The fiction of fantasy

Reading a few books doesn't make anyone a master on any topic, let alone several topics at once. Imagine that for all your life you weren't allowed to read more than a few books, together covering everything you would ever know about history, language, literature, religion, mythology, economy, science, warfare, sociology, and so on. You would, frankly, know next to nothing.

Yet partaking in epic fantasy, such as reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, fits this scenario: the reading of a few books describing another world, with those few books being everything we come to know about that world. But after reading those books, far from realizing our ignorance, we instead believe we got the real story. We believe we understand the different races of peoples, and the way magic works, and the only meaningful interpretation of that world's history. How incredulous we are!

If epic fantasy were anything like real life—and yes, I realize the irony of this sentence—the conclusion of every book and series would leave us more befuddled after than before. That Sauron fellow, we might say after finishing The Return of the King, he got a viciously lopsided treatment by the author. Even Hitler had some good points. I wonder what Sauron's real story is? Or: So all dwarves like to live in caves? Yeah, right. The author is too racist to bother fleshing out a people beyond a few stereotypes.

Yes, I know I'm taking seriously a genre of fiction—and one that's especially detached from reality. Relax, Craig, I hear you say. It's just a story. Maybe so. But I wonder if the biggest lure of epic fantasy is the comfort of believing in a world that makes sense, of believing in a world that our puny brains can get a handle on. If so then that's the fiction of fantasy. Reality can't be understood by one person, especially not by only reading a few books on it—never mind how numerous the appendices.

Now vs Later

Now vs Later. It's a trade-off with no right answer. A smaller benefit now vs a bigger benefit later. A bigger cost later vs a smaller cost now. A blog post stub now vs a fleshed-out one later. There's no right answer.

We should not accept PEDs in competitive sports

In the IQ Squared debate on doping ("We should accept performance-enhancing drugs in competitive sports."), the side arguing for the motion swung the most votes. Before the debate, 18% of the audience voted for the motion, 63% against, and 19% undecided; after the debate, 37% voted for (up 19 points), 59% against (down 4 points), and 4% undecided.

Though I believe doping ought to be banned, the debate's results don't surprise me. Rarely do I hear a good argument being made against doping. During the debate, I heard none. But the side arguing for the motion made some good points—points good enough to capture the imaginations of most undecided audience members.

Not just in the IQ Squared debate but in doping debates in general, anti-doping proponents tend to argue for some form of athlete paternalism: that doping harms athletes and that athletes need protection. Though the intentions behind this argument are good, the argument is terrible for the purpose of persuasion. First, the arguer has an uphill battle defending the claim that doping does harm. Though it's obvious that some forms of doping are harmful, doping proponents will agree that those extreme uses of PEDs should be disallowed. What's left are the non-extreme uses that are either harmless or low-risk. Why not allow those?

But even if an anti-doping proponent can persuade listeners that doping is dangerous for athletes, then there's still the matter of convincing listeners that it's not the athlete's right to take the risk anyway. This is an even harder sell. We glorify athletes in their prime—so long as they continue winning—but we're quick to forget them once they're used up. No matter whether a retired athlete suffers from financial problems or permanent, debilitating injury or depression or brain damage or doping-related health problems, Americans aren't likely to care enough to help. They made their millions, we might say. They took the risks, and now they must live with the consequences. It's not that sports fans are callous; it's just that we care more about active athletes than retired athletes. So arguing against doping on the basis of long-term harmful effects on retired athletes is a bad way to persuade.

Another umbrella of bad arguments against doping is that doping is unfair. This usually refers to how drugs aren't fairly distributed, or that some athletes benefit more from taking the same PED than do other athletes, or that athletes who choose to abstain from PEDs for moral reasons will be made less competitive, and so on. These are all terrible arguments. Their common weakness is their arbitrariness: sports competition is inherently unfair, starting with the different genes and maternal determinants a future athlete is born with, continuing with the different environmental factors and financial resources they grow up with and train under, and including the different technologies they compete with. What's a little more unfairness by allowing doping? doping proponents will ask. Why ban a PED but not a super-slippery swimsuit or a faster bicycle? These are hard questions for the anti-doping proponent to answer in a way that persuades the listener.

But Craig, you say, if these are all bad reasons for banning doping, why do you oppose doping?

I'm glad you asked.

I think doping ought to be banned because doping makes sports less fun to watch. This is nothing but a selfish opinion of a fan. If doping made sports more fun to watch then I would support doping. (Hey, those athletes make millions, you know.) But as it is, doping makes athletes less human, and for me, less interesting.

This has become clearer during the last couple years as I've kept track of pro cycling. In that time, the pro peloton has begun looking a lot more human. Speeds are more modest, yet guys are popping off the back of the group anyway, and at the summits they look like they're hurting. This is a long ways from the Tour in 2006, when Floyd Landis broke away solo for 120 kilometers on a mountain stage and beat the field by over five minutes and looked as fresh at the finish as at the beginning. For all the achievement of turning over the cranks faster and harder, why not put a robot on a bike instead? No, I like to see that even the pros feel pain and have limits—like us other mortals.

