Death Is Bad

Western society seems far too lenient on those who harm others due to gross negligence. Far too often people are given a free pass because they “believe” something “deeply”. I was recently gladdened to see that parents who killed their child by resorting to “prayer” rather than going to a doctor were convicted of homicide.

In fairness, this is only a small first step. The true culprit, the man who should be in jail, is the clergyman or woo-peddler who convinced these parents that prayer was the correct course of action. That person (if s/he exists) is morally no better than the man who sold novelty golf-ball finders as bomb-detectors  to governments. Yet somehow he isn’t even prosecuted, whereas golf-ball-man is going to jail.

Usually the priests, homeopaths, anti-vaxxers, and other woo-peddlers avoid any prosecution because they are seen to “believe deeply” in the bullshit they are spouting. This is a terrible excuse. It’s my contention that even if a priest honestly believed that drinking poison gives you super X-Men powers, as someone in a position of authority giving that sort of advice he has a moral responsibility to know at least as much about how poison affects the typical human as a high-school graduate. I don’t give the smallest shit as to what he sincerely believed. Only what he can be reasonably expected to know before advising others.

This is not a claim that anyone who disagrees with the current scientific consensus needs to be jailed. Only that persons who put themselves in positions to advise others have the basic moral decency to ensure that the advice they are giving isn’t going to get people killed. I’m very disappointed in humanity, as most people seem to not care, and that leads to untold numbers of preventable deaths.

This also incentivizes people to know as little as possible about the real world and what effects real things have on real people, because as long as sincere ignorance is a valid defense they can get away with murder by simply not bothering to know anything. This is the most perverse of perverse incentives.

I was watching the Wendy Davis spectacle last week. For those unfamiliar, the Texas State Legislature was about to put vast restrictions on abortion. There was a populist filibuster where hundreds of people spoke in the congress in order to delay the vote. This was cut short by the Chairman, but not before a day was lost.  In the next session, State Senator Wendy Davis filibustered the bill for 11+ hours, until she was shut down by the Lieutenant Governor just in time for a vote to be taken. The vote was delayed by roars of outrage from the gathered audience, and the bill failed to pass in time.

Every single part of this seems crazy to me.

First, the abortion restrictions themselves – the government is supposed to pass laws for the good of the society is governs. Banning abortion is obviously a failure in this regard, it shows either that the senate has been infiltrated by radical elements (if you believe society at large is good), or that society at large has been corrupted to a degree that the government can no longer steer it toward the common good.

Second, the people’s filibuster – rather than attempting to fix the source of the problem (either a compromised govt or a corrupt society) people instead decided to exploit a vulnerability in the system. They took a process intended to help the government make good decisions via testimony and intentionally broke it to halt the law-making process.

I think this was an acknowledgement that society has broken down to the point where we can’t have nice things anymore. The government now seems to work as a fail-safe instead. It is here mainly to prevent the civil war and chaos that results when people can’t live together. We really don’t want to live in Iraq. This is the only way I can make sense of these filibusters – they are games that formalize conflict with artificial rules which, as long as both sides agree to follow them, prevent violent outbreaks. Earlier I claimed that the Diamond Invention  is useful because it prevents us from wasting resources for signaling that could be better used for practical matters. In this case, the Politics Invention is useful because it prevents armed conflict.

Much of the rest of this story makes sense in this context. The opposing team made the next move – the Chairman of the House cut the filibuster short, saying the testimony had become repetitive (which was true). But more importantly – this tactic is too powerful. Either side can use it to stop any bill indefinitely, because it’s not hard to find a few hundred motivated people when pulling from a pool of millions. It’s a game breaker, and the game must continue to prevent war.

The counter-move was the announcing of a champion – Wendy Davis. This is acceptable because there is a very small pool to choose from (only the elected Representatives) and Texas rules make filibustering difficult enough (speaker cannot sit or lean on anything, cannot pause for bathroom breaks or other needs, and must stay on-topic) that it is a costly weapon (until someone like David Blaine is elected…). It is also a brilliant entertainment move – a single champion in a physical contest makes for a great narrative and allows for humans to do our much-beloved hero-worship thing. And games should always be entertaining.

It was also executed with a great eye for drama – the champion may falter twice, but is defeated upon the third fault, and has a deadline. The opposition managed to get in two strikes against the champion, one of them of extremely dubious validity. Then they ruled her in violation at third time with only minutes to the finish line! THE CROWD GOES WILD!

That was where the Republicans screwed up – they failed to account for the climax of an emotional event like this, because not only must they stop Davis, the also need to make one final move before midnight… a move which isn’t possible amidst the cacophony of raging fans. The clock ticks past midnight before a vote can be taken. Win by technicality!

This sort of thing convinces me that politics is a game. What sort of society allows their law-making body to be usurped by a loud mob that managed to delay a vote by three minutes? Seriously, three minutes make a difference here? 12:03 is an arbitrary time, and should make no difference in whether a law is “official” or not. That is the sort of rule that is fully in the providence of games and has no anchoring in reality.

