Gadflies, Intimacy, and God

If you have been following my research, then you know that "gadfly" is a type of person, like male or female, not just a role that one can adopt or abandon at will.

A gadfly can act like he or she is not a gadfly, but will still be a gadfly inside. In other words, to achieve emotional intimacy with a gadfly, to love a gadfly for who he or she is, one must love that he or she is a gadfly. But a gadfly is someone who challenges others, so only someone who values humility can love a gadfly intimately. Anyone who does not seek humility can have only a superficial relationship with gadflies--such a person may be committed to a gadfly, but cannot love him or her intimately.

Why would anyone not value challenge and humility?

1. If we are already struggling, additional criticism might offer no benefit. 
2. Challenge leads to higher expectations which in turn lead to higher failure-rates and greater incidence of depression and disappointment. 
3. Inflated self-confidence is a self-fulfilling prophesy--it helps us secure friendships and leadership positions--and humility undermines that process. 
4. Furthermore, humility incapacitates us by miring us in doubt, and 
5. Anyone who associates with gadflies is sure to be stigmatized by their reputation. 

In short, there is really good reason to name gadflies after a creature which stings--they bring social and psychological pain. It's no wonder the people of ancient Athens put Socrates to death for being a gadfly!

But I want to point-out that people can have good reason to seek challenge and humility. We cannot reach our full potential without challenge, and we will be blind to certain truths if we lack humility. The wife of a gadfly told me why she stayed married to him: "Because I know what I can do, and what I can't do. The world needs trouble-makers because the rest of us don't have what it takes to fix the world without them." She didn't need to be humbled herself, but sought humility for the rest of the world.

Elsewhere I have suggested that our ability to relate to God depends upon relationship skills honed relating to humans. I wouldn't call God a "gadfly", but one cannot help be humbled upon confronting God's true nature. If we cannot tolerate intimacy with gadflies, how can we tolerate intimacy with God? On the flip-side, gadflies seeking someone with whom they can share emotional intimacy may be wise to look among the reverent. Those who can be intimate with God have the skills to be intimate with a gadfly.

I have been wondering what kind of husband and father a gadfly can be (the question humbles me). On the one hand, the wife and children of a gadfly are likely to be more humble and better able to face challenge. On the other hand, they may become overwhelmed with expectations, or may fear intimacy and transparency, having been stung.

The Gadfly Dad may suppress his true nature much of the time, fostering shallow relationships so as to avoid creating discomfort, but he cannot truly be a part of his family if he hides from them forever. One can only pray that such families find reconciliation, and that the fruits of their efforts include greater intimacy with God.

Skip School, or Skip Career?

In Don't Go to Grad School, Penelope Trunk argues for skipping grad school because it will not help your career:

"This is why millionaires have stopped leaving their money to their kids—it undermines their transition to adulthood. But instead of making the transition, you are still in school, pretending things are fine. The problem is that what you do in school is not what you will do in a career. So if you love school, you’ll probably hate the career it’s preparing you for, since your career is not going to school."

I've got four honors students planning their "transition to adulthood" right now, so seeing them exposed to this advice gets my attention. I agree that schools offer terrible career preparation, but I'm not so sure they waste the time of people who enjoy and can afford them. I am also skeptical of Penelope's advice not to seek a career doing what you love. I think Penelope's understanding of adulthood is growing old-fashioned (it reminds me of slavery).

I used to think my kids have to get a good job, because I will die before they do, and therefore I can not feed them forever. That logic breaks down as labor efficiency goes up: Technological advances (not just robots) will allow a single human to accomplish the labor of two, or three, or four, or one hundred humans. Eventually, that means 99% of us won't need to work, and, let's face it, at least 1% of us are workaholics who will happily support the rest.

College admission officers tell my kids that tuition is balanced by higher life-long earnings, but those calculations are based on historic availability of jobs.  I expect higher-paying jobs to continue to be awarded to applicants with higher education, but I also expect increased efficiency to make those jobs more scarce. I can understand risking debt for a chance to avoid a bad job, but there is a third option: Don't get a career at all. The day is coming when work will be optional, and my kids are welcome to bide their time living with me in the meanwhile.

