A Little Fishy

Strand #1: I first heard about the concept of 'Intelligent Design' from Darren Barefoot's post referring to this interesting article about it in Wired.

More recently, Pogge has posted on the topic and the New York Times had an article on it today (reg. req'd).

Personally, I find it hard to take the whole Intelligent Design concept seriously. In a nutshell, the argument is that the world is so complex that somebody (intelligent) must have designed it. e.g. If you were walking on a beach and found a watch, the purposeful nature of it's design would leave you to believe that it must have had an intelligent creator and not just occurred by chance. And like a watch has a watchmaker a body must have a bodymaker.

Now I'm not saying that the universe wasn't created by some intelligent being. I'm guessing that anyone with the power to create a universe would have the power to lead us to believe whatever they wanted, leaving the question moot.

But the fact that the universe is complicated (by our standards) doesn't prove anything one way or the other. Arguing that human's are so special that we had to have been made specially, just sounds way too much like arguments that the sun goes round the earth, that the earth is the centre of the universe, that humans have a soul or a 'free will' that other animals don't and all the other human-centred nonsense we like to make up to make ourselves feel special.

Especially when simple observation shows us how similar we are to the next most intelligent animals on the planet and when evolution clearly lays out how beings of greater complexity can arise out of simpler ones without the need for intelligent external intervention.

Strand #2: As long-time readers will know, after making the ill-advised decision to fly with Jetsgo, my flight home for Christmas was delayed by 28 hours. On the plus side, all my time waiting around at the airport allowed me to catch up on my reading. Specifically, I was able to read two books I had been meaning to get to for a long time: Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind (readable but not great - The Amazon editorial review is pretty accurate in my opinion) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams which was great fun, although I think it was wise to leave it as a fairly short book.

The Rope¹: Since I had read the Wired article on Intelligent Design, I was amused to come across the following passage in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (written in the 70's), which is written in reference to the Babel fish, a small fish you can put in your ear which will translate any language for you,

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed at the next zebra crossing."

That pretty much sums it up.

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¹ Technically, according to Wikipedia, a rope is made from three strands, whereas my story only has two. But does this really bother me? I'm afraid not.

Post Holiday Book Reviews: Rebel Sell

Of all the various forms of writing, the book review has to be one of the ones I know least about. Of course, if I was going to let something like lack of knowledge of what I'm talking about keep me from posting, this blog wouldn't be here. So far, the most interesting book I've read over the holidays has been, The Rebel Sell, which was first (and second, third and fourth) brought to my attention by Darren Barefoot - so here's the review.

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Reading through the Rebel Sell, I was consistently entertained, but I found it difficult to keep track of the general argument in my mind. Looking back over the table of contents, it's not hard to see why, the book doesn't seem to have any coherent structure to it: the chapters are more like a series of meditations on the same set of basic points, with the occasional digression into just about anything the authors happen to find annoying about left-wing commentary. That said, I found myself generally agreeing with most of what was written and finding some definite insights, so I have made the effort to pull out what I believe to be the main argument:

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1. Society has lots of problems (e.g. there's too much pollution, you find the same stores everywhere, lousy conditions on factory farms, school children way too concerned over what they're wearing, etc.)

From here the argument splits in two: the counter-culture version of how to solve these problems (as described by the authors) and the authors view on how to solve them.

'Counter-Culture' view of the world:

2 a) The 'Counter-culture' (think Naomi Klein, AdBusters, anti-globalization protestors, Rabble.ca etc.) believes that these problems are reflective of a systemic problem with (Western) culture / capitalism / paternalistic institutions (like organized religion, schools, hospitals etc.). Collectively known as 'the system' or 'the man' these institutions enforce statism, conformity, oppression, rationality, stifling of creativity etc.

3 a) Since the specific problems we see are just symptoms of the underlying disfunction of our society / culture / system, the way to solve them is not by addressing them directly, but rather by changing the 'root problem' - i.e. changing the system.

4 a) Since the government, the church and the other institutions are part of the problem, they can't be effective as part of the solution. The way to solve the problems is by taking individual action and by forming together into groups (as long as these don't become too formalized - otherwise they are betraying themselves by becoming part of the system) in order to defeat / change the system.

5 a) Once the system is defeated, the general mass of people will see the light / 'have their consciousness raised' and will be ready to do things the new way (which will then solve all of our problems).

Author's View of the World:

2 b) The authors believe that most (many) of the problems we face are not caused by 'the system' but are instead collective action problems¹. Basically, prisoner-dilemma like situations where what makes sense for each of us individually doesn't make sense for us collectively (e.g. I am safer if I buy a gun and you don't but if we both buy guns then we are less safe than if neither of us did - hence the rationale for gun control).

