Death Is Bad

The Slippery Slope fallacy is probably my least favorite fallacy ever. It seems I run into it every single time I want to talk about anything outside the norm with average people. Thanks to SMBC’s great comic on the matter, I’ve taken to slipping the slope the other way to try to demonstrate how dumb this is. Recent examples:

*Car accidents kill ~35,000 people every year in the US. 90% of accidents are attributed to human error, and self-driving cars eliminate this almost entirely. This is an easy win.

! But I really enjoy driving. Why are you taking away my freedoms to do something I enjoy? You people want to turn the world into such a safe, sterile place that all joy is drained from life and we will in a soul-sucking nanny state!

– Ignoring all other objections, what you’re saying is that you should be allowed to put others in danger for your own amusement. Why not just get rid of all traffic laws and every commute can be an action-packed Road Warrior death race? So much fun!

*It’s better for people to not have Down Syndrome. Terminating a fetus that has tested positive for Down Syndrome is a good thing.

! Down Syndrome children are people, and parents should be happy to raise whatever they’ve been given rather than trying to play god. You’ll proposing a path that will lead us to China’s gender-imbalance problem, because no one will want girls/brunettes/whatever trait.

– You’re right. We should also ban all nutrient supplements to pregnant women, because they should be happy with their natural children rather than trying to play god by making sure they gets enough folic acid.

*Death is bad. We should eliminate it.

! But the world will become over-crowded! We’ll live in a hellish Malthusian dystopia.

– We avoid that right now by letting people die of old age rather than starvation. Your answer to this problem is literally the application of death. What other social problems do you think would be best solved with wide-spread killings?

I try to phrase them a little lighter, and then follow-up with “I didn’t argue that your policy is a slippery slope toward inviting all terrorists to come onto planes with our eyes closed, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to do that to me.” Or a similar “I didn’t straw-man/slippery-slope you, please don’t do it to me.” Sometimes it works. Other times I just get “You call it a fallacy, I call it the way that the world often works.” /sigh

Still I think a constant, liberal application of slipping the slope in the other direction, every time this is encountered, may eventually make people think just a teeny tiny bit before they jump to using it. I hope I’m not just being naïve again.

When asked what to do if the fetus one was carrying was diagnosed with Down Syndrome, Richard Dawkins recently tweeted “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” I learned about this via the outraged Facebooking of an in-law, who has a close friend with two Down children. Fortunately I had just written a long post about eugenics, so I was able to refer back to that and already have most of my thoughts laid out. But it took me hundreds of lines of typing to explain a <140 character tweet.

I know Dawkins doesn’t need my advice on this sort of thing, but you simply cannot post new and interesting insights on complex concepts in 140 characters. When the overwhelming majority of social moral intuition goes against you, simply being right is not enough. That statement implied that anyone who may choose otherwise, or who did, is immoral. And that results in immediate defensiveness. That tweet managed to polarize everyone into the factions of “Those who already agree with me” and “Those who don’t.” The people who could be helped by this message were immediately alienated.

To get to some decent dialog I first had to (again) acknowledge that all existing people are valuable, and this choice only applies to pre-existant potential people. Then I had to prime the ground by stating that if I loved someone who was unable to have non-Down children I “personally wouldn’t leave anyone for something like that, but back in darker ages “inability to produce healthy offspring” was considered a valid reason to nullify a marriage.  Fortunately we’ve come a long way.” This was needed to get my audience to agree that moral progress is a thing that exists, and that it is good. Finally I was able to parlay that into saying that people who do choose to have Down children are actually NOT immoral, personally. Generally they are good, kind people. It’s not their fault they were misled by an archaic system into making that choice. It is the system’s fault for continuing to push ancient, out-dated moral customs. The parents are the victims, not the perpetrators. This takes some effort to say – at least a couple lines, maybe a paragraph, per point. That’s longer than 140 characters. Which is why Twitter is the worst. It’s primary use is for signaling allegiance and spreading memes. Meaningful content takes a few more words than that.

