Morality, Religion & Philosophy: May 2003 Archives

COMMIES: I don't know if I hate all communists, but I sure hate communism. Most young, American commies that I come into contact with are just misguided idealists, but that doesn't really make them any less dangerous. Communism has killed more people than fascism has, but it isn't recognized as being as evil because its intentions are better (on the surface, anyway). I saw a hippie wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt at In-N-Out last night and I wanted to start an arguement with him, but I didn't. What's the point? Other than pure entertainment, I mean.

Communism is seductive because it sounds so nice, but it doesn't work, and when it fails it fails spectacularly.

Donald Sensing mentions the Christian doctrine of original sin and I wanted to toss in my 3 cents.

It's common to hear it said that "most people are basically good", but whenever someone tells me that I wonder if they're living in the same world I am.

Me: Are you good?
Them: Well, mostly I guess. I try to be.
Me: Have you ever murdered anyone?
Them: No, of course not!
Me: Oh, well that's good. Have you ever lied?
Them: Sure, sure, sometimes I do.
Me: Ever steal anything?
Them: Haha, when I was a kid maybe.
Me: Never fudge your time cards then at work, I suppose?
Them: Maybe a little....
Me: Ever rape anyone?
Them: What?! No!
Me: Not even in your mind?
Them: Well you certainly can't judge me for the things I think about....
Me: So you're a liar, a thief, and you've at least contemplated rape --
Them: Bye.

The point is that no one is "basically good". Everyone is depraved, self-centered, and evil -- the fact that we don't act on these desires isn't due to some inner virtue, it's because of fear. That's the purpose of society, to pit my selfishness against yours and thereby restain both of us from our true nature. I'm planning another article on this topic as it relates to my previous post on game theory.

Anyone who has ever seen or been a part of a mob knows what can happen when societal restraint breaks down. Otherwise orderly, good, decent, normal human beings can go completely nuts when their fear of retribution and punishment disappears, and this is our natural condition. Anyone who is honest with theirself knows this to be true -- I alone know the beast that lives within me.

It was horrifying to me to read about the terror that Saddam's regime perpetrated on the Iraqi people. How could anyone commit such atrocities? The countless murders and rapes, children tortured, mass graves, medical experimentation... we've only begun to discover the carnage. One of the scariest things to me was that I could see kernels of that same evil in my own heart. Sure, I'm a long way from there in action, but somewhere deep inside of me is a sliver of darkness just looking for tiny ways to break free each and every day. What about you?

Game Theory is a method for formalizing interactions between players. You have a set of players, a set of strategies that the players can use, and a set of outcomes that result from the cross product of the players and the strategies. If you have a 10 player game and a selection of 5 strategies there are 5*10^10 (50,000,000,000) possible outcomes. That's a lot. Let's look at a 2 player, 2 strategy game instead. The one I like is the ever-distressing question of "should I call her/him or not?"

There's a girl/guy that you like and you don't know if she/he likes you or not. Your two options are to either call her/him or not to. If you call and she/he doesn't like you, you might look dumb, but if you don't call and she/he does like you then you'll miss out. So, what do you do? Just apply game theory! The numbers in the table below indicate how much benefit you gain from your strategy, depending on her feelings for you. (Don't get caught up on exact values, I'm going to pick them arbitrarily. The numbers are very important, however, since they determine what the best strategy is.)

You \ She	Likes you	Doesn't like you
Call	+2	-1
Don't call	-1	+1

You want to pick the strategy that maximizes your benefit. If you knew her feelings it would be easy to pick -- call if she likes you, don't if she doesn't. However, since you don't know she feels you'll have to pick the strategy with the highest likely payoff. If you estimate the chances are 50/50 that she likes you then you can estimate your expected gain for each strategy.

If you call, you'd expect a 50% chance of getting +2, and a 50% chance of getting -1.
(0.5)*(+2) + (0.5)*(-1) = 0.5

If you don't call, you'd expect a 50% chance of getting -1, and a 50% chance of getting +1.
(0.5)*(-1) + (0.5)*(+1) = 0

So with those outcome payoffs and those predictions for her behavior you're better off to call than not to call. However, if you think there's only a 25% chance that she likes you then you shouldn't call.

A lot of the trickiness comes from choosing the payoff numbers. Do you really lose something if you call and she doesn't like you? Maybe instead of a "-1" in that position there should be a "0". Similarly, if you really really really super duper like her, then maybe the payoff for calling if she likes you will be much higher than merely "+2". The relative values of these numbers really determine the most beneficial outcome of the game.

