The Big, Big Picture

Maybe my upcoming 50th high school reunion inspires me to step back (not for the first time) and look at the big picture of the world as I see it. Yes, (a) the world is an interesting place, (b) there is no inherent meaning or right or wrong, only the essentially arbitrary things we choose, and (c) we're all going to die. But those will never change. As for the more newsworthy:

1. Climate change and mass species extinction are mostly unavoidable, and will have consequences lasting millions of years. But there still may be significant differences between the worst case and better cases, so working for lower emissions is worthwhile. I find it psychologically hard to connect with an issue that honesty requires us to frame as, "We've already lost, but let's work very, very hard so we don't lose quite so badly!" but logically that seems best to me. The prospect of getting large portions of the earth's people to take this issue seriously seems quite dim.

2. American democracy is under serious attack. Revelations from the January 6 hearings make clear how hard Trump tried, after one term in office, to stay in power after losing the vote. If he is elected in 2024, we are in much graver danger. The Constitution prohibits him from seeking a third term, but he could put forth Donald Trump Junior in 2028, making it clear that the latter will rule in name only, as long as Trump Senior lives. His control over the Republican Party will only become stronger. If his supporters shrug at the idea of blatant and repeated lies, that is most worrisome. If state legislatures controlled by Republicans can be convinced to certify a slate of Republican electors even if the people of the state's people voted Democratic, that's a huge blow to democracy. (What about falsely blocking certification of the election of Democratic state legislators, if people are so uppity as to elect them?)

With a 6-3 Supreme Court majority, and the "rotten boroughs" of the US Senate structurally favoring Republicans, the Presidency is in the short term the key office. I am adamant that every person who disagrees with Joe Biden and agrees with Donald Trump on every policy issue of the day must nonetheless vote for Joe Biden. That is if they value democracy, and that is more important than anything else. If there is no functioning democracy, and Donald Trump Jr. does something that is unpopular with a large majority of the people, there is no way to get rid of him. I don't see how people with the most rudimentary knowledge of history can miss that crucial point. One unpopular decision can be followed by a series of others, leading to a government more and more out of line with the will of the people.

Disenfranchising voters that tend to vote against the preferences of local government officials is also a serious problem. Primarily we think of disenfranching black voters, but it is not limited to that. That effort pre-dates Trump.

3. Everything else in my mind fits into a miscellaneous category.

Russian aggression in Ukraine is terrible, though it seems the country will survive, and steps are in place to deter any such attacks in the future. But I wonder about credibility of deterrents. If Russia attacks the NATO member Latvia with conventional forces and seems poised to win, just what is NATO going to do? Use nuclear weapons? Seems unlikely. Would Russia try to call NATO's bluff? Perhaps NATO can defend Latvia with conventional forces.

The Left has committed itself to the idea that the US was founded on slavery and displacement (or worse) of Native Americans, and is thus rotten to the core. White Americans should recognize that they have White Privilege, and while technically they are not instructed to feel guilty about that, in practice that's what happens if they take it seriously. This view might be true in some sense, but it is just not a workable position. A more reasonable approach is to recognize serious problems in our past, but to recognize that all modern nations have huge problems in their past, and the best ones struggle to be the best nations they can be now. It's also a political disaster of the highest order. The policy prescription for white voters who are struggling? Recognize that you are guilty and unduly privileged, and deserve less than Those Other People. I can't think of a better way to get people to vote Republican even if it means giving up democracy.

Sexual minorities, blacks, women -- the pendulum is swinging far to the right, and they will suffer. Overturning Roe v Wade is recent and looms large.

Fundamental to my view is that the government has to engage in a certain amount of income redistribution. The economy, following its own internal logic, has evolved to a place where a few highly skilled workers earn a great deal, and lesser skilled workers who work just as hard have trouble maintaining a decent lifestyle. It's the government's job to ease that... take more from the rich (but also leaving them plenty) to support the poor. This view is not popular with Republicans these days, and thus even the elements of it that we have (like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security) are under attack.

Covid is with us, and a worse virus might be on the way. Lack of trust in government on this issue is a serious problem. More competent and efficient government agencies would also be great.

I am not going to try to make an exhaustive list of all the big issues in the world today. Those are the ones that came to me while writing this on a hot Sunday afternoon in June. But that's the end of category 3, "Miscellaneous".