You can argue that our next golden age is not so close at hand. You have a lot of control over whether it is or not--you participate in deciding how much we invest in automation, and how much of a market we create for unnecessary labor (e.g. labor devoted to fighting--think lawyers, advertisers, security officers, etc.). I think about half of the American labor market is devoted to unnecessary labor right now. If enough young people boycott the labor market, however, you may be more inclined to accelerate automation, and to reserve labor for necessary tasks. We could get very efficient very fast, if we wanted to.

Anticipation of a golden age puts pressure on employers to pay for education. Even Penelope Trunk would not object to education paid for by employers. If employers instead expect job applicants to get educated before they apply, then they will find more and more talented young people disqualifying themselves by following Penelope's advice. Industry can function with less, but missed opportunities are wasteful, and an economy run by the less-talented would be a market failure.

Reserving the final jobs for the elite matters, because the people with the last jobs will make important decisions: How will they ration resources among the other 99%? Will they penalize the fools who took on college debts they were not fit to pay? Will they penalize people in careers that disappeared early? Will they penalize people who hoarded careers expected to disappear late? Or will they penalize people who lived with their parents, and hoarded no jobs at all?

Penelope Trunk seems to think there are rules to career planning, but social change is so accelerated that those rules are no more reliable than those of love and war. If skipping school is a viable option, I'd say skipping career is a viable option too. I want my kids to be happy, and there's no time like the present. If you like school, go to school. If you like a career, work. If you don't like either, find something you do like to do. I've got good kids--if they do what they love, the world will be better off.

Six Facts With Which to Humble Oneself

Is humility a gift? If so, how could one give it? I am convinced that we need humility like we need food and shelter.

When conflict is an essential element of a collaboration, it can be resolved only through humility. For example, eagles and mice are collaborators in an ecosystem, but the ecosystem requires that eagles kill mice. If the conflict between eagles and mice were resolved through victory by either (i.e. through an end to the killing or an end to the escaping), their ecosystem would be destroyed, and both species would lose, so a different kind of resolution is required, one that accepts lack of both victory and defeat. That kind of resolution is humility.

Human humility stems from awareness of humbling facts. In a way, humbling facts empower us, since we need humility in order to participate in something larger. However, they are not obsolesced by awareness of alternative possibilities; any valid reason to be humble is sufficient. Thus, the same facts arise over and over again in both modern and ancient texts.

Different people are humbled by different facts, so I am offering here a balanced set of six humbling facts, one blog post for each:

1. Unaided individuals are inadequate in both power and virtue.
2. Pure reason is inadequate because our language is inadequate and because we fail to recognize our errors.
3. We need reformers; inherited norms change across generations.
4. Individual pursuit of measurable extremes (like pleasure, power, security, and prestige) backfires by escalating desire/competition.
5. Proper rules include some which cannot be disambiguated, thus forcing empathy/exploration.
6. Role-models are social gadflies, challenging social barriers and norms of empathy.

I gave these facts to my family and friends for Christmas (they did appreciate them), but I was really just passing along a gift I had received myself. I hope posting them online will help you to pass them along to your loved ones as well.

Next >

How to be Intelligent about Elections

Like the Sex-Talk, I think schools delegate important parts of the Election-Talk to parents. Here's my go at it:

In addition to the right to vote your conscience, you have the right to keep your opinions private or to discuss them. Since it bears no minimum age or citizenship requirement, you might expect this second decision to be less important, but it might actually be more critical to determining our future. To what extent will our community respect minority views? To what extent will we remain divided and isolated? The answers to such questions will be determined by when/if/how we talk about politics. If you think only about who to vote for, and never about whether to share your opinion or not, you've thrown half of your vote away.

Intelligent voting also includes awareness of the potential impacts of your vote:

1. Impact on Your Future Wealth: One candidate may be less likely to make avoidable mistakes than another, or less likely to be manipulated by people you didn't intend to elect. Different candidates may favor different members of our community. Thus, your vote could impact both the wealth of the entire community, and your personal wealth relative to the rest of the community.

