Bill Maher on White “Privilege”

I just watched this video entitled “Bill Maher on White ‘Privilege’,” in which Maher says that he doesn’t like the word “privilege” in this context, that he prefers “advantage.” Asked to explain his preference, he seemed to struggle a bit. I’d like to take a stab at clarifying the distinction for him. Of course I don’t represent Maher, so if you have a problem with this, it’s on me, not him.

The word “privilege” has a “silver spoon” connotation — you are being given special treatment. People are affording you some unusual treatment or opportunity, or exempting you from some hurdle or punishment that is generally suffered in this situation. And you are being given this special treatment not because you deserve it, but because of something unrelated that — for no good reason — grants you the privilege.

If your parents are donors to a university and you get accepted despite your mediocre grades, that’s privilege. You don’t deserve it — you’re getting it because of your parents’ money. If being beautiful gets you out of a speeding ticket, that’s privilege. You should get a ticket, but you don’t.

But if you’re getting the treatment considered normal in a situation, that’s not privilege. Even if there are others around who, for whatever reason, would get worse treatment.

Consider height. Tall people earn higher salaries, are more likely to be managers, are more likely to be elected to political office. And tall men have a disproportionate amount of success in dating. Is this because height makes you a better CEO or president, or a better husband? No. Talk about privilege!

OK, but what about the 5’9″ or 5’10” guys — are they privileged? They’re pretty average, and are not getting the special opportunities that the over-6′ crowd are getting. But they clearly are better off than the 5’5″ guys — a lot of women are turning up their noses at those short guys, and they aren’t getting as many promotions at work, etc. Those short guys got disproportionately picked on in school and passed over time and time again.

If you are a 5’9″ male, have you expressed your shame at your “tall privilege” for not suffering the shit that the short guys suffered? No, of course not. You have an advantage over them, for sure. But privilege? Nah. Nobody would use the word that way. Nobody feels ashamed of being average height just because there are short people in the world. Normal treatment is not privilege, even if some people don’t get it. Special treatment that is not deserved — that is privilege.

By the way, in my class in high school there was one black kid; he was tall and on the basketball team. He could often be found making out with a hot white cheerleader who wouldn’t give the time of day to the short white guys at the school. If you had given him the choice between being a tall black kid or a short white kid, he would most assuredly have stuck with tall and black. Having dark skin is by no means the only way of being disadvantaged in this world.

If you are being mistreated because of the color of your skin, that’s a problem, and I’m unhappy about it. But the fact that some white guy is not similarly mistreated doesn’t mean he is privileged. It means he is being treated reasonably and you are not. He’s not getting something undeserved. It does not advance race relations to talk about the difference as though he were born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It does not bring us closer to a solution to insist that he feel ashamed of his “privilege.”

The real problem here is the racist jackass who is treating you poorly, not the bystander who is being treated reasonably. Instead of trying to make the bystander feel guilty about not being mistreated, ask him to be angry that you were.

Thoughts on Whoopi’s blowback on the Holocaust

Like the rest of the world, I recently learned that Whoopi Goldberg dominated a news cycle for saying that what the Nazis did to the Jews was not about race. She was even accused of “giving comfort to those who want to wipe out the memory from historical records“! She ultimately apologized, and was suspended from The View for a couple of weeks. But I can easily see this from her perspective, and I’d like to explain why.

Let’s first be clear about some things that Whoopi absolutely did NOT say:
* The Holocaust did not happen.
* The Holocaust was not horrible.
* The Nazis did not hate the Jews.
Not at all! She just said that that hate was not based on race.

When I first heard the kerfuffle about this, I thought “Are Jews actually considered a different race?” I didn’t think so, but wasn’t sure, so I looked it up. I had to look at several pages enumerating races before finding one that even mentioned Jews, and even there it was mentioned only as a second-order distinction below race. And when I asked “Are Jews Caucasians?” I found lots of pages essentially saying “it’s complicated.” I also found a page saying that in a survey, most US Jews (note that Whoopi lives in the US) said that they considered themselves white (Caucasian). And a black person can convert to Judaism and be considered Jewish, because the term’s meaning is partly about origins, partly about religion, and partly about culture (holidays, traditions, dress, etc.).

