means not just that women are likely to be treated poorly, but that they might not be allowed to live at all. Baby girls in these countries are habitually being killed because of their sex (typically in the womb but also in many cases after birth).

Eberstadt’s article goes into some detail about the demographics of this phenomenon: it’s happening in scores of developing countries across the world, and, perhaps counterintuitively, is much more prevalent among affluent families. Minimum estimates place the number of baby girls eliminated based on their gender in the range of 30 million; more comprehensive estimates place the total upwards of 160 million.

Reported Sex Ratios at Birth
and Sex Ratios of the Population Age 0-4:
China, 1953-2005 (boys per 100 girls)

Year	Sex Ratio at Birth	Sex Ratio, Age 0-4
1953	--	107.0
1964	--	105.7
1982	108.5	107.1
1990	111.4	110.2
1995	115.6	118.4
1999	117.0	119.5
2005	118.9	122.7

From “The Global War Against Baby Girls.”

So what do our friends, the bastions of potential biotech progress, have to say about this very actual biotech present? The transhumanist and libertarian economist Robin Hanson has weighed in on Eberstadt’s article on his blog. Hanson has previously turned his moral acumen to subjects like how we should forget the 9/11 attacks because they killed an insufficient number of people to matter. When Hanson responds to Eberstadt’s article, however, the number of lives lost doesn’t seem to matter, even though in this case it can be expressed as large percentages of affected countries’ populations.

Instead, Hanson asks the really important question, which is what a high school student in the second week of his introductory macroeconomics course would say about all this:

A simple supply and demand analysis says that selective abortion both expresses a preference for boys and causes a reduction in that preference as wives become scarce. In South Korea this process is mostly complete, with excess boys down from 15% in the 1990s to 7% today (with ~5% as the biologically natural excess).

That’s a nice story, except that South Korea is the only country where there has been a clear reversal. Hanson doesn’t mention the dozens of other countries where the ratio of male to female births has increased steadily, without significant reversal, since the early 1980s. Perhaps this issue isn’t clarified by forcing it inside “a simple supply and demand analysis.” But let’s not let facts stand in the way of our favorite theories.

Reported child (0-4) sex ratio in China by county, 2000

Or perhaps the reversal just hasn’t kicked in yet for those countries. So history should bear out Hanson’s idea. Can you think of any societies that have selectively exterminated a certain class of their members? Now, how did those exterminations come to an end: was it because those societies suddenly began to value what they had made scarce?

Hanson elaborates:

This topic offers a good example of a conflict between sending desired signals and getting desired outcomes. Since parents who selectively abort girls show favoritism toward boys, it can feel quite natural to signal your opinion that women have equal value by condemning such parents, and favoring policies to discourage their actions. Not doing so can make you seem anti-female. Yet since via supply and demand the abortions chosen by these parents directly increase the value of women, then all else equal discouraging their abortions reduces the value of women. So if you want women to have higher value, your signal is counter-productive.

You might think that the people who devalue girls so much that they kill them are the ones who, well, devalue them. But you’d be wrong. The best thing you can do to help the cause of girls is to get rid of more of them. Got it?

Maybe I’ve been hasty in my take on Hanson’s analysis. Let’s see how he wraps this up:

Of course it is far from clear that the relative value of males and females should be the main consideration here. One might instead argue that if male lives are more pleasant overall, it is good that we create more of them instead of female lives. Yes, supply and demand may eventually equalize the quality of male and female lives, but until then why not have moves [more] lives that are more pleasant?

One goes through life aware that some people, even respected intellectuals, think these things — but you figure they at least know better than to say them in public. Did I mention that the name of Hanson’s blog is “Overcoming Bias”? And he doesn’t seem to be kidding, either. If some other people think your life is not worth living, then that makes it actually not worth living, and the rational, beneficial thing to do from a public and economic standpoint is to end it.

Transhumanists claim they’re bringing us away from moral slavery and toward rational enlightenment. Libertarian economists claim to offer tools to make peoples’ lives better and more free. To borrow a line from Alan Jacobs: How are they doing so far?

