Prove it

One phrase I'd like to see vanish from public and private discourses is proving a theory. Let's all agree there's no such thing as proving a theory. The phrase is as meaningless as erasing a pencil.

An example where proving a theory often comes up is in evolution vs creationism debates. One problem with evolution, we're sometimes told by creationists, is that it's only a theory or that it hasn't been proved. Of course it's only a theory, and of course it hasn't been proved. That's because there's no such thing as proving a theory.

Another, recent example where I've heard this phrase is that physicists proved the existence of the Higgs boson. First of all, the Higgs boson has only been possibly discovered; physicists remain busy analyzing the data collected last month at the Large Hadron Collider. But even if the data prove consistent with the theory of the Standard Model, the Standard Model won't have been proved, nor will the existence of the Higgs boson have been proved. That's because there's no such thing as proving a theory.

Theories can't be proved. At best they remain plausible and tentative explanations of what we observe in the universe around us. The most certain we ever get about a theory is when it ends up being wrong, such as with numerous obsolete or superseded theories, including theories such as spontaneous generation and Newtonian physics.

But if theories can't be proved, then what can be proved? The answer is: not much. The justice system may interest itself in proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but logic demands something far more stringent; logic requires proof beyond all doubt. So long as there's any possible way a statement mightn't be true, that statement hasn't been proved. And there are a lot of ways a statement mightn't be true. For everything having to do with the real world, there's the specter of Cartesian doubt, that nagging worry that everything we see and hear and otherwise sense is a hallucinatory deception. Unlikely, yes, but possible.

Someone with a better understanding of epistemology may correct me on this, but it seems to me the only statements that can be proved are abstract logical statements, such as math theorems. For example, we may prove the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem many different ways, including one way invented by a former President of the United States. That math can be proved and scientific theories cannot has to do with how math doesn't rely on sensory experience and is thus immune to Cartesian and other doubts.

Jobs, more jobs!

It's strange that it's during an economic downturn that people have a lot of free time and it's during the good times that people spend long hours doing what other people want them to do. Isn't this backwards?

Wanted: Profit-Minded Self-Starter

Scanning the job ads these days, I see that a lot of employers are looking for professionals who take initiative and who're profit-minded. I wonder what it would be like to work somewhere where I would be expected to take initiative about minding profits…

So here I am, at my new job. My initiative and profit-mindedness stir me to action. I search for the company's balance sheet to see what impact I can have on profits. But there I encounter a problem: I, a mere rank-and-file software developer, am not allowed access to the company's finances. I'm barred from seeing budgeting and other data needed for making profit-minded decisions. But because I'm resilient and capable of working around the rough edges of a problem—those were two other requirements for the job—I make do with what I can: I use my personal finances instead.

I study the transactions in my checking account, which is where my paychecks are direct deposited, and I gain my first profit-minded insight: I'm paid the same no matter what I accomplish at work. At first this seems like a setback because it means the only way I can raise my profits is by cutting expenses. And who wants to do that?

But I'm an outside the box thinker—another trait that landed me my current job—and I recognize that there's a smooth solution to this rough-edged problem. I can increase revenue, I say to myself, by getting a higher-paying job. So I set out, ever vigilant about minding profits, to find a higher-paying job.

Being as how I already looked for the highest-paying job I could get given the skills I currently possess—and the result was finding the job I currently have—it follows that I need to acquire more skills. I need to learn new languages, platforms, and tools. And it's well known that the best way to learn these things is by using them in a real project. But my current employer hired me to do a job I can do with the skills I already have. After all, they wouldn't have hired someone who needed time or training to learn on the job. Why waste resources on employees when they have no loyalty and will leave if they learn something more valuable? So that means I need to do my own work—stuff that's more likely to return a bigger profit. No problem.

So I begin padding my estimates for my assigned tasks and using the unused slack time to work on personal projects. I make websites, solve Project Euler problems, play with new operating systems, and pore over tech-news websites. Within a year I update my résumé with all the new things I know, and I go to job interviews ready to talk about everything I accomplished during the past year (at my current job). I'm also sure to point out my track record of taking initiative with profits and that I'm a proven fast learner who's capable of working without much supervision—and that I'll do as much for their company, too.

