To follow-up to Coming out of the closet as a social conservative, my thoughts on parenthood.

I negatively judge those who don't want to have children. I still like you, but it is a choice that I do not respect. First, I see it as a rejection of adulthood and of an essential part of the human experience, thus I view it as a childish decision, or perhaps more accurately, a decision to retain a more childlike life. A childlike life is great fun, but to me it is a small life, an immature life.

Second, I view the decision as saying, in the most profound way, via actions not words, "I wish there to be less people like me in the world. I wish the next generation to be less like me than this generation. My type of person should be removed from the world." That is, after all, the effect of the choice, and when you make a choice, you are choosing its effects. This is the inexorable logic of evolution and the hereditibility of personality traits.

The thing is, I like you, dear readers. Many of you I admire, respect, and approve of. I want to be in a world with more people like you, not a world full of people who aren't the type to be my friends, readers, commenters and lurkers. And I am deeply saddened when you don't seem to feel the same way - when you choose to concede the world to people not like you.

I'm sure you see things a different way, and I'm sure you have all kinds of reasons. You may be scared, prefer your independence and fun, have had bad experiences with your parents, not want the responsibility, don't see it as your fight, don't like the world of the future, etc. There are lots of reasons, some selfish, some noble, some good, some bad. That's fine, it is your life, and I'm glad you are choosing how to live it.

But I view myself, in the role of a parent, as fighting a crucial battle for a better future, and I view non-parents who are unusual people I like as deserters from that battle. (Ironically, this negative judgement is a mark of respect. since I only care whether you have kids if I like and respect you.) Maybe this is perspective is illogical self-glorification of the sacrifices I am making as a parent. Maybe it is hubris to be judging others rather than accepting them. But it is my perspective.

There is a "public good problem" aspect to this, where the gains from more great people accrue to a wide number of others, so they are underprovided. One can argue that potential parents shouldn't be expected to undergo the hardships of parenting to help the world, that is calling for altruism. While that is true, let us not forget that humans have mechanisms to enforce public good creation based on status and respect. Writing free software is a public good, so we give props to people who do it. Maybe we also dis those who can and don't. Do I have any right to tell people whether to have kids? Of course not. But my respect is a currency, and it is my currency, and it is up to me to parcel it out to those who are providing public goods that I benefit from. That's how humans handled public goods before the state, and I like it.

Yay for Bryan Caplan for writing a book encouraging smart people to have more kids!

Gah! It's calmly and evenhandedly deflecting everything we're throwing at it. Our deductive fallacies are only making it stronger! Wait…what on earth is it doing now? Oh, no, it has sources! My God, it's defending itself with ironclad sources! Someone stop the citing! Please, please stop the citing!
...
What?!? Noooooooooo! Richard! For the love of God, it's convinced Richard!

No time for tears now. Richard's mind has been changed forever. But we mustn't let it weaken our resolve. Mark my words, our ignorance will hold, no matter the cost. Now, more than ever, we have to keep floundering ahead with blind faith in our increasingly fallacious worldview.

For Richard's sake.

What's that? Now it's making an appeal to reason? Never! Do you hear me, you eloquent, well-read behemoth? Never! We'll die before we recognize what we secretly know to be true! The cognitive dissonance only makes our denial stronger!

The Onion: Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!

Yep, that's the homo sapiens I know...

Awesome:

There is such a thing as a pornography consumed exclusively by women .. it is the romance novel. Romance novels account for 40% of mass market paperback sales in the United States .... The realm of the romance novel, which might be called "romantopia," is a utopian erotic female counterfantasy to pornotopia. Just as porn actresses exhibit a suspiciously male-like sexuality, romances are exercises in the imaginative transformation of masculinity to conform with female standards.
...
On a personal level, women often express concern over a partner's regular purchasing of Playboy or watching pornographic videos. In particular there is a verbalized concern that these things will effect their relationships. ... [And in fact] males that viewed images of attractive models reported being less committee to their partner after the viewing. ... Playboy centerfolds ... got the same results. ... Modern media .. perhaps giving men an unrealistic view of how many attractive available women are out there.

If women complain porn hurts relationships by giving men unrealistic expectations, why don't men complain romance novels hurt relationships by giving women unrealistic expectations? Why so much more effort to regulate porn than romance novels?

Seems like a fair parallel to me.

altamira16 writes:

Evolution is not a political theory. It is a scientific theory. It mostly applies to biology, but shortly after it was discovered it captured people's imagination, and they applied it to all sorts of things. Some of it panned out, and some of it did not. I found the scientific racism of the late 19th century to be a bad thing.