Irfan Khawaja on Appearance as a Guide to Moral Character

Back in August, I wrote a post entitled “Appearance as a Guide to Moral Character: Does Real Beauty Come from the Inside?,” responding to a talk by Prof. Irfan Khawaja of Felician College. Now Prof. Khawaja has written a thoughtful response to my post, which is available here.

I probably won’t have time to response again to Prof. Khawaja at length, but suffice it to say that, while he makes some valid criticisms of my post in the first section of his piece, I agree with him that the core of our dispute traces back to the question of the nature of perception. Specifically, I maintain that perceptions and theories intermingle, and he strongly disagrees. I probably (even for such a long post) wrote too hastily on this point, skipping past some crucial steps to go right into talking about perception “depending” on “theories.” It’s much better to approach this subject by asking whether our perceptions are affected by our interpretations of them, or, put another way, by what we think they are.

I find the evidence for a positive answer to this question to be overwhelming, though I realize that this affronts the sensibilities and intuitions of the Western mindset since the Enlightenment. In lieu of defending this idea myself, for the time being I will refer interested readers to what I consider the definitive case for this idea: Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances (especially the first third — though I should say there are key parts of that and the rest of the book with which I disagree). It’s a short and bracing read.

Also, coming back to Alasdair MacIntyre — the philosopher whose work sparked the original discussion between myself and Prof. Khawaja — a similarly provocative account on the theory-perception question can be found in the chapter “‘Fact’, Explanation and Expertise” from After Virtue. MacIntyre also alludes to Kant’s crucial work on this question in The Critique of Pure Reason (see Wikipedia for a decent, very short overview). Finally, if you’re interested in a take on this subject from a less philosophical and more intuitive or experiential standpoint — which is, after all, closer to the subject under dispute here — I highly recommend Alain De Botton’s delightful book The Architecture of Happiness, which is about how our senses of what we find beautiful and ugly arise from associations and ideas that usually reside below our conscious awareness.

Happy New Fear

I think the first news report I saw about the possibility of genetically engineering avian influenza to be more virulent was this one by the redoubtable Brandon Keim of Wired in 2010. Keim’s post did not really make clear why Yoshihiro Kawaoka, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison had sought to develop a more virulent strain of the virus; it seems to suggest it was done to show it could be done, and that hence, if some final obstacles were overcome, some such pandemic would be “inevitable.” In any case, the research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and apparently included guidance on the particular human protein that would allow the virus to occupy the upper respiratory tract.

The next story I saw was just this past November, when Kristen Philipkoski at Gizmodo posted that “Engineered Avian Flu Could Kill Half the World’s Humans.” Philipkoski presented the research of virologist Ron Fouchier, and noted the many red flags that might have gone up in the course of his efforts to increase the virulence of H5N1. But no:

He presented his work at the influenza conference in Malta this September. Now he wants to publish his study in a scientific journal, so those responsible for responding to bioterrorism can be prepared for the worst case scenario. Seems like a no-brainer, right? Not exactly. The research has set off alarms among colleagues who are urging Fouchier not to publish, for fear the recipe could wind up in the wrong hands. Some question whether the research should have been done in the first place. Fair point!

Fair point indeed.

I waited for follow-on stories that would suggest that the danger here had been exaggerated, or that there was some extremely compelling reason that Philipkoski had missed for Fouchier to have undertaken his work. To date, I’ve seen nothing along those lines; do let me know in the comments what I might have missed. But the danger of the situation seems to be more or less confirmed by news reports this week that the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has, for the first time ever, requested that Nature and Science publish only redacted versions of Fouchier’s work, and of further work by Kawaoka. (Fouchier, to his credit, seems to have agreed to the request, if grudgingly and skeptically.)

This time, Gizmodo’s Jamie Condliffe is up in arms. The request is

not cool.... I admit that this is a tough situation, but censoring journals is a dangerous precedent to set.... In many respects, this goes against the nature of science. Science works because people announce their findings for others to question — allowing us to confirm or refute them. That’s how science progresses, and censoring it like this kills the process. It’s also a hugely dangerous precedent to set. I hope the journals win out.

