NotPhil's Notions

The Education That Isn't

2011-02-21T13:16:00.004-06:00

Last month, the President of the United States called for a better-educated populace. If you missed that speech, don’t worry, it expressed the same sentiment presidents have been expressing in speeches for the last few generations. Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and Carter have all insisted that the future of America depends on our schools steeping students more deeply in the essences of math and science. Of course, we all understand that when our presidents insist on more math and science, what they’re really asking for is more financiers and engineers. And the reason we all understand this is because we all also understand that, in America, the word “education” is really just a euphemism for some job training you must go into debt for before you’re allowed to actually apply for a job.

Another thing we all know, but don’t really understand, is that, despite all these calls for a better-educated populace, Americans have become increasingly more poorly-educated. And this is what’s wrong with euphemisms. Sure, it sounds better to say “education” instead of “job training that companies can’t be bothered to do themselves anymore,” but if you keep saying it long enough, you might start believing that it’s really so. And, then, you might just end up with an education system that doesn’t even try to educate and not even be able to recognize it. Listen to Neil Postman, a chairman at NYU’s School of Education, describe the average American professional as someone who “barely has even a superficial knowledge of literature, philosophy, social history, or art ... and is not expected to have such knowledge.” Remember, Postman isn’t describing the average American, he’s describing the average American with a graduate degree and a professional license, presumably one of the best and brightest members of our society.

If you’re not bothered by even our best and brightest knowing nothing other than how to do their jobs, then you should be, because a healthy, robust society requires a populace which is a lot more than just a collection of workers hoping to earn wages. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, believed that the purpose of education was to provide everyone with the ability to engage in intelligent debate on the issues which affect their society. John Locke believed education should produce a civil, and literate, populace which wouldn’t be so short-sighted that they would spend their time trying to sabotage each other. Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed education should free people from the habits instilled by corrupted institutions. And we, well, we believe education should prepare us for a job at ACME. See what’s wrong?

What’s wrong is that we didn’t say no when companies decided that they didn’t want to be bothered with the expense of job training anymore and insisted that our education system pick up their slack. After all, they had the jobs to offer, so we went along with their rules. But their rules had consequences far greater than just producing higher profit margins by pushing job training costs onto the public. And their rules had consequences even greater than producing generations of student trainees saddled with decades worth of college debt for skills that no longer matched the current employment market. The real consequence of their rules was the creation of a populace which could no longer see education as anything other than technical training, a populace which would accept more rigidity, more testing, and more stringent qualifications for work and school, and a populace which would insist on an ever more specialized, disjointed, and narrow notion of what an education is.

This populace has scoffed at the humanities because who’s going to employ a social studies, philosophy, rhetoric, history, or literature major? But these are exactly the studies that epitomize a useful education. These are the studies which bring context and meaning to life. These are the studies that provide understanding, inform discourse, spur creativity, and solve problems. When we ignore, or even throw away, those studies which could create a genuinely-educated populace, we also ignore and throw away our chances for meaningful discourse and progress. We face serious problems in economics, ecology, and politics, none of which are going to be solved, or even understood, by people trained solely for engineering or finance, yet we pretend that training people for these jobs will insure that everything will turn out okay.

As Heather Wilson, a former congressman who has also sat on the selection committee for Rhodes scholars, put it, “Our universities fail ... the nation if they continue to graduate students with expertise in biochemistry or mathematics” but are “less able to grapple with issues that require them to think ... or reflect on difficult questions about what matters and why.” We shouldn’t be surprised that our public discourse sounds more like a Three Stooges film than a Socratic dialog when our students are never even told who Socrates was, other than some Greek philosopher who killed himself by drinking too much hemlock.

If we really want a more educated society, then we’ll need to recast education as something other than a prerequisite for profit-making. We’ll need to recognize that education is a precursor for a civil society. Employers can train employees. Schools must educate citizens.

Why the Only Business of America Is Business

2010-11-13T13:49:00.006-06:00

Last week, Americans flocked to the polls to engage in their biannual election ritual. In America, voting is — as every schoolchild is taught — a very important responsibility.

According to the most popular theory of representative democracy, voting is the method through which the populace selects representatives, who must take moderate policy stances on those issues which different groups of citizens have voiced concerns over, in order to win a majority of votes and serve in public office.

Most of us would like to believe this is true, largely because it sounds good. But, as polls have repeatedly shown, most of us also suspect that things don’t really work this way.

And so, another, very popular, theory of representative democracy gets passed around outside of school. Voting is how citizens keep in-check all those politicians who keep using the potent central government to amass more and more control over our lives for the state.

While this theory allows Americans to express their cynicism about politics — and is frequently one of the main themes of election-year rhetoric — it, also, doesn’t really explain the American political process.

Take the recent, several-year-long, squabble over health-care reform in America. If elected representatives really act moderately on behalf of voters’ concerns, then why did it take almost a century for citizens’ concerns over the cost and availability of health care to become a genuine public-policy issue? And why did the results end up being so lame that most citizens consider health-care reform to have been a complete failure?

And, if representatives really wish only to seize more power and control for the central government, then why have they repeatedly failed to create socialized medical care, or at least socialized medical insurance, when every other developed nation has found it quite easy, and very popular, to do so for over a century? And why has every president, even those with immense popularity, like Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, or Harry Truman, who ever broached the idea of government-managed health-care funding, suddenly found himself a persona non grata within his own government?

The truth is, in America, elected officials neither represent voters’ concerns, nor are they interested in expanding government power. Instead, they represent the concerns of those who finance their campaigns and employ lobbyists. Citizens can vote, if they like, but they will only have the opportunity to vote for those who will represent the big businesses that can afford to sponsor candidates and purchase influence.

In order to understand how this situation came about, you’ll need to understand both the nature of power and the history of institutionalized power in the West.

Power is, simply put, the ability to achieve desired results. Mostly, it comes in four variations: authority, reference, resources, and coercion. Authority is the willingness to arbitrate disputes and accept responsibility for group action. Reference is the ability to make sense of things or know how to do things. Resourcefulness is the capacity to determine how materials will be used and distributed. And coercion is just punishing or misleading others.

Long ago, the institutions that people created to make their lives simpler started exerting more power over their people than vice versa, largely because it had made sense for people to create their institutions around one or more power bases. For instance, government and courts exercise authoritative power, the church and academy exercise reference power, merchants and corporations exercise the power of resource distribution, and the military and police exercise coercive power.

Not surprisingly, you can understand the general character of any society by looking at the power bases of its most dominant institutions. Particulars will vary, but, inevitably, most of a societies’ goals and public policy will serve the institutions whose power most influences that society.

For instance, during Europe’s medieval period, coercion and reference determined the character of life. Armed and armored aristocrats ensured, through coercion, that the royal houses’ authority and the serfs’ agricultural production bolstered the aristocrats’ power. The Catholic Church also, through reference, ensured that royalty was dependent on it, for legitimacy, and also kept the trade guilds dependent on it, by commissioning the cathedrals and accouterments necessary to display its reference power.

Eventually, though, the merchants’ resource-based power found a way to tip the balance in society. Merchants began funding the small and constantly-indebted royalty, who, in turn, began adjudicating disputes in the merchants’ favor. Soon, states and businesses found that they could match or even dominate the aristocracy’s and church’s power. In response, both the aristocracy and the church began to operate outside their power bases, by engaging in adjudication or business, like their rivals, and were soon rejected by a population which saw that they had been corrupted by other institutions.

This led to the colonial period in the West, where the state’s authority and the merchants’ resourcefulness dominated society. Merchants continued to fund the state as long as the state would use its authority to validate their actions. Merchants patronized and publicized scholars who would use their reference power to explain how markets could manage everything. And states, at the request of the merchants, who they could not afford to ignore, socialized the military and police’s coercive power and then attempted to expand themselves into neighboring territories, and even in territory overseas, so the merchants could acquire new markets and continue to fund the state’s actions.

When, in the modern period, colonies, like the ones in North America, began to rebel against the practices of their colonizers, they attempted to limit the government’s authoritative power, believing that this must have been the means by which corporate merchants had controlled and exploited them. So, the fledgling United States limited the scope of government, attempted to make it accountable to the populace through representative democracy, and, just to be safe and avoid a repeat of the Middle Ages, barred it from colluding with the church. But the founding fathers didn’t see the need to put limits on business institutions — which the merchants’ scholars had told them were completely benign — and so corporations’ resource power quickly grew to fill the void left by limited authoritative power, limited reference power, and limited coercive power.

This oversight soon became obvious. Thomas Jefferson hoped, early in American history, to “crush, in its birth, the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge [us] to a trial by strength.” But it was too late. With no other institutions empowered to stand in their way, companies easily dominated society. It’s not that they prevented other institutions from exerting influence. After all, all institutions require the use of some degree of authority, reference, resourcefulness, and coercion, but dominant institutions can, and do, set the terms under which others may operate.

The academy, for instance, may exert reference power, as long as it continues to conduct corporate research and train potential employees. The military may exert coercive power, as long as it continues to buy expensive weapons systems and deploy itself to regions unfriendly to American markets. The government may continue to exert authoritative power, as long as it continues to adjudicate in favor of big business and doesn’t tax wealthy corporations.

Now, remember all that fuss over health-care reform? Knowing that corporate institutions set the agenda and terms of public policy, we can see why it took almost a century for health-care costs to become a policy issue. It’s because it wasn’t until now that the costs finally reached the point where creditors feared the growing number of bankruptcies, which were occurring for no reason other than because people were getting sick and then trying to pay their medical bills. Want to know why it took an entire legislative term filled with political infighting to end up with a mostly-useless law that’s filled with concessions to various industries? It’s because bankers, employers, hospitals, and insurers had conflicting interests and used their bought-and-paid-for representatives to fight each other to a stand-still. Want to know why we’ll probably see the legislative infighting over this issue continue through the next term? It’s because some factions of industry are still getting hurt by health-care costs, and the law hasn’t fixed that yet.

So, two years from now, most of us will, again, return to the polls to vote for representatives, thinking we’re either getting the issues which concern us to the table, or limiting our representatives’ urge to expand government power. But, really, we’ll only be validating the choices big business has already made for us through their institutional funding. And, until our society, as a whole, refuses to allow big business to keep America in a stranglehold, that’s the way it will continue to be.

Why Bird-Brains Get the Highest Perches

2010-08-04T16:09:00.008-05:00

Everyone wants to believe that the administrators and executives perched at the top of our institutions and organizations hold their jobs because of their exceptional competence. After all, that’s the way things are supposed to work in a meritocracy, right? Sure, and so it must be only our bosses who are bird-brains. It couldn’t possibly be everyone else’s too. Or could it? Well, it probably is, and the fact that our higher-ups never seem to act with any more insight than we would expect of our pets isn’t as controversial as you might suspect. In fact, we’ve spent centuries trying to explain why our bosses seem better suited for pecking at seeds than making policy.

The 19th century gave us the Ivory Tower theory, which supposes that our big-wigs aren’t incompetent as much as they’re just cut-off. Their positions prevent them from seeing what’s really going on, and so they’re doomed to create irrelevant policy. But this doesn’t explain why executives frequently dump their stock in a company long before outsiders know that something’s gone badly wrong, or why administrators always seem to have a crisis-management strategy set up long before a scandal emerges. They’re obviously not so cut-off that they can’t see an impending disaster, are they? So, the 20th century moved on to the Peter Principle and its funnier cousin, the Dilbert Principle, to explain executive incompetence. In these theories, meritocracy itself creates clueless big-wigs. People are either promoted until they’re too lousy at their jobs to warrant further promotion, and just stay there messing up things, or they just get promoted out of harm’s way, because they’re too incompetent to be trusted with the more practical jobs. But neither of these theories explain why organizations will install people exactly like the person they just fired, or usually, just pushed into “early retirement,” when they go outside the organization for “new blood.” Institutions, it seems, actually seek out clueless people for their highest positions.

Now, why would they do that? Well, first, the nature of competence itself produces some surprising effects. While there are a few people, usually called prodigies, who are exceptionally good at something without knowing how or why they are, most people need to understand the point of an activity before they can become competent at it. Then, there are those who understand, but cannot do very well, and those who both understand and can do well. Both of these groups have the capacity to judge competence, both in themselves and in others, because they understand what an activity is about. But, oddly enough, the largest group of people are those who so completely misunderstand the point of something that they’re not only incompetent, they’re also completely unable to judge competence, and so they’re actually incapable of knowing that they’re awful at a task.

The two sociologists, named Dunning and Kruger, who attempted to measure the extent of this problem in society, panicked at the results of their surveys. Among the more disturbing implications of the existence and extent of this phenomenon is the fact that those who “get it” and those who don't “get it” will never be able to understand, or even communicate in a meaningful way, with each other. Worse still, since there’s no way for someone this incompetent at something to realize it, there’s also no way for anyone, including you, to know when you are so wrong you’re not even wrong.