Impressionistically, in the background of our modern commerce I see a gigantic container ship on the high seas, its engines spewing a huge blast of carbon dioxide into the air with every nautical mile they travel. That's the climate price of just about everything we do.

And democracy... remember democracy? "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others," said Churchill. I fear we're going to be reminded of just why he said that.

Skip the Airplane Safety Videos

 I have enjoyed the YouTube channel of Mentour Pilot (https://www.youtube.com/c/MentourPilotaviation), in particular the series of videos on airline accidents and his very careful look at what happened and various methods that could be taken to reduce such accidents in the future. Concerning Sully's famous ditching into the Hudson... a great job with a wonderful outcome, but still look for potential improvement. Example: They should have switched from an "engine failure" checklist to a "ditching" checklist as they approached the Hudson. Terrrain proximity warnings were not helpful.

But he recently did a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzTs6T4ZTu4&t=1452s) that troubled me. It was a reaction video to an irreverent video of the "real airline safety video" that had been making the rounds of the internet, and I found much to object to in both the original and his reaction to it.

The basic point: The chances of dying in a commercial air crash are 1 in 11,000,000 per year. That is so small that it is not worth people's time to invest mental energy in preparing for such an event.

So you could argue that simply doing away with the entire concept of a safety video would be best. But suppose "we all" decide they should be made. The vast majority of flyers have flown many times, and their time is wasted listening to safety videos. Why not have safety videos optionally available in online reservation systems, kiosks in passenger terminals, a channel on the airplane's entertainment system? Maybe detect based on the wealth of data online if someone might be a a new flyer, and print something prominent on their boarding pass reminding them of how they in particular should look at the safety card in the seat pocket or the one on an entertainment channel. Save everyone the couple minutes of annoying yammering on every flight.

Another note was that most accidents occur during the first 3 minutes or last scheduled 8 minutes. The video suggests keeping your shoes on and your laptop stowed during those times. Why suffer discomfort and waste time during those minutes? They may be just 11 minutes, but your chances of dying are still in the 1 in 11,000,000 range.

Almost all accidents start with an emergency situation that is diagnosed many minutes before a crash -- ten, at least? That's plenty of time to stow your laptop, or put on your shoes, though I'm not sure how vital having shoes on is to your survivial. Plenty of time for people who are not frozen with panic to help out those who are or who don't know what to do by teaching them safety basics. Time to try out your seat belt buckle, making sure you know how to faste and unfasten it. Now you have a strong motivation to pay close attention!

"The frequency of occurrences necessitating the use of oxygen is approximately ten events per one billion flight hours." (https://www.cntraveler.com/story/what-you-dont-know-about-airplane-oxygen-masks#:~:text=%22The%20frequency%20of%20occurrences%20necessitating,per%20one%20billion%20flight%20hours.%22) Once again, amazingly unlikely. If only (say) 1 in 4 people know what to do and don't panic, they have time to get their own mask on and help the other 3 in 4 to get their masks on. If planes really do almost always get down to a safe altitude before brain damage begins, there's an argument for omitting them entirely.

There is also plenty of time to look around for the nearest exit, and to learn how to put on a life vest if needed (though the original video suggests we would be just as safe without them).

These are extremely unlikely events, and for every issue (including the safety video itself) we are concerned with the marginal increase in safety achieved by including or omitting it.

Some safety measures are useful because of events that are far more common and not fatal. You often are best advised to put your seat belt when turbulence is expected. But the PA announcement should be enough, perhaps supplemented by the advice of experienced flyers to new ones as to what is meant.

But actual safety is not the only thing at work here. People like feeling they are safe, and perhaps having a safety video increases their sense that they are safe(r), however irrational. But it's basically a superstition. Civilization has overcome other superstitions; why not this one too?

Performance measured by streaks (bad) and percentages (good)

I don't follow sports much, but I remember often hearing things like, "He hasn't missed a single game in 4 years", or "He has had at least one hit in each of his last 19 games". Another is how many free throws a player made in a row without missing a single one.