2. Impact on The Rules of Politics: Politicians are constantly innovating, testing what they can get away with--can I get away with negative campaigning? How much can I spend on political advertising? Is it acceptable to delay legislation so as to make an incumbent look bad? Is it acceptable for a President to behave like a doctor, trusting experts to determine what we really need, rather than prioritize demands we express in polls and markets? By punishing or not punishing candidates, elections set precedents which constrain politicians just as much as a constitution does.

3. Impact on Our Image: What people believe about us as a community is determined somewhat by how we vote. For example, will a substantial part of our electorate vote for candidates who are liked in other countries, or will we seem entirely insensitive to foreign opinion? Do you want our state to be known as a "swing" state? Do you want us to be known as people who don't care enough to vote?

The more you've seen of politics, I think, the less you expect to control your wealth through your vote. You've seen candidate after candidate fail to keep promises, sometimes despite their best efforts--no one can predict what challenges the winner will face over their term. The cure for voter apathy may be to remember the other two kinds of impact. 

Another cause of voter apathy may be doubt that one is well-enough informed. The amount of money and effort spent on campaigning might lead you to believe that some wealthy/powerful force expects to be able to manipulate your vote, and anyone that wealthy/powerful probably has good research to inform their expectations. It's no fun being a puppet, so you ignore the election. 

But, for every potential voter clever-enough to leave voting to the better-informed, there is someone else too dumb to realize they are being manipulated, so fleeing manipulation serves only to dumb-down the electorate, and make manipulation that much easier. Therefore, vote. Make every effort to see through the tricks--tune in to the big speeches and debates where candidates can't tailor their messages to different audiences. Then, even if you are so confused that you have to flip a coin, vote anyway, if only to make the manipulators pay through the nose for their treachery. The truth is that attempting to manipulate an election is risky--no one can predict what challenges the winner will face over their term--so if we keep it sufficiently expensive, the manipulators will lose (on average), and the voters will win in the long-run.

Finally, I want to strongly recommend befriending local politicians. You might think local politicians are less important because they control fewer resources, but one undeniably important contribution they make is to be sufficiently accessible that one can get to know them personally, and discover that politicians aren't all bad--in fact, many are inspiring. To vote intelligently requires knowing that politicians can be worthy of our vote, and the only way to know that about the big inaccessible candidates is to know public servants in general. If there are no worthy politicians in your life, voting will strip you of your humanity (or constrain you to delusion). We should be sure to appreciate local politicians for allowing us to keep our humanity intact, something arguably as important as any presidential duty.

I Love You

To my kids:

Apparently you think you can never live up to my expectations, that you are victims of an unfair double-standard.

If you actually asked me what I want from you, you might be surprised. These would be my top three requests:

1. Reserve 30 minutes a day to journal, meditate, talk or pray about yourself or your goals
2. Every day, help someone (or do something else you can be proud about)
3. Every day, enjoy at least one inexpensive blessing (nature, music, laughter, peace, affection, creativity, etc.) 

Like legs on a stool, two-out-of-three aren't enough--it will take all three to satisfy me--but doing these three things really would make me happy. I want this so much that I even wish you would post these requests on your wall where you would see them every day, and that you would feel obliged to obey your father (and it really frightens me to ask for your obedience, knowing that you may be more competent than I am). I'm a bit shocked to realize this: I do have a double-standard--I wouldn't make such requests of other people--and I really do wish I could get my way in your life on these three requests.

Yes, you're right, if I am honest, I have to admit that I am unreasonable. I think it's because I love you.

College as Crack-house

Granting disciplinary degrees is a shady business made necessary by academia's failure to sell its legitimate purpose. Instead of convincing society to finance great thinking, many institutions make money by addicting employers to the use of academic degrees as tools for screening job applicants, and then charging students to pass the screens.

Many academics admit that this business model exists, but do not take responsibility for it. Institutions that provide substantial financial aid may even try to shift blame to other institutions, as though giving away addictive drugs for free would not create a market for them. However, even the well-endowed institutions can no longer stop structuring their degrees as job-screening tools. If you doubt that you've sold the soul of higher-education, I dare you do way with career-oriented degree specializations (especially "business", "medicine" and "law") and to set caps on how many students you can admit who are preparing for new careers.