For instance, it’s entirely possible that those executives at the celebrated energy trading company that created blackouts throughout the West Coast in order to justify absurd rate hikes, and then invested the proceeds in bizarre investment schemes that lost so much money that they had to hide their financial condition with “creative accounting” were actually as smart as they, and everyone else in the business community, claimed. Or, it’s also possible they were just plain clueless, as the more charitable of the rest of us think. We can never really know for sure, but I think that not only were they clueless, but that their cluelessness was exactly what made them eligible to hold their positions in the first place, because complete incompetence turns out to be a very useful trait for those who administer broken institutions.

You see, institutions are designed to serve a function or fix a problem in society, but they’re also designed to perpetuate themselves. Of course, things change, and so, eventually, every institution will become obsolete, but no institution will ever dissolve itself or change itself beyond recognition. And here is the problem. If a broken organization gives someone competent the authority to make changes, then this person would feel obligated to reshape the organization into something it isn’t. This means that the organization would, essentially, cease to exist. This, of course, is unacceptable, so, instead, organizations will rely on people who are so wrong that they can’t even realize they’re wrong to ensure the organization’s own survival. In other words, if you’re smart enough to question an institution, then you’re too smart for that institution to give you the authority to change it.

Competence is a threat, not an asset, to any entrenched institution. And this is why we keep seeing absurd policies being promulgated and why we keep seeing things like, for instance, the most powerful economist in the world having to admit to a congressional committee that he didn’t see our latest economic collapse coming because it never even occurred to him that something might be wrong with market theory. As Upton Sinclair pointed out, long ago, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Carrots and Sticks Are for Mules

2010-06-15T17:02:00.009-05:00

Economists and politicians will tell you that they know exactly what motivates people. We are, according to some of their most fundamental beliefs, much like recalcitrant mules, who must be threatened with punishments and coaxed by rewards into doing anything worthwhile or, at least, non-destructive. And so, when energy companies lie about their ability to handle deep-water oil-well blowouts, despite the rewards that reasonable assessments and simple safety precautions would have yielded and the penalties that fines, clean-up, and plummeting stock prices will exact, both economists and politicians act astonished.

How can things like that happen when we’ve designed so many penalties and rewards into the system, they wonder? And, come to think of it, why has the No-Child-Left-Behind Act, which demands that schools meet test-based performance targets or suffer financial hardships, lowered the quality of education so far so fast? And how could America’s decades-old get-tough-on-crime policies have had such counter-productive results? Could it be that people aren’t just like mules? Might carrots and sticks have adverse affects on human behavior?

It’s entirely possible. Mules only have the capacity to perform the kinds of mindless, repetitive tasks that are easily measured and notoriously unappealing. They can, even if they don’t want to, turn a donkey wheel around all day long, and you can sit by and count how many times that wheel spins in a day. If you want the wheel to go faster, just tie a carrot in front of the donkey’s harness and swat the donkey’s rump every once in a while, and, sure enough, you can easily count how much faster the wheel starts spinning. While beasts of burden have been around for a long time, the idea that people could, or would need, to be motivated in the same manner as draft animals didn’t become predominant until our technology and economics morphed into a system where most of the work available to people bore striking similarities to tasks that used to be performed by beasts of burden. Industrial agriculture and assembly lines created human mules, whose tasks were mindless, repetitive, miserable, and easily measured. Count the number of bushels or machine parts workers put together, and then punish them for not doing enough while rewarding them for doing more, and, just like donkeys, their productivity increases.

As soon as economists and politicians saw this, they figured they had discovered the key to human motivation: just measure, reward, and punish, and people will, naturally, transform themselves into hyper-efficient productivity machines. Want administrators to do better work? Link their pay to company profits or stock prices. Want students to learn more? Link schools’ finances to test scores. Want to reduce crime? Link prosecutors’ and policemen’s job security to conviction rates and crime statistics. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, watching oil geysers poison the Gulf of Mexico, high-schools graduate functionally-illiterate students with weak reasoning skills, and American incarceration rates, false convictions, and criminal activity soar makes it quite clear that something did, in fact, go badly wrong. And what’s wrong is that these tasks aren’t the same sort of tasks that mules could, but wouldn’t wish to, perform. Things like managing companies, educating students, eradicating crime, and, pretty much, all of normal human activity, are things that require some amount of comprehension, creativity, and judgment. And they’re all things that people actually wish to do and do reasonably well. There’s no need to penalize or reward people for doing these things, and doing so only changes the goals of these activities, anyhow, because, despite what most managers will tell you, there’s really no way to measure the quality of any activity that requires any sort of cognition.

Why? Because quality and quantity are fundamentally different concepts, and the very few things they have in common with each other aren't things that people particularly value. As the statistician and quality-control expert W. Edwards Deming put it, “the most important things we need to manage can’t be measured.” Ask yourself, is profiteering really the same as producing sufficient, clean energy? Is test-taking really the same as learning? Are conviction rates and crime statistics really the same thing as safe, uncorrupted environments? Of course not. And it turns out that they’re not even good indicators of each other.

When people are told that their financial well-being is dependent on profits, test-scores, or crime-statistics, then, just like donkeys, that’s exactly what they’ll start, mindlessly, churning out. Instead of producing safe, clean energy, they’ll lie about the hazards of highly-profitable deep-water oil drilling. Instead of engaging students’ curiosity while encouraging them to critically assess concepts, they’ll just drill students on test answers. Instead of investigating the root causes of crimes and attempting to create safer and less corrupted environments, they’ll just convince juries to convict the innocent while fudging crime statistics. They may hate the work that they once aspired to, but the measurements, penalties, and rewards make it unambiguously clear what their real jobs are: to make the numbers look good, or suffer the consequences.

Despite what some of our societies’ most dogmatic cynics believe, most people actually do wish to make contributions, learn about the world and each other, and help everyone satisfy their basic human desires and needs. Carrots and sticks don’t turn apathetic people into productive contributers, they just turn well-meaning humans into recalcitrant mules.

Introversion Isn't an Illness

2010-05-05T13:13:00.008-05:00

I’m an introvert.

Chances are, at least a quarter of you are too.

Several generations ago, I probably wouldn’t have needed to point this out. Back then, introversion was a well-understood, and even well-respected, phenomenon. Extroverts used to refer to us as “deep, sensitive souls” or “strong, silent types.” Now, however, we just get called things like “weird” or “anti-social.” So, maybe, it’s time to clear a few things up.

Introversion isn’t an illness, a handicap, or a social problem. It’s a trait that about a quarter to a third of the population has been — always has been, and always will be — born with. It doesn’t make us hate or fear other people. It doesn’t make us want to never speak or want to always be alone. Introverts are just predisposed to noticing and thinking about things. Simply put, introverts pay attention to the rest of world and then think before we speak, while extroverts pay attention to each other while thinking aloud.

Of course, this means introverts speak differently from extroverts. We’re quieter. We’re not bothered by lapses in conversations. We also don’t tend to get enthusiastic about things like sports, or movies, or gossip, or even ourselves, because these topics usually provide us with very little to think about.

And introverts don’t just speak differently than extroverts, we also behave differently. We have very little interest in, and are often annoyed at, the political games extroverts tend to play with each other. We’re neither followers nor leaders, and we can’t grok why extroverts expect us to behave like one or the other. Instead, we tend to be independent, and will react very poorly to coercion or even attempts at “consensus building.” Because we think a lot, we know life is just a little more elaborate than any one idea or or one set of rules can handle, so when we see a large group of people all looking, acting, and saying the same stuff, we tend to head for the door rather than try to fit in. We’re just not interested in being anyone other than ourselves.

This doesn’t mean that we “don’t play well with others,” it just means we play differently with others. We expect people to be different from one another. We even like that. Disagreements don’t bother us in the least bit, but insults, dismissals, and peer pressure do. So, yes, you’ll find us in groups, but they won’t be the large, loud, homogeneous ones, they’ll be the small, quiet, diverse ones. And, yes, you’ll also find us hanging out by ourselves. But that’s not because we don’t like other people; it’s because we aren’t afraid to be on our own.

And introversion isn’t the same thing as shyness either. Introversion is thoughtfulness. Shyness is anxiety. If you think you’ve noticed a lot of introverts who are also shy, that’s because many of us are. But there’s a reason for that, and it’s not what you might expect. At some point, a few generations ago, people apparently decided that there was something wrong with introverts. We just didn’t seem to fit in and, therefore, needed to be “cured” of introversion and “socialized” to act like extroverts. And so, now, it’s become commonplace for people to hassle, harangue, ignore, or ostracize introverts, thinking that that’ll “teach us” to be more extroverted. But what it actually does is demonstrate that other people will be hostile to introverts. Hostility causes anxiety, and social anxiety is shyness. So, when you see people giving an introvert a hard time, by gossiping about him or ostracizing him, you’re not seeing people helping someone with shyness, you’re seeing people making someone shy. And this isn’t just true of introverts. Hassle or ignore an extrovert long enough, and he’ll end up shy too. After all, that’s what shyness is: social anxiety caused by a hostile environment. It’s not inherently related to introversion.

However, like shy people, introverts don’t tend to know as many people as extroverts, and we don’t meet people as frequently as extroverts either. But unless we’re also shy, it’s not for the reasons extroverts might think. The truth is, introverts don’t need to know as many people as extroverts. We actually do like to spend some time alone, and we know other people do too. So, we’re not going to bother you if you look busy or uninterested. We’re not being aloof or wary, we’re just taking things as they seem. We don’t like to be interrupted when we’re occupied, and we won’t assume that anyone else would either. That’s just how we see the world and each other. For us, this really isn’t a choice; it’s how our brains function.

Biologists have confirmed that introverts and extroverts have, quite literally, different minds from each other. You can’t change an introvert into an extrovert anymore than you could change an extrovert into an introvert. We’re “wired together” differently, and researchers believe there’s a good reason for that. Introverts and extroverts provide balance for each other. Societies need people who think about things as well as people who are happy to just go ahead and see what happens. We need people who are paying attention to what’s going on as well as people who believe that everything will turn out okay, regardless. We need people who are actually listening and thinking about what people are saying as well as people who will just say anything until something happens. We need people who won’t just go with the flow as well as people who just want to fit in and get along. And, we need people who are thoughtful and sensitive as well as people who are impulsive and brash.

So, if you’re an introvert, don’t pay attention to anyone who wants to make you feel bad about it, and if you’re an extrovert, don’t try to punish introverts for not being like you. We understand, and can accept, extroverts, and we think it’s about time that extroverts tried to understand, and accept, us too.

Privacy Is One Thing, Silence Another

2009-11-30T20:23:00.016-06:00

Everyone's favorite golf celebrity just spent several days in the hospital after running his SUV into a fire hydrant and tree at the end of his driveway. His face was bruised and lacerated even though the accident was minor enough that the airbags in his car didn't deploy. His neighbors called the police after they noticed him lying unconscious on the driveway. He says his wife heroically smashed the rear windows of his car with a golf club so she could drag him from the dented vehicle, but, really, he'd rather not talk about it.

So, let's go ahead and respect his privacy and leave it at that. Instead, let's talk about something completely different: domestic violence against men.

Then again, most people would really rather not talk about that either. Because really, there's nothing to talk about. We all know it doesn't happen because how could it? Women just aren't like that. And even if some of them might want to beat their boyfriends or husbands, they wouldn't be able to because men are, on average, larger than women. And the only way to attack and injure other people is by being larger than them, right?

Well, maybe that isn't right. And maybe that's part of why we either mock or ignore men who have been assaulted by their girlfriends or wives. Remember how funny it was when that professional pitcher was beaten so badly by his petite wife that he had to miss several games? It was so funny that after he had recovered and returned to pitching, the stadium's music director couldn't resist playing the music video that had made his wife famous over the PA system.

And when there's no obvious way to mock someone for being assaulted by his wife, we'll just ignore it instead, like those reports you probably didn't hear about the world champion boxer who was beaten and strangled to death by his diminutive wife last summer. Apparently, the local police wanted to rule it a suicide, but couldn't explain how the man had managed to bruise himself so badly while choking himself to death with a purse strap.

The police tend to be like that in cases like these. In fact, it's policy in most American jurisdictions for the police to arrest a man every time a report of domestic violence is made. What police learn when they arrive at the scene doesn't matter. What does matter is that someone is arrested and that the someone who is arrested is male.

The reason we have policies like these isn't because government agencies believe that domestic violence always consists of men attacking women — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have known for years that about half of all domestic violence consists of women attacking men — it's because talking about the fact that women are just as prone to violence as men will get public officials labeled as anti-feminists or misogynists.

Mandatory-arrest policies, and the associated notion that male-on-female violence is the norm, gained popularity in the mid-80s, when the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment showed that if women were "empowered" to instantly jail a man after a fight, domestic violence decreased. If this happened, scholars reasoned, then the real problem must be men systematically bludgeoning women into submission. All women needed was to be able to threaten men with imprisonment, and the problem of domestic violence would go away.