Of course then the Republicans made a mistake so massive that both sides are doing their best to ignore it – they acknowledged the primacy of the game, and attempted to cheat, at the same time. But this post is long enough, I’ll get to that tomorrow.

Based on various discussions in recent weeks, I am revising my stance on Transparency. Not the end result, which is still ideally a state of complete transparency, but in how to get there from here.

I’ve said that the records the NSA was collecting should be public information anyway. But obviously the government doesn’t feel the same way, because they were hiding the fact that they sought them. And they are now attempting to prosecute Snowden the same way they’ve reprehensively detained and prosecuted Bradley Manning. And yet they are doing NOTHING to investigate whether these secret programs actually needed to be secret. There are some things that will have to be held secret, even in a transparent society, for reasons of national security. After an interval of time they should all be revealed, and an independent panel would review past actions to determine if the secrecy was truly necessary for self-defense. Any abuse MUST be prosecuted fully, so that secrecy does not become the norm again, to keep the society as transparent as possible. In light of Snowden’s leaks, it seems that these programs should never have been secret, and the government officials/agencies that claimed protection from exposure in courts due to security concerns were lying. They are vile people who threaten the very concept of transparency. If the government cared anything for Transparency they would be prosecuting these obfuscationists for fraud and treason, rather than attacking the people who have brought this outrage to light.

Right now the window goes one-way only. The actions of those in power are being held in opacity while they can peer in on everyone else. Most people want the opacity to go both ways. I want the transparency to go both ways. But in either case the party that will be forced to change is the government. I was in the wrong to say the data that the government was gathering was no big deal. It is a big deal because they are trying to hide it, and until we can pry back their shells and expose them to the same light we live in, we should demand the same secrecy they get. The exchange of information must be mutual, or they will not have any incentive to change.

I was proclaiming “This is not a big deal” because I often live in the world I wish was already here, a world were Transparency works both ways, and where a return to secrecy and paranoia is a net loss for everyone, and thus must be defended. (“Be the change you want to see in the world” and all that). I forgot that this is not the world we’re in. We are a LONG way from there, and getting There from Here will require a lot of leverage and negotiation by those of us on the wrong side of the glass. We shouldn’t give away any tools in that fight for free, which is what I was doing. My bad.

Kindle Worlds lets you get paid for fanfic. Yay? No.

John Scalzi summarizes the legal jargon, go read it. You’ll get paid for what you write, but then Amazon and the Licensors have full copyright ownership of everything you created. If you want to protect your rights you’ll have to change all the names, like Scalzi did with Redshirts.

This is nothing new, of course. Anyone who writes fanfic never had any legal claim on their work. That was a large part of the appeal. You are making something and gifting it to everyone for free, and in return they do the same. Eliezer wrote HPMoR, I used that to podcast it, Sam used the podcast to animate it. I get many of my FX from freesound, where other people upload their sounds for free for everyone to use. I upload my sounds in return (at least one of which has been used in a product) and the community as a whole financially supports the site. No one particularly minded, as there was no money to be made anyway. At best the original author gets extra sales from people who become interested in the world due to the fanfic (I only bought the original Harry Potter series because HPMoR was so good and I wanted my background. I never actually finished reading it, because frankly it wasn’t as good). At worst it’s just a bunch of people telling stories to each other and it doesn’t affect the author or publishers. Fanfic has been largely untouched by hostile hands due to this no-profit agreement.

Now Amazon is licensing fanfic for profit. At first blush this sounds good for the fanfic authors, but I have extreme reservations. Because now there is money to be made. Which means that if you’re writing fanfic and you AREN’T charging for it and giving the copyright holder a portion of the profits, there are lawyers that will make the case that you are stealing. Lawyers with a LOT of funding behind them.

I’m not saying this will happen, but now it could. And I don’t trust Amazon to not be evil. Hell, I don’t trust humans to not be evil, and they have preferences other than Maximize Profit! Give this tool to a Profit-Maximizing Optimization Process (which is what corporations basically are) and you will likely have to fight it to prevent a scouring of free fanfic.

Some people may not have a problem with this. The best fanfic writers will get some supplemental income and maybe make a name for themselves in the publishing world, and the rest will finally die off. But a lot of people first cut their teeth on fanfic. Every writer started out writing fanfic, most of them just had it in their elementary school notepads where they don’t have to admit to it. Imitation is always the first step in learning. Even people who don’t plan to write professionally often write fanfic sheerly for the pleasure of writing it. Soon they might be prosecuted if they don’t wish to turn over fiction written in licensed worlds to Amazon.

And some people have other agendas entirely. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is explicitly a teaching tool. It isn’t just there to tell a story, it’s there to promote rational thought in readers. To help raise the sanity waterline of the reading public, just a wee bit. That’s why it was written. That’s why I do the podcast. I am not seeking financial gain, I am trying to make the world slightly better, and slightly more like me. This is a purpose important to us, too important to limit it behind paywalls. The work is given away free not just out of necessity, but also to disseminate it as widely as possible. If we do not wish to charge for it, will Amazon be able to take us to court and force us to charge or remove it?

I’m betting we’ll find out sooner or later.