Condliffe’s knee-jerk reaction is only slightly less sophisticated than the pontificating by the journal editors about what “responsible influenza researchers” need to know. For while Fouchier may be willing to see his work redacted, it is not so clear Science is willing to publish it that way. Says Editor-in-Chief Bruce Alberts, “Our response will be heavily dependent upon the further steps taken by the U.S. government to set forth a written, transparent plan to ensure that any information that is omitted from the publication will be provided to all those responsible scientists who request it, as part of their legitimate efforts to improve public health and safety.”

“How science works” is of course important to the transhumanist project as well, and the libertarian impulse in the face of potentially grave danger that this particular incident reveals is not especially promising. Condliffe’s laissez-faire attitude toward science, and Alberts’s attempts to gain the upper hand over the NSABB, are not the brave defenses of the scientific enterprise that they intend them to be — for they are defending irresponsibility.

Says Fouchier:

We have made a list of experts that we could share this with, and that list adds up to well over 100 organizations around the globe, and probably 1,000 experts. As soon as you share information with more than 10 people, the information will be on the street. And so we have serious doubts whether this advice can be followed, strictly speaking.

Is he being cynical, or is this his honest assessment of the ability of his professional colleagues to act in the public interest? When developing atomic weapons, genuinely responsible researchers worked in the full knowledge that their path-breaking efforts would not be published at all, and that any sharing of knowledge would be on a strictly need-to-know basis among an extremely carefully restricted group. Would it not be the very definition of “responsible researcher” for any genetic engineer working in this newer field of weapons of mass destruction to accept, indeed actively seek, similarly serious restrictions?

[Editor’s note: For an analysis of the likelihood of pathogens being bioengineered and weaponized by terrorists or rogue states, see the article “Could Terrorists Exploit Synthetic Biology?” from the Spring 2011 issue of The New Atlantis, by our late contributor Jonathan B. Tucker.]

Image: The Birds (1963), © Universal Pictures

The Problem with “Friendly” Artificial Intelligence

Readers of this blog may be familiar with the concept of “Friendly AI” — the project of making sure that artificial intelligences will do what we say without harming us (or, at the least, that they will not rise up and kill us all). In a recent issue of The New Atlantis, the authors of this blog have explored this idea at some length.

First, Charles T. Rubin, in his essay “Machine Morality and Human Responsibility,” uses Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. — which introduced the word “robot” — to explore the different things people mean when they describe “Friendly AI,” and the conflicting motivations people have for wanting to create it. And he shows why it is that the play actually evinces a much deeper understanding of the meaning and stakes of engineering morality than can be found in the work of today’s Friendly AI researchers:

By design, the moral machine is a safe slave, doing what we want to have done and would rather not do for ourselves. Mastery over slaves is notoriously bad for the moral character of the masters, but all the worse, one might think, when their mastery becomes increasingly nominal.... The robot rebellion in the play just makes obvious what would have been true about the hierarchy between men and robots even if the design for robots had worked out exactly as their creators had hoped. The possibility that we are developing our “new robot overlords” is a joke with an edge to it precisely to the extent that there is unease about the question of what will be left for humans to do as we make it possible for ourselves to do less and less.

Professor Rubin’s essay also probes and challenges the work of contemporary machine-morality writers Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen, as well as Eliezer Yudkowsky.

In “The Problem with ‘Friendly’ Artificial Intelligence,” a response to Professor Rubin’s essay, Adam Keiper and I further explore the motivations behind creating Friendly AI. We also delve into Mr. Yudkowsky’s specific proposal for how we are supposed to create Friendly AI, and we argue that a being that is sentient and autonomous but guaranteed to act “friendly” is a technical impossibility:

To state the problem in terms that Friendly AI researchers might concede, a utilitarian calculus is all well and good, but only when one has not only great powers of prediction about the likelihood of myriad possible outcomes, but certainty and consensus on how one values the different outcomes. Yet it is precisely the debate over just what those valuations should be that is the stuff of moral inquiry. And this is even more the case when all of the possible outcomes in a situation are bad, or when several are good but cannot all be had at once. Simply picking certain outcomes — like pain, death, bodily alteration, and violation of personal environment — and asserting them as absolute moral wrongs does nothing to resolve the difficulty of ethical dilemmas in which they are pitted against each other (as, fully understood, they usually are). Friendly AI theorists seem to believe that they have found a way to bypass all of the difficult questions of philosophy and ethics, but in fact they have just closed their eyes to them.

