I feel like I cannot be the only one who is disgusted every time I walk through someones exhaled cigarette smoke while walking on a public sidewalk or entering/exiting a public building. In populous areas, this equates to every few steps.

People crowd around the doors to their establishments, which happen to be right on the sidewalk, and inhale into their lungs a cocktail of long-established and well-documented poisons. And then they blow it into the sidewalk where the public walk through it and breath it in as well. I can smell the stink of someone smoking over a hundred feet away, including in the car in front of me (which often has kids in it).

Public smoking is a repugnant and sickening anachronism. It belongs in 2012 like an interracial dating ban belongs in Star Trek. Happily, it appears some are figuring this out. I am personally going to raise the issue locally here in San Francisco, and I encourage you to do the same in your local area. In the meantime I’m exploring the idea of confronting offenders with a simple question:

Excuse me, you do realize how rude it is to stink up this entire area with documented poisons that other people have no choice but to breathe?

I am also thinking of starting a campaign of recording rude (redundant) smokers throwing their butts out of their cars and sending the videos to the local police department in hopes they’ll be fined. Same with those dropping them on the sidewalk like they’re too special to find a garbage can. Maybe getting a $1,000 fine for being an asshole will change some behavior.

It’s time for public smoking–and the extraordinarily rudeness of pollution and littering associated with it–to be considered as nasty as it is, and for the law to reflect this view.

::

I was re-reading a part of Moral Landscape this weekend and came across a concept I had not shared yet.

It’s the idea of building the ultimate society by creating all the social structures, advantages, disadvantages, tax codes, rules, laws, etc.–but with no knowledge of who you will be within it.

So you build out whatever the world will look like, and then you randomly get assigned an identity: Black woman, Hispanic man, young Asian child in South Africa, White male in Australia–whatever.

I think it’s brilliant. ::

Chicken

Beef

So, two things here:

1. Raising awareness: did you know this type of practice takes place so that you can eat cheese, eggs, chicken, and beef?
2. Behavior considerations: now that you do know, what are you going to do about it?

My answers to these questions are both honest and reprehensibly inadequate. First, I will continue to eat these products, because I like them.

I would, however, happily support legislation that required humane treatment of these animals. I fully accept that this would lead to considerably higher prices for these products, and I would happily pay those prices. So, if brands of these products were made available that were “humane” in much the same way as there are currently “organic” options, I would purchase them despite the higher cost.

But ultimately this is a moral failure on my part, as I am willing to continue eating standard products until this happens, and I won’t be spending much energy to bring it about. I can, however, take a small bit of satisfaction in at least knowing that my consciousness is raised, that I know I’m in the wrong, and that if a solution presents itself I will participate.

What about you?

I wrote about this before, but that was from personal experience and analysis. I knew of this piece when I wrote this (I had read about it before) but I couldn’t locate it. Well, here it is. But first some background.

In 1994 “The Bell Curve” came out and made a number of extraordinary claims about intelligence. They basically said it was the end-all/be-all of attributes, and that it defined whether or not you would succeed in life or fail–statistically, anyway.

The hot topics were race and poverty. They said that certain races were smarter, on average, than others, and that this was the main reason for their respective achievements as groups.

So, the media jumped all over it. Tons of “experts” came out and refuted the book, saying it was 100% crap. As it turns out, however, much of it was quite accurate (yet some of the research methods were shown to be flawed). What follows is the official academic response to the book, i.e. a public-oriented statement from the foremost academics in the field of intelligence regarding what was accepted as true by science.

Here are the basic findings (my summary):

1. I.Q. is real, and I.Q. tests are good at testing it.
2. It reliably predicts “success” and “failure” across large numbers of people, i.e. not necessarily for individuals.
3. I.Q. tests are not generally culturally biased.
4. The main races do have significantly different I.Q.s. Whites are the “average”, with 100, Blacks average 85, and Hispanics score about halfway in between. Asians and Jews score a bit higher than Whites. The reason for this, according to the consensus, is: “The reasons that blacks differ among themselves in intelligence appear to be basically the same as those for why whites (or Asians or Hispanics) differ among themselves. Both environment and genetic heredity are involved.”
5. Although science knows I.Q. and intelligence is real (as shown by the data on various life metrics), they don’t really know how or why. Understanding of the brain was still an admitted weakness, in other words.
6. Genetics is considered to be more important than environment for intelligence, but the degree to which this is true is still debated. Environment is still considered to be a major factor.
7. And most importantly: “The research findings neither dictate nor preclude any particular social policy, because they can never determine our goals. They can, however, help us estimate the likely success and side-effects of pursuing those goals via different means.”

This is a critical paper. I believe people completely underestimate the importance of intelligence, and that their doing so causes great harm to society. Most do so because they feel the whole concept of intelligence is baseless or weak as a scientific truth.

It’s not.

Check out the list of people who signed that statement. It’s astounding. And that’s not a random list of people; it’s the result of the academic community responding as a group to the Bell Curve. It’s a formal statement of “truth”, as agreed upon by known science at the time. My guess is that this has not changed much at all in the intervening time, and even that it’s been solidified even more.

But we live in a different time now. There’s very little chance of this many academics putting their names on a document like this right now. Not with all this talk of race in it–and in an arguably negative light no less.