Of course, this didn't happen. And no one has ever been able to duplicate the results of the Minneapolis experiment either. But that wasn't important, because the idea that men were oppressing women through violence turned out to be remarkably popular. It fit right in with the equally popular notion that men had been conspiring to oppress women by various means throughout history.

And so, for the last few decades, men who were once scorned for not being "manly" enough to control their wives or girlfriends were, instead, just ignored. They were turned away from family-violence shelters. The police viewed their stories with suspicion. The courts punished them for provoking their spouses. And if a male victim of domestic violence were too notable for any of those tactics, we'd just resort to the old-fashioned way of handling these things. We'd mock him for not being "man enough" to handle his wife or girlfriend in the first place.

But hiding the fact that women assault men just as often as men assault women isn't easy. Over time, people start to notice that something's wrong. The signs of domestic abuse we've all been told about seem to appear just as often in the men we know as the women. And male celebrities keep having strange accidents at home at almost the same rate as female celebrities.

Eventually, some people will get suspicious and start looking into things. And what they'll find isn't just that real data hasn't been publicized, it's that fake data has been promoted. For instance, have you been told that women are far more likely to be seriously injured in a domestic fight than men? Then you've been lied to. According to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, men are almost twice as likely to be seriously injured in a domestic fight as women.

How can this be? Well, maybe, aggression isn't determined by gender. Maybe it's determined by temperament. And, maybe, the ability to injure someone isn't related to bulk. Maybe, its related to viciousness. And, maybe, men and women are both from the same planet after all, and both are just as prone to violence as each other. And, maybe, it's time for us to recognize this and stop pretending otherwise.

If that golfer I mentioned doesn't want to talk to the public about what happened to him the other night, that's fine. He shouldn't have to. But the police should have to talk to him about it just the same as they would if his name had been Michelle Wie instead of Tiger Woods. Domestic violence is no less harmful, or less prevalent, when the victim is male instead of female.

The Merchants of Melancholy

2009-10-15T13:57:00.006-05:00

Depressed consumers give more than $10 billion a year to drug companies, hoping that corporate chemists really have found a cure for the melancholy that afflicts them. But even our psychiatrists' certainty that chemical imbalances trigger depression has begun to waver. After all, the doctors of the classical and medieval world were also certain that alchemical imbalances spurred the affliction they called melancholia, yet the modern world's ability to manufacture pharmaceuticals hasn't alleviated the problem; instead, it appears to have aggravated it.

The ancients saw depression as a troubling, if unusual, condition. But by the early 1700s, physicians, like Dr. George Cheyne, began worrying about a "class of distemper with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our ancestors" which causes "almost one third of the complaints of the people." And today, most everyone will be afflicted by it, some for years at a time. Depression is the modern world's leading cause of disability.

But what could explain the spread of despondency over the last four centuries? Might nature see some evolutionary advantage to depression that encourages it to rewire our brains? Probably. Both biologists and psychologists now suspect that depression is analogous to pain. Just as pain warns us about environmental hazards to our bodies, and goads us into withdrawing from, or eliminating, whatever is hurting us, depression is probably warning us about social hazards to our minds, and drives us into withdrawing from, or eliminating, whatever is hurting our psyches. But nature hasn't spawned a new variety of people who are more disposed to depression; man has just contrived a new variation of society which predisposes us to depression.

This new society began in the 17th century, when the West transformed itself into modernity. It would produced people who would rather labor than play, who would suspect cooperation instead of competition, and who would insist on specialization over generalization. Religion, economics, and training took us from pastoral peace-of-mind to modern melancholy.

The Protestant Reformation is one of the markers of modernism. Dour Calvinists and Puritans rebelled against the festive Catholics' stern, but forgiving, God, who saw the pleasures in life as a naughty, but entirely forgivable, relief from the workaday world. And they replaced him with an unforgiving God, who would damn us if we succumbed to pleasurable vices instead of hard work. The Protestants saw our world as a vale of tears: a labor camp where we all serve out the sentence for Adam and Eve's original sin. Only constant toil could earn us a reprieve from this God. And while few people still believe in a world quite this grim today, the notion that anything which feels good must, somehow, be bad, is still entrenched in modern society, and so is the work ethic. We may no longer labor to prevent the Devil from stealing our souls, but we still feel guilty when we stop working to have fun.

This need to toil also aided the modern world's renewal of mercantilism. Feudal farmers and craftsmen had lived in a world where their neighbors weren't their competitors. Farmers worked the land with each other and craftsmen banded together in guilds, so peasants never needed to undermine each others' efforts. In the medieval world, competition for wealth and status was the curse of the gentry. But mercantilism not only freed peasants from feudalism, it also condemned them to the suspicions that plagued their former masters. Now everyone, not just the lords and ladies, felt the need to compete with each other for wealth, status, and even survival. In a mercantile world, you can't really trust anyone else, because their profit comes only at your expense. And profit is not only everyone's means of survival, it's also the measure of everyone's worth.

This new need to profit off everyone else fed into another staple of modernism, specialization. Large profits require large scale. And scale comes most easily through organization and regimentation. Workers are most efficient when they only do one thing, over and over, in a constant, predictable manner. But Adam Smith, one of the founding fathers of modern economics, saw a human cost to this and warned us about how alienating this specialization could be: "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, ... always the same" falls into a stupor "acquired at the expense of his intellectual ... and social virtues." Even worse, specialization not only numbs you to your work, and your environment, it also alienates you from anything you might enjoy doing. In a specialized world, storytelling, music, and sports are no longer activities we all participate in. They're spectator activities: commodities that must be purchased, like anti-depressants, to relieve us from the from the mind-numbing world we've created for ourselves.

In other words, the very same ideas which make it easy for the modern world to churn out billions of dollars worth of anti-depressants may also create the need for those anti-depressants. Maybe we should listen less to the imperatives of modernity and more to moods of our minds. We're not depressed because we can't manufacture enough pills, we're depressed because the way we manufacture those pills deprives us of the conviviality, trust, and engagement we need to be happy.

The President's Necktie

2008-10-06T19:08:00.010-05:00

I'm sure you've noticed how poorly the American political system represents its citizens' interests. Bluntly put, our government is broken. But I could never figure out exactly why it didn't work right until I witnessed an election for the student-government's presidency in my first year at a university.

The school wasn't in very good shape. Tuition, increasingly, went to the football team. As many as two-hundred students were assigned to the same class. Most subjects were taught by graduate students. Professors spent the majority of their time working on proprietary studies sponsored by corporations. The city council was thinking about condemning some of our dormitories. And students didn't feel safe crossing the campus at night anymore.

Now, this university's charter provided the student government with the authority to establish and change school policy. So, as you can imagine, most of the students believed they had a lot at stake in that year's student-government election. And, as the campaign heated up, one issue, especially, grabbed everyone's attention.

Would the challenger for the presidency wear a necktie in office?

Sound familiar? It should, because, as the United States begins sliding into an economic depression, and our government's military expenditures and corporate welfare sink it into unprecedented debt, and our expensive, bureaucratic, health-care system pushes more and more of those who have access to it into bankruptcy, and our infrastructure crumbles and is passed off to companies, and corporate globalization taints our food supply and drives employment overseas, the issues that dominate this year's presidential campaign are just as absurd and irrelevant as neckties.

We argue about whether one candidate's Arabic-sounding name means he's, secretly, a Muslim or not, or how another candidate's imprisonment in a POW camp may have either made him an tough-minded maverick or a spiteful imbecile. We marvel at how charming and folksy one of the vice-presidential candidates seems and how outspoken the other one sounds.

Just like the co-eds in that student-government election, we act as though we're voting for a homecoming king and queen instead of electing civic policy-makers. Puzzling, isn't it?

Well, it's only baffling until you realize that the reason political candidates and their constituents spend most of their time talking about neckties, names, and personalities instead of public policy is because American politicians don't forge public policy. People with lots of money do that.

And this was as true at my university as it is in society at large. The school's administration controlled the school's finances, so regardless of what the university's charter said, it set policy for the school. And administrators were much more concerned with what wealthy, sports-loving alumni liked, and what grant-giving corporations wanted to learn, than they were with what meager tuition-paying students needed. The student-government rubber-stamped the administration's policies because they couldn't afford to do anything else.

And, whether we like to talk about it or not, the money American politicians need to mount expensive advertising campaigns for election, and maintain two separate residences, one at the seat of government and one wherever they live, comes, almost exclusively, from corporate lobbyists and campaign contributers. So, if they want to keep getting elected and show up for work, then, yes, they're going to be much more concerned with what makes their corporate sponsors satisfied than with what we tax-paying citizens need.

Don't think so? Think that sounds a just a little too corrupt and conspiratorial? Then take another look at our candidates' quickly- and vaguely-described public policies. How will they handle our economic crisis? They'll both give taxpayer money to reckless, incompetently-run corporations, after they've both already toughened-up bankruptcy laws for debt-ridden citizens. What about all that military spending and warfare? They both think that it just might be necessary to invade another oil-rich country, which doesn't allow Western oil conglomerates to operate in its territory, for Americans' security. How will they deal with a health-care system that's been corrupted by insurance companies and other business interests? They'll both rely on insurance companies and other businesses to do a better job of taking care of us. What about the tainted food and outsourced jobs that have resulted from corporate globalization? They both assure us that further globalization by trans-national corporations will, eventually, be beneficial to all of us.

Well, these policies certainly benefit someone, but it's not citizens. And if these things sound awfully familiar too, then that's because they're the same policies that political candidates always support. In fact, they're the same policies that have caused the problems we're all facing today. They're policies that benefit the business associations and corporate conglomerates whose money candidates depend on to finance election campaigns. Now, if you had to choose between talking about that and talking about whether your opponent seems too young and inexperienced or too old and sickly, then which kind of topic would you choose to emphasize?

I know which kind of topic the incumbent student-government candidate favored. And it wasn't university policy that catered to alumni and big business. Sure, he insisted that football teams and commercial research were, actually, beneficial for students, but, mainly, he wanted us to notice that no one had ever seen his opponent wear a tie. Obviously, if the guy couldn't even commit to wearing a tie, then he couldn't be a serious candidate. After all, how presidential can you be without a necktie?

And, whether or not you wear a necktie, or a lapel pin that looks like a little American flag, how can you represent citizens' interests if you owe your candidacy to your big-business sponsors?

Free Markets and Freedom

2008-07-07T12:48:00.010-05:00

Over the last several decades, a new idea about freedom has, slowly, eroded our beliefs about what freedom really means. Politicians, business leaders, economists, and even scholars, have been telling us that the one true freedom — the freedom that can safely replace all those older notions about freedom from injustice, fear, or deprivation, and freedom of expression, mobility, and self-determination — is, oddly enough, the freedom to be ... greedy.

Of course, they don't put it in those terms. That would just sound absurd. Instead, they tell us that free markets and personal freedom are, actually, the same thing. You can't have one without the other because, really, markets are the only thing that can provide you with freedom. You see, if every human want or need can be mediated through the market, and they're quite sure this is possible, then restricting or regulating markets just prevents people from obtaining their freedom. The greedier we allow ourselves to become, the freer we become.

So, deregulate the economy and get rid of those oversight agencies, these people demand. Push our economics and corporations into every nook and cranny of the globe, they advise. Privatize public services and sell off the public's infrastructure, they insist. Legalize victimless crimes and decriminalize the black market, they beg. It's the only way to insure freedom.

Now, you may think their reasoning sounds a little wonky. You might, for instance, remember that many people only had the freedom to live in company-owned towns and spend their waking hours working for starvation wages in the unregulated market environment of the Industrial Revolution. Even those that managed to hang on to their middle-class status were only free to buy the, frequently, tainted products the robber barons offered them while watching their world become more frightening, unjust, and poverty-stricken. But, yes, the wealthy were free to be as greedy as they liked and they could buy, pretty much, anything, including freedom from what they were inflicting on everyone else. You might even remember something similar happening in Russia, and Indochina, and Latin America, and, now, China during their experiments in unregulated markets.

But, finally, some scholars have begun to doubt that free markets lead to freedom. They've correlated the extent of market regulation in a nation to the extent of human rights abuses that occur in that nation. And they've found that there is, in fact, a clear correlation, but it's not the correlation they had been told to expect. Apparently, the freer the market, the less free the people.

But how could this be? Throughout the Cold War, we were told that free markets are democratic, while anything else is authoritarian. After all, what could possibly be a better way to vote than by voting with your dollars? Is there really a reason to think that unhampered markets might hamper human rights? Surely, only government interference can deprive people of freedom.

But maybe the word free means something different for markets than it means for people, and, maybe, markets aren't as benevolent as we've been told. Maybe there's a reason citizens keep demanding that their governments reign in the activities of domineering market players. Maybe market forces alone can deprive people of freedom.

