Death Is Bad

I used to hate the phrase “I’ll keep you in my prayers.” It’s a meaningless sentence muttered so that people can feel like they’re helping without actually doing a thing. As the saying goes, “Two hands working accomplishes more than a thousand clasped in prayer.” I’d much rather that someone offered to help in some way.

My thinking has started to change on this, however, due to the cynicism/realism of bloggers like Robin Hanson. As Robin would say – religion isn’t about God. I’ve started to simply disregard any explanation that a believer makes that involves God or the supernatural as a lie (even if they don’t realize that it is), and started to look for the real answer. When a believer says they’ll pray for you, they’ll tell you it’s because their recitations will invoke a magical entity to alter the laws of physics in your favor. But what’s really happening?

A lot of the time when someone is suffering (say, they’ve been in a car accident) and they are visited by a friend, there is nothing that the friend can do at that exact moment. The injured does not have a doctor’s bill in their lap. They don’t need anything fetched from the shelf they can’t reach, and they aren’t particularly hungry. Maybe they’re in a lot of pain, but there’s nothing the friend can do about that. The injured will need help later, when it’s less convenient and no one is around.

By “keeping someone in their prayers”, what the divine-petitioner is actually doing is reminding themselves every day that this friend of theirs is still in need of help. Not only does this keep the memory of the injured fresh in their mind, it also may convey a slight sense of obligation. By praying for the injured’s welfare, they are emotionally pre-committing to aid that has not yet even been asked for. In theory, this would make them more likely to check-up on the injured party, and quicker to respond to any requests for help, be it physical or financial.

Studies seem to be mixed. Sometimes there appear to be correlations between surgery recovery times and religiosity, and sometimes no such link is found. It used to be the case (in America) that mainly only the very independent would shirk religion – even nonbelievers would remain in a church community for the social aspects. As non-belief becomes more common and communities form around other things, I imagine that this correlation will continue to decrease. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, so regardless of how communities function in the future, I’ll be unlikely to ever fully participate in them and get these advantages. Which is ok with me.

But now – when people say “I’ll keep you in my prayers” – instead of tasting indignation, I remind myself that they are simply trying to say “I’ll try to remember to help you when you need it.” Which makes for much better social interaction. :)

A gun is a tool like any other. But its function is specifically to kill, which makes it a tool we’ve got good reason to be wary of and maybe place some restriction on (an obvious no-brainer is the magazine capacity limit). Some people find the registration of guns controversial. I don’t think it should be.

Of course one cannot blame a tool for how its used, one can only blame the user. For this reason we have restrictions on who can use guns – we don’t give them to children, or the insane, or people who are likely to use them for criminal purposes. And yet somehow these people still often get their hands on guns, guns which they do not legally own. This is because some gun owners do not treat the ownership of guns as a responsibility. If you have created or purchased a tool who’s purpose is to dispense death, you have some responsibility in ensuring it isn’t used for evil.

My support for registration comes from my opinion that the legal owner of a gun should be held at least partially liable whenever a gun is used illegally. Which means that a gun must have a legally registered owner from the point of manufacture, through transportation, resale, and final ownership. Any time a gun is reported stolen, lost, or missing, there would be a hefty fine on the owner, reflecting the cost to society for having a death-machine unaccounted for on the loose. I assume this may lead to gun insurance, with lower rates for more responsible owners.

Yes, people will complain when their guns are used by criminals against their consent to do things they would never endorse, so why should they be held partially responsible? My reply is that they should think about the consequences of owning a death-machine when they purchase one. It’s fucking pathetic that someone would need a law to make them feel responsible about what a gun they’ve made/sold/purchased was used for, but it looks like many people lack a sense of basic responsibility. Anyone who would complain about this doesn’t have the maturity to own a gun in the first place.

If you own a dog you may be held liable if it maims someone. Especially if it has a history of aggression, and doubly so if you are a negligent owner who allows it to roam the neighborhood without supervision. The standard should be at least as high for the ownership of firearms. The primary purpose of a gun is to kill. That is why they are made, that is what they are designed to do most efficiently. They are literally death-machines. Yes, sometimes we need death-machines, that’s why they were invented in the first place. I’m not saying they are inherently bad. I am saying that if you buy a device who’s purpose is to spit death, you need to treat that ownership like the responsibility it is. Which means accepting the consequences when your death machine is taken to hurt or kill someone.

As almost everyone who’s bought a diamond knows – along with most people who haven’t – diamonds are only valuable because de Beers wants them to be. Through strict monopoly practices and careful marketing they can sell cheap, abundant shiny rocks at a huge markup. Some people say this is bullshit, and that we should overturn the system. I think they’re doing us a favor.