A long time ago I thought that Martial Arts simply taught you how to fight – the right way to throw a punch, the best technique for blocking and countering an attack, etc. I thought training consisted of recognizing these attacks and choosing the correct responses more quickly, as well as simply faster/stronger physical execution of same. It was later that I learned that the entire purpose of martial arts is to train your body to react with minimal conscious deliberation, to remove “you” from the equation as much as possible.

The reason is of course that conscious thought is too slow. If you have to think about what you’re doing, you’ve already lost.  It’s been said that if you had to think about walking to do it, you’d never make it across the room. Fighting is no different. (It isn’t just fighting either – anything that requires quick reaction suffers when exposed to conscious thought. I used to love Rock Band. One day when playing a particularly difficult guitar solo on expert I nailed 100%… except “I” didn’t do it at all. My eyes saw the notes, my hands executed them, and no where was I involved in the process. It was both exhilarating and creepy, and I basically dropped the game soon after.)

You’ve seen how long it takes a human to learn to walk effortlessly. That a situation with a single constant force, an unmoving surface, no agents working against you, and minimal emotional agitation. No wonder it takes hundreds of hours, repeating the same basic movements over and over again, to attain even a basic level of martial mastery. To make your body react correctly without any thinking involved. When Neo says “I Know Kung Fu” he isn’t surprised that he now has knowledge he didn’t have before. He’s amazed that now his body now reacts in the optimal manner when attacked without his involvement.

All of this is simply focusing on pure reaction time – it doesn’t even take into account the emotional terror of another human seeking to do violence to you. It doesn’t capture the indecision of how to respond, the paralysis of having to choose between outcomes which are all awful and you don’t know which will be worse, and the surge of hormones. The training of your body to respond without your involvement bypasses all of those obstacles as well.

This is the true strength of Martial Arts – eliminating your slow, conscious deliberation and acting while there is still time to do so.

Roles are the Martial Arts of Agency.

When one is well-trained in a certain Role, one defaults to certain prescribed actions immediately and confidently. I’ve acted as a guy standing around watching people faint in an overcrowded room, and I’ve acted as the guy telling people to clear the area. The difference was in one I had the role of Corporate Pleb, and the other I had the role of Guy Responsible For This Shit. You know the difference between the guy at the bar who breaks up a fight, and the guy who stands back and watches it happen? The former thinks of himself as the guy who stops fights. They could even be the same guy, on different nights. The role itself creates the actions, and it creates them as an immediate reflex. By the time corporate-me is done thinking “Huh, what’s this? Oh, this looks bad. Someone fainted? Wow, never seen that before. Damn, hope they’re OK. I should call 911.” enforcer-me has already yelled for the room to clear and whipped out a phone.

Roles are the difference between Hufflepuffs gawking when Neville tumbles off his broom (Protected), and Harry screaming “Wingardium Leviosa” (Protector). Draco insulted them afterwards, but it wasn’t a fair insult – they never had the slightest chance to react in time, given the role they were in. Roles are the difference between Minerva ordering Hagrid to stay with the children while she forms troll-hunting parties (Protector), and Harry standing around doing nothing while time slowly ticks away (Protected). Eventually he switched roles. But it took Agency to do so. It took time.

Agency is awesome. Half this site is devoted to becoming better at Agency. But Agency is slow. Roles allow real-time action under stress.

Agency has a place of course. Agency is what causes us to decide that Martial Arts training is important, that has us choose a Martial Art, and then continue to train month after month. Agency is what lets us decide which Roles we want to play, and practice the psychology and execution of those roles. But when the time for action is at hand, Agency is too slow. Ensure that you have trained enough for the next challenge, because it is the training that will see you through it, not your agenty conscious thinking.

As an aside, most major failures I’ve seen recently are when everyone assumed that someone else had the role of Guy In Charge If Shit Goes Down. I suggest that, in any gathering of rationalists, they begin the meeting by choosing one person to be Dictator In Extremis should something break. Doesn’t have to be the same person as whoever is leading. Would be best if it was someone comfortable in the role and/or with experience in it. But really there just needs to be one. Anyone.