I agree that it is a scientific theory. So is economics. But since both of them are deeply relevant to the nature of systems composed of human beings, and politics concerns itself with designing those system, both evolution and economics are, in my opinion, relevant to politics. Evolution is also very relevant to philosophy, yet very few thinkers (Dennet, Pinker, Wright) seem to incorporate it.

The fact that evolution has been used for bad political ends in the past does not change the fact that it is true, wide-ranging, and important. Economics has been used for bad ends in the best - Marx was used to justify communism, which killed far more people in the 20th century than racism in the 19th. Does that mean that the fields like law & econ, or public choice economics, should be thrown out?

Perhaps there are some sophisticated argument involving the bad past uses of evolutionary science which are reasonable. But most of the ones I've heard are equivalent to throwing out the incredibly important contributions of modern economics to understanding political systems because Marxism killed people. And that's just plain stupid.

My dad points out that while conservatives are the ones calling for Creationism to be taught, liberals only embrace the surface idea of evolution, rejecting most of its implications and holding positions which counter it.

So while the left loves to diss the right for being anti-evolution and anti-science, they are just as bad (and more hypocritical).

I think I posted some stuff from Robot's Rebellion earlier on the subject, but the sad fact is that many decades after Darwin and several after Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, the ideas of evolution - an incredibly powerful and far-reaching theory with enormous implications about human nature - are still largely ignored by philosophers and the general public. We finally have the answers to some deep questions about why we are the way we are...and people ignore them, either because they don't understand, or the answers counter their deeply held prejudices.

As my dad has posted in the past, a true scientific theory will always cut across political lines, and thus have elements that make everyone uncomfortable. Evolution is no exception. But it is true, and it has wide-reaching uncomfortable implications. So you can believe it, or you can be a crypto-Creationist, saying you support evolution while denying its implications.

If you want to learn more, I recommend starting with Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives:( excerpt )In a sense, evolution is like economics - a field which people think of as applying to a few specialized areas, like money and international trade, when in reality it has profound things to say about the daily life, interactions, and decision making of everyone. Just as I am imperialistic about the application of economics, I am imperialistic about the application of evolution. People are incredibly complicated, weird machines. Knowing who built them, how, and why is an incredible tool to wield in understanding how they work. To neglect it is to bury your head in the sand.

After Evolution for Everyone, I recommend Pinker's "Blank Slate", Robert Wright's "Moral Animal", and Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene". If you can read those books and think that evolution doesn't have broad-ranging implications to most aspects of human life...I'd love to hear your reasoning.

I most often invoke EvBio when discussing differences between men and women. Yet it occurs to me that there are some strong EvBio arguments to be made in favor of gender equality.

There are 2 general reasons why human instincts can be counterproductive: when they help our genes rather than ourselves, and when they are adapted for our ancestral environment and don't find with the modern one. I think some areas of gender stereotyping fit into this latter category, and thus we should be consciously trying to overcome them.

The simplest example is sexual mores, such as the slut/stud distinction. Because of the asymmetrical investment in children, without birth control, there was a huge practical difference between male and female promiscuity. Men getting laid was generally good for their genes while women getting laid (outside a committed relationship) was generally bad - so of course relatives treat the two very differently! But now that we have birth control, the link between female promiscuity and single motherhood is far weaker. And we are rich enough that single motherhood, while very difficult, is a lot easier than it used to be[1]. So our viewpoints should shift much more towards equality when evaluating promiscuity.

Also, the economics of hunter-gatherer tribes was such that there was much more variety in the resources obtained by men (hunting) than women (gathering). So male income mattered a lot more than female income, because it varied more. Because childbirth was so difficult and dangerous, female youth and health were very important, thus female beauty.

Again, things have radically changed. Men still have higher-variance in income than women (note the male dominance of CEO positions and athletics, for example), but the difference is much lower - especially in utility-space, because we are so rich that the marginal utility of money declines very quickly. And while youth & health still matter for childbirth, with modern medical technology it's a much less life-or-death matter. So, when evaluating the attractiveness of women, we should be up-weighting mental characteristics (income, career) and downweighting the physical ones.

Hopefully these arguments will also help us accept the existence of these stereotypes. Yes, they are stupid, but it's nothing personal - just evolution rearing its ugly head. Someone in modern liberal America who looks down on a promiscuous female is falling victim to the same trap as a fat person who eats too much and doesn't exercise enough - both are following instincts that used to be accurate. Sadly, since the harm in the former case falls on someone else, it will be more difficult to get people to overcome their instincts. But perhaps this framework can help.

(All of these "shoulds" are of course categorical imperatives assuming that people want happiness.)

[1] Actually, I'm not certain about this. Because we have moved from tribal to nuclear family households, there is a lot less help around for a single mom.

Will Wilkinson on the local-food movement:

Local food is often better-tasting and more nutritious. That's a pretty good reason to pay more for it. Maybe you want to support small local farms. Go ahead, if that's your bag. But don't think going local does much to reduce your carbon footprint. And it shouldn't do much to ease your conscience.

How far your food travels matters a lot less than what kind of food it is, or how it was produced. According to a recent study out of Carnegie Mellon University, the distance traveled by the average American's dinner rose about 25 percent from 1997 to 2004, due to increasing global trade. But carbon emissions from food transport saw only a 5 percent bump, thanks to the efficiencies of vast cargo container ships.

A tomato raised in a heated greenhouse next door can be more carbon-intensive than one shipped halfway across the globe. And cows spew a lot more greenhouse gas than hens, or kumquats, so eating just a bit less beef can do more carbon-wise than going completely local. It's complicated.

But one thing is clear enough: the farmers in Mexico, China, and Brazil, who produce a lot of the imported food Americans eat, are poorer than the farmers here in Iowa. A lot poorer. The corollary of "eat local" is "don't eat Mexican," so to speak. But the way poor people get less poor is to do business with people who have a lot of money, like us.

As is so often the case, those with soft hearts who think they are righteously doing the good thing to make the world a better place are actually contributing to inequality. Normally, I would just say "hey, if they care more about supporting local farmers than reducing global poverty, that's fine".

But because the local food movement has an explicit component of self-righteousness: "We do this because it makes the world a better place relative to other eating choices", it is open to criticisms about whether that is the case. And to me, it's pretty clear that supporting rich farmers instead of poor ones, at the price of slightly more CO2 emissions from the transportation, is worse for the world.

Heck, I suspect that this is true even if your only metric for good/bad is CO2 emissions! If I pay $1 for 3 apples from Mexico and you pay $1.50 for the same 3 apples from California, I bet that your $1.50 turns into more CO2 than my $1. Sure, my Mexican apples require a little more transport, but transport is such a tiny fraction of the total cost that it is overwhelmed by the extra 50c you paid. Since everything in the economy uses gasoline and transportation and thus generates CO2, the extra 50c implies significantly more CO2 used elsewhere. For example, consider the profit. Suppose in both cases the farmers make 5%. That means either a Mexican farmer makes 5c or a California farmer makes 7.5c. The latter will lead to more resource and CO2 usage.

Put more simply: By eating local, you are rewarding those who don't transport goods...but also rewarding those who live extremely resource-intensive lifestyles relative to the global norm (ie Americans). If you instead buy things from poor people far away, you are supporting those who live low-resource lifestyles (pretty much by definition, being poor means not using many resources).

That those with soft hearts get this simple idea so utterly backwards seems like strong evidence of their soft heads. Prices are signals about resource usage - if you want to save resources, buy cheap things! Anytime you are buying something more expensive while thinking you are saving resources, you are probably deluding yourself. Local food is no exception. Buy it if you want - but stop pretending that you are saving the environment.

(also posted on NT)

When I argue with pro-war people, they all seem to assume that Iraq will be freer and better off as a democracy than under Saddam. They seem to be missing a very important point, which is that Saddam was a secular dictator, who was (for the Middle East) relatively pro-education, pro-female rights, pro-freedom and progressive. Now Iraq is becoming a religious democracy, strongly influenced by radical Islam. These ignorant hawks assume that Iraqi dictatorship was repressive of all freedoms (perhaps based on Russian dictatorship?), when it was extremely repressive only of political freedom. They assume that Iraqi democracy will be progressive and egalitarian (perhaps based on first-world democracies), when it may well turn out to be repressive and patriarchal.

Now, it may be that the gains outweigh the losses, and Iraq will get more free. I think there is a decent chance of this. But I also expect the difference to be far smaller than the naive viewpoint. As an example, consider this article about the change in tolerance for alcohol. Alcohol was widely accepted during the Saddam era, and now in "Free Iraq" liquor stores are being blown up by fundamentalists. This could just be due to temporary civil disorder which will end when the police get the upper hand. Or perhaps it will be the police who enforce prohibition.

Don't assume that Dictatorship -> Democracy increases all freedoms.

Two new pieces at No Treason:

Computer Student on Trial for Aid to Muslim Web Sites

Pattern in Racial Differences