But my argument against doping isn't a persuasive one, either. It's entirely subjective, and I suspect that a lot of fans disagree with me to boot. To them, bigger, faster and stronger are always better. More home runs makes for better sport.

So I realize the lameness of my own argument and as such, you'll never catch me formally arguing against doping. I promise.

(I reserve the right to revoke that promise.)

On Reading Well

Though William Zinsser's book On Writing Well has made me an only somewhat better writer, it's made me a much better reader. That's because Zinsser encouraged me to stop blaming myself whenever I quit reading something midway through. As Zinsser says, if a reader stops before the end, it's the writer's fault.

(If any of you reading this blog post quit before the end, blame me.)

Readers, Zinsser says, put up with a lot of bad writing before giving up. And when they do give up, they often blame themselves. Maybe they didn't give the piece enough attention? Or maybe they're not smart enough to follow along? No. It's the writer's job to ensure readers don't need a surplus of attention or smarts to understand what the writer means to say. Writers must be clear and concise.

When I'm reading, there are two patterns that make it likely I won't stay till the end. The first is redundancy, which causes me to skip words and sentences because there exist more than are needed. As a writer, redundancy is easy to fix—so long as one has a computer with a working delete or backspace key.

The second pattern is too much rereading—too much scanning backwards and reading again parts of a sentence to make sense of what the writer is saying. When readers do a lot of rereading, their eyeballs continually flicker back-and-forth as they take in sentences in lots of small, out-of-order chunks. This is as opposed to the eyes more evenly sweeping left-to-right and taking in sentences in fewer passes.

Some rereading is unavoidable, as our eyes will always dart around at least a little when we read. But bad writing requires a lot more darting around than good writing. And darting around is exhausting. Eventually, it causes readers to give up. Only, thanks to Zinsser, we can stop blaming ourselves for moving on to better written pieces.

We should accept performance-enhancing drugs in competitive sports

The title of this post isn't my opinion. Instead, it's the proposal for yet another years-old Intelligence Squared debate I listened to last week. And it's yet another debate that left me more confused after than before.

Like with the debate I wrote about last week (It's wrong to pay for sex), I began listening to the debate on doping by holding an opposed position. And like with the paid-for-sex debate, I ended up thinking more about what the proposal says than anything the speakers said.

Does the proposal ask for the unconditional allowance of PEDs (performance-enhancing drugs) in all sports? Or is the proposal conditional—does it ask for the limited allowance of PEDs in some sports? For example, maybe we should allow steroids in American football but not in baseball. Or maybe we should allow steroids in both sports but put limits on the quantity of steroids the athletes use.

As it transpired, both teams argued their sides as though the proposal is conditional. The for side argued that the regulated use of PEDs could be safe and would make athletes faster, stronger and better. The against side argued that all uses of PEDs are wrong and thus PEDs should never be allowed. Predictably, the against side lost—it's a lot harder to defend never than sometimes.

For example, the for team squeezed the against team on the use of human growth hormone to speed up injury healing. As a PED, HGH helps athletes by allowing them to recover from workouts faster, thus allowing them to train harder and build muscle faster. But another use of HGH is helping an injury heal faster. Is it wrong to heal faster? If there are bad side effects caused by such use of HGH, then possibly yes. But if there aren't any bad side effects, then it's hard to see the problem. And in fact such bad side effects are well hidden—if they exist.

Another way of looking at this is to ask if it's wrong for athletes to use antibiotics or any other kind of medicine to recover from an illness. Some religious sects aside, we all agree it's OK to use medicine to recover from an illness. What then makes an injury different from an illness? What makes the use of HGH as a treatment for injuries different from the use of medicine? The difference is unclear. Yet HGH is considered a PED, and medicines aren't. Maybe we should put penicillin on the PED list.

No, it's absurd to debate this. The proposal must be asking something different, something more contentious. It must be asking about the more straight-up uses of PEDs, the kinds of uses that help a guy hit 73 home runs in a season or dominate the Tour de France for seven consecutive years. We know it when we see it—but should it be allowed? Could we regulate doping and make it safe enough for athletes while allowing them to achieve speed and strength never before realized by humans?

The problem is: doping already is allowed, and it's already regulated—in every sport. Yes, it's against the rules, but the rules are unenforceable. The outcome—made necessary by non-enforceability and the high stakes for winning—is that many top-tier athletes will dope as much as they can get away with. Like with speeding in traffic, we can't fully stop it; we can only limit it.

If that's the status quo now, then the implication is that the debate's proposal—We should accept performance-enhancing drugs in competitive sports—can't be argued for by taking the position of regulate the PEDs. The limited use of PEDs is the minimum use of PEDs, so the for side must argue for a stronger interpretation. Absent a specific limit described by the proposal, the sensible interpretation is of the unconditional use of PEDs—should athletes be allowed to do whatever they want to their bodies?

But I suspect a majority of people, once realizing the effects of combining the allowance of unhindered drug use with the win-at-all-costs attitudes present in many athletes, would oppose the proposal as interpreted unconditionally. There just aren't enough anarchists out there who trust in free markets so completely to make the proposal an even enough fight.