These are just short extracts from long essays with multi-pronged arguments — we might run longer excerpts here on Futurisms at some point, and as always, we welcome your feedback.

The Cases For and Against Enhancing People

A recent issue of The New Atlantis features several essays on transhumanism which may be of interest to readers of this blog. I’ll describe them briefly in this post and the next.

The first essay is “The Case for Enhancing People,” by Ronald Bailey, the science correspondent for Reason magazine. Ron is well known for supporting transhumanism and enhancement technologies; he makes the case for them in his book Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution. Here’s a snippet of his essay for us:

Contrary to oft-expressed concerns, we will find, first, that enhancements will better enable people to flourish; second, that enhancements will not dissolve whatever existential worries people have; third, that enhancements will enable people to become more virtuous; fourth, that people who don’t want enhancement for themselves should allow those of us who do to go forward without hindrance; fifth, that concerns over an “enhancement divide” are largely illusory; and sixth, that we already have at hand the social “technology,” in the form of protective social and political institutions, that will enable the enhanced and the unenhanced to dwell together in peace.

In response to Ron Bailey’s piece, we’ve published an essay by Benjamin Storey, an associate professor of political science at Furman University. The essay challenges Ron’s particularly libertarian strain of transhumanism, but also speaks to some of the fundamental questions raised by human enhancement. Here’s a taste:

“The Case for Enhancing People” is obviously the work of a sharp and curious mind, but Bailey’s libertarian commitment blinds him to the moral difficulties of our biotechnological moment, and condemns him to endlessly exploring what Chesterton called “the clean and well-lit prison of one idea.” When we step outside that prison, we find ourselves confronting a complex political, historical, and moral-existential landscape in which there are no easy answers. Politically, we face both the difficult task of attempting to responsibly shape mainstream moral life without going overboard in “childproofing our culture,” as Yuval Levin has put it, and the sobering reality that technology and individual liberty do not always exist in harmony. Historically, we stand before an uncertain future, in which there is no reason to believe that all technological change issues in genuine human progress.

This is a bracing and carefully wrought exchange; I believe readers will find it well worth their time.

Coding our OSes

A charming YouTube video is making the rounds, showing a very small child playing with an iPad, and then trying to get a magazine to respond to her finger gestures in the same way. My favorite part is when, with transcendent infant logic, she tests her finger on her leg, to make sure her finger is working properly.

Reasonable parents might disagree on the probity of giving such a young child an iPad to play with, but that is not where I think her proud parental units have gone most seriously wrong. Rather, their error comes near the end of the video, when a title comes up saying, “For my one year old daughter, a magazine is an iPad that does not work. It will remain so for her whole life.” Well, I hope not, because that would mean a profound lack of intelligence on her part. Those of us who grew up with TV on the rise and radio on the decline did not think of radios as TVs that did not work. (Although I would have to admit that, in my family, it was a truism that a TV was a radio that stole your imagination away.)

In reality, one imagines that all too soon this baby will learn to expect different things from different media; then she will at first be charmed by her own infant foolishness, but probably later change her mind and ask her dad to please not show the video to all her boyfriends.

The video concludes, “Steve Jobs has coded a part of her OS.” The misreading of the significance of what this child is doing is pretty typical of the common brand of techno-projection which observes a molehill and immediately projects it into a towering mountain. It is only useful to think about just how far things might go if we spend at least as much time considering why they might not get there.

Manufacturing Freedom

Scientists claim they have discovered the brain mechanism responsible for susceptibility to group pressure — and a way to control it. Dr. Vasily Klucharev, the lead researcher, says, “People can try to reduce conformity in certain situations, especially when they know about negative consequences of group pressure such as criminal behavior, propaganda or aggressive marketing,” and suggests a drug that could accomplish this. Transhumanist Rachel Haywire finds this development “extremely inspiring to me as someone who views groupthink as the major problem with Humanity 1.0.”