3 b) Rather than changing the system, what we need to do is improve the system to solve these collective action problems.

4 b) Since, by definition, a collective action problem requires collective action to solve, solutions which disregard our collective institutions (i.e. government) in favour of individual (or unformalized group) action are doomed to failure.

5 b) The way to solve the collective action problems is to institute solutions which apply to everybody. Rather than being coercive limitations on our freedom as the counter-culture would suggest, these rules will instead protect us from harmful prisoner's dilemmas.

6 b) If only counter-culturalists would stop trying to destroy the system they could work towards fixing it, and we would have the necessary political willpower to solve our collective action problems.
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Once we have this framework, the entirety of the book can be seen as a long series of examples which attempt to support the argument (and show that the Author's view is accurate while the counter-cultural one is counter-productive).

A couple of the more memorable examples they give are:

School uniforms: Counter-culturalists reject the oppression of conformity and uniformity they bring while the authors suggest they are just a practical way to stop the collective action problem whereby students are forced to put great effort into buying and wearing the right clothing to avoid being seen as geeks/losers etc.)

Advertising: Counter-culturalists think we can defeat the advertising system by turning brand power against the companies which own them through culture jamming, protesting etc. while the authors suggest that advertising is just a collective action problem in which one company can gain an edge by advertising but then other companies have to respond and then it just keeps escalating like an arms race. What's needed is government rule changes to help companies get away from this self-destructive behavior (they recommend making advertising only 50% tax deductible - a good idea in my view).

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The biggest source of confusion (for me) was that the authors dwelt at great length on one particular example - the example of counter-culturalists trying to defeat 'the system' through their consumption choices. So much so that at first I thought the book was actually just about this particular case and was thus puzzled at all the other unrelated examples they threw in.

So we hear about Adbusters selling their own branded shoes, Naomi Klein living in a loft instead of a suburban house, alternative music instead of the mainstream, free range chickens and on and on, with the Authors consistently asserting that not only are these consumption choices not going to destroy capitalism, they are in fact reinforcing it (because these purchases are only done to achieve status by being unique but eventually what was initially cool (i.e. grunge music) becomes mainstream so the counter-culturalists have to find some new cool trend to buy stuff for, leading to a never ending cycle of consumption in the pursuit of counter-cultural status symbols).

Aside from the confusion caused by not clearly separating this frequently cited example from their core argument, I was surprised the authors would choose this particular example to focus on since it doesn't seem like one of their strongest.

The primary weakness of the consumption example (to me) is that, clearly not all 'counter-cultural' purchases are made in pursuit of distinction or status. Lots of people buy organic produce, not to feel morally superior or just to be different, but because they're willing to pay more to avoid the negative externalities caused by pesticides. If everyone started buying organic food and it started being sold by Kraft or whoever, most of the current organic food advocates would see this as a good thing - not as a sign that organic was no longer cool and that it was time to buy something else.

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Looking at the book as a whole, the big weaknesses were the lack of structure, the over-emphasis of the one (not particularly strong) example, a tendency to argue against their opponents weaker points and ignore their stronger ones and a tendency to sometimes gloss over things a little too quickly.

Strengths were the clear entertaining prose, the wealth of interesting examples, the emphasis on collective action problems and the need for government involvement to solve them, and the broad range of ideas and other points of view that they covered.

The true message at the core of the book comes through when the authors talk about what they call the counter-culture's cardinal sin: opposing (or at least not endorsing) positive changes in the laws/regulations because they were just superficial changes that are all part of the same corrupt, screwed up system. As an example of this, they mention how in Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore rejects gun control laws as a solution since they don't get to the root of the problem which is the culture of fear in the United States.

I'd go into more detail on the strengths and weaknesses but I've already written too much (writing a book review is hard).

In a nutshell? If you're interested in consumerism or environmentalism this book is the best I've read on the topic in quite a while - even in this long-winded post I've only scratched the surface of what's in it. I just wish they had taken the time to structure their argument in a logical, easy-to-follow manner (it would have saved me some trouble anyway).

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I feel like I haven't really gotten the point across about just how many collective action problems we face so perhaps I will add an (infrequently) recurring post on 'Collective Action Problem for the Day' starting with some of the better ones mentioned in the book and then moving on to whatever seems worthy/relevant/topical as time goes by.

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¹ If you want more background on what is a Prisoner's Dilemma / Collective Action problem, the Wikipedia article is excellent and very readable.