Whoopi is a black woman, and not just a little bit black. The question of whether Jews are Caucasians may be complicated, but for her, it’s not complicated at all. She is clearly of another race, a race disparaged by some in her country, and that has surely had a significant impact on her life. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that to her the situation with Nazis and Jews seems different. Hate, yes. Awful, yes. But was it really racism?

Also, there are big reasons why many Germans hated the Jews that have absolutely nothing to do with race. For example, the church the Germans went to stupidly told Germans that lending money for interest was a sin. Well, nobody is going to lend money without interest, so Germans were strongly discouraged from being lenders. So Jews, a minority, said “Hey, we’ll lend you money!” There was lots of demand for loans, but low supply because the majority couldn’t lend, so of course the interest rates the Jewish lenders charged went up. Any economics professor would tell you that that was the inevitable outcome. So the lenders made a lot of money and the Germans resented it. But this had nothing whatsoever to do with race — it was entirely about religion; some dimwit high up in the church hierarchy set the stage for Germans to hate Jews.

And on top of that, according to the church, the Jews were sinners for charging interest on the money that the Germans wanted to borrow. More reason for the Germans to hate them!

Now it’s true that the Nazis talked about Germans being a “master race,” superior to others. But that’s just wrong; Germans are not a race. This is not controversial; it was just Hitler being a populist leader working the crowd. You don’t really get to call the people in your country a race just because you want to; political boundaries don’t define races!

Some might say that all that matters is that the Nazis thought it was about race, even if they were misusing the term. But let’s test that. There is some tension between Texans and Californians — partly political, partly cultural, and partly because they are rivals in many ways. And some Texans are not happy that a lot of Californians are flowing into Texas right now, following business moves to more favorable regulatory conditions. Nobody would say that Texans’ feelings about Californians are about race. Would it change anything if Texas’s Governor Abbott were to start spouting nonsense about the superiority of “the Texas race” and how “the California race” is dragging down our society? Is it racism now? Let’s say he gets thousands of bigots in Texas to start saying the same thing. Is it racism now? I don’t think so; do you?

Given all of this:
* the fact that Jews are not generally considered a separate race
* the fact that lots of Jews, including the majority where Whoopi lives, consider themselves to be of the same race as Germans
* the fact that being Jewish is as much about religion and culture as it is about origins
* the fact that Whoopi is quite obviously of a different race and has no doubt felt racism many times in her life
* the fact that there are big reasons having nothing to do with race why many Germans hated the Jews
* the fact that the Nazi propaganda about race was not tied to any real-world concept of race
I personally am not at all surprised that the Nazi treatment of the Jews doesn’t really seem like racism to Whoopi.

We’re doing education wrong, part 1

I just watched a video in which a university professor talked with students about cheating. Cheating is a big problem, but it’s one we created.

Universities should not be in the business of certifying that people know things. Their job should simply be to educate people, and to allow them to assess their own progress. Hiring companies should pay for separate testing services that certify that you know things. At the time they want to hire you, not decades earlier. For the knowledge that they care about.

Consider somebody with a degree in Physics from 2002. Are they right for the position you want to fill? Well, you don’t know, really. To begin with, that was 20 years ago; a lot has changed. And even for the parts that have NOT changed, if they haven’t been using some of that knowledge, it’s probably pretty stale. And how good was that university’s physics department around 2000? That particular professor — perhaps he wasn’t very good, or graded easy. Maybe what you really need is knowledge of particle physics, but they concentrated more on relativity. Should you prefer the candidate with the newer degree or the candidate with more experience? The employer can only infer so much from that university degree; they have a lot left to assess themselves! This is a fact of life in hiring; bad hires are made all the time, and they are expensive.