So again, like with the paid-for-sex debate, the proposal becomes a jumble of meaningless words. In this case, if the proposal is interpreted unconditionally then the debate is uncontentious. But if the proposal is interpreted conditionally then the against side is squeezed into a defenseless position.

I propose another IQ Squared debate, one to finally settle the matter. Here it is: Intelligence Squared proposals should be more specific.

But is my proposal specific enough?

Undecided

The thing that bugs me about Intelligence Squared—other than its title—is that the number of undecided votes in the audience is always lower after the debate than before.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, IQ Squared is a formal-debate show whereby two teams, each consisting of two or three speakers, take opposing sides on a contentious proposition. For example, if the motion is Ban college football then one team argues in favor of banning college football, and the other team argues against. The catch is that for each debate there's an objective winner and loser; the audience is polled both before and after the show, and the team that changes the most minds in its favor wins the debate.

In theory, it's possible for both teams to lose. That would happen if the for and against sides both lost votes to undecided. But that never happens—even though IQ Squared propositions are worded ambivalently.

Today I listened to the IQ Squared debate titled It's wrong to pay for sex. When I first read that proposition—before I began listening to the arguments—I assumed its meaning was categorical, as in: It's always wrong to pay for sex. That's as opposed to a non-categorical claim such as It's sometimes wrong to pay for sex, or It's usually wrong to pay for sex. As I figured, though prostitution is usually carried out in deplorable circumstances and to regrettable ends, paying for sex is categorically wrong only if it's wrong in all possible circumstances. Even if there's only one case where paying for sex isn't wrong, then there's nothing intrinsically wrong about paying for sex: any of the wrongness we often observe accompanying it must be because of other factors, such as coercion, violence, and sexual inequality. Or so I figured.

The debate played out, as many IQ Squared debates do, as a lesson in ambivalence fallacies. What exactly does the proposition mean? The team arguing for the motion (—that it's wrong to pay for sex—) implied the proposition is not categorical. They argued that prostitution is a big problem worldwide—that buying sex from women makes them worse off, that buying sex from a woman who has no other opportunities to support herself is a form of rape, and that all attempts to regulate prostitution fail to improve these problems.

The other team made an argument similar to the reasoning I outlined two paragraphs previously—that most prostitution is bad, but sometimes it's good, and so saying that it's wrong to pay for sex is to commit a fallacy of composition—to mistake what is common for what is universal.

And so it went—for the entire debate neither team budged from its interpretation of the motion. Neither team agreed to the other's terms.

As a listener, I became more confused and more irritated as the debate went on. My irritation stemmed from the unresolved disagreement in terms. My confusion was because I didn't know how the disagreement should have been resolved.

On the one hand, the interpretation It's usually wrong to pay for sex strikes me as stupid. Of course it's usually wrong! To argue otherwise is to take a naive or callous view of prostitution and its consequences. But if that interpretation is too obvious to debate, then the proposition must instead be asking about the categorical claim—that it's always wrong to pay for sex. Right?

But the categorical interpretation transforms the debate from a real topic into an abstract one: i.e., what is the moral meaning of paid-for sex after untangling the act of paying from the act of sex from the other acts, such as coercion and violence? That's a fascinating topic—for ethicists and philosophers. But we shouldn't expect it to capture the audience's imaginations. Most people aren't philosophers; they think in terms of real-life occurrences, not hypotheticals.

And as if that line of reasoning didn't make me doubt the categorical interpretation enough, towards the end of the debate I began to wonder about extreme, bizarre forms of the categorical interpretation. The topic of prostitution-like behavior in chimpanzees came up among the debate's speakers. Is that relevant to the proposition? The proposition makes no conditional specifier about being human, as in It's wrong for humans to pay for sex. Should we include chimpanzees and other animals in the motion? And what about forms of payment other than money? How do we define pay? Where on the continuum between dinner-and-a-movie and handing over a wad of cash does prostitution begin? For the categorical interpretation, such a definition is critical.

By the end of the debate, I no longer knew what to think because I no longer knew what the proposition was saying—it had become a jumble of meaningless words. On the one hand, I had an interpretation whose likely conclusions seem obvious. Why not instead propose something contentious, such as It should be legal to pay for sex, or It's wrong to pay men for sex? (Think: gay-male prostitution.) On the other hand, I had a different interpretation, one whose likely conclusions are pedantic and abstract. No interpretation is good for mainstream debate.

In the end, I was decided on only one matter: that the debate wasn't and couldn't be about logic.

Status report

So, how am I doing with my year's goal of changing a major opinion? Answer: not too good. I've still got the same stale opinions I did last year.

But for a while there was some hope. For three months—January till April—a JEC reader repeatedly wrote comments on my Thomism C.A.Q. post from last year, trying to convince me of the truth of Thomism. We bantered back and forth, and no opinions were changed, but at least someone cared enough to confront. That's a rare thing, and it means a lot.

In other news, Laura and I (and fifteen others) will be away at Havasupai for the rest of this week. That means there'll be no post on Thursday.

In the meantime, I'd like for readers to respond with a comment describing the last major opinion they changed. What was your last big “aha” moment?