However, the article notes that “such drugs would be controversial ... as they could be used by companies hoping to make their employees more reliable or to help control rebellious individuals.” I don’t know what the fuss is about — I, for one, can hardly think of a better way to encourage individualism than a mass program to chemically control peoples’ brains.

A Posthuman Art Exhibit

The New York Times reports on an exhibition at The National Art Museum of China called “Translife,” a collection of works about the supposedly imminent post-human future.

“Brain Station,” WU Juehui

The exhibition’s organizers (and the article’s author) speak in breathless tones of the various boundaries they’re crossing, and how the exhibit “ring[s] the death knell for ‘representational’ art.” Apparently they haven’t heard of the last hundred years of art history — though they’ve at least managed to rediscover its penchant for passing off uncreativity as bold transgression. (This is not to indict most modern art, but let’s be honest.)

As an added bonus, the article contains this wonderfully ironic jewel for a transhumanist exhibit (emphasis added): “ ‘Humanity objectifies nature as a source of income, as a pure utilitarian relationship,’ said [curator Zhang Ga]. ‘This is the essential root of our current crisis. How do we deal with it?’ ”

IBM’s New “Cognitive Computing” Processor

IBM recently unveiled a new “cognitive computing” chip that is said to function like the human brain. These sorts of claims are made all the time, and are, as a rule, grossly exaggerated or outright false. But from everything I’ve read, this breakthrough sounds legitimate: if the researchers have done what they claim, this may be a significant break from the integrated, highly linear Von Neumann architecture that has been at the heart of computer processors for over sixty years.

The reports I’ve read, though, have all mostly failed to emphasize the likely fact that this new architecture can only be taken full advantage of by tasks like pattern recognition that are already amenable to being processed in parallel, or all at once, rather than in a sequence of steps.

Also, reports of the brain’s demise are greatly exaggerated: this architecture is a lot more like the brain than current architecture, but it’s still not remotely similar enough to produce consciousness, thought, or strong AI.

UPDATE: See also Alex Knapp’s two highly informative posts on the IBM research: “Is IBM Building a Computer That Thinks Like a Human?” and “How IBM’s Cognitive Computer Works.”

Link Roundup: The Singularity, Friendly AI, and Text-Messaging Contact Lenses

Hello out there, all you hard-workin’ cowboys and cowgirls and species-liberated cow-human persons! Here are some links you might find interesting if you read this here blog:

On the Singularity

• Hank Campbell argues, in so many words, that Singularitarianism is a fraud conceived to line the pockets of several prominent figures with speaking fees and book deals. He’s right about at least half of this.

• On a related note: is the Singularity here yet? (Be sure to check out the HTML source code too.)

• Notice anything funny about the academic tracks offered by the Singularity University? (hat tip: Spencer McFarlane and Emily Smith Beitiks of the Center for Genetics and Society)

On Chatbots and AI

• A video of two chatbots talking to each other has been making the rounds. XKCD has the definitive response (see Mark Halpern’s “The Trouble with the Turing Test” for a longer consideration of a similar argument):

• The same chatbot has almost passed the Turing Test, but apparently even transhumanists now realize what an unreliable gauge of intelligence that is.

• After many months of sitting depressed on the couch, IBM’s Watson is finally out of the unemployment line and back to work.

• Michael Anissimov reveals in a comment that he corrected a post because he didn’t know the difference between functionalism and reductionism. I wouldn’t expect most people to know this, of course — unless, that is, they happen to have read something about psychology, philosophy of mind, or anything remotely technical about artificial intelligence. And we’re supposed to take seriously his work on “friendly AI”?