I know some people will feel uncomfortable with this notion. Eurasia has used markets for as long as it's had a history. And America was born at the same time as capitalism, that ultimate expression of free markets. The United States and capitalism are twins, and Europe and Asia's markets are our parents, and we all love each other very much. But, if we really want to explore the idea that unfettered markets might fetter people, we'll still need be honest with ourselves about what markets actually do, instead of just reciting what they're supposed to do. It might seem like a kind of betrayal, but I'm sure the invisible hand will forgive us, so let's go ahead and take a look around and see.

Can markets deprive people of freedom from injustice? Well, we all know markets aren't fair. Businesses with a lot of resources can, easily, trounce smaller businesses, employees, and consumers through any number of methods. Their accumulation of resources allow them to absorb a great deal of temporary, or local, loss while applying a wide range of long-term strategies in an effort to extract more profit from people. In fact, businesses with a lot of resources at their disposal can manipulate and corner entire markets all by themselves. Everyone, from consumers to laborers to businessmen, can be bullied by a corporation. We've all seen this happen, and that's why we have anti-trust regulations, labor regulations, and consumer-protection regulations. Markets are, by their nature, unjust.

Can markets deny people freedom from fear? As pretty much any manager can tell you, businesses actually rely on fear. They want their employees to fear firings, their competitors to fear bankruptcy, and their consumers to be afraid of not buying their products and services. FUD, or fear, uncertainty, and doubt, is a well-established, and very successful, business-management tactic. That's why we have regulatory agencies who monitor business practices. Markets really can, and frequently do, create fear.

Can markets create deprivation? The truth is, markets can't exist without deprivation. There'd be no point to them otherwise. Without markets, we'd all have to live like those primitive hunters-and-gatherers, or those silly hippies, and actually cooperate and share things with each other. To prevent this from happening, markets actually create deprivation, so they can, then, alleviate it, for a price. Don't think so? Ask yourself how many people needed a computer 5 years ago, a phone 50 years ago, or a car 100 years ago. No one needed any of those things back then, did they? People could take them or leave them, but, now, being deprived of any of one of them can cripple someone. That's why we try to regulate markets. They're very good at creating deprivation.

Can markets limit freedom of expression? It might not seem like it. Just look at all those communications devices and all that mass-media content that markets push. But look a little closer and you might notice something disturbing. Markets won't allow communications that threaten profit. Researchers who can prove that certain products and practices are harmful frequently find themselves slandered, fired, and unemployable. Employees who complain about their businesses' unsavory activities find themselves without a means of support, and those who blow the whistle on criminal practices will also find themselves unemployable. Journalists who write stories that their publishers think might frighten off advertisers or turn away their audience end up having to find another job. Even consumers have been sued for publishing, or in some cases, just publicly saying, things that expose corrupt business practices. You might think these things only happen rarely, but you would be wrong. That's why we have whistle-blower-protection regulations, free-press regulations, and regulations that limit businesses' ability to sue consumers. Markets really do censor expression.

Can markets restrict people's freedom of mobility? Again, a quick glance tells us the opposite, but a closer look reveals something very different. Market players can't profit from labor that can easily move from place to place looking for better wages. And companies are loathe to hire managers who aren't anchored down by a mortgage or dependents. If you move from job to job or town to town too much, you end up looking too "unreliable" for long-term employment. Worse, companies, using the resources they've accumulated, can always, quickly, leave people behind. Remember when those folks in the Rust Belt wouldn't work for peanuts? Manufacturers just stranded workers there, without enough money to leave, while they headed for a country that would tolerate sustenance wages. And let's face it, you aren't going anywhere if your employer doesn't allow it. Want to travel on a vacation? Then hope your country has labor regulations that ensure vacation time. Otherwise, you're stuck exactly where your boss wants you, working, because markets restrict labor's movement as much as possible.

Can markets usurp freedom of self-determination? Surely, if nothing else, markets allow for freedom of choice. We've all been told that we can be whoever we want, and have whatever we choose, as long as we work hard, right? Well, no. Sorry, but you can't be an artist or philosopher if the market starves you for doing it. And, unfortunately, you can't even have clothes that weren't made in a sweatshop — no matter how hard you try — because sweatshops are so profitable that the market won't offer anything else. And this turns out to be true for, pretty much, everything in a market. You do what's profitable, whether you like it or not. There's a reason we all feel like we're caught in a rat race, doing things that make us miserable, and buying things we don't care for, instead of spending our lives in meaningful, constructive ways. And it's the same reason developed countries spend so much time and energy regulating markets. Greed is your boss in the marketplace, and you do exactly what your boss tells you, when he tells you, or you're out on your own. Markets strip us of self-determination.

Now, you might think some of the examples I've used aren't all that bad. After all, we're still alive and kicking, and it's not like the invisible hand of the market has locked us up in prison cells or something. But if you really want to see how bad it can get, spend some time an unregulated, 3rd-world, market economy. You won't doubt for a moment that markets deny people human rights. You'll see working conditions worse than labor camps. You'll see labor activists tracked down and beaten by security guards. You'll see poverty and deprivation that will give you nightmares. You'll see that only the wealthy minority really has freedom.

So, yes, greed is bad, and, yes, markets are based on greed. That's why people keep insisting that their governments prevent businesses from putting profit before people, despite everyone who chants the mantra of unregulated markets. People know better. Free markets don't provide us with freedom. They do the opposite, because the one freedom that will usurp all the other freedoms we need to be secure and healthy is the freedom to be greedy.

Clones for Dinner

2008-01-14T21:46:00.003-06:00

So, was anyone surprised that the FDA told us cloned livestock is okay to eat because, "it is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause the food to be unsafe," on the very same day they also pointed out that, "currently, it is not possible to draw any conclusions regarding the longevity of livestock clones or [the] possible long-term health consequences" of cloning?

If you have been paying attention to the way the FDA approves of new foods and drugs, you wouldn't be surprised. What the FDA is, essentially, saying is, sure, most clones are stillborn, or deformed and have unnervingly short lifespans, but we couldn't prove that the survivors produce unhealthy meat or milk, so the process must be okay. That may not be sound reasoning, but it is the same sort of reasoning the FDA usually uses.

As Margaret Mellon, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said, "The possibility remains that [clones] may harbor subtle genetic defects that could ... make them unsafe for consumption." The truth is we don't know whether cloned livestock produces safe food or not, but we do know that biotech companies want cloned animals on the market, so the FDA is going to let them do it.

Why?

Good question. Livestock doesn't seem to be experiencing any reproductive crises. They're still, happily, creating offspring the same way they always have. And consumers can't see what's so great about these high-tech Frankenfoods either. Despite the poorly-publicized nature of the FDA's investigation, people sent in more than 150,000 complaints about the prospect of genetically-manipulated livestock before the agency had even made a decision.

But the FDA can't seem to figure out how this is any of our business. So the agency decided that food from clones and their offspring will not be labeled as such, preventing consumers, and even distributors, from choosing between cloned or natural meat and dairy products. Most unsettling of all, the lack of labeling will also make it much more difficult for researchers to discover whether or not the clones actually are causing problems in our food supply.

No doubt, biotech firms are very happy with these decisions. Even though cloning livestock may not provide consumers with any real benefits, it will, almost certainly, benefit gene-suppliers. As Henry Ford discovered, quite some time ago, uniformity means efficiency, which means more money for less effort and more market power for competitors to contend with. And, as the software industry figured out, not so long ago, patents mean more money from licensing, and more uniformity, which means a lot more market power to squash competitors with. Uniform, patented, livestock is a biotech company's dream, and a rancher's nightmare.

What we do know about animal cloning, at this point, is that the few animals who survive the process tend to be sickly and short-lived, and ranchers who feel the need to use them will have to contend with their health problems for as long as they survive. Worse still, the marketing advantages that patented strains of livestock give biotech firms will push ranchers into purchasing, and using, these clones — just as farmers have needed to use patented crop strains — no matter how expensive buying and caring for them might be, and no matter whether the ranchers actually want to use them or not, because — just like the farmers — they'll have problems selling their livestock to processors and distributors otherwise. An Italian agricultural union has already promised to "mobilize strongly" against the sale of cloned livestock, if it occurs in Europe.

Even if cloned animals or their offspring really are safe to eat, and, even if consumers and ranchers could, somehow, choose to not buy or raise cloned animals, having large numbers of nearly-identical animals in the food supply still poses a serious risk to all of us.

Monocultures, like the ones biotech companies would like to create, are notoriously fragile. When only one strain of an organism is cultivated in a community, then, when that strain is attacked by any pathogen it happens to be susceptible to, the entire community falls prey. They have none of the genetic variety that would allow many members of the species to survive. We've already seen this happen, repeatedly, with crops. The Irish, for instance, grew only one variety of potato in the 19th century because that variety produced good yields in bad soil. But when a fungus attacked it, the entire nation's potato crop died out in only two years, creating a famine that took more than a million lives. Other varieties of potato were not susceptible to the fungus, but that didn't matter, because the Irish weren't cultivating them. The same sort of thing happened with a strain of grapes in France and also with a strain of corn in America. In all cases, the human and economic losses would have been much less severe had farmers not felt the need to use what were, essentially, cloned crops.

Cloning may, very well, prove to be useful in medicine or other fields. One day, we may even be able to clone mammals without the sort of problems our current methods create. But even when that day arrives, we should still be very careful about what clones are used for and what the consequences of those uses might be. We might all like to think that regulatory agencies such as the FDA will protect our society from hazardous business practices, the way they're supposed to, but until regulators change their standards for approval from "we can't prove it's dangerous" to "we can prove it's safe," we should all pay very close attention to what sort of products businesses want to push on the market. And all of us should be worried when our governments ignore our, genuine, concerns in favor of a few corporations', monetary, concerns.

What I Learned From Hookers

2007-05-21T20:20:00.003-05:00

A few years ago, I did something kind of odd. I talked to prostitutes to see if I could learn why they would try to take money from people for sex. I just couldn't understand why anyone would treat someone else like that. It really baffled me. And so, every once in a while, when women would "offer" to take money from me in this way, I would ask them why they were trying to do that.

Of course, the first people I spoke to, when I wanted to know what was going on, weren't hookers. I don't like being treated like that, and so I really didn't want to speak to them except to express some polite variation of "no way." Instead, I'd ask my buddies about it. But they didn't have much to say except to point out that some people are a little messed up, and it probably had something to do with them being mistreated as children, and that it was a depressing subject and they'd rather talk about something else.

You might notice, as I did, that what my friends said wasn't the thing we often hear about prostitution, which is that it's all men's fault. That didn't surprise me, because no man that I've ever known has liked prostitution. I'm certain every man has had to deal with it, and I'm sure many men accept it, and there's little doubt that a few men think it's a wonderful idea, but, by and large, most of us seem upset by the practice.

And why wouldn't that be the case? The first time someone tried to "turn a trick" on me I thought, initially, that she must be joking. After I figured out that she wasn't, I thought that there must be something horribly wrong with me. And I felt that way for years. I've had prostitutes try to grift money off me in bars, parks, college campuses, convenience stores, and shopping malls. Just the other night, I had someone in the car next to mine try it when I stopped at a traffic light. Despite the way prostitution is typically portrayed in the mass media, it's not, as most men eventually learn, limited to street walkers who have fallen in with the local organized crime scene. They don't dress oddly. They don't act differently. They aren't any more or less attractive than anyone else. To all appearances, prostitution is just something that some women have tried to do to me, on a fairly regular basis, ever since high school.

At business school, I was introduced to some other ideas about why this happens. Business managers, and their students, love their market theories, and they'll apply them to pretty much everything they see. And while none of my teachers addressed this subject, directly, my classmates would, on occasion, voice their theories about prostitution. They figured that men must be inherently unappealing, or women must be fundamentally asexual, or perhaps, prostitution had something to do with "value adding processes" concerning presentation or efficiency or competence or dependability. To business students, these notions fit right in with the rest of our subject matter, except that these theories were, as far as anyone could tell, completely counter-factual.

It was puzzling. If there wasn't anything particularly wrong with me, or other men, and if none of the economic theories made any sense, then, what, exactly, was going on? I got my first real answers when I was on vacation in Las Vegas. Yes, I know, but I wanted to see the shows and the funky architecture and I figured the situation couldn't be much worse there than anywhere else I'd been. Of course, I was wrong; it was worse. But while I was there, I couldn't help but notice some things that weren't quite as obvious elsewhere. For one thing, hookers really don't like to hear "no" as an answer. For another, a startling number of people assumed that I was a prostitute also. The last thing I noticed was that, if you ask, they'll tell you what's up with what they do. And so I did. And I did so on other vacations, and when I moved to another town, and when I moved to still another town. I stopped asking when it became clear that I wasn't going to hear anything but the same stuff over and over again.