Career-training (including in business, medicine and law) is more efficiently delivered on-the-job:

1. On-the-job training is up-to-date. Especially in careers that use changing technology, much of what one learns in a four-year degree quickly becomes obsolete.
2. On-the-job training permits career change. Declaring a major for a four-year degree implies intention to work in that area for more than four years, right? But the Bureau of Labor reports that Americans change career area every 18 months, and a variety of sources suggest they should.  
3. On-the-job training need not require remembering. A great deal of the effort made in four-year degree programs rests on the assumption that students will remember what they learned, but research suggests most is forgotten in just two years. (see Bacon, D. R. "How Fast Do Students Forget What They Learn in Consumer Behavior? A Longitudinal Study" Journal of Marketing Education December 2006 vol. 28 no. 3 181-192)
4. On-the-job-training is relevant to the job. Businesses say that the most relevant parts of a four-year degree are critical thinking and problem-solving skills, but college students are directed to learn many other things as well, and 36% learn nothing relevant. 

Especially considering the need to retool the labor force to meet job crises, on-the-job training is important, and the market for that kind of education can only be hurt by the implication that academic degrees provide career preparation.

Research institutions have additionally contributed to the problem by delaying in their duty to create what John Smart calls the conversational interface. Essentially this involves teaching computers, so they can teach humans (thus allowing the integration of learning and work 24/7). It involves every discipline. Academics may have other interests they would like to pursue, but leaving this project to IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson team is like leaving food patents to Monsanto: where monopolies are intolerable, academics must take sufficient ownership for progress to render patent law unnecessary.

I'm not sure the American people get it. Academia should play a very important role in society, and financial incentives should align it with that role, rather than distract it into providing ineffective career-training. We pity countries whose wealth relies on the export of addictive narcotics, yet America considers the export of higher-education a key part of its own economic strategy. When higher-education is reduced to a product, it really isn't so different from an addictive narcotic. This business is costing us our security, the nobility of academia, and the efficiency of our economy.

Seeking Jobs That Pay

People who attempt to amass wealth are warned:

1. It can be lost to untimely illness.
2. It can be lost to taxes or legal suits.
3. It can be lost to inflation and consumption.
4. Those who inherit what we amass may lack our competence or values.

Nonetheless, we choose how to spend our time, feel morally obliged to make the most valuable contributions we can, and rely on the labor market to evaluate potential contributions. According to the US Occupational Wage Estimates, the highest paying (i.e. most valuable) contributions are doctor, lawyer, manager/analyst, and post-secondary teacher with mean wages about seven, six, five and four times that for a maid/cook, respectively.

Analyzed deeply, this data doesn't really tell us to prize health, justice, progress and knowledge--many workers earn low wages, despite contributing health, justice, progress and knowledge pro-bono, through non-profits, or in developing countries--rather, the market tells us that the greatest contributions one can make to society are to address the four problems mentioned above with retaining wealth. It also reports success on the fourth: the highest paying jobs are, in fact, protected by systems of credentials (even though some credentialed workers choose lower-paying jobs), and thus more accessible to people to whom the wealthy choose to give scholarships.

Waiting to Grow-up is No Laughing Matter

I think it is important for my kids to know why (most) people want to grow-up.

Most humans enter a season when, underneath the typical ups and downs of life, they experience a relentless ache, a sense that life just isn't right. The ache doesn't go away until their relationships and career have been stabilized, until they know where they will live, who their friends and in-laws will be, and what role they will play in their community.

This is a serious matter because the typical length of that season has grown over the last couple centuries among the upper and middle classes of developed countries. A man used to start a marriage and carpentry business (both for life) as a teenager; now he may have to wait until his late twenties before he knows whether he is ready to wed or will need to relinquish his plan to be a doctor or a manager.

Teaching Ethics

To teach a class on ethics seems like a potentially unethical thing to do--what if you get it wrong? You may think you are safe if you just say, "Here are a bunch of ethical questions to consider, and here are the most cited sources in the field," but, even in that case, the structure of the class could lead students astray.