I suspect the sports "quants" take a dim view of such records. A much more accurate measure of skill is in percentages. If some guy has missed only 2% of his games in the past four years, but they were in the middle of the four years, his streak would be way less than the guy who holds the record who maybe missed 4% of his games during that period -- it's just they were clustered at the beginning or end. But the first guy is more reliable to be available for the new game. I suppose part of the job of sports writers (or bloggers, or whatever) is to make stories interesting, and "streaks" are kind of interesting in a way that percentages are not.

Maybe I'm unusual in thinking about streaks and percentages in my own life too. But I bet some other people do. I recall trying to bounce a ping pong ball up in the air off a paddle 1,000 times without missing. I think I succeeded after very few attempts (it's not that hard). More recently I played some "Plants versus Zombies" (the original edition). The most difficult challenge is "survival, endless". I think you need to survive 20 levels of this to win the relevant "achievement" within the game context. Naturally, people on the web made posts about their favorite strategies. I developed a strategy I liked and made it through more than 900 levels before the computer crashed, for no apparent reason. Starting over again, I completed 200-odd levels before I died, but due to a clear error I myself had made. I then started again, and got up into around 1500 levels. I finally died when I had a failing hard drive on that computer replaced, but the new drive was not uniformly responsive, so I couldn't reliably make the mouse do what I wanted in a timely fashion. But I was relieved to lose. When working on a streak, every level of play is fraught with tension... If I'm not careful, I could lose now! When you're just working to win a game, you can feel good if you win it and bad if you don't, but a single loss doesn't mar the whole enterprise.

This same issue came up recently in the land of Wordle and Quordle. I guess I am still undefeated in Wordle after 89 games, but try not to think about that. And because of that, even if I'm tired or not feeling very competitive I will play anyway. In Quordle I had 91 wins in a row and hadn't lost a game -- but then I did lose one and once again felt that sense of relief. I've won another 8 since then, so my percentage remains high.

People should set for themselves whatever goals they want, of course. I just think that going for streaks causes extra tension and when your streak ends could be dependent on nothing but bad luck. With percentages you can be a lot more relaxed. A loss is just a loss, and tally that determines your percentage keeps right on going.

What Shaped My Parents

 

My mother died in 2007 and my father in 2010. I had plenty of time to ask them questions. I did ask some, and got some answers. Perhaps some of the questions I consider now are ones they didn't even know the answers to themselves.

My father was born in 1920 and raised in a rather devout Northern Baptist family. They were not well off, and he attended Bates College on scholarship. He reports that at some point in college he realized God didn't exist; it just didn't make sense. He went into biology, following in his big brother's footsteps, and was working towards a PhD at Harvard in roughly 1942. My mother's story is that he avoided the draft because of either a physical deferment (flat feet?) or being in an essential occupation (teaching anatomy and physiology to medical students). Sometimes one, sometimes the other. There was a sense that he was too sensitive to have been suitable for the army, but I'm not sure I ever heard that idea really supported. It is a bit hard to picture him in basic training but I imagine this was true of a lot of draftees. I don't recall anyone saying he volunteered and was disappointed he couldn't serve his country in that way. I asked if he had made any sacrifices on account of the war, and he said he did teach some extra sections way beyond what would have been the usual load, I guess. I think his thesis work was on hormonal cycles of the frog. Getting jobs and getting tenure in the late 1940s was very easy due to the extreme shortage of professors to teach the many students who enrolled under the GI Bill.

At some point around 1961, as a tenured professor at University of New Hampshire, he noticed that the college students were woefully uninformed about the basic facts of human sexuality, and he started teaching the course Human Reproductive Biology. He was qualified to do this from a scientific perspective because of his work in endocrinology. This course became very popular, especially when it met a science distribution requirement. But it was also a subject that the students cared about a lot on a practical level. At one point three lecture halls were required to accommodate all his students -- he lectured live in one and the other two saw closed-circuit TV images of him. At its peak he enrolled 2,000 students a semester. New Hampshire was then a very conservative state, and there was a lot of backlash against teaching sex to college students -- that was up to parents! Yet this man who shied away from conflict in most aspects of life did not shy away here. He kept teaching the course despite the fierce criticism.

Later in his career some woman (foreign student, I think) was arrested for walking through Durham naked, to make some political point. Against the advice of his attorney, he testified for the defense, saying that especially as she had never bent over, she had not displayed any sex organs, so the law did not apply. Why did he volunteer? A sense that the local climate was too prudish about sexual matters?

A stor of a different kind:. Natural childbirth was not a common idea in the early 1960s, and some students showed him a film on the subject, hoping he would show it to his class. He declined, noting that the women in question were obviously in a lot of pain, and he was afraid that women who had that to look forward to would never want to become mothers.

But returning to the big picture, what inspired a retiring, conflict-avoidant professor who was deemed too sensitive for the army to start a course on sex education and keep at it in the face of intense criticism?

My mother was born in 1921 into a family that was prosperous due to ownership of a prestigious wholesale drug company (BO and GC Wilson). But when the depression hit it wiped out the company, so she too attended Bates College on scholarship. Her parents were Republicans. My grandfather in his diary underlined election day of 1932 with "Voted for HOOVER!" My grandmother was later very much on the Joe McCarthy bandwagon, genuinely concerned about the alleged armies of communists that had infiltrated the land. In the era of the Vietnam War, my mother was doing anything she could to help me and my two brothers avoid the draft, but my grandmother thought it was a cowardly dereliction of duty to country. From this conservative background my mother joined up in the human potential movement of the 1960s, including such things as Encounter Groups. What made her adopt values so different from her parents? For her it was less of a change, perhaps, as there was a movement arising that she could become part of.. Becoming atheist was a smaller step, because while her parents were heavily involved in the FUSN church as workers in the organization, neither was particularly devout.

My mother was a valued counselor to high school students (more or less a therapist), and a few of them became friends in her personal life. This would be strongly discouraged today but was not considered a problem back then. One "Curt" visited at our house frequently on weekends. They developed such a rapport that they traveled around New England together showing a human potential slideshow they had devised, "Child of Clay". He also traveled with our family to Europe a couple times. My father had no use for human potential issues, and Curt was a companion to help my mother accommodate those interests.

I did not know at that time that he was gay -- I only figured that out in college. Suddenly (roughly 1974) it all made sense -- they could have this close relationship emotionally, but there would be no sexual tension to tempt her to be untrue to my father. Except then it suddenly didn't make sense, because I discovered (around 2009, I think) she was in fact having sex with Curt at that time. It was a common view at that time that homosexuality could be cured by heterosexual experience, and she wanted to help cure her friend. My father was fully aware of this. However, surely most women did not choose to have sex with gay men unless they themselves felt considerable desire in that direction. It all stopped when Curt decided to embrace his gay identity and started having sex with men.

It was an interesting situation regarding the secrecy involved. It was not an illicit affair in that my father knew (though I do not think he was at all happy about it). But we boys were not informed, which was a sensible choice because of the extreme stigma Curt would have faced had it been known he was gay. To her credit, my mother was largely consistent and adopted a liberal attitude towards sexuality with us boys. Sex was OK as long as both partners were willing and there was the use of reliable contraception. She also adopted the view that statutory rape shouldn't be a crime when girls were willing participants, and definitely felt it was at an entirely different level of offense from "ordinary" rape.

She had definitely non-liberal views on some key questions. She agreed with many thinkers of the time that overpopulation was a catastrophic problem, but laid the blame squarely at the feet of ill-disiplined poor people who did not limit their family sizes, and I think also feared that the higher reproduction rate of these same poor people would weaken the gene pool. Shadows of eugenics.

My mother was widely agreed to be self-centered, and her parents and husband cooperated in having her emotional needs and moods be at the center of life of the extended family. But one incident stuck with me. She was trying to earn her PhD at Boston University in psychology. She wanted to study homosexuality in men. Confidants at the department told her privately that she shouldn't do that, because the senior faculty just couldn't deal with that topic. She felt it was her right to do her thesis on the topic she chose anyway, and the lesson imparted to me was how terribly unfair it was of the BU department to put obstacles in her way (she never got the PhD). I accepted her version of events. In more recent years I parse it differently -- often you have to compromise to get what you want in life. She was unwilling to compromise, and just felt wronged when she was stopped. My father also later confided that he thought she rather panicked at the prospect of doing a PhD thesis, so perhaps that muddies the lesson somewhat.

Conservative grandparents, and quite liberal parents at a time (on issues of sexuality, largely?) when they were rare... What caused the shift?