What they told me really wasn't all that surprising. It just wasn't what you usually hear. It's not because of childhood trauma. Only one prostitute told me that was the case, and when I asked if that were true, she laughed and admitted she only said so because she thought that "johns" liked to hear it. With few exceptions, and those overseas, it's not because of economic hardship. And it's not because they think of sex as a chore, or because they aren't attracted to men, even though a few of them did say they were homosexual. It's also not because American society has left them with no other options, or because a "patriarchal culture" coerces them into it.

What they told me was that, in general, they engaged in prostitution because they thought men were dumb, or insecure, enough to agree to it, or because they thought that men, in general, were awful people and deserved it. The reasons they disliked men varied, a lot, from men being too "too casual" or "too insistent" about sex, to men being "too possessive" and "clinging," to the idea that "everybody knows" men are abusive or callous.

I don't think this means that the usual reasons we hear for prostitution are false. When I was stationed overseas, in the military, I saw, and heard, things that led me to believe that, in some places, families will sometimes "contract" their children to brothels or prostitution rings to try to get out of debt, and that there are organizations that will claim to be "entertainment" agents, but not tell their clients what they're really signing up for. I've also been to places with economies so broken that people are reduced to cannibalizing each other in whatever way they can manage. And, yes, I'm aware of the fact that some men actually look for hookers, and I'm also sure that there are people who live in places so prudish that prostitution is the only practical alternative to courtship rites or marriage contracts.

But I also think that most prostitutes in the developed world do what they do, mainly, for the reasons they told me. And if you think those reasons sound petty and mean-spirited, then maybe that's because they are. And maybe it's time for us to stop blaming men for the phenomenon. I've tried to work through the tortured reasoning of political activists who claim, to everyone's applause, that the men who get scammed by prostitutes are, somehow, the victimizers, and that hookers are, in some undefined way, the victims of prostitution, but I really can't understand it. I also have a hard time understanding the people who claim it's some sort of victimless crime. Let's not kid ourselves. Even if we pretend that "john's" really like to have their money taken from them, or be treated as if they're so inadequate or repugnant that they should feel grateful for it, prostitution does have an effect on how all of us, both men and women, see, and treat, the opposite sex, and there's no way anyone can construe that effect as a positive one.

What Science Is and Isn't

2007-05-07T13:11:00.004-05:00

I've always had a thing for the natural sciences. You see, when I was a kid, I was something of a bookworm. Okay, I still am, sort of, but back then I had lots of time to read, and play, and do all that other childish stuff that we should all be doing more often, but aren't. Anyhow, in between all of Encyclopedia Brown's reasoned use of information to solve mysteries, and Long John Silver's attempts to mislead and bully his way to a fortune, I read books about dinosaurs. If you were ever a little boy, you probably did too.

But, the thing about dinosaurs is, you can only read about them. You can see people trying to solve problems with information, if you look really hard, and you can see people lying and bullying for money, whether you're looking or not, but dinosaurs are tough to spot. Which leads little kids, like the one I once was, to ask questions, like, how can people possibly know about dinosaurs if no one's ever seen one?

The answer, it turned out, was science. And once I could figure out some of those words scientists liked to use, I couldn't get enough of what they were saying. Scientists, after all, have this way of answering a lot of those questions that kids like to ask. But they didn't answer all of them. In fact, real scientists didn't even try to answer all of them, and they had this irritating way of pointing out that none of their answers were certain, because if they were certain, then they wouldn't be scientists.

Science, I learned, was a very narrow, and very peculiar, way of looking at some aspects of the world. Specifically, it's a vaguely-defined process of reducing things down to their constituent parts, imagining how those parts interact with each other, dreaming up ways to observe those parts doing their thing, and then measuring the degree to which they do or don't behave in accordance with a theory. If they do appear to do what your theory predicts, then you tell lots of other scientists about it and wait for them to replicate your experiment and confirm your theory. It's really pretty clever.

A bunch of guys in the 17th century, who called themselves natural philosophers, came up with this, and, right away, they discovered something that scientists have known ever since. This process, which they eventually called the scientific method, worked great, but it only worked for some aspects of our world, which they eventually named physics, chemistry, and biology, and it never, ever, allowed for a concept which already had a name, called certainty.

Well, all kids have to grow up, and when I did, I went off to have some scholastic adventures in academia. Not surprisingly, one of the subjects I studied in school was geology. Not only was it one of the natural sciences, it was the meta science, which combined all the other sciences: physics, chemistry, and biology. It was great. Well, it was great up until I figured out that what most geologists end up doing is wandering around in the middle of nowhere looking for oil.

And so I wandered around looking for a discipline that wouldn't lead to a job that would make me miserable. And my academic meanderings were pretty interesting in and of themselves. I spent some time in the liberal arts, which was filled with people who scoffed at the natural sciences, because, while science could tell you why a pigment was a certain color, or why an instrument produced a certain sound, or why people are capable of writing, dancing, and singing, it couldn't tell you what any of those things meant or distinguish a good painting, or fiction, or song, from a lousy one. No surprises there. I knew that, and so did all those people over in the science department.

What was surprising, however, was what I saw when I wandered over to some of those other fields, such as economics, or engineering, or mathematics, or sociology. There, I found people who, sometimes, referred to themselves as scientists, but rarely practiced science. Odder still, when they did try to apply the scientific method to some subject in their discipline, things would go wrong. No, that's not the surprising part. Of course things will go wrong when someone tries to use the scientific method on subjects it can't be applied to. What was surprising was that these people knew they weren't scientists, and they knew science wouldn't work for their disciplines, but they would still do it every once in a while, mainly, they admitted, so they could call themselves scientists.

So, what was going on? Why would people who knew better pass themselves off as scientists and use a way of learning that they knew wasn't going to work? Well, remember those physicists and chemists and biologists? They discovered some astonishing stuff, didn't they? And we were all very impressed by it, weren't we? We were so impressed that, at some point, we decided that the word "science" really meant "enigmatic but certain," even though scientists tried to tell us that it meant nothing of the sort. We also, because we liked the word "science" so much, decided that it would work for anything at all.

Want to know a secret? Science doesn't even work for everything it's supposed to work for. Several years ago, some biologists wanted to see what effect genetics had on alcoholism. They used three labs, in three different locations, with several genetically identical sets of mice, and conducted the same experiments on the mice at all three labs, at the same, local, times. But they didn't find the "alkie" gene they were looking for. Instead, they discovered that the mice behaved differently in each lab, depending on, apparently, nothing more than their latitude and longitude. This, of course, didn't make any sense. It did, however, remind these biologists of an inherent limitation in science. As one of the biologists said, "You're looking into something that people would like to believe is not a problem."

What is that problem? It has to do with what science is and what it does, and doesn't, do well. Remember that bit about reducing things to their constituent parts? This only allows science to see a few interactions at a time, but most things interact with many other things in a variety of ways, so science isn't always useful for understanding this sort of, very common, holistic, phenomenon. And that observation and experimentation stuff? It's fine for inanimate objects, but flora and fauna deliberately adjust to their environments, including experiments, and this makes the results of those experiments difficult, and sometimes impossible, to interpret. And what about quantifying and replicating data? As we've known since forever, not everything is quantifiable. And even some of those things that seem like they are, turn out to be trickier than we suspect. If scientists can't be sure of their measurements, or can't make any meaningful ones at all, then how can they know when they've reproduced results?

Now that I'm all grown up and out of school, I can see why those scientists whose words I read and whose classes I attended were so determined to tell anyone who would listen what science was, where it could be applied, and what its limitations were. I'm sure they saw things even more unsettling than a few academics running into dead ends. They, no doubt, saw the same sort of things I'm seeing now. Because, now, I see things like executives claiming that chaos theory requires their corporations to do randomly destructive things. I see companies and think-tanks paying "scientific researchers" to create evidence that supports their policies. I see marketers swearing that their "innovative" products are beneficial, or, at least, harmless, because they're the "products of science." I see poll-takers crowing, endlessly, about how scientifically-accurate their questionnaires are. I see theologians saying that their notion of intelligent design should be taught in biology classes because, hey, it's scientific too. And, most distressingly, I see financiers, educators, and politicians deciding that science is so important to our economy that it should be taught at the expense of other subjects.

Whether you're a scientist or not, none of this is good news. It is, instead, an indication that our society is systematically neglecting thousands of years of philosophy and the humanities — subjects that enable us to understand the world and each other — for no reason other than because pseudo-scientists want to claim that whatever they say is true, and know they can get away with it because we've been led to believe that "science" is universally applicable and that it brings us a certainty about the universe that will solve all our problems.

Science is great, but it's not that great. It isn't the end-all and be-all of thought and knowledge. Scientists know this, and they always have. You should know it too, because if you don't, you might end up doing something Encyclopedia Brown would never do, using the wrong process to gather the wrong information while trying to solve the wrong problem. Or maybe, you're like Long John Silver, and you know you're not a scientist, but don't care, as long as saying so gets you closer to some buried treasure.

And it doesn't really matter whether these experts who are misusing, and misrepresenting, the natural sciences are fools or charlatans, because, either way, if we don't start calling them out and start using some of those other methods of thinking and understanding that mankind has developed over the millennia too, we're going to end up like those dinosaurs I read about as a child, plodding along with one train of thought, oblivious to the fact that their world was collapsing around them. We are smarter than dinosaurs, aren't we?

Connected but Isolated

2007-04-23T13:46:00.002-05:00

Telecommunications companies want you to believe that their wireless gadgets make you better connected and more in-touch.

But do they?

Yes, you can talk, or send text messages, to the people you aren't with whenever you want with these gizmos, but this requires you to choose between paying attention to remote disembodied voices instead of your surroundings and all those people who occupy your surroundings.

And that sounds a little disconnected to me.

These people I see, who wander around, clinging to little metal boxes that they intermittently stop to type on, or who chatter to invisible people through the gadgets strapped to their ears, seem more oblivious than connected.

A while back, I was waiting in line at the grocery store, involuntarily listening to someone blather on and on about how to clean up the cat's vomit from his living-room floor, when I noticed that not only did the, very loud, voice not seem to be talking to anyone at all, but the line wasn't moving either. A dozen people in front of me, at the head of the line, I saw someone gesticulating wildly while talking to his phone. The cashier couldn't get his attention, and so she couldn't tell him that his groceries were bagged and it was time to pay and let the rest of us have a chance to check out.

The line kept getting longer, and this guy kept getting louder, until a store manager grabbed his arm, to get his attention, and pointed out the cashier to him. So, this guy was probably embarrassed by the situation and turned off his gadget, right? Wrong. He started shouting at the employees instead. Couldn't they see he was on the phone? Who did they think they were? He had more important people to talk to than them; that's what his cell phone was for.

And, oddly enough, he's right. That's exactly what cell-phones and hand-held computers are for. There really is no point to them if you don't use them in public. You could just use your less-expensive land-line or home computer instead. These people aren't acting oblivious and rude because they don't care about courtesy; they're doing it because someone sold them these gadgets, and if they don't use them while they're in the middle of everyone else, then they'd have to admit that they just threw away a lot of money. So, you guessed it, they're going to ignore and irritate everyone around them. That's what they paid for, and that's much easier than recognizing that these gadgets disconnect and isolate rather than contact and connect.

As abrasive as they are, I still feel sorry for these folks. After all, phones are irritating enough when they're just sitting in a corner of the room, occasionally interrupting whatever we're doing with their incessant ringing. But, these people, they actually bought phones and computers that follow them around, constantly ringing, buzzing, or playing some piercing tune, demanding that they pay attention to their gizmos instead of anything else.

It's hardly surprising that the American Sociological Review recently noticed that Americans' social skills have plummeted over the last few years, and that a startling number of people now say they feel more comfortable typing than speaking. What's more disconcerting is that, in only a few years, the average number of people without anyone to confide in has risen from one-in-ten to one-in-four. But then, who are you going to meet when you're constantly chatting with the same half-dozen invisible people on your gadget instead of the dozens, or hundreds, of people you run across, but pay little attention to, every day?

And how often have you had to dodge someone in traffic, or even in a hallway, because they were busy mucking around with some mobile-communications gadget instead of paying attention to their surroundings? A half a dozen times a day? A dozen? A couple dozen?

Ironically, the very same organizations that insist we buy this stuff seem to know that it doesn't really do what they say it does. A British telecom company recently banned internal text messages and intra-office calls after it noticed that its employees were spending almost a third of their time doing that instead of dealing with customers. After the ban, productivity rose, customer complaints decreased, and the company is now saving $1½ million a year in telecommunications charges.

So, maybe we should be listening to what this telecom's CEO is saying instead of what his marketers are telling us. Mobile communications aren't connecting us to more people, more efficiently, they're disconnecting us from our surroundings and our activities. And it's costing us more than just money.

Your Data, Their Format

2007-04-09T11:12:00.001-05:00

Just the other day, I finally got sick of the way the computing industry was treating me and decided to "opt-out" of the market.