And crucially, the fact that employers are looking at diplomas and transcripts issued by schools means that students are trying to game them. There is an incentive to cheat. Even for those not cheating, there is an incentive to “learn things for the test.” The fact that universities publicly report their assessments of students CAUSES both cheating and the kind of shallow learning that evaporates a few weeks after the test.

If universities were just great places to learn, and a student could get a private assessment of their knowledge that would never be given to any company, then students would have no incentive to game tests. Rather, they would want an honest answer to the questions “If I were to apply right now for a job that required this knowledge, would I get through their testing? Would I be prepared to do the work that they need done?”

Then imagine that companies looking to hire list in the job posting the key knowledge areas they are going to have you tested on and the results they expect. Say linear algebra, calculus, quantum chromodynamics, Julia and Rust coding, whatever, all at least 90%. Candidates who think they are qualified can apply, get phone-screened, and then make an appointment at the company’s chosen testing service. Candidates get tested and are told their scores in each subject. The company pays the testing fees for everyone who meets the posted criteria, but if you really bomb a test, YOU pay part or all of it, as a disincentive, for wasting everyone’s time and money. Perhaps in our example the company would say that they will cover the costs if your score is at least 80%.

If a candidate recently tested in some of the subjects the company cares about, they can refer the company to that testing center, and the company might decide to just accept that result rather than have you re-test. If after testing a company needs more info to decide between several good candidates, they can send you back to the testing center for a few more assessments, a “round two.”

Imagine how much better this system would be. Professors no longer have to worry about testing; they get all that time and bother back. There is no longer even a need to produce unique tests every semester. The reason fresh tests are given, and given in class, is to make it harder to cheat; if there is no incentive to cheat in school, then students can take the tests online and get immediate feedback. Since tests are not single-use, you invest more time in them, making them better tests. Furthermore, any errors or ambiguities get corrected. You also invest in good video explanations of the test problems, for students reviewing what they got wrong. Students can take the tests as often as they want. If they feel like crap on the day of the test, they can reschedule it; it does not matter whether other students have taken the test already. Students can reassess what they learned three years ago, to see how well they remember it. Students’ focus in school shifts from cramming for tests for better grades to thoroughly learning the material so that they will be able to use it years later.

Meanwhile, hiring companies get an assessment of your CURRENT skills, in the areas that they care about, from a testing service that they trust. The testing is tailored to their needs, and they know what the assessment means — their existing staff has taken pretty similar tests under pretty similar conditions.

In fact, maybe the employer doesn’t really care about the degree itself; they just want to know that you have the skills to do the work that they need done. If you can learn that on your own, then perhaps that’s good enough. If non-university education mechanisms arise that produce students who can show that they have the knowledge you need for your business, well good for them — more of that, please.

The fact that schools publicly report their student assessments is a ROOT CAUSE of significant problems in our education system.

On Rittenhouse’s Acquittal

UPDATE: LegalEagle did a video on this.

Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges after shooting three people, killing two of them. He feels vindicated, saying “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

The truth is that he did plenty wrong, and what happened was largely due to his poor choices. But that doesn’t mean that he’s guilty of the charges against him.

I was once on a jury in which I was elected foreman. When it came time to deliberate, everyone spontaneously said they thought the guy was guilty; they were ready to convict.

But I reminded them that the instructions from the judge said that three things had to be shown in order for him to be guilty — A, B, and C — with detailed instructions about how each part could be shown. The prosecution had shown A and C, but did anyone think that B was shown?

Not one juror thought that the prosecution had satisfied requirement B. The instructions were clear that all three must be met. Looking for a way out, I wrote a note and had had the bailiff deliver it to the judge; back came a note just saying to follow the instructions.

So we did. I read the “not guilty” verdict in court.

As the jurors were leaving, the prosecuting attorney, standing next to the judge at her desk, stopped me, saying “How could you let that guy go? He was guilty!”