Tyranny of tyranny of the majority

Tyranny of the majority refers to any scenario in a democracy where a majority of citizens votes to oppress a minority. For example, if 80% of the people in a country vote to enslave the other 20%, that constitutes a tyranny of the majority. The outcome is a democracy with the brutality of an oppressive dictator.

Tyranny of the majority shows that it's insufficient to justify governance solely on the basis that what a majority wants it should get. Governance ought to require both a majority's will and moral justification for the act. But people will vote immorally on occasion. To protect against this, modern democracies have in place limits that minimize the possibility and impact of a tyranny of the majority. For example, the United States has a Bill of Rights as well as other constitutional amendments that guarantee personal liberties from the government. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude; along with our country's separation of powers, which (among other features) grants the courts the power to strike down unconstitutional legislation, it's unlikely for a majority of people to get away with enslaving the remaining minority.

Nevertheless, tyrannies of the majority happen every year. For example, many non-Arizonans decry tyranny of the majority against Arizona's constitutionally questionable enforcement against illegal immigration, just as non-Southerners decry tyranny of the majority when some Southern states force their public schools' science textbooks to give equal credit to evolution and creationism as scientific doctrine. Conservatives tyrannize reproductive rights, and liberals tyrannize fetuses. Democracy turns us into little tyrants who carry voter registration cards.

There are two ways to stop a tyranny of the majority. The first is for the majority to see the errors of its immoral ways and to stop oppressing the minority. This is great when it happens, but it's far from inevitable. Usually, tyrannical majorities keep on with their tyrannizing until they're forcibly stopped—often by a larger, encompassing majority. This is the second way to stop a tyranny of the majority, and it's called kicking the problem upstairs. It's what happens when, say, the federal government imposes uniform civil rights laws on all fifty states: smaller, individual majorities are swallowed into a larger, centralized majority—one that supports equal civil rights. The smaller, anti-civil rights majorities are diluted into powerlessness.

The United States has a long history of kicking problems upstairs to the federal level. It's a tactic underlying many progressive causes. Just as puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time, progressives fear that someone, somewhere might be taken advantage of. The progressive fights for a good cause, and many of the benefits we enjoy today are due to progressives' victories, but as with most benefits there are costs. The act of forcibly ending a regional tyranny of the majority by kicking the problem upstairs brings about its own problems—often ones that don't manifest until later. Much later.

One problem is that tyrannies of the majority don't end merely because problems have been kicked all the way to the top. Tyrannies of the majority still happen at the federal level, owing to the same kinds of democratic pressures that cause them to form at regional and state levels. Only, once a problem has been kicked to the top, there's nowhere left to go—except possibly to war.

We ought to consider the act of kicking problems upstairs to be a nonrenewable resource. Like other nonrenewable resources, its use confers a benefit. But like other nonrenewable resources, its use is finite and produces waste. The benefit is that we resolve tyrannies of the majority affecting us now. The waste is that we're left with governance that's more centralized, and it's inevitable there'll be larger majorities tyrannizing larger minorities later. And because future people suffering those problems won't have an upstairs to kick their problems to, they'll have less means for resolution.

Because of this, we ought to be selective and prudent about what we kick upstairs. This means we ought to let people in other regions and states keep more autonomy for resolving their own conflicts.

Joke

Q: What do you call an economist with a prediction?

A: Wrong.

Space

The·Romans·conquered·their·world·with·only·the·interpunct
They·had·no·spaces
No·other·punctuation
Just·a·single·dot·to·separate·words

ThenaroundAD200theydroppedtheinterpunct
Allthewordsrantogether
Therewasnovisualindicationofwherewordsbeganorended

It wasn't until the dark ages that Western man invented the space

CI, PD, and the value of diversity

Today's post answers the question of how I came to be against the categorical imperative.

I never liked the categorical imperative—not since I first learned about it in an ethics class during my second year in college. But my current reason for rejecting the CI is new.

When I first learned about the CI, I thought it could be used to prove just about anything and was therefore a bad theory. For example, CI proponents often use the CI to claim that lying is universally bad based on some specific cases of lying being bad. But there are some specific cases where it's bad to tell the truth, so what's wrong with the claim that telling the truth is universally bad?

In hindsight I'm sure I missed something about the CI.