You didn't think that was possible, did you? Corporations like Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe don't like to talk about it much, but it turns out that you can, and you don't even have to give up computing to do it. All you really have to do is install Linux on the computer you already have, and you can say goodbye to forced hardware-and-software upgrades, top-secret file-formats that prevent you from using a different application on your work, and encrypted songs, videos, and documents that you can only look at on the few devices that they'll "authorize" for you, if you follow instructions very, very carefully, and if the vendor doesn't go out of business, or switch something around on you, first.

That last bit was what made me take the plunge. I lost the use of songs I had purchased from an on-line music vendor when it decided to change its encryption scheme. I found out about its new way of "managing digital rights" when I couldn't listen to my music anymore. Complaining to the company didn't help. Its employees just told me that I needed to install a new version of their software, which would require a new version of my operating system, which, in turn, would require a newer version of my computer. Then, they'd be happy to "authorize" that machine to play those songs, using their new encryption scheme. My computer is about three years old, and, surprise, the same corporation that makes it also makes my operating system and its digital-music software.

So, I asked for my money back. I wasn't being unreasonable; I only wanted the money I had spent on the music they took from me, not the money I spent on a computer that's now incompatible with their on-line music store.

I don't think I'm going to get it, though. After all, the computing industry didn't feel the need to compensate me when I lost my writing after I skipped a couple "upgrades" of my word-processor, only to discover that the version I finally did end up re-buying no longer "supported" its old file-format. And, come to think of it, no one in the computing industry has ever offered to refund the money I spent on applications that won't run after I upgrade my OS. I've replaced three computers, and who knows how many applications, in the same amount of time that I've had the same car, the same TV, and the same stereo system. No doubt, this makes computing companies think that they're really very, very clever, but, chances are, I will buy another car, another TV, and another stereo, while I won't buy a new computer or new software again. I hope they invested the money I gave them in something other than those intellectual-property lawsuits that are choking our court system, because they aren't getting any more money from me.

This is, I suspect, why companies like Microsoft call Linux "un-American" and "a cancer." Corporations don't like sharing or playing nice, and that's exactly what Linux and the open-source community do. They share their software with everyone, even corporations, and you can share your work with anyone too, not just those people who are using the same version of the same software that you're using. There's no such thing as digital-restrictions management on a Linux box, and it won't save anything to a proprietary file format unless you tell it to. For instance, this essay can be read, exactly as I formatted it, on any version of any word processor. That's what open formats, protocols, and codecs can do, and that's why the computing industry avoids them. They just don't give them a way to hold your data hostage and force you to upgrade; and that, they think, is horrible.

At least, they think it's horrible until a government agency starts investigating their practices. Microsoft added the open rich-text format to their word processing programs (if you can find it) when it looked like they were going to lose the anti-trust suit federal regulators brought against them, and now they say they're adding the open-document format to their productivity applications after a governor banned the use of MS Office in state agencies because Microsoft's file-format shenanigans were preventing them from reading each other's documents without constantly upgrading their software and converting their files. Apple recently tried to shift the blame for its encrypted music format to the recording industry after European-Union regulators started investigating its practices, while Microsoft now says it thinks that digital-restrictions management has become too complex. But if you really want to see complicated, just try to play some sound or video files on your brand-new Vista operating system (which, of course, requires a brand-new computer). Naturally, you shouldn't expect it to work very well even after you've figured out what all those forms and messages about "migrating licenses" and auto-magically "protecting content" that no one ever intended to lock-up is all about.

Fortunately, we do have a choice about these sort of things, but it's not one that the computing industry approves of, or even wants us to know about. It's called open-source software, and it's made by hobbyists who don't think that sharing is "a cancer." Linux, which is part of the open-source community, has had a bad reputation for not being "user-friendly," but I can't see why. It works, it doesn't require you to use a brand-new computer, and it doesn't try to lock-up your data in secret formats and encrypted codecs. That's a lot more user-friendly than commercial software, and it's what I'll be using from now on.

Databases and Privacy

2006-11-20T13:15:00.002-06:00

If you aren't doing anything wrong, then what do you have to hide from us?

And, if I'm not doing anything wrong, then why am I under surveillance?

Or, what if privacy and surveillance don't have much to do with wrongdoing at all?

What if privacy were about a person's right to choose what he wishes to disclose about himself, and who he wants to share that with? And what if surveillance were about the loss of dignity and the likelihood of harassment that occurs when someone loses the ability to decide who knows what about his life?

We used to live in a world where privacy only worried celebrities. Now, we live in a world filled with questionnaires, application forms, and silicon gadgets — from credit-card readers to personal computers — that leave electronic tracks. Why should we worry about that? After all, the marketers and law-enforcement agents who collect, store, trade, and characterize us with this data only want to sell us nifty stuff and protect us from evil-doers. And it's not like they're trying to interpret all this data themselves; they have sophisticated software that makes all the assumptions for them. What could go wrong with that?

Well, most everything, as it turns out. Even if you aren't one of the millions of people who received letters in the mail this year telling you that your social security number or credit-account information had been stolen, you've still been hurt by data mining and database surveillance.

You've been hurt by all those telemarketers out there who pester you on your home phone because you bought a gift for someone with your credit card, or all those marketers who think you want your mailbox stuffed with obnoxious spam because you filled out a form for a company, or or all those insurance agents who think you're a reckless driver because your car has two doors instead of four, or all those employers who will screen you out of a job if you've ever said anything they might disapprove of on a blog or online discussion group, or all those security guards and law-enforcement agents who will hassle you at the airport, or on the highway, if you've ever called someone who's called someone who's been making a lot of long-distance calls to his sick grandmother, who happens to live in an Islamic country.

Of course, no reasonable person would ever do things like that to you, but then corporations and governments aren't reasonable people, are they? They are organizations whose obsession with data and statistics leads them to make even more ridiculous assumptions than the ones I've mentioned above. Every time they collect, store, and then "share" our personal data with some affiliated company or government agency, the thousands of little nuisances that make our lives a little bit worse multiply. Worse of all, not all of the problems they create are mere hassles.

Ron Peterson, for example, couldn't get a job, or insurance, because a company that purchases information from law enforcement agencies to sell to employers had him listed as a prostitute in Florida, a fencer of stolen goods in New Mexico, a witness tamperer in Oregon, and a sex offender in New Mexico. Peterson actually had been convicted of a crime, petty theft, in Texas, more than three decades ago, but that's all. Brandon Mayfield isn't too happy about database surveillance either. He was arrested and held in a cell for three weeks because his fingerprints, which are stored in a database, matched the fingerprints found on a duffel bag which contained the explosives that destroyed commuter trains in Madrid. But Mayfield is an Oregon lawyer who has never been to Spain. And Audra Schmierer has discovered that she can't "prove" she's herself to employers anymore because more than a hundred illegal aliens are using her social security number to get work after someone found her personal information stored on an organization's database server.

The organizations who do these things to us say they are concerned with our privacy, but if this were so, then why would they collect personal information in the first place, and then store it, forever, on machines that are inherently insecure and error-prone?

They do it because they've mistaken data for people and statistics for character. As a result, they've created a world where people should be worrying about what their credit cards might say about them or whether a phone call or E-mail message could be misinterpreted by a bureaucrat or a piece of software.

But organizations have no inherent right to data about us. Their "mining" of electronic networks, for browsing habits and communication patterns, is invasive. Their forms, which require us to divulge information to them that they have no reasonable use for, are obnoxious. Their habit of keeping, even relevant, information about us much longer than is necessary for them to do their jobs is irresponsible. Their notion that information about us is some sort of commodity, which they can sell and trade to each other, is contemptible. And their willingness to let statistics tell them who we "really" are, and what we are liable to do, is dangerous.

Organizations have demonstrated that they are not willing to stop collecting and "interpreting" our personal information until they are made liable for their actions. So, maybe, it's time to do so, because privacy matters more than you may think.

STD Scare Tactics

2006-11-06T11:38:00.002-06:00

When I was in high school, sex-ed was an elective class which, unfortunately, didn't cover the things students most wanted to know about, like interesting sex positions. It did, however, cover the other basics, like hygiene, what contraceptives and prophylactics were, and how pregnancy occurred. We dutifully sat through the class, wrote down our suggestions for more interesting material on the evaluation forms, and told other students that the class was easy, but dull.

When I joined the military, sex-ed was a grisly slide-show shown to GIs who had been assigned to posts outside the US. The slides mainly consisted of close-up photos of bizarre, stomach-churning lesions and growths on people's genitals. This, of course, prompted some ewws and ughs during the slides and a fair amount of snickering after the lights came up. Even our lecturers had a tough time keeping a straight face, and, when pressed, admitted that the photos were of people who had refused to take antibiotics for decades. Nevertheless, we were told that it was dangerous to have sex with foreigners. Apparently, we were supposed to believe that no one besides us had ever heard of penicillin.

Over the last half-dozen years, the American public school system has decided to move from the dull, but useful, syllabus I saw in high school, towards the frightening, and deceptive, curriculum of the US military. According to the Washington Post, most sex-ed classes are now teaching students that AIDS is transmitted through perspiration, chlamydia induces cardiac arrest, and feeling someone's genitals causes pregnancy. It looks like some schools are even telling students that STDs are divine punishment for out-of-wedlock sexual activity. I haven't heard whether they're using the gross-out slide-shows in schools yet, but a Senator has been showing one to college interns at Capital Hill for years. I guess it replaced the outdated honesty-in-government lecture.

It's not tough to discover that, of the one or two dozen STDs which exist, all but a few are either easily prevented with vaccines or treated with a few days of antibiotics. Of the few that aren't treatable, only one is likely to develop into anything dangerous. Don't, however, trust your school system, or the government's public service announcements, to mention this to you. They won't. You can be sure that they'll talk about AIDS, though, because, despite the remote odds most Westerners have of catching it, it's the centerpiece of America's abstinence-only campaign.

So, how likely are you to catch AIDS? According to reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association and The New England Journal of Medicine, if you live in the West, and you haven't hooked-up with a homosexual male, intravenous drug user, or a hemophiliac, the chance of picking up AIDS is roughly one in a million. With a condom, it's one in tens of millions. For comparison, the odds of being struck by lightning whenever it rains are one in several hundred thousand. This isn't to say that it's clever to have hundreds of different sex partners a year, but the actual risks don't really call for an abstinence-only approach, do they?

So, what's going on? Why would people exaggerate the risks of sex so ludicrously if the STDs which aren't treatable are either a nuisance or extremely rare? No one tells people not to shake hands or talk to each other because they might pick up one of the other thousands of bacterial or viral diseases floating around, do they?

Well, one argument is the, "Aren't there too many people in the world as it is, and do you really want teenagers getting pregnant?" line of thinking. Yes, they're right, but populations have been shrinking in the West, mostly because someone figured out that it might be a good idea to mention that contraceptives work, and people don't have to worry about sex resulting in pregnancy. If these people were really concerned about overpopulation and young parents, they could just tell them about contraceptives. It's been astonishingly effective.

Another argument is the, "We know people won't tell the doctor if they catch something, because we've spent so much time trying to make them ashamed of sex that they'll be afraid to and end up spreading the infection," line of thinking. Okay, VD isn't very healthy and can spread, when left untreated, but if these people really cared about that, wouldn't it make more sense for them to stop embarrassing people and encourage them to talk to a doctor about it the same way they do for any other infection?

The last argument is the, "But my religious denomination told me it was wrong to have sex out of wedlock, so no one else should either," line of thinking. Alright, but ethically, the only thing wrong with sexual activity is when someone's lying, coercing, abusing, or trying to take money from people with it. And, if someone's religion tells them not to have sex outside of marriage, then perhaps they shouldn't, but they also shouldn't assume everyone else belongs to their religion or that even those people who do are strict adherents to it. Deception is probably prohibited by their religion also, so why would they think it's okay to lie about the situation?

Wouldn't it be nice if our leaders and educators didn't spend so much time creating paranoia and hysteria about sex and were, instead, honest and informative about it? I'd bet we'd have a lot fewer problems with VD and unwanted pregnancy if they were.

Modern Numerology

2006-10-23T15:26:00.005-05:00

How can you think without numbers?

This might seem like an odd question to some of you, but in business school it was a rhetorical question. The people who asked it didn't offer, and never expected to hear, an answer. To them, the notion of thinking without mathematics was absurd. It simply wasn't possible. Everything could be expressed as a cost, an equation, or a procedure. Numbers were objective. And math, they told me, was science. Anything else was superstition.

Could this be true?

There's no doubt that math is useful. Every culture on Earth has had some form of mathematics, even if it was just arithmetic, because some of the things in our world can be counted, weighed, and measured. But, not surprisingly, the more elaborate a culture's mathematics become, the more likely it becomes that the people in it will engage in a practice called numerology: assigning numerical values to qualities, instead of only quantities, and then performing mathematical procedures with those numbers. The Chinese, ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, ancient Greeks, and Medieval Kabbalists did this. And, yes, we do it too, perhaps more extensively, and more convincingly, than anyone else.