That simple example only deals with the benefit to you of your strategy. Let's look at a more complicated game that has benefits for both players: The Prisoners' Dilemma. To set the stage, imagine there are two thieves who have been caught by the police. The cops get the crooks, but they can't convict them unless they find the loot as well, and they don't know where it is. So the police separate the crooks into two rooms so that they can't communicate to each other and they tell each of the crooks: "If you tell us where the loot is and turn on your partner we'll go easy on you, but if your partner turns on you first then we're going to go easy on him and you're going to take all the heat." What do the prisoners choose to do? We can represent the situation with a table similar to the one above, except that this time there will be payoff numbers for both crooks -- the first number in the parenthesis represents the payoff for crook 1, and the second number represents the payoff for crook 2 (the payoffs are negative because they represent how many years the crooks will spend in jail, say).

Crook 1 \ Crook 2	Doesn't talk	Talks
Doesn't talk	(0, 0)	(-10, 0)
Talks	(0, -10)	(-5, -5)

Crook 1 has a decision to make: does he talk and squeal on his partner or doesn't he? If neither talks then both get to go free, but crook 1 knows that if he doesn't talk and crook 2 does then he's going to get screwed. If both talk, then both go to jail, but at least they'll get some time off for cooperating with the cops.

So crook 1 draws the table above and examines his options. If his partner doesn't talk, then crook 1 doesn't go to jail at all no matter what he himself does; however, if his partner does talk then the length of crook 1's sentence will hinge on whether or not he himself cooperated. So, even though crook 1 has no idea what crook 2 will do, he knows that he'll be better off if he talks to the cops, and so he does. If you've ever watched Law & Order then you know that the cops actually do this kind of thing all the time, and it's very effective.

Bah, games! What good are they in real life? Well, they're good for a lot and game theory is very useful in any situation where there is negotiation, such as diplomacy or economics. Saddam Hussein made the determination that he would benefit most by not cooperating with the UN and destroying his WMD, and his mistake was miscalculating the chance that the United States would attack. He knew that the cost of such an attack would be high, but he thought that the likelihood of it actually happening was low. Additionally, there was a cost associated with getting rid of his weapons because it would have weakened his position in the Arab world and within his own country. He may have constructed a table like this:

America \ Saddam	Gets rid of WMD	Keeps WMD
Invades	(-20, -100)	(-20*, -100)
Doesn't invade	(+10*, -20)	(-20, +50)

So based on this table, Saddam would determine that no matter what America does he is better off keeping his weapons. If he gets invaded then it won't matter what he does, since he'll be deposed, but if he's not invaded then he will gain a lot of prestige for having faced down the US and will be able to keep his weapons. I put (*) next to two of the values because I wanted to point out that these were Saddam's miscalculations. He believed that America would benefit most by not invading whether he kept his weapons or not, and so he thought that America would use these values and thus not attack. However, these numbers were incorrect.

Once the United States had deployed troops on his border it was inevitable that we would invade and occupy his country, whether he gave up his weapons or not. Why? Because we can't allow countries to manipulate us into spending that kind of money and effort and then escape us just by changing their minds. If Saddam had changed his mind at the last moment and we had withdrawn our troops, then nothing would stop him from simply waiting until they were far away again and then starting his WMD programs. We would begin to deploy, and then at the last moment he could change his mind yet again. America couldn't afford to play this game, and so from the moment we had serious troops on the ground we were committed to an attack. By America's calculation the "+10*" was really a "-20".

Saddam also thought that if he kept his WMD and America did attack, he would be able to inflict substantial losses on our troops. The "-20*" represents this belief -- even if America attacked he thought that it would cost us a lot to do it, and he thought this would dissuade us. Many people around the world didn't think that the US was serious; based on recent history, they believed that as soon as we started taking casualties we would pull out. In fact, we never did start taking heavy casualties, but even if we had we would not have withdrawn our forces. In America's game theory table, this number was more like "+20". We wanted to go in there and shake up the region, undermine support for terrorism, and give the Arabs a bloody nose.

These two miscalculations resulted in Saddam's seemingly irrational behavior. If he had guessed these numbers correctly he would have seen that the strategy that would have given him the most benefit (and least loss) would have been to get rid of his WMD early and hope to avoid a US attack.

Game theory can be applied to almost every area of life. I'll write later about how our entire social fabric is based around game theory and the enforcement of cooperation, even though it is to everyone's individual benefit to cheat and steal.