I turned to face her and the judge. “Oh, we all thought he was guilty,” I assured her. “But none of us thought that you had satisfied part B of what was required to prove him guilty.” Neither said a thing, and after a moment of awkward silence, I left. I have often wondered what was going through the mind of the judge, whom I had asked for guidance on the point.

There was actually one woman on the jury who ignored the instructions and voted guilty anyway. But that’s not what is supposed to happen — we convict people for demonstrably violating the law, not for seeming guilty. The idea that a juror would vote to convict you of a crime even though the legal standard for evidence has not been met, just because it is his/her intuition that you are guilty, should scare the crap out of you.

Rittenhouse had a really bad idea that fed his ego but set the stage for a terrible outcome: he provoked people in an already tense situation, and when they came after him for it he was so frightened that he just assumed they were going to kill him if they got the gun. Perhaps he was projecting his own psychology onto them; I think it’s far more likely they would have turned the weapon over to the police or just emptied it of bullets and thrown it in a dumpster. But Rittenhouse was in way over his head, scared to death, and in effect his fear justified his killing them. If you just want to slap him upside the head, perhaps with a 2×4, I don’t blame you. But don’t jump to the conclusion that the jury was biased. And don’t interpret the acquittal as meaning that he “didn’t do anything wrong.”

Amdahl’s Law and AI Risk

I’m sure you’ve heard the warnings about AI (or more precisely, AGI, for Artificial General Intelligence) — that once we create a machine smart enough to improve itself, then things will get quickly out of control. In no time we’ll have an AI that can think a thousand or a million times faster than we can, and we will be like ants to it — it could do a thousand years of science in an afternoon.

I agree that there’s cause for concern, but many such claims are exaggerated. One reason why is essentially Amdahl’s Law.

Not Moore’s Law, the observation about how rapidly semiconductor technology advances. Amdahl’s Law observes that if you have a process that includes parts that can be done in parallel and parts that must be done serially, ultimately the serial parts limit how much you can speed things up. It seems obvious once you hear it and think about it, but we have a tendency to think that we can always speed up computational tasks by throwing more computer cores at the problem. That is only true up to a point; eventually the serial parts dominate. And typically even the parallelizable parts are not arbitrarily parallelizable; there are limits.

The same considerations are at play with AGI if you consider that there are some things that an AI can do much faster than we can and other things that it cannot. But to be clear, I’m not talking about Amdahl’s law with respect to computation, but rather with respect to the scientific process. Let’s say that we have an AGI that can think a million times faster than we can. So it thinks and quickly comes up with a clever hypothesis, say about the nature of physics. Or a ground-breaking experiment to measure some important physical quantity. That’s great, but now we need to test the hypothesis or make that measurement. How much faster than humans can an AI, say, create a new particle accelerator to do the work? Not much. In fact, it probably can’t make the particle accelerator at all — it has to ask us to do it. And we start by trying to get funding approved by Congress….

So yeah, being able to think a million times faster would be wonderful — I sure wish I could. But surely every project, including acquiring knowledge, has mundane parts that can’t be made that much faster. Scientific progress requires interacting with humans and the physical world.

Don’t get me wrong — I agree that there’s plenty of reason to be concerned about AGI. I’m particularly wary about the incentives for using AI in the military. But anyone saying that, for example, an AGI could do a thousand years of science in an afternoon is ignoring Amdahl’s Law.

Colbert says corporations, not individuals, are causing climate change. He’s not thinking clearly.

I just watched this video, in which Steven Colbert basically says that sure, you as an individual can do little things to combat climate change, but it’s corporations that are really causing the problem.

Well, hmmm. It’s true that Amazon, as an often-picked example, has a very large carbon footprint. But it’s individuals who are pushing the Purchase button on Amazon.com that triggers all the activity. Putting the blame on Amazon is just … weird.