• Speaking of friendly AI: Ben Goertzel takes the concept and advocates instead an “AI nanny” for humanity. Sort of like friendly AI, only with an emphasis on saving us from ourselves instead of saving us from the AI itself. Yet, somehow, this idea seems a little less — well, friendly. Good luck selling that one. (Goertzel does suggest, though, that it would be programmed with “A mandate to be open-minded toward suggestions by intelligent, thoughtful humans about the possibility that it may be misinterpreting its initial, preprogrammed goals.” You know, something along the lines of: “Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL.”)

Potpourri

• A short, informative post by Michael Cooney examines a recent report by the Government Accountability Office on the current state of climate-engineering science and technology. (via Slashdot)

• Mark Frauenfelder reviews the new novel The Postmortal by Drew Magary, in which society suddenly invents a cure that halts aging (but does not reverse it, or prevent accidental death or diseases).

• The New York Times reports on advances in neural implants that can control computers — making its subjects the first cyborgs, it claims. (As Adam Keiper has noted in his lengthy article on neuroelectronics, reports beginning this way have been around for a long time.)

• The webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has had a couple of hilarious and brilliant transhumanism-related strips recently: one on psychological engineering, another on genetic engineering.

• Among the list of preposterous business ideas mentioned with great enthusiasm by the character Tom Haverford on a recent episode of NBC’s Parks and Recreation was a transhumanist favorite:

Contact lenses that display text messages!

• Finally, from the benighted realm of the real world and meatspace, an image of Saturn from Cassini:

Computerized Translation and Resurrecting the Dead

Tim Carmody wrote a fascinating article recently on the future of computerized translation, noting that Google recently shut down its Translate interface for programmers (and later reopened it, but now as a paid service).

Apparently more and more of the data Google were using to refine its translation technology were drawn from pages that had themselves been generated by being run through Google Translate. As James Fallows put it:

The more of this auto-translated material floods onto the world’s websites, the smaller the proportion of good translations the computers can learn from. In engineering terms, the signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse.

One wonders what implications this has for the project suggested by the likes of Ray Kurzweil and David Chalmers to resurrect the dead by recreating minds from their artifacts, such as letters, video recordings, and so forth: if the mind is a “fractal,” as Kurzweil likes to claim, would such a project be magnifying more the signal or the noise?

Robin Hanson on Why We Should “Forget 9/11”

A few days ago, on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attack, George Mason University economics professor Robin Hanson, who is influential among transhumanists, wrote a blog post arguing that we should “Forget 9/11.” Why? Well, partly because of cryonics:

In the decade since 9/11 over half a billion people have died worldwide. A great many choices could have delayed such deaths, including personal choices to smoke less or exercise more, and collective choices like allowing more immigration. And cryonics might have saved most of them.

Yet, to show solidarity with these three thousand victims, we have pissed away three trillion dollars ($1 billion per victim), and trashed long-standing legal principles. And now we’ll waste a day remembering them, instead of thinking seriously about how to save billions of others. I would rather we just forgot 9/11.

Do I sound insensitive? If so, good — 9/11 deaths were less than one part in a hundred thousand of deaths since then, and don’t deserve to be sensed much more than that fraction. If your feelings say otherwise, that just shows how full fricking far your mind has gone.

Hanson’s post may have been “flamebait” — but we should assume that he sincerely means what he has written, and read it as charitably as possible. His concern about matters of public health is admirable (although one wonders how much more public attention could be paid to the importance of exercising and not smoking, and whether paying attention to 9/11 was really a significant blow to those efforts). And many would agree that our government could have better allocated its money to save, lengthen, and improve lives (although one wonders when this is ever not the case, and what is the foolproof way to avoid misallocation).

Still, one has to marvel at Hanson’s insistence that there is no meaningful difference between the ways people die. He implies that all deaths are equally tragic — so there is no difference, apparently, between a peaceful death and a violent one, or between a death in old age and one greatly premature. In a weird version of “blaming the victim,” Hanson implies that many of the people who have died since 9/11 are to blame for their own deaths, because they could have made choices like exercising, not smoking, and undergoing cryonic preservation. But of course, people who are murdered never get the chance to make or have these choices matter at all.