For example, the curriculum of a course on engineering ethics is expected to cover scenarios like "You are working on a product that can save hundreds of lives, and you can double its efficacy by incorporating a discovery you made while working for a former employer, but your non-disclosure agreement with your former employer forbids you to disclose such discoveries (even though your former employer will not implement them)--what do you do?" The question implies that it is an engineer's responsibility to resolve this ethical dilemma, but what if pragmatic ethics is right?

How to be Loving about Sex

To my kids (and any potential in-laws):

A time will come when you face various options related to sex: intercourse, dating, flirting, and, of course, communicating (or hiding) your feelings. Activities related to sex lead to surprisingly large consequences (both good and bad), so it is important to be loving about sex. Telling you how to be loving about sex is like telling you how to master the viola—you can't learn viola just by reading about it, and even the best violists are still trying to improve their mastery, but it's better to get some advice than to figure it all out on your own.

You are surrounded by sex advice. The magazines in the grocery store are obvious sources, but more often it comes like advertisement, describing goals you should supposedly pursue. For example, you and every other teenager have been humming a chart-topping song that goes, "Let's go all the way tonight, no regrets, just love...I'll be your teenage dream tonight." It describes what to wear ("skin-tight jeans") and what to to do ("take a chance", "runaway" together, get "drunk on the beach", get "a motel", "look at me", "put your hands on me", let your "walls come down", "don't ever look back", "be young forever").

When I talk about being loving about sex, I mean being good to your partner...trying not to hurt him/her. We might call this "moral" love to contrast with fleeting "emotional" love, something one can feel even when being morally unloving. For example, although it is morally loving for a parent to discipline their children, it can be emotionally loving to spoil them instead. When evaluating sex advice, be aware when the kind of love promised is just emotional.

Growing Together

I thought of this book as my dissertation, a chance to write for the sake of learning, to advance original thought, and to establish a specialization (in my case, practical philosophy).

Each chapter offers something I want for my kids:

1. How can we become wise?
2. How can we become truly free?
3. How can we have the deepest love?
4. How can we be at peace with one another?
5. How can we gain spiritual experience?
6. How can we discover purpose in life?

The major theme is that the answers to these questions require being social, so it is written as a series of one-hour "gatherings". Testing revealed that they don't work as planned--there might be something interesting to discover from thinking about why they don't work, so I am linking to them as they were.

The questions are religious, so I tried to appeal to all faiths, including atheism; I supported every answer with both science and scripture. That might have contributed to the ineffectiveness. Feedback also suggested that people don't like to move through these ideas so quickly (maybe people slow down in interfaith situations).

Skills Inventory for Kids

I'm not above using tools to help me be a better father. I have found it helpful to use personality inventories and the love languages inventory, and I developed the following skills inventory to be used in a similar way:

I like to take my son or daughter out for breakfast one-on-one, have him/her fill-out the inventory, and then we discuss the results together. Inventories are an ice-breaker and they help me understand what makes each of my kids unique--the skills inventory helps me coordinate with them on "growing up".

The weakness with this tool as it stands is the lack of age appropriate language (my kids ask, "What's that supposed to mean?")--you can download this as an editable Word file and fix that problem, but I have found it useful even as it is.

Ethics for Artificial Intelligences

Since I published this paper in 2002, it has been cited in several scholarly works and served as required reading for the first course on "machine ethics" (at Yale). The book, Moral Machines (2008), covered most of the same issues with greater detail and less arrogance, and had six more years of scholarship to reference. However, its discussion of my paper could not account for improvements made in subsequent versions. For example, the paper benefited from feedback which showed me that pessimism about the future morality of learning machines is no more justified than pessimism about the future morality of our own children. Therefore, I am republishing the paper as a "knol".

The paper explains why some authorities in relevant fields are concerned that machines will take over the world in the next 10-20 years. It also discusses what we can do to ensure that machines will behave as though instilled with an appreciation for ethics, has implications for human ethics, and may explain why I encourage my kids to figure ethics out for themselves.