You might be surprised to learn that when our corporations and governments say that they have "studied" something, they aren't using the word "study" the way you might think. What they mean is that they have taken polls about, assigned metrics to, and performed statistical analysis on something or other. What's wrong with this? If what they're looking into comes in quantities, then nothing's wrong, but often they're using mathematical procedures for qualities also. And while they like to say that doing this is very scientific, scientists don't seem to think so at all.

In fact, when I was at Texas Tech, science students weren't allowed to take math classes from the math department, we had to attend math classes given by the science department. When I asked why, the reply startled me. Apparently, they believed that mathematicians have a tendency to think like Pythagoras — a very clever Greek mathematician, and the father of Western numerology — who insisted that "all things are numbers." Scientists, however, tend to think that, as Einstein said, "not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

I didn't think the scientists' assessment of mathematicians was very fair, however, because I had previously taken a statistics course in the math department. The course had been taught by someone who was so annoyed by the way organizations use mathematics that our final project for the semester was to find a statistical study, along with the methods used for it, and debunk it. He said he wasn't the least bit concerned that one of us would end up with a valid study, because, in the two decades he had spent in the industry, he had never taken part in, and had rarely seen, a valid one. The class consisted of almost two dozen students, and, sure enough, not one of us found a study that withstood even an undergraduate's scrutiny. The problem, this teacher told us, wasn't with mathematicians; the problem was that none of the companies he had worked for had ever been asked to perform a valid study.

The businesses who were commissioning those studies were trying to avoid thinking by counting instead, but the things they wanted to know about, like product quality, consumer needs, customer satisfaction, employee performance, or public opinion, can't be quantified. Companies are more than happy to assign numbers to those sort of things and do the math, but, because these things can't be clearly measured, weighed, or counted, the numbers won't mean much.

Think about it. If I were to ask you how many you felt about something, you'd probably think that I had gotten tongue-tied. But poll-takers ask this all the time. They'll ask you to rate something on a scale of one to ten, and most of us won't blink an eye. They'll also ask series of questions that we're supposed to answer with phrases like "strongly agree," "agree," "no opinion," and so on, and then assign digits to those responses and start crunching the numbers. We take part in this sort of thing so often that it's sometimes difficult for us to see how silly it is.

So, let's look at an example of something that we don't, yet, do very often. I've taken three papers on similar topics that I wrote for business school and fed them into a Markov-chain generator. What this generator does is perform a statistical analysis of my writing and then create new text based on that analysis. This text is statistically identical to the text in my papers:

They may work creatively with each other unless the techies have taken care of the different aspects. Similar problems, not only concerning the medium the information is held in obsolete or proprietary file formats, a situation which often leads to a better understanding of the distribution of personal information.
We'll also look at the nature of the week. In fact, the problem appears to be constantly transferred to new mediums and how those assumptions may effect your life. But how many cheeseburgers were purchased with your credit card?

It looks mildly convincing. I actually do say things that sound similar to that, but I like to think that I usually make a little more sense. Mathematics, it appears, can't be successfully used to analyze, understand, or recreate my papers. Oddly, however, some people call text like the above "Markov insights." And, not long ago, a few students did the same sort of thing with some technology journals and then submitted the results to an engineering convention. The organizers accepted the paper and asked the students to present it to the convention later that year. However, they changed their minds after the students revealed the origin of the paper to the public and announced that their laptop computers would also handle the presentation.

But, before we laugh too long, and too loudly, at those engineers, let's remember that we're fooled by the same sort of thing every time an organization claims to have "measured" public opinion on some topic or a corporation gloats about how much consumers "value" its products and services. They've done little more than what the Markov generator does. They've invented "metrics," by associating numbers with qualities that mean something to us, that spew out mathematically-generated results which have little meaning, but look mildly convincing.

So, if math can only be used for quantities, and most of the things that matter to us are qualities, then how can we start thinking about things without numbers? We could try imagination & insight, deduction & induction, analogy & intuition, ethics & empathy, rhetoric & dialog, and reason & critical thought. It's not as easy as crunching numbers, but at least it's possible for them to produce sensible, and human, results. The same can't be said for numerology.

A Very Ad Day

2006-10-09T19:35:00.002-05:00

Perhaps you woke up to an acne-creme commercial shouting at you on your clock radio. If not, it was probably something similar to that. It seems like almost half of radio is advertising.

Maybe, after you woke up, you thought you'd catch some news on the morning show. There's a pretty good chance of it — only a third of TV is advertising — but, instead, you see an interview with a sports celebrity who keeps mentioning a particular brand of athletic shoe, which, judging from the number of times he's brought it up, must have been what made him the athlete he is today. He seems sincere. Maybe if you bought some expensive athletic shoes you'd be healthier too.

Or maybe not. So, on your way to work, you figure you'll pop in a CD to avoid all the ads on the radio. Sneakers are expensive, after all. And the CD just might be that one with the cover art which tells you that the coffee shop you got it at not only makes the best coffee around, it's also pretty good at selecting music for your sophisticated lifestyle.

On the other hand, maybe you won't listen to anything at all. Maybe you'll just watch the impressive skyline — filled with architectural wonders that would have made the ancient Egyptians envious — but billboards block your view every few hundred yards. All you can see are ads for the radio stations you're trying not to listen to.

At work, the walls around you are emblazoned with posters that remind you of what your corporate values are. Apparently, you're very concerned with performance metrics and stock prices. So, during your break, you figure you'll catch up with your colleagues by browsing through the trade journal. But part-way through that featured article, you realize that it's mentioned a specific product several times in each paragraph. Oops, it only looked like an article. It's actually, according to the fine print at the top of the page, an advertiser-sponsered "supplement" to the magazine. Well, you're sure it will help you with your performance metrics anyway. And someone's stock prices are bound to go up because of that ad.

After work, you think about catching a movie, but then remember that the last time you were at the theater, you had to sit through a stream of clothing and soda commercials before the theater started showing "trailers" for upcoming movies. You try to remind yourself that this only makes the film you want to see much less expensive for you. Once they decide to let you see it, that is. But, wait, were ticket prices really more expensive before they started pushing ads at you through the silver screen?

You suppose you could catch the sunset at the public park, but the last time you were there, the pigeons had splattered all the billboards on the benches with their excrement. You're not sure you can blame them for that. The benches actually look better that way, but you still don't want to sit on them.

Well, if you hurry, you should be able to spend this week's salary on a sports game, but you can't remember the name of that new stadium the voters in your city volunteered to pay for. It has something to do with motor oil. No, wait, it's named after an airline. And you're sure that makes sound financial sense. Just like you're sure that it's very sensible for the announcers at the games to continually remind you that penalties and scores are sponsored by a couple other corporations.

Maybe you should catch the game at a neighborhood bar. You could use a drink, and the ads on TV that stop the games every ten minutes or so are much more entertaining than the ones they show on the scoreboards at the stadium. While you're there, a couple next to you asks if you would take their photo with their new camera. You do, of course, and then they tell you about how happy they are with the camera. You congratulate them on their purchase and ask how much a camera like that costs. They're not sure, because, for them, the camera is swag. The manufacturer gave it to them if they would send in a weekly report documenting the number of people they've shown the camera to. They'd be happy to tell you which retail outlets in the area stock the camera, though.

Suddenly, you feel like going home. On your way back, you pass a couple of city buses painted like billboards. Then, you step over the pile of junk mail the postman has pushed through your front door's letter slot and answer the phone, which has been ringing since you got out of the car. The caller apologizes for phoning so late, but he was sure you'd want to hear his very important message about a brand new product. You try to remind him that your home isn't his retail space, but it turns out that the caller is a machine.

You disconnect your phone, so you can get some sleep, and worry a little about when marketers will figure out a way to insert product placement in your dreams.

Radio Tracking and You

2006-08-28T19:26:00.002-05:00

Imagine a society where everything you use contains a radio tag. Your clothing, food containers, toiletries, credit cards, and identity cards have tiny transmitters embedded in them that broadcast information to receivers built into floors, walls, desks, computers, cabinets, or lamp posts. Your phone, bike, and car contain more powerful receivers and transmitters that pick up signals from GPS satellites and broadcast your activities and location to antennas that collect this information and distribute it to whoever has the money or technology to use it.

Sound like a science-fiction writer's fevered nightmare?

Yes it does, and it also sounds exactly like what corporations and governments are currently pushing into the marketplace. Radio-frequency-identification and global-positioning-system tags are now being integrated into consumer products and identification cards so marketers and law enforcement officials can keep track of products, consumers, and citizens.

If you're not a techie, your first impulse, after hearing me say this, might be to head for your nearest public library, or your favorite Internet search engine, to confirm whether this is really occurring or not. Go ahead. I'll wait. Look for "RFID" and "consumer GPS."

Now, decide how you feel about it. If you're not a corporate executive or government official, you'll probably feel, at least, a little uncomfortable with the idea. If you're like me, you might decide that radio tags are little more than a high-tech way of stalking people. You may also ask yourself why executives, who are supposed to be concerned about consumers, and government officials, who are supposed to represent citizens' interests, are so gung-ho about the idea. Simply put, radio tracking will make their jobs easier. What it will do to us doesn't appear to be a priority for them.

Several giant retailers already use radio tags on their products' shipping containers so they can track their distributors' activities. Last year they made plans to require their suppliers to embed radio tags on each product they sell to them, so they can not only track items after they reach their stores, they can also track items after consumers have purchased them. As one executive said, "Won't it be great when we know every time a consumer takes the top off the toothpaste?"

You might not think it'll be great, but at least two clothing manufacturers aren't complaining about their retailers' demands. They started sewing radio tags into the seams of their clothing long before retailers thought about asking them to. But these companies also sell clothes through their own outlets, where they plan to install systems that "read" the clothes consumers are wearing, while pulling up their purchase history, so the system can tell an employee which items to push at a customer.

As Dick Cantwell, a vice president at a large toiletries corporation, said, radio-tag readers are "going to be a ubiquitous part of construction, whether you're building stores or homes. ... We see this as a tremendous opportunity and we intend to make full use of the technology." He's thrilled at the notion that his company will soon be able to remotely examine the contents of your medicine cabinet, and use that information to its advantage.

You probably aren't so thrilled, but, as you may have noticed, radio positioning systems are already standard equipment in some cars. Yes, they can tell you where you are, if you've forgotten, but they can also tell anyone else where you are and where you're headed. Data recorders, called EDRs, which can transmit information on how you drive — to car rental agencies or insurance companies — have been in testing for several years, and one auto manufacturer has already started installing these devices in its cars.

Bothered by idea of someone tracking your movements and driving habits? Well, avoiding new cars won't help. Phone companies are now selling tracking services which allow people, and employers, to follow someone's cell phone around. It's great for keeping track of salesmen or the kids, they say, and it's also great for snooping on anyone else.

This was something that the military noticed, and was quite upset about, several years ago when a soda company embedded radio tags and voice transmitters in cola cans as a promotional stunt. Press a button, which tells the company where you are, then tell the can your name and occupation, and you might win a prize. Military intelligence suddenly realized that tracking troops no longer required elaborate and expensive intelligence systems. Now, it could be done just by selling a soldier some soda. Oops.

But if you think government officials are planning to curb the use of these devices, you can think again. Senator John Cornyn, founder of the Senate RFID Caucus, is pushing the technology as hard as corporations are. He says that radio tracking will "strengthen homeland security, revolutionize the supply chain, and promote significant advances." Not surprisingly, one of the major manufacturers and marketers of tracking devices is based in his state. That same manufacturer has recently lobbied legislators, asking for radio tags to be embedded in government-issued identification cards, like driver's licenses and passports. Soon, you won't even have to hand your ID over to someone. All anyone would need to "see" it is a receiver. If you think identity theft is a problem now, just wait a couple of years.

Delly Tamer, CEO of an online retailer and a proponent of tracking technologies, said, "Now that the technology is here, the innovative uses that people are going to put in place to use these services are just going to be magnificent to watch." Apparently, he uses the word "magnificent" a little differently from me.

At a time when government officials think that watching citizens means security, but regulating corporations means intrusion, it's not hard to imagine a future where police profile people based on the brand of products they have, or track people on the off-chance that they might be doing something illegal. And, if you're tired of advertising now, imagine what it will be like when marketers know what you do, and what you have with you, every moment of every day. Not worried about those guys? Well, what about the thieves who will be able to "case" a home or business from the safety of the sidewalk?