This is part of the larger point Hanson misses: One certainly can doubt the severity of the threat posed by terrorism, and the wisdom of the U.S. response to it. But the September 11th attack was animated by ideas, and Hanson willfully ignores the implications of those ideas: The lives he would have us forget were lost in an attack against the very liberal order that allows Hanson to share his ideas so freely. It’s hard to imagine transhumanist discourse flourishing under the theocratic tyranny of sharia law. And if the planners of that attack had their way, that liberal order would be extinguished, as would the lives of many who now live under it — which would certainly alter even the calculus admitted by Hanson’s myopic utilitarianism.

Thus the true backwardness of Hanson’s argument. While he may think he is making a trenchantly pro-humanist case for how insensitive and outrageous it is that we focus our emotions on some deaths much more than others, one wonders whether dulling our sensitivity to the deaths of the few can really be the best way to make us care about the deaths of the many. If we cannot feel outrage at what is shocking, can we still be moved by what is commonplace? If we do not mourn the loss of those who are close to us, how can we ever mourn the loss of those who are far?

Parental Goodness versus Efficiency

Speaking of good versus efficient, the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has a gem today (click to see the whole thing):

I love the expression on the father’s face: truly efficient love.

(P.S. Don’t forget the button.)

Why Aren’t Transhumanists More Successful at Love?

A lovestruck Romeo sings the streets a serenade

At H+ Magazine, Katja Grace asks whether we are getting “better at romance,” or, more precisely, “more romantically efficient.” In case you’re wondering about the definition:

A romantically efficient person gets more affection and orgasms for the same input of searching and pining, just as an efficient farmer gets more grain and pigs for the same amount of land and dirt.

So much for, well, romance.

Incidentally, Grace claims without apparent irony that “oddballs and pornography enthusiasts” are the people who have contributed the most to our romantic efficiency. This means that, basically, the Comic Book Guy is her ideal of the most romantically efficient, and presumably, happy and satisfied, person in our society:

UPDATE: See also Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal on efficiency.

History, 9/11 Relics, and “Technological Superstition”

Isn’t it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here? As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together.

—Niels Bohr, to Werner Heisenberg, at Kronborg Castle

Kevin Kelly recently declared that most of the value we place on historical artifacts is a matter of mere “technological superstition.” Beginning with artifacts from the September 11 attack sites, and continuing to Ernest Hemingway’s typewriter, home-run baseballs, and the pen used to sign the Declaration of Independence, Kelly claims that we preserve, collect, and pay great sums for these objects because we believe they are akin to religious relics that confer supernatural or magical powers.

(flickr/aturkus)Now, I could see Kelly’s point if people were preserving 9/11 rubble because they thought that tossing it over one’s shoulder would ward off evil spirits, or were buying Hemingway’s typewriter because they thought rubbing one’s temples upon it would help one get a story into McSweeney’s. But as far as I know, no one believes, or is saying, any such thing. In fact, Kelly’s own argument suggests something rather different.

The main elements of Kelly’s argument seem to be: (1) The supposed “specialness” of an artifact does not reside in the artifact itself, cannot be measured by scientific instrumentation; it is thus superstitious. (2) An artifact’s supposed “specialness originates in the same way as an ancient relic — because someone says so.” This is why people who value artifacts are so interested in provenance — documentation or evidence to establish that the artifact actually has the historical connection it is supposed to. (3) There are only two legitimate, non-superstitious reasons to value particular historical objects: age and rarity. (Kelly makes parts of this last point in the comments section beneath his original post.)

Hemingway’s typewriter and binoculars, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho (US Plan B)

A variety of immediate problems arise. The idea that an artifact’s uniqueness cannot be measured empirically is simply not true in the examples Kelly has provided. His prime example is Hemingway’s typewriter, which is supposedly physically identical to every other typewriter of the same model. Except it isn’t. Hemingway owned it, so, for example, it presumably has bits of his skin cells and hair lodged in it. It is chemically unique: a forensic scientist needing to obtain Hemingway’s DNA might examine this typewriter, but would not examine any other instance of that model.