What you should really ask about Amazon is whether their carbon footprint is higher or lower than the alternative. In other words, given that people want to buy stuff, would less pollution be caused by doing it the way we used to, shipping it to stores in shopping malls and having people drive around to make their purchases? The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT! Having stuff shipped in big trucks to distribution centers and then to consumers’ doors in electric vans along routes is far more efficient.

And yes, Amazon’s huge AWS service for virtual computers uses a ton of energy. But the alternative is having many thousands of companies do it themselves, buying a bunch of physical computers, setting them up in air-conditioned rooms, and managing them. For a number or reasons, using virtual servers at Amazon is much more efficient. And it’s much more reliable as well.

You can’t just look at one side of the ledger, pointing the finger at a company’s carbon footprint. Well, you CAN, but you’ll just be confusing matters rather than addressing the problem. Please don’t do that.

But oil and gas companies — grrr! How I wish we had eliminated subsidies for them and instituted a carbon tax back when it was first proposed, in 1973, using some of the funds to incentivize the development of green energy technologies. Products would be more energy-efficient, green technologies would be more advanced, the US would be a leader in them, and we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of a 2-degree global temperature increase. Our government leaders failed us here; they should have found a way to get it done instead of repeatedly kicking the can down the road.

What my cat taught me

For most of my life I have had cats as companions. Often dogs too, but if I had to choose, I would choose a cat. And my favorite cat of all time was Aurus, whose name was Latin for “of gold,” because he was a tabby with fur that was vaguely gold in color, and his eyes were very much gold. And he was as precious to me as the metal.

Aurus once taught me a really important lesson. He bit me — not too hard, but still — on the eyebrow. I GRRRED to let him know that that wasn’t OK, and his eyes opened wide and he carefully backed away. He got the hint.

Eventually he tried again, though, biting me again on the eyebrow. This time I thought OK, I’ll bite you in response. So I pulled up some skin around his neck and bit him — not too hard, but still. Maybe he’ll get the message this time.

Soooo … he purred. He purred a LOT. And in a flash it hit me that for him this was just a way of showing affection — I had just IMAGINED that he was being aggressive. And it was MY INTERPRETATION of what he had done that upset me, not the action itself. As soon as my interpretation changed, I liked the bite. I wanted him to do it again.

It was all in my head.

And so it is with a lot of life — it isn’t what happens that makes us angry, it’s how we interpret what happens. We feel slighted, or unappreciated, or whatever. The slight itself is not a big deal — only that somebody thought so little of us to slight us. Or so we imagine, fueling our outrage.

I miss you, Aurus.

A college nightmare realized

I did well as a university undergrad — mostly. I managed to graduate Magna cum Laude with a degree in Mathematics, and took a bunch of science and tech courses along the way. And some accounting, economics, psychology — I wanted to know about a lot of things. I ended up with a 3-way split minor: chemistry, systems engineering, and psychology. Kind of a weird combo.

But I was pretty challenged by it all, especially with work on the side. My parents didn’t have much income, so they were in no position to help financially. When I was as a senior in high school, a counselor contacted MIT to see about me going there, and they sent us a proposal for how we could pay for it, including various kinds of financial aid. But they assumed that my parents would chip in. When I took that paper to my father, he went berserk, yelling “God damn it, you were supposed to get a FULL SCHOLARSHIP!” In his mind that invitation to go to MIT marked my abject failure. So I told him to forget it, and he stopped yelling. I did not go to MIT.

So anyway, one semester during finals I was dead tired as I sat down in this big lecture hall with auditorium-style seating for a 2-hour final exam in some math or physics course.  Next thing I know, I’m waking up just in time to see the professor write “30 minutes” on the blackboard.  Holy SHIT!  I didn’t know how long I had been asleep; was that 30 minutes REMAINING?!?  If so, I was royally screwed — I had only completed a small fraction of the test.