Authority is a weird thing.

Last year I had a great time volunteering at Denver Comic Con (DCC). I ran around, did what people told me to do, got to be part of the machinery that let tens of thousands of people have a great weekend. And I got to see a bunch of stuff for free! It was a good time. The head of the department I was in most of the time was impressed enough by me that he recommended me for a management-level position for this year, and I accepted.

First surprise – it’s not very fun to be management. When you’re a low-level volunteer, the management-level guys are quest-givers, and you get to go on fun quests! “Stand here and do this thing!” “Go run there to deliver this message and bring back these supplies!” “Check the badges of all the people in this line!” It was a cool IRL video game. You know why there aren’t any games where you play the quest-giver? Cuz it ain’t that fun. A lot of your time is simply giving out the quests. Then more of it is checking to make sure the quest is being completed (correctly, or at all). Then some time is spent checking with every PC to make sure their quest is progressing OK and they don’t need more help. And all the time you’re getting random questions about the quests which you aren’t really sure how to answer. You’re literally making up the answers on the fly, trying to keep the whole thing running as best you can.

I already knew this, from various reading and talking with people, but over the weekend it was really driven home: The most important skill of leadership is good acting ability. Specifically, you have to be good at acting like you know what you’re doing and have complete confidence in your actions. When someone asks “Hey, can we take pictures?” and this was never discussed in any previous meetings or trainings you get to snap back immediately with a confident “Sure, as long as there’s no flash” and pretend that it’s official policy you’re quoting.

Really the most amazing part of all this is that it works. People defer to the guy in charge simply because he is in charge. It’s the craziest damn thing. Someone said “Hey, you wanna be in charge?” I said “OK”, and boom – people are acting like I’m someone that needs to be deferred to. This isn’t that surprising in the case of volunteers, since they did sign up to be part of this game. We all agreed I’d play the role of quest-giver and they’d play PCs, so it’s part of the play. What surprised me is how the thousands of general attendees deferred to me in exactly the same way, if not more so. After every panel I’d approach the stragglers and say “Excuse me, I need you to clear the room for the next event.” When knots formed near egress doors I’d interrupt the group and say “Excuse me, we’re moving a lot of people through this area, I need you to move along.” Every time I expected push-back.* Not once did I ever get any. In almost every case people responded *immediately* like I was the school principal or something. A couple times there was some reluctance, but they didn’t actually protest or resist, they simply complied a little slower.

I think the radio helped a TON with this. As a management-level volunteer I had a radio clipped to my belt and a conspicuous earpiece. It looked official as hell. The thing itself was a pain in the ass, it was always interrupting my train of thought and 95% of the chatter didn’t apply to my team. But the psychological effect was astounding. (yes, I realize that being a tall white male probably helped as well) It was the costume that made the role complete. As long as I kept up the appearance of confidence and authority, people seemed to instinctively follow my orders. I didn’t even have to exert any effort beyond the acting, the compliance drive was entirely within themselves. It was like flicking a switch.

But I know I was just acting, and so it was exhausting as hell to keep it up for 12 hours straight. I can see why the ruling elite is a social class. This sort of thing would be much easier for someone who’s been raised from birth to believe that s/he should be in charge. Acting takes effort, it’s a constant strain (although it probably gets easier with practice). If someone wasn’t acting, if they internalized that role as part of who they are naturally and simply expected to be deferred to at all times, they could do this constantly without much strain. It’d be a hell of a social hack, and a massive advantage. Likely not just for them but also for their entire team, assuming the leader is competent in whatever skills and administration are needed.

Obviously this wouldn’t work with a hostile group. Everything went smoothly because everyone there wanted to have a good time with minimal hassle. But it astounded me just how easy it was to become the guy in charge. And I wasn’t even that high up the ladder.

Next time: a few specific experiences.

*Ok, by the time Sunday rolled around I had kinda gotten used to this, and wasn’t as surprised anymore.