But nevertheless, a couple years ago I changed my mind in a way that made my previous doubts about the CI moot. What happened is I came to believe that humans are part of their ecosystem, not apart from it. This change-of-mind may not sound like much, but it has profound consequences.

One such consequence is the corollary that we live in a world full of trade-offs—that few ways of doing things are better in all regards. This is opposed to the world view of the rationalist, who believes that by thinking things through hard enough, one can eventually arrive at the best answer. The answer may be worldly, such as the secular ethicist who believes in the universality of the CI, or it may be otherworldly, such as the monotheist who believes in an unlimited god.

The former is Hofstadter's world of pure reason and superrationality, where prisoner's dilemma players have cause to believe their thought process ought to be shared by all other players and that therefore there is a correct answer to the game. But if humans are in an ecosystem then there's no basis for that belief. Behavior in an ecosystem satisfies niche, not law. And niches are finite, mutable, and diverse.

This is in direct contradiction to the CI, which is infinite, unchanging, and uniform. Thus, the CI has no place in an ecological world view—unless of course one niche is to accept the CI.

Now, many people would object to what I've written. They might say: Yes, human behavior is subject to niche, but humans will be judged according to law. Thus, the CI could be valid as a law. This would be the position of, say, a Christian who accepts ecological principles.

I have no counter to that objection. It seems to me that where a person stands on this issue is a matter of faith. And I welcome a diversity of opinions on the matter.

Bike maintenance update

Tonight I cleaned and re-lubed my bike chain. I got another 2000km on the previous lubing, thus bringing my total mileage for the chain to over 5000km with only two cleanings/lubings. (Is it OK to say mileage when using metric?) This is twice farther than I've gotten with any other chain, and my current chain shows little wear. So consider tonight's blog post another unpaid advertisement for Chain-L.

So now I'll claim to have conquered what were my two biggest peeves of bike maintenance:

1. Too many flats

2. Chains don't last long enough

The too-many-flats I fixed with Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires. I have yet to get a flat tire in 8000km or so on my current tires, which is quite a feat in goathead-infested Phoenix. As for broken glass, I now ride right through it.

So what are my new maintenance peeves? Here are some candidates:

• Bent rear derailleurs arms

• Handlebars needing new wraps

• Putting on and taking off fenders

• Truing wheels

Choose Craig's adventure

Craig still had a job. This was the problem on his mind as he sat down in his cubicle chair late in the afternoon. He had just returned from a team meeting that hadn't gone as he had hoped. The meeting was last-minute, having been announced with an email from the boss at 3:29 titled URGENT--meeting at 3:30. Upon reading the email Craig had hoped the meeting would somehow be about himself getting fired, but in fact it turned out to be near the opposite.

I just finished meeting with my bosses, Craig's boss said to start off the meeting. They told me we have to get the next generation of the product out the door by the end of the year. If we don't, then, well, we probably won't have jobs anymore. At that, Craig's spirits lifted, his mind calculating the likelihood of failure. In general it's a good bet any software project will be late. And it's well known the company Craig worked for was heading toward a financial cliff and getting desperate. Maybe this was it—Craig's big break.

But then the boss began laying out a plan and schedule. And as much as Craig didn't want to admit it, the goal to have everything finished by the end of the year was all too possible. There were risks, as all projects have, but not enough. Is our incompetent subcontractor involved? No. Are we doing both the residential and commercial software? No, just the residential. What about hardware problems? The hardware guys will fix the problems as we find them. But how long does it take to produce a new board? Two to three weeks. Isn't that too much time? No, we'll just solder quick fixes as needed. In all, too many answers and not enough questions.

Alas, the project wasn't doomed from the start as so many more worthwhile projects are. And the news got worse. The hardware guys, the boss said, have the hardest jobs. They have to get everything UL-verified in December. But you guys—you have to get your jobs done, too. If that means working 10 or 12 hours a day, then that's what you do.

Craig still had a job—maybe 25% or 50% more of a job than when he had started the day. And that's what was on his mind as he returned to his cubicle. He considered his options for a few minutes and then made a decision.

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If you choose Craig to walk into his bosses office and give his two weeks notice, then turn to page 3, or, er, say so in a comment below and stay tuned.

If you choose Craig to stick with his job while maybe kinda looking for something better in the meantime, then say so in a comment below and stay tuned.