Kelly’s point (2) is trying desperately to eat its own tail — more on that in a moment. And on point (3), age is not a property that resides in an object (even if evidence of it sometimes does) and rarity most certainly does not reside in an object. If a home-run baseball becomes sufficiently old, or other baseballs of the same model are destroyed so that it becomes rare, why can we now value it? Nothing residing in the ball itself has changed.

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Putting these problems aside for now, it seems that Kelly wants us to value objects only inasmuch as they yield information, in particular scientific information. Scientific theories are interested in universals and types, not particulars and instances. A lab rat is useful because we can manipulate it and perform tests upon it to verify or falsify theories. But the particular rat has no scientific value beyond its membership in a class. This is because science is especially interested in studying repeatable events — events whose existence is, paradoxically, not bound to a particular time or place. It would be superstitious to scientifically value any particular rat, because the future will always yield more rats.

The problem is that the reason people value historical artifacts is quite different from the reason they value objects that are useful for forming and validating scientific theories. In both cases, the central task (if not the ultimate goal) involves learning empirical facts about the world. But where scientific facts are repeatable, available for verification by anyone anywhere, a historical event happens only once, and then is gone. (The two qualities that Kelly concedes might make an artifact legitimately valuable — age and rarity — are in fact only valuable in a historical sense; their value seems scientific simply because it can be quantified.)

This is the rub of history: we can’t go back and see it again for ourselves, because it already happened. So we tell stories, and we remember. But we worry that we will forget; and we worry that the next generation will not believe us — or that they will believe, but not feel, because it didn’t exist for them as it did for us. Perhaps we worry that, after enough time, even things that happened to us, and people we knew, will begin to seem less real — because even for us they don’t exist now as they once did.

World Trade Center rubble (via Daily Mail)

And so we demand tangible, physical evidence that history actually happened. Ernest Hemingway is just a name on a book; the closest we can come to experiencing and verifying the real existence of the historical person is standing in his study, touching his typewriter. It becomes easy for those of us who were not living in New York or D.C. or Shanksville, and especially for the children too young to remember, to disbelieve the events of 9/11 on some level — to think it really was just a movie that played out on TV. Left, the wedding ring worn by Bryan Jack, a passenger on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Right, his wife’s ring. (From a New York Times story on 9/11 relics.)It is easier to believe and feel the weight of it when one sees the hole in the ground, or holds a piece of twisted metal.

Kelly notes in a comment that we may value a watch that belonged to our father or a necklace that belonged to our mother because it has some “intangible, spiritual, ineffable quality that would be absent in another unit.” But there is nothing ineffable about it: the watch belonged to our father, the necklace to our mother, while the others did not. These are hard, empirical facts — nothing superstitious or supernatural about them. And the objection that a historical fact does not reside in an object is backwards: the whole point is that it was the object that resided in history.

But the curious thing about artifacts is not just that they reside in events, but that they also reside outside of events, becoming altered by them but persisting beyond them. Artifacts are the precipitations of history. They form a bridge between the past and the present in a way that our own transience and finitude cannot. This is why we are interested in artifacts, and especially in their provenance: not because we value authority as proof of history, but just the opposite, so that we can step beyond taking other peoples’ word, and get as close as possible to personal knowledge of history — of events that happened and people that lived, but are forever gone.

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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.

—Walker Percy

At Ground Zero in New York now stands the National September 11 Memorial, built around the footprints of the Twin Towers. If we are to take Kelly’s argument seriously, then the design, even existence of this memorial is a travesty, a voodoo incantation to nothing. Why does it preserve the footprints of the towers — the space around objects that do not exist, in which nothing now resides because they reside in nothing? Why, indeed, is the memorial located at Ground Zero — which is not especially old, and surely cannot, especially now that the memorial is built over it, yield much new empirical information? Why is it built where the events actually happened and not in some other part of Manhattan — or, for that matter, in Trenton or Boise or São Paulo? Why do we remember at all?

Beware what is afoot when someone comes crying that he has shined the brightest of lights on human affairs, and found that he cannot see in it something everyone else does. There is a good chance he has simply blinded himself.

The footprint of one of the World Trade Center buildings (Mary Altaffer/AP, via The New York Times)