Turned out that we were 30 minutes in; I had only slept 15-20 minutes.  And I probably got a better score as a result. 🙂

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We blame corporations for failures of government

A friend posted on his Facebook page something implying that corporations were evil, citing climate change as an example. I definitely agree that we should act to prevent catastrophic climate change, or rather that we should have acted long ago. However, placing the blame at the feet of corporations is misguided.

It is the nature of the free market that corporations will generally do the right thing if externalities — the “collateral damage” of an economic transaction — are properly represented in the price. Really, they will. The harm to the environment from fossil fuel use is a good example of an externality, a cost paid not by the buyer or the seller, but rather by society as a whole. If you can buy gas without the cost to the environment being factored into the price, then you’ll want more of it, and corporations will be happy to sell it to you. You consume too much gas because the price doesn’t cover the real costs of you using it.

When corporations do the wrong thing, it’s generally a political problem. A major responsibility of governments is to represent economic externalities in the free market, e.g. by placing Pigouvian taxes on activities which produce negative externalities. For example, a “carbon tax” on the consumption of fossil fuels would raise prices, effectively forcing consumers to pay the whole cost of fossil fuel use, rather than just part. Consumers would react by finding ways to be more efficient, like buying more fuel-efficient cars, using (and voting for) public transit, finding ways to work from home, etc. Corporations would react to the change in demand, producing more fuel-efficient cars, less gasoline, better tools for remote work, etc.

The flip side of Pigouvian taxes is subsidies on things that produce positive externalities, like green energy, or funding research. And where those don’t work well for some reason, regulation might be called for. There are costs to regulation — regulatory agencies need to be staffed, and corporations often have to hire people to deal with regulatory obligations. Regulations are also blunt instruments that don’t allow for as much innovation around addressing the actual concerns that motivated them. And regulatory agencies are opportunities for corruption. To make things worse, regulations tend to live on even when their utility decreases — you can count on regulators to work hard to justify their existence so they can keep their jobs — so corporations have to comply with an ever-growing pile of regulations from which the dead wood is virtually never removed. So there are many potential problems with regulation! But sometimes you just don’t see a good way to get the desired result by representing externalities in the free market, so despite the costs and risks, you have to regulate.

Pigouvian taxes, subsides, and regulation are powerful levers that government can and should use to guide economic activity to produce results that are good for society. If we had instituted a carbon tax 50 years ago and used that money to fund research into alternative energy sources — and then later to subsidize nascent green energy technologies — we would be in a very different situation today. But instead we subsidized fossil fuels! What a monumentally stupid failure of government! And of course it had the predictable disastrous effect. That was the result of money being allowed to influence politics, which is in itself a political problem — a huge one.

Government sets the rules of the game that corporations play. If the rules say that the way to win is to make gas-guzzling vans for consumers unconcerned about artificially low gas prices, then that is precisely what they will do. Whenever corporations are doing the wrong thing, you should ask yourself what the government did, or failed to do, to incentivize the right thing. What were the rules of the game?

In fact, by setting the game up wrong, we might as well say that government forces corporations to do the wrong thing. Even if corporate executives want to do the right thing, doing so would put them at a disadvantage relative to their competitors, perhaps even putting them out of business. Corporations have little choice but to play the hand they are dealt. Or perhaps to bribe politicians and regulators, but in a sense that too is part of the hand corporations are dealt — if the opportunity is there and the rewards outweigh the risks, then any corporation not cheating is at a disadvantage. The rules corporations are given should strongly discourage corporate money from influencing politics, but they do not. And of course monopolies are bad news, but the existence of monopolies is itself a failure of government.

Government is responsible for creating the conditions in which the free market yields good outcomes for society.

Yes, there is the occasional Enron that is just pulling some scam. But the vast majority of corporations are like lasers in that they are not inherently “evil,” but if you don’t set them up correctly they are probably going to ruin things. They play the hand they are dealt by government. But WE GOVERN POORLY in the US, and as a result corporations are too often given the wrong incentives, so — predictably — they do the wrong things.

Update: Here’s Milton Friedman’s article “Why Government is the Problem.”