Some game theory links:
GameTheory.net
The Prisoner's Dilemma: A Fable
The Prisoners' Dilemma simulation -- a neat Java applet.
Game Theory from Yahoo

SDB is continuing his excellent explanation of his atheistic beliefs, and Robin Goodfellow discusses it some more, Brian Chapin used to be an atheist and talks about evangelism, and Mark Byron mentions some studies on the power of prayer (and its non-power). Fascinating stuff to read by some very smart people.

I'm an engineer, as SDB is, and my general reaction to new knowledge seems to be the opposite of his. I want to know everything, and the more I learn the more certain I am that our universe could not exist as the result of pure chance. Life as we know it could not have just happened randomly... I've run enough evolutionary AI algorithms to be very skeptical of the power of the evolutionary process. (One of the main foci of artificial intelligence research is in so-called "evolutionary algorithms". These algorithms are patterned on the theory of biological evolution and attempt to harness recombination, mutation, and natural selection forces to generate "emergent effects" that are greater than the information content that is put into the system. That's it in a nutshell... I can write a more thorough description later if anyone is interested.)

The general concensus of the artificial intelligence folks that I know is that we just aren't doing evolutionary programming "right" yet, which is why we aren't getting the types of emergent effects that they believe real evolution produced... but because of my own pre-dispositions, I don't think that we'll ever get the type of power out of evolutionary programming that some hope for. We all look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions, based on our philisophical backgrounds.

The existence and nature of God is the central question of life, and a great deal depends on whether you are right or not. I'm a Christian, and if my beliefs are wrong then my beliefs are worthless.

I Corinthians 15:14 -- And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.

Similarly, if I am right and SDB turns out to be wrong then there will be consequences for his wrong beliefs. The matter is not one to take lightly, no matter what you believe.

I've got to say that I really respect Steven Den Beste because he is one of the most intellectually honest people that I have come across. He describes himself as a "mechanist atheist" who believes that the material universe is all that exists, and that it is wholly governed by the laws of physics. He has written a rather detailed essay explaining why his beliefs, and atheism in general, must be based on faith.

This is a point that most of the atheists I know refuse to conceed. I've argued endlessly merely trying to demonstrate to people that atheism cannot be rigorously proven to be true, and more often than not my logic is dismissed with handwaving and appeals to the "intellectual authority" of some writer or another. This dismissal of logic and reasoning only further demonstrate the religious fervor of some atheists and their refusal to accept the fact that their beliefs do, in the end, rely on faith.

Of course, there are some Christians who believe that God's existence can be proven; most of those also claim that it can be shown that the God who can be proven to exist is the Christian God and not the god of some other belief system. I think that these Christians are deluding themselves. If you claim to believe what the Bible says, then this is the only possible view:

Hebrews 11:1-2,6 -- Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. ... And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

Read the whole chapter, it's all about faith. Hebrews 11 describes the actions taken by dozens of people who put their faith in God, despite the fact that they could not see him or touch him. If God wanted to prove his existence he could certainly do it, but he has intentionally not done so because he wants us to come to him in faith.

Why? Well, that's a good question. I'm not entirely sure. Most likely it's a combination of two factors: his love for us, and the gift of free will. If he acted in such a way that his existence could be proven, then it would negate the usefulness of the free will that he gave us. I believe that when the Bible says that we are created "in his image" our possession of free will is a fundamental component of that. And because of his love for us, he didn't design us to be mindless robots. He wants us to love him in return, and love that is forced is not love at all.

I've been thinking about intellectual property again, and the fact that digital encoding can basically reduce all IP to a number (or set of numbers) makes me think that it's going to be very difficult to enforce copyright laws in the future; basically, extend the effect Napster had on music to everything. This isn't a very profound realization, but the underlying question seems important to me: how can anyone ever claim to own a number?

I was reading a little bit about how radio frequencies are licensed by companies for use but are considered to be "owned" by the public as a whole and administered by the government. If numbers can be considered to be owned by anyone, they should fall into the public domain in the same way that radio frequencies do. But then what? Government-run licensing for companies that want to monopolize certain numbers (such as the number that encodes a specific song in the MP3 format)? Would they have to pay to hold these licenses? How then would they make money, through advertising like a radio station? It just doesn't make any sense.

The end result is that I think we're nearing the end of the period in human history wherein it has been possible to "own" a representation of an idea (through copyright). Inventions and processes that depend on physical constructions will be protectable into the forseeable future (until we have replicators?), but the concept of the copyright will probably disappear by 2050 (my conservative guess). As it is, many societies are incapable of / unwilling to enforce existing copyright treaties, and the difficulties will only grow. Social momentum will eventually overwhelm the existing order, and it will collapse.