Speaking of thieves, some convicted criminals are now forced to wear ankle bracelets that continuously transmit their location. This is more than just humiliating for the felon; it's debilitating because it allows law enforcement to control where they go and when they go anywhere at all. We don't tend to sympathize with these people too much because they're the bad guys. But soon ankle bracelets won't be necessary because we'll all be transmitting our location, and a whole lot more, all the time. Whether you're a bad guy or not, anyone, from a surly spouse to a stodgy employer, will be able to treat any one of us exactly the way these criminals are treated.

And what, exactly, have we done to deserve that?

Complex Is Simple?

2006-08-14T20:43:00.002-05:00

My video player reboots itself three times a day. And it won't record anything on tape if an optical disk is in its other drive, even though the 79-page owner's manual says it will. I'd replace it, but it is a replacement. The first two I bought were even buggier.

My digital camera has 85 controls. The introduction to its 123-page user's guide tells me how simple it is to use, but I can't find a way to adjust the shutter speed, focus, or aperture size, which were the only controls I had on my mechanical camera. The clerk at my local electronics store told me they sell digital versions of "old-fashioned" cameras like that, but they cost several times as much as the "point-and-shoot" camera I was complaining about.

Before I left the store, someone asked me if I knew how to set the clock on his cell phone. He would have asked a clerk, but they were busy trying to explain how all the new functions on their gadgets made things easier and more convenient to some other customers. I thought I might be able to help him out, but I was wrong. I did notice, however, that the reason he couldn't listen to music with his phone anymore was because its streaming-video digital-rights-management software had locked up his MP3 files.

You'd think I'd be past complaining about things like that by now. After all, the word processor I wrote this with has several hundred functions listed in its menu. Like most everyone else, I use fewer than a dozen of them. And I'm not saying the other three hundred functions aren't wonderful too, but the last time I tried to figure out what some of them did, I had to reboot my computer.

It'd be easy to say that engineers are clueless and have no idea what they're doing to consumers, but, really, they do. They even have names for situations like the ones I've described. "Convergence" is one of them. "Feature creep" is another. The basic idea is, since software allows them to model any process that can be described as a procedure, as long as it deals with things which can be represented with digits, then that's what they'll do. Whether it makes sense to do so or not isn't really the issue. They just design the things; it's the marketers that tell them what to design.

And that's their job, isn't it? When they aren't bogged down with adding silly "features" to their companies' "innovative" gadgets, they're busy trying to fix the problems caused by the last set of features they added to the gizmos. Of course, the fixes often create just as many problems as the bugs did, but if that weren't true, then what would they do with their time?

Practice good engineering? Possibly. Electrical engineers and software engineers knew that over-designing things would create problems long before industry practice demanded it from them. Their mechanical engineering predecessors had told them so. In fact, engineering students at Purdue University participate in the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest every year to remind themselves of the hazards of creating pointlessly complex devices.

Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist who spent decades lampooning over-engineered machines. He, along with other early 20th-century cartoonists like Heath Robinson, drew ridiculously complex contraptions involving such things as gerbils running around in exercise wheels powering pulleys that lifted anvils which tipped over onto levers that triggered another chain of reactions in an apparatus. The joke, of course, was not only that the machines would fail, spectacularly, when some mechanism went awry, but the purpose of the machines was usually something that could be accomplished very simply.

While engineers may find designing such devices a challenging way to spend their time, that doesn't make it the most sensible thing for them to do. We all end up getting stuck with their Swiss-Army-knife contraptions that take forever to figure out and then crash and burn once we've worked out how to operate them. Even though marketers may not be overly concerned about consumer frustrations, their bosses should be.

The British government's Health and Safety Executive claims that their businesses lose around £1.24 billion a year while employees struggle with electronics and succumb to stress-related illnesses. Yes, people, literally, get sick of working with these things. While workers are stuck with the tools their employers purchase, consumers can try to return them or just toss them in the closet. The Associated Press recently reported that half of all electronics returns were from customers who discovered that they didn't want to futz around with their purchases as much as their purchases wanted them to. They couldn't tell whether the devices worked correctly or not; they just knew they didn't want to try to use them anymore.

Marketers insist that these gadgets really are as simple as they say, and they're getting easier to use every time they market a new one. And consumers need multi-function machines. The computer revolution proved that. They point out that they'd never promote devices that don't function properly or cause stress, because we wouldn't buy them if they did. So, when thing go wrong, it must be the user's fault. We all just need to learn to adapt to the marketplace. Marketers know best.

And maybe they do, in a way. No, they clearly can't give us useful and usable tools, but they can get us to buy the same sort of electronics over and over again. The trick, apparently, is to pretend products aren't getting buggier and tougher to use, so we'll keep buying new ones, hoping that the next gadget we empty our wallets on actually will work sensibly.

You knew all those focus groups and marketing surveys had told them something, didn't you?

Us, Inc.

2006-07-17T21:48:00.004-05:00

The founders of the U.S. guaranteed citizens certain protections against the most powerful institutions of their time. It was an afterthought, but it was a valuable one. And while they prevented governments and religious institutions from colluding with one another, and forbade governments from violating certain, basic, rights, they neglected to address an institution that, currently, has more influence and control over almost every aspect of our lives than anything else: the corporation.

How could they forget about something that is commonly larger than governments, something that has de-facto control over how we spend our time, what we eat, where we live, the ways we travel, and how we communicate? They didn't forget. Five decades before the constitution was written, the laws that allowed for-profit corporations to form had been repealed and stockbroking had been banned after riots in Great Britain had prompted a trade commission to look into the matter. The commissioners were so appalled at the extent of corporate misdeeds in the century since the institution had been created that they called the corporation the most "wholly perverted" legal structure they had ever investigated. The authors of our constitution didn't forget about corporations, they just figured no one would be foolish enough to unleash them again.

But we were. In less than a decade, the beginnings of the industrial revolution not only convinced us to resurrect a dangerous institution, it led us to allow corporations to exist indefinitely, engage in more than one activity, own stock in other corporations, and lobby governments to create and repeal laws and regulations. But corporations aren't citizens. They're not even human. They are legal structures committed to increasing stock prices. They are not responsible to, nor do they feel empathy for, their employees, their customers, or the society that created them. And when the horrors of the industrial revolution became so blatant that lawmakers could no longer ignore them, legislators finally realized that, even if they were too frightened to ban corporations, they would, at least, have to regulate them. However, in the 1970s, an economic philosophy called neo-liberalism asserted that corporations were so flawless that, not only should they not be regulated, but every aspect of our society should be turned over to them through economic privatization. The process of doing this is going on right now.

Corporations are allowed to sell and hire across national borders, but are, by policy, exempt from any nation's criminal justice system. After all, you can't imprison a corporation, you can only sue it. Governments have been signing agreements with organizations like the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, which are clearly more concerned with the interests of multi-national corporations than the interests of any country's citizens.

In fact, the meetings of these organizations are the only meetings that governments routinely assign riot police to. Of course, they are also the only meetings that routinely attract thousands of protesters. What is it that these protesters are trying to tell their governments? It might be that they don't aspire to live out their lives in concrete wastelands, spending 10 hours a day sitting behind a computer screen in an office cubicle, or standing on their feet in a three-acre retail outlet, only to spend the next couple of hours stuck in a car in a traffic jam listening to corporate advertising on the radio just so they can get home and fall asleep in front of their TVs, which are broadcasting even more advertising, and then do it again, and again, year after year. Or, maybe, they realize that this is the best that corporations have to offer us, and the most likely scenario is the one being played out in third-world countries around the globe, where people are given starvation-wages for working 80-hour, 7-day work-weeks inside factories with armed guards that make sure they don't drink water during their shifts because that might make them go the restroom more often.

Why would any government tolerate, let alone support, an institution that does these things to us? Because the "invisible hand" of market economics tells governments and corporations what is really best for us. This invisible hand will lift the stock prices of beneficial corporations higher while pushing down the stock prices of harmful corporations. You see, no matter what we think we want, the hand tells us that we actually want full-time retail employees to be paid so little that many of them must use food stamps to feed their families. The hand tells us that we want food companies to lace foods with so many additives that our bellies bloat and we're likely to spend the last few years of our lives in a cardiac or cancer ward of a hospital that we can't afford. The hand tells us that we want corporations to demand that potential and current employees give them their user-profiles on Internet discussion groups so corporations know who to hire, and who to fire, based on what we say, and think, when we're not on the job. The hand reminds us that we want to pay $150 billion a year in taxpayer subsidies to corporations that lay-off workers, refuse to pay off pensions, "outsource" jobs elsewhere, and keep increasing prices, so we can become indebted to rotating-credit companies, who charge 20% interest rates, because we can no longer afford to not be in debt to them.

If you're like me, and think the invisible hand is lying, then it might be time to start using your voice to tell lawmakers what we really want. The longer you remain silent about the problems caused by corporations controlling our lives, the longer lawmakers can say, "no one told me anything was wrong." The more often you complain about corporate power and greed harming us and the society we live in, the more obvious it becomes that legislators and administrators are not looking after our best interests. The more obvious it becomes that government officials are more interested in corporate stock prices than in the lives of their constituents, the more tenuous their position becomes. Say something.

Categorically Speaking

2006-07-03T16:06:00.003-05:00

A few months ago, I went to see my school’s career counselor, a former human resources manager, who told me that I needed to prepare an “elevator speech.” This, she said, is a 20-second characterization of who I am and what I do. I expressed some doubts that anyone could really be characterized that simply, but she had experience and insisted that I was mistaken and that this elevator speech would allow potential employers to quickly and accurately categorize me.

Well, business school taught me that the things people with credentials said were never to be questioned. If you think there might be another way of looking at things, then that’s just because you don’t have the proper credentials to think for yourself; if you think the world is different from the way they think it is, then that’s just because “things have changed;” and if you say that you have a different point of view, why, then, you must think that you know everything.

So, I recognized that I was a former military-intelligence interceptor and analyst, with an MBA, concentrating in the management of technology, and I trotted off to the school’s job fair with my elevator speech and my one-page résumé and spent the afternoon telling recruiters about myself in 20 seconds. But in an arena full of HR personnel attempting to recruit employees for their companies, not one of them seemed to find the elevator speech, or the one-page résumé, helpful to them.

How strange. After all, not only the career counselor, but many of my teachers, and the executives they often quoted, seemed to think that categorizing and profiling people was not only helpful, but very effective. I was told that you could determine what sort of attitudes people had by seeing which demographic category they fit into, you could predict people’s behavior by examining their consumer profiles, you could tell what people understood by looking at their credentials, and you could even tell how trustworthy people were by reading their credit scores. These weren’t just statistics, they told me, this was management science.

Well, science or not, I was still bothered by the notion that you could predict what someone would be like by noticing which category that person belonged to. But, I wanted to be a good management student, and to do that, I had to think whatever the experts told me to think.

Yet odd things kept happening. For instance, I was in a class where the teacher attempted to apply chaos theory to business institutions. I thought some of her recommendations were sensible, but others weren’t. She also appeared to misunderstand the nature of the natural sciences. I knew that I couldn’t question the material presented to me in class, because I didn’t have the proper credentials. But the teacher had checked our credentials and knew who she could speak to about this. He was sitting in front of me, belonged to a different age group, had a different educational background (in physics), and judging from the suit he wore to class, he was in a different economic bracket and had a very different consumer profile. Strangely, he said pretty much the same things I would have said. The teacher, however, patiently explained to him that since he didn’t have as much experience as the executives she was quoting, he must be mistaken.

Later, I was walking to the bus stop, and someone spoke to me. She was from a different country, a member of a different ethnic group, a different age group, and after we exchanged majors, it turned out she even had a different educational background from me. Well, we couldn’t have anything in common with each other, because we had completely different profiles, but on the way to the bus stop, we discovered that we actually shared similar points of view on several different subjects. But, being the good management student I was, I could explain this. You see, the theory behind profiling doesn’t claim that all the people in a particular category are exactly the same as everyone else in that category, and completely different from people in different categories, just that they are, statistically speaking, much more likely to be. The things I had noticed were called statistical aberrations, and should be ignored. Profiling doesn’t require you to believe that people can be so easily categorized; it just requires you to behave exactly as if they could be.

Over the summer, I was given a mentor. I met him in the parking lot of a local restaurant and saw that he drove a car similar to mine. We discovered that we were about the same age, had similar social, economic, and educational backgrounds, and we even had the same job as each other when we were in the military. Categorically speaking, we couldn’t have been more similar to each other. Over the course of the next couple of months, we also discovered that the only thing we saw eye-to-eye on was that statistical analysis was pretty horrible at predicting and accessing qualities. But he told me that didn’t matter. What did matter was that the business community thought it could make money by using statistics this way, and any problems this created were called externalities and weren’t really problems at all. The real problem, he said, was that I would admit that I didn’t share the opinion of most executives, and that meant I thought I knew everything.

Well, he was my mentor and so his point of view must be the only correct one. After all, I’m only a former military-intelligence interceptor and analyst with an MBA, concentrating in the management of technology, and I’m just not qualified to think about anything else.