Consider: what is the primary function of a diamond? It certainly isn’t to look pretty – plenty of things look just as pretty at much more reasonable prices. Cubic Zirconium and polished glass give you functionally identical beauty at a fraction of the cost. What is the first thing you think when you see a really big, sparkly diamond on someone’s finger? “Damn, that must’ve cost a ton.” The function of a diamond is simply to be expensive in a way that everyone recognizes.

Other substances aren’t as useful for this purpose. There are a wide variety of precious gems and very few people have a working knowledge of how much they cost, and how stable that price may be. Thanks to de Beers throttling of supply (to make the price high and stable) and extensive advertising (to ensure everyone knows how high the price is) everyone knows just how expensive that diamond is. Metals can be tricky (Can you easily tell silver from white gold from platinum?) and can be impractical – to give a woman a $10,000 gold ring you’d have to make it a 6 ounce ring. Diamonds are a much more compact package.

There are other gems which are also very valuable, but they suffer from the same recognizability problems – most people aren’t able to quickly tell they are expensive. A celebrity can get away with an exotic gem, as the tabloid media will inform everyone how much it costs. But the average guy needs something that is already well-known.

In additional, gem diamonds aren’t very useful for other applications. If people couldn’t use diamonds as their social wealth-barometer they may turn to substitutes that actually are rare. If those substitutes have alternative uses we may be bidding away material that is providing us with a real benefit simply for our signaling games. (And yes, industrial diamond would be a bit cheaper if it wasn’t for 20% of it going to gems, but it’s not in short supply).

So sure, de Beers is extracting huge profits. But as long as we’re going around comparing what we make by glancing at the hand of the other person’s spouse, someone will be making those profits. It might as well be the organization that’s putting in the effort of limiting the supply of a cheap product, and stabilizing and advertising its price, all while preventing us from using up useful minerals. Cheers to de Beers!

The Tragedy of the Commons is a broader application of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (brief summary at Wikipedia). I wouldn’t call the Prisoner’s Dilemma the Root of Morality if it wasn’t for the fact that the Tragedy of the Commons is interchangeable with it, since the TotC is more common and a bigger problem.

Most laws are attempts to avert the Tragedy of the Commons. Take theft. Everyone is better off if theft is illegal. When property rights are stable people have incentive to make things, and society grows. In a world where everyone can take anything at will and there are no property rights it is nearly impossible to go beyond simple hunter-gatherer economics. Everyone is much better off. (as Paul Graham says: “the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it. Once you’re allowed to do that, people who want to get rich can do it by generating wealth instead of stealing it.”) But if a single person can avoid the restriction on taking things that “belong” to other people he gains immense personal advantage over everyone else, while still living in a rich and vibrant society! Thus it is in everyone’s personal interest to steal, while simultaneously demanding that no one else do so. The Tragedy is that if everyone does what is individually best for them, society crumbles (the Commons are destroyed) and everyone is much worse off, including the cheaters.

This is why the anti-vaxxers (people who refuse to have their children vaccinated) are morally evil. They are defecting in a TotC/Prisoner’s Dilemma situation. There are some miniscule risks to getting vaccinated. (Let me say right now that Autism is not one of them. Autism has been conclusively proven to not be linked to vaccination in any way, and the single study that claimed otherwise has been demonstrated to be maliciously fraudulent.) They are extremely rare, and as a compassionate society we’ve even set up a program to compensate and help people who are thusly injured. The fact that we can coordinate in such a manner makes me extremely happy, I didn’t realize we’d once had such a well-functioning government! Even if this program didn’t exist, the tiny risk of complications is worth the benefits. Small pox used to ravage populations, with a 20-50% mortality rate, usually leaving permanent scars, and sometimes causing blindness. Polio would kill and paralyze thousands per year just 60 years ago – people hid indoors during the summer months in fear of catching it. These have both been wiped out in the US, and other major childhood killers are held at bay, by a successful public vaccination program.

Anti-vaxxers take advantage of the fact that everyone else vaccinates their children. They live in areas with such a high vaccination rate that their children run no risk of catching the disease – it has been functionally wiped out. By doing so they avoid the risk of vaccination complications, and transfer that cost onto their neighbors. This is the very definition of an evil act. They are weakening herd immunity in their area for personal gain. They are no different from the thief who takes other’s property but expects society to continue to function as if property rights exist. If the community followed their example we would return to the Dark Ages in terms of infant mortality and public health. These people must be found and punished no less than the thief or the fraudster.

I’m not sure how long it took society to develop such strong taboos and counter-measures against theft and violence. But I hope we develop a strong defense against subtler TotC defectors much quicker than it took us to figure out slavery was bad.