Anyway, the point here isn’t race. The only reason that was so heavy in the document is because it was a response to the Bell Curve book, which received most of its scrutiny due to that issue. My point here is that intelligence is real, and that it’s measurable, and that it is crucial to a modern, healthy and happy society.

I think far more emphasis should be placed on studying intelligence in order to engineer methods of increasing it. I think increasing intelligence, more than any other measurable human attribute, will help improve the quality of decisions made throughout the world, and that this should be a major focus of modern educational systems.:

[ Edit: By the way, if any of you know of any modern version of this type of consensus, whether it agrees or disagrees with this one, I'd very much like to see it. ]

Links

[ Mainstream Science on Intelligence | psychpage.com ]

A provoking argument about the effects of agriculture.

Links

[ The Worst Mistake | awok.org ]

A new study has found that violent behavior is correlated to the presence of three genes. Here’s a basic overview by CNN’s Dr. Gupta. If anyone has a link to the study, please share.

This is going to present a whole new set of questions. Do certain groups have these genes more than others? Gender? Race?

I expect this research to get very interesting, very quickly.

Links

[ New Study Finds Link Between Violent Behavior and Genetics | cnn.com ]

I’ve thought a lot about having children over the years. Not so much whether I wanted to have them, but why people in general want to have them. More specifically, I’ve been trying to determine whether or not it’s becoming immoral to do so.

Everyone knows that once a good parent has a child they become rather selfless. We often hear things like, “It changes everything”, or, “…all you care about is the baby.”, etc. That’s fair enough and quite admirable, but what about before you had the child?

What are the modern reasons for having kids in the first place? I have some rather unflattering ideas on how most people answer that question.

• Everyone Else Was Doing It
  Typical groupthink. Chris and Julie had a child and it was just precious. It seemed to make them happy. Maybe we should do that too?

• It Just Happened, and I’m Glad It Did
  Typical adolescent mentality. I wasn’t really planning on this, but I can definitely see the attraction now that I’m committed. I guess I’ll just go with it and embrace parenthood. It’s not like I have much of a choice at this point, and I was probably going to do it later anyway.

• It’s What You’re Supposed to Do
  Typical mature conservative. Grow up, go to college, get a job, get married, have kids. Natural. Basic. Timeless. That’s what we’ve been doing for thousands of years. It’s what we’re supposed to do.

Ok, so if I’m arguing that these are not good reasons (although the “nature” argument is the best of them), then what are good reasons for having a child? That’s my problem — I don’t really see any. Not in today’s world anyway. I see excellent reasons for being a good parent once you have a child, but not for bringing a new life into the world in the first place.

I’m toying with the idea that having children in a world where there are children awaiting adoption (and where overpopulation is a real issue) ultimately reduces to selfishness. I think the reason people become parents comes down to one thing: desire. People want kids. They want their own kids.

That’s perfectly understandable, of course, as we are programmed to want things that help us survive as a species. But that doesn’t make it right. We have plenty of other desires given to us by our biology that we control for the benefit of society. Perhaps the desire to procreate is simply one to be added to that list.

It’s a strange thing to contemplate, but the real reason we seek to bring children into the world is for our own benefit. Children bring us joy. They’re there to take care of us when we age. Children are selfish expressions all the way up until they are born. At that point we become mostly selfless, but we can’t use our selflessness after they are born to justify the selfish act of bringing them into the world.

In earlier times we needed to reproduce in order to keep ourselves alive. We have plenty of people now. Some believe that they’re providing a service to humanity. They feel their belief system needs to be expanded, and that creating a few offspring is the best way to make it happen. Aside from the highly self-important slant of that approach, i.e. I’m going to help better the world with my seed, it doesn’t seem very efficient.

So what are good reasons for logical and compassionate people, living in today’s world, to have children?:

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New York is rolling out a new program where they pay poor people to take care of their children.

The experimental program, called Opportunity NYC, is modeled on a 10-year-old Mexican program called Oportunidades, which has been so successful in reducing poverty in rural areas that it has been adopted by more than 20 countries, including Argentina and Turkey. International studies have found that these programs raise school enrollment and vaccination rates and lower the number of sick days students take. Bringing this idea to Harlem and the South Bronx may not make a radical difference, concedes Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor for Health and Human Services. But, she adds, “It makes these activities matter in a new way.” Gibbs thinks that the money could also make parents more active in asking for services that might not exist in their neighborhoods.” A mother might demand an early-intervention evaluation [to look for developmental or learning disabilities] for a child” to get the $150 payment, Gibbs says. “If she can’t find a doctor to do it, the cash incentive might make Mom more likely to ask why those services aren’t available in her community.“

So here’s the basic idea: bribe poor, ignorant parents into taking care of their children by paying them to do what they should be doing already. I find this horribly depressing. All it says to me is that these people should not be parents at all.

If there are utterly simple things you could be doing that would drastically help your children, but you’re not doing them, then you’re a burden to society. The fact that a financial incentive would inspire them to do these simple tasks is utterly sickening.

Let’s be clear here — this isn’t money to help them pay for these services; it’s to encourage them to simply take actions that they should be taking already as parents.

I still support the program because it increases the chances that children will succeed, but I think the real answer is for society as a whole to apply social pressure on poor parents — as peers. Society must police itself, and that starts with demanding that people are capable of supporting themselves successfully before they start bringing additional life into the world.

The first step to reducing the world’s suffering is finding a way to stop increasing it. And that means bringing less people into the world that are likely to suffer.: