Pictures on the Wall Reconsidered

When decorating a home, it is customary to put things on the walls. Large expanses of bare wall are unusual. Visitors will note the blank space as a peculiarity.

For the past year and a half I have lived in an apartment with a rather eccentric and demanding landlord, who asserts that any screw holes or nail holes must be patched up perfectly to avoid a charge against the security deposit. My solution has been to just leave the walls bare. For the five years before that, I lived in a converted attic with slanting walls which do not allow putting up pictures in the usual manner. I elected to leave the very few suitable vertical wall spaces bare as well. Although external factors led me to this situation, I find I like this arrangement.

I am of the opinion that thoughts should be guided from within. We should choose what to think about. Of course this is usually originates with our senses. Whether we use old-style books or magazines, or look at screens, we usually start with words and images to guide our thoughts. (The battle over advertising's imperative to impose their own agenda on our minds is the topic for a different day.) In the internet era it is more and more possible to actively choose. A TV channel was much more passive. The only options were to look for a new channel or turn it off. Even there, the TV screen was constantly changing, showing us new things. Today, clicking different places on a screen in sequence can lead to a stunning variety of different destinations.

Pictures on the wall never change. When we look at them they interrupt anything else we were thinking about and our perceptions of them take a place in our minds. Is there really anything that we want to endow with that power? Is even a picture of a beloved deceased parent really helpful? Perhaps you do want to remember them, but do you want your memories to be guided by looking at that particular patch of wall at that particular time? Most pictures do not tie us to something of such powerful emotional significance. Why should we think about that particular thing (yet once more) when we were in the midst of a train of thought we recently chose to start in on? The mind wanders plenty as it is, but do we really want to give another nudge to the wandering? We may feel we get so used to what's on the wall that we don't really register it any more. But more of our thoughts are governed by automatic processing than we are aware of. And if we really don't see it, there's surely no strong reason for it to be there.

Then there are visitors. What a first-time visitor sees when looking at our walls gives them an impression of us. But does a series of pictures, however carefully chosen, really convey what we want to convey? If we follow the standard rule that walls should be covered with things, then they can judge us compared to the other things we might have chosen to cover our walls with. But perhaps we would do better to escape that paradigm entirely, and with mind uninterrupted by anything on the walls, hope they listen more carefully to what we say, or think more carefully about what they say to us. If we want them to concentrate on a particular set of images, we can show them a photo album in some format or other (phone, tablet, paper book).

I recently saw at someone's home a sort of intermediate arrangement, which is presumably quite common. A large-screen TV had a looping slide show of pictures from a recent vacation. Presumably they enjoyed being reminded of that vacation. But they quite likely replaced it with a different set of pictures after the next vacation, or perhaps simply shut it off and had a blank large-screen TV on that section of wall.

Compare this to places outside your home. If you have your own office, the same considerations would apply, if to a lesser extent. If you go into a restaurant, the décor has likely been chosen to help set a particular mood, and quite possibly you chose the restaurant in part because of the "ambiance" for that particular block of time while you're eating. If you go into something like a Target or Walmart, you have put yourself in the world of retail commerce and probably aren't upset to be inundated with advertising -- some of it might actually be useful! If you go into the sanctuary of my Unitarian-Universalist church, you are typically wanting to nudge your thoughts in the direction of the profound or spiritual. Stained glass windows are in line with what you want to be thinking about.

In your own home, whatever is on your walls is bound to be relevant to a much smaller fraction of the things you want to be thinking about at any given time. Likely so small that they hinder rather than help you in your life goals. Maybe bare walls would serve you better.

It's not the money, it's the eternal emails

I am a fan of the YouTube channel "Mentour Pilot" https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot, especially the series on airline crashes or near-crashes. I'm not sure why, but I like them. The Swedish owner "Petter" has a variety of sponsors. One sounds kind of appealing to me, "Curiosity Stream", which would offer a wide variety of documentaries. What amuses me is how he emphasizes how it's only $20 a year, and you can get $5 off if they use his code, and to top it all off there's a money-back guarantee (I'm making up the specifics, but you get the idea). Presumably others with sponsors make the same sort of pitch.

But the price has nothing to do with why I won't subscribe. I'd happily pay twice that much. I won't subscribe because once I did, and my information got into their database, my expectation is that I would never, ever be able to free myself of the various promotions and "junk email" arising from that purchase. Possibly if you look carefully there's a way to opt out of them selling your information to others, but it wouldn't stop they themselves from sending me promotional email forever. Or they would change their terms of service, or Curiosity Stream would be bought by a bigger organization who would inherit the access to your information, and send you promotions for far more products. Basically, my perception is that one way or the other they've got you. Perhaps writing a blog post with "Curiosity Stream" in it will bring me to their attention and get me on their lists.

You could create an identity with links to entities you're not sure you want to hear from forever and then shed it every so often, like Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose shed his antlers. Perhaps some service could help you with this. But perhaps the marketers have a clever way of rediscovering people if the new identity subscribes to some of the same things as the old one.

If there was a service that guaranteed they would use your identity for the sole purpose of the subscription you make, and never ever send you another email or share your information, on pain of criminal penalties vigorously enforced, I think they might have a market -- if we could ever really trust them.

I'll also share one way I stayed naive until just a few years ago. When you belong to something like the ACLU, they send messages like, "your membership is about to expire!" and "last chance!" and I somehow got the idea that if I didn't respond then I'd lose my chance to be a member and they'd take me off their mailing list. Ha! Of course they won't ever take me off because they'll always be hoping I'd come back and give them more money. (The ACLU has lost its way -- they have become "woke" at the expense of protecting civil liberties.)

Subscriptions and "Ghosting"

I recently emailed an old work colleague to reminisce about that old job, and he replied telling me he was not on speaking terms with me because of a blog post I had made a year and a half before. He had disliked it, but decided that we were so far apart there was no point discussing it, so he just unsubscribed from my blog. This overall situation has disturbed me quite a bit.

I think in modern terminology what he did is called "ghosting" -- someone just disappears without a trace, and you aren't informed of it.

I don't know how many people read my blog. When I looked using the simple tools at hand, I found one person subscribed by the simple method, but I know from email replies that there are at least 4 other people who have read my blog within the past year. At least two of them get my blog posts by email, one of them (maybe more) from Google FeedBurner. I have generally been fine with that situation. I figured only a handful of people read the blog, and I was writing for those few. I started this blog in 2007, which is forever ago in internet time, and I am very poor at figuring out how these shifting program configurations connect things together. There was some hint that FeedBurner was itself an obsolete technology. If anyone knows how to figure out who is actually reading my blog, I'd love to know. Then I'll at least have a method to figure out if someone "ghosts" me.

The readers I have heard from emphasize that they don't always agree with everything I say (possible translation: think lots of it is really crazy), but find it interesting. A blog author would ideally get comments from readers and there would be occasional discussions back and forth. I've accepted that my blog isn't that kind of place -- which is probably more the rule than the exception for blogs with few subscribers. Sometimes I toss out ideas that I am not at all sure of, and a few words might lead me to look at it again and happily say (perhaps even with relief) that I take it back.

The post my former colleague reacted to so strongly was one where I said people were eager to make sure Derek Chauvin paid for what he did without knowing the full evidence, and I gave some reasons why maybe he wasn't really guilty of murder. Simply being alerted that "Someone really hated this post" led me to look at it again and see that it was terrible. I hadn't looked at even the basics of evidence on the other side, and it quickly became apparent to me that he was appropriately convicted. The whole post also had an emotional tone to it, where feelings were trumping careful thought. I first quickly posted a reply saying that this was a bad post and I didn't believe it, and then within a couple days decided it was such a bad post I would just delete the whole thing (I do have a saved copy in case anyone really, really wants to see it).

My former colleague was an "inconsistent ghoster", where my recent email brought the whole issue to his attention again, but I can hardly blame him for that. It just happened to bring to light a situation that otherwise would have just lain hidden.

Overall I think what's disturbing is this idea that people who sign up for the blog might have extremely strong negative reactions -- and I'll never have a clue. Of course maybe many or most of my readers are prepared to have very strong negative reactions but just let them go by and wait for the next interesting idea. Perhaps they would think that only if I was actively a purveyor of evil would they be moved to reply or unsubscribe -- but I would never know about the latter course either. If anyone wants to comment to me privately, my email is bart.wright@comcast.net.

In one post from a while back (http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2021/05/racism-as-one-of-many-comparable.html), my reasoning led me to the astonishing conclusion that racism shouldn't be in the top tier of problems we should be working on. I also said I definitely believed it was a serious injustice -- not trying to say there was no racism or white people have it just as bad or anything of that kind. I'm not sure I had ever heard anyone with that combination of views. Could some reader with a few words point me to some article that would explain why my thinking on the subject was wrong? Or maybe they all agreed, or they just let it go -- reading a blog doesn't commit anyone to provide feedback, ever. I guess I'll never know.

Older Men and Younger Women

It is generally assumed that men and women will choose partners of roughly the same age, and the vast majority do. They share life experience and outlook in a way they would not with much older or younger partners. Shared experience and outlook are ingredients in helping to make a rich emotional relationship.

Yet fairly often older men - even up into their 60s or beyond -- pursue women in their 20s, and sometimes marry them. Sometimes it is these younger women who are pursuing the older men.

In my part of the world the accepted explanation is what I would call the feminist take: the men are denying their mortality and want to feel younger. They want a woman they can more easily manipulate, due to her inexperience. The woman they seek might be called a trophy wife. As for the women who accept the courtship by the older men, they will be called gold-diggers, or women who want a daddy figure.

There may be some grains of truth to these explanations, but there is something more profound going on, something that goes back to human mating patterns in our environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA, a key concept in evolutionary biology). Evolution strongly favors leaving more descendants than fewer. Women over 45 rarely bear children, while women who are 20 or 30 very often do. So it is a simple and powerful evolutionary force that would tend to make men attracted to these younger women more intensely than older women. In our society, we see this played out in men whose marriages end (due to widowhood, or divorce initiated by either party) and marry younger women. In many other societies polygamy is practiced, and there the men don't need to divorce their older wife(s), they just add on the younger one -- or more than one. In some of these older societies women do not have choice as to whom they marry, and some might be very upset to be stuck with an older man -- but quite possibly not all.

Some young women today who have undeniable freedom of choice do freely choose an older man. Why would they do that? There is an evolutionary explanation for that preference as well. Evolution programs women to seek two things in mates. First, like all mammals and a great many other creatures, the females seek males with the best genes. Presumably those genes will make the offspring more successful at reproducing, and the women's genes that are along for the ride will also spread more widely. Second, humans have a rare pattern compared to other mammals -- males actively help to provide resources for their offspring. So when choosing a mate, women will prefer males who seem better able to do that. In our terms, that could be summarized as "richer". A woman may well prefer a successful young man to one who seems unable to keep a steady job. All else being equal, she would prefer a younger man to an older one. But how to trade off these two desires? It is quite common that a relatively rich older man can be expected to provide more resources to his children with his second wife than a poor young man could to those with his one and only wife. The quality of genes does not vary significantly over lifespan. So even if a man is physically past his prime, his genes will tend to produce young men who are like he was as a young man -- not as the older man he is when he (re)marries.. However desirable they once were, women of 45 rarely produce any children, while men of 60 usually can father children quite reliably.

Evolutionary explanations are very often not expressed directly. Instead, they mold our desires in a way that meets the ends of evolution without our conscious choice. A very clear case is sex and contraception. If we were guided only by a conscious desire to produce offspring, we wouldn't bother with sex if we weren't planning to reproduce, and there would be no need for contraception. But evolution has not endowed us with a desire to produce offspring, it has given us a very strong desire to have sex. This accomplished the goal very well, in the original environment where there was no contraception. So we still strongly desire sex. Knowing intellectually that it cannot produce offspring in most cases barely attenuates this desire at all, and we are not embarrassed to seek out contraception and still want sex very much.

Return now to marriage. In many societies, marriage is an economic contract, with no pretense at romance. The two partners have sex, but otherwise their lives are lived in quite separate men's worlds and women's worlds, but each helps in their own sphere to raise the children. But in our society -- and a great many others -- men and women feel a strong desire for each other and often feel love. This helps them stay together in the face of adversity and jointly raise their children and also induces them to conceive more children. But the subjective experience is love -- a very powerful feeling.

The same thing is likely to happen between older men and younger women. They love each other. Evolutionary explanations like wanting to father more children or wanting more resources for children are typically not experienced psychologically. The young woman and the older man genuinely love each other! The feminist story devalues such feelings as shallow illusions, and they claim any actual examples are quite rare.

We have no right to discount a young woman's desire for an older man because it might stem in part from his success in life. Her yearning for him must be respected on its own terms, as is any other romantic yearning. And I assert that we also have no right to discount an older man's yearning for a younger woman. When such yearnings are reciprocated, the result is a love as real as any other.

In my experience, it is older women who judge such situations most harshly. They will give young women a pass on the theory that they are inexperienced and misguided, but the men will get nothing but hostility. A man's desire for a younger woman is attacked, even if he is single and there is no question of deserting an older women. If his desire is not reciprocated, he is in for even harsher treatment. What on earth made him think an attractive young woman would go for *him*?! This entire attitude is demeaning and disrespectful.

It might also be selfish. Older women -- which here might mean age 40 and up -- want male partners as much as younger women -- this desire does not disappear when their fertility drops, though it may become noticeably less. The men who are pursuing younger women are not available to them. Older women may not at all like the idea that younger women are in an important sense viewed by men as more valuable than they are. They also might realize that their condition of being without a partner is partly their fault. When they were young and more desirable, they were perhaps more choosy about a mate than they would have been in retrospect, or busy with careers that might not really have been worth it, if the consequence is to live the rest of their lives single and childless. This surely does not apply to all women or even most women.

But kind-hearted people are sympathetic when anyone develops romantic interest in someone their own age and it is rejected. They don't look hard for reasons why it wasn't a genuine interest. They should be just as sympathetic if an older man develops romantic interest in a young woman.

I speak from the perspective of a coastal, blue-state, leftist culture. There are a lot of women who might have a different view. Donald Trump felt confident that women liked it when he grabbed their pussies, and bragged that he did so frequently. This was not enough to keep a majority of white women from voting for him. This certainly opens up the possibility that such women do not hew to the feminist stance on other sex- and gender-related subjects too. This might include older men with younger women, and some may have what I would consider a more realistic attitude. But this is just speculation.

I am now a single man in his late 60s. I am myself aware of an emotional and sexual interest in young women. I would like to be able to tell others, including casual acquaintances, about crushes and feel confident they would respect that feeling. They are most welcome to point out practical difficulties to any relationships that might emerge from such feelings, and in fact I heartily agreed and typically regard them as insurmountable. But that does not invalidate the initial attraction.

Cognitive/Memory Limitations

 I've been worried about some aspects of my memory for some time. Twelve years ago I went to a job interview in Kendall Square, and when I was done I went to retrieve my car from the parking garage and could not find it. I was in the wrong garage, and they were also quite different -- one had three "aisles" per level instead of the usual two. But "wrong garage" didn't occur to me until I had spent half an hour or more scouring the one where I thought it was. I also thought I had short-term memory problems, like being far less able than I thought was normal to (say) be given a list of 10 words and then say them back, especially the version where they distract you with something else in the middle. I got a cognitive assessment and was assured everything was fine, though there was no test relevant to the "wrong garage" problem, I don't think.

What seems to happen more lately is to have a conversation with someone (this is on the web), and then forget two weeks later that it ever happened; often it never occurs to me to wonder if I've had the conversation before. I now try to adjust a bit by assuming I might have had just about any conversation earlier, and the web (at least the programs I use) remembers history, so I can check. But it does get in the way of even tentative friendships when I see someone's name come up and have no memory of whether I've talked with them before and if so what was said, and what it revealed about who they are.

You have heard of "test anxiety" or "performance anxiety" (of various kinds). We've all heard of word-finding difficulty, a symptom of aging. But what I experience sometimes is "word-retrieval anxiety". For instance, "What's the name of the kid in that family, the middle child? <oh no, I'm not going to be able to remember it.!..> And indeed, I can't remember it. I remember the name of the older brother and younger sister, just fine, even if it's the middle child who was my friend, because those aren't the ones I was trying to remember. My few simple attempts to find any discussion by people with this sort of problem on the web were not successful. I think it may be getting worse as I get older, but I'm not positive.

Since late high school almost everything I write has been composed at a keyboard. Along with getting a high typing speed (100wpm or more, which I still have), I also had good accuracy. I typed the words I meant to type, exactly right. This was a handy skill for a software engineer, where quite often the computer is intolerant of errors of a single character, and if you don't make them you don't waste time trying to find them or fixing them.

Then a decade or so ago errors started getting more common in my writing. I would put in the wrong homophone, I would reverse letters, or drop a letter. Lately these get more common, and with surprising frequency I just omit a word entirely. One source of evidence of this has been what the spellchecker finds -- when I run it in "batch mode" rather than interactively, it's easy to get an overall picture.

I still write some computer programs, and now I get the series of compiler errors indicating this exact problem -- I skipped a character here, put the wrong one there, etc. At least as of last year, I could solve most of the programming problems in "Advent of Code", which often require some pretty clever computer programming. Lately I wrote a program (a solver for "Waffle" is the most recent, I think) where I had to correct 15 or so typos, and after that was done the 200-line program worked perfectly the first time -- the logic was correct.

One sort of cognitive decline I had never considered in advance was losing my knowledge of spelling. I don't mean the general rules of spelling, but the exceptions that we learn that go with individual words. One example is "Cacophony". I was writing this in some document, and "cacaphony" is what came to mind. The spell-checker flagged it immediately, and whereas in the past after making such a rare mistake I would have instantly known the real answer was "cacophony", now I don't. I just look at the word and wonder how to spell it, then have to look it up -- entering the wrong spelling as a search term in Google will usually find the right one. "Guerrilla" -- Two r's or one? Two l's or one?

For Wordle I wrote a trivial little program that lets me enter a word and simply asks, "Is this in the Wordle dictionary of valid answers?" (While the program will reject many rare words immediately so you don't lose a guess, it will accept 10,000 or so words as guesses compared to 2,000 or so valid answers.) I figure use of this program is completely defensible and not cheating, because the list of valid Wordle answers is in no way systematic. For instance, plurals of common words are often omitted, such as "stars" and "roses". But in some cases I use it to ask, "Do I have the right spelling of this word, or not?"

My cognitive decline is highly selective. Along with the computer programs, I win at least 99% of my games of Wordle, Quordle, Octordle, and Waffle. And I think/hope people can read my posts here and find the text to be well-written and the ideas expressed well.

I was going to write about some other memory problems I have -- but I can't remember them, now.

Did I already write a blog post on this issue? Checking reveals that it wasn't recent if I did.

Why aliens exist but aren't here: the simplest explanation

I suppose I am not the typical blogger when I say, "I covered that topic 14 years ago, so I don't need to cover it again, right?"

Recently the question of the existence of alien intelligence has come to my attention again. It's a sensational topic. People have been discussing it continuously, I'm sure, but it comes to me anew as part of my scanning for suitable YouTube videos to watch.

These are the links to the posts I made 14 years ago:

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2008/06/aliens-are-bountiful-but-unreachable.html

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2008/09/failure-to-detect-aliens-does-not-mean.html

None of my views have changed, but I will add a new analysis. Some people may find it boring. (Oh, no! I will lose viewers and advertising revenue!)

Wikipedia includes an article on "The Fermi Paradox", which is essentially: If earth isn't special in some way, there should be lots of other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Yet, we have not detected any, let alone had any of them come visit us. How can this be?

First I'll give my answer, which is basically: "You can't get there from here." Most likely the resources and technology needed to colonize a single other world are too great and beyond the capabilities of EVERY ONE of the millions of civilizations.

But if we get past that step, we realize that colonizing the galaxy requires an expanding population growth of colonized planets. Some of the time a colonized planet has to colonize two or more others. If civilizations can expand at most for a small distance around their origins, and habitable planets are as sparse as we suspect, that is why we haven't met any aliens. I'll abbreviate "You can't get there from here" with the shorter "TOO FAR".

I think all of the other explanations are unsatisfactory (except for the Zoo Hypothesis). Here I focus on the Wikipedia article's list of hypothetical explanations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox

Earth is special: extraterrestrial intelligence is rare or nonexistent. This is hubris. As scientists look, they find planets around stars, stars of the right types, and planets of the right size and composition, the right distance from their stars. Given our current detection capabilities, everything they would expect to find in support of life elsewhere they have found.

The key question for the others is not, "Is this a possibility?"or "Is this pretty likely?" but rather, "Is this so certain that it would prevent ALL of the millions of civilizations from reaching us?" Some of them are about time limits on these other civilizations. Others are about their being too alien. Others are about why they don't communicate with us. But all are consistent with the resolution of the paradox being that there are alien civilizations (likely millions), but we haven't detected any of them.

A. Global catastrophic risk. ALL?

B. Intelligent alien species have not developed advanced technologies. TOO FAR. If millions of species have been at this for a long time and none has developed the right technologies, chances become very high that there is some limitation beyond cleverness, that is a barrier to all societies. ALL? and TOO FAR mix.

(I switch here from using letters for possibilities to numbers).

As an overall concept (specific examples below) some complex set of psychological or sociological forces will limit or destroy civilizations. None of these have the aura of inevitability. ALL?

1. It is in the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself. ALL?

2. It is in the nature of intelligent life to destroy others. ALL?

3. Civilizations only broadcast detectable signals for a brief period of time. ALL?

4. Alien life may be too alien. (This becomes a version of "earth is special", if ALL of the millions of species are so terribly alien. The electromagnetic spectrum and the presence of physical bodies seem pretty basic). ALL?

5. Colonization is not the cosmic norm. ALL?

6. Alien species may have only settled part of the galaxy. TOO FAR. With so many species having the opportunity for so long, why would they stop halfway?

7. Alien species may not live on planets. ALL? RELEVANT?

8. Alien species may isolate themselves from the outside world. ALL?

9. Lack of resources needed to physically spread throughout the galaxy. TOO FAR. Some few individual planets may be brimming with resources, but that's just one small step on being able to spread.

10. It is cheaper to transfer information than explore physically. IRRELEVANT, or a variant of "too alien".

11. Humans have not listened properly. IRRELEVANT.

12. Humans have not listened long enough. IRRELEVANT.

13. Intelligent life may be too far away. TOO FAR. Treated more fully in other points.

14. Intelligence may exist hidden from view. IRRELEVANT.

15. Everyone is listening but no one is communicating. ALL?

16. Communication is dangerous. ALL?

17. Earth is deliberately avoided. The "zoo" hypothesis. Interesting. In a class by itself!

I am proposing that ALL of the millions of civilizations have failed at colonization. That's a high bar to meet, that even with some highly unlikely mix of favorable circumstances, not a single one of millions has succeeded at an arbitrarily expanding colonization.

Here is a brief rundown of what is required to have an expanding population of of colonization.

A huge spacecraft must be constructed. Life must be maintained for thousands of years if the spacecraft goes near the speed of light, millions if it doesn't. Long-term stasis might be one option, but it is entirely possible that NO form of intelligent life can survive and thrive after long-term stasis -- space has dangerous objects and dangerous rays. Otherwise, the society with its usual cycle of life and death must function aboard the spacecraft for those thousands or millions of years.

The spacecraft has to stop when it reaches its destination. The energy to set it off from the home planet can be assembled locally, but the energy to stop has to be carried with the spacecraft, and it is huge. Additional energy in similar quantities is required for course corrections, if the aliens detect from their spacehip that there is a more promising place to visit.

Aiming difficulties. Before setting out on this voyage, the colonists have to know where they are going. Perhaps their techniques will let them verify that there is a world which matches their own environment rather closely, and that is not already occupied by a civilization that would not welcome them. But for an expanding pattern of colonization, far more is required: The planet has to have support for a sizable population, lots of heavy industry, and large, accessible quantities of many minerals to construct at least one new colony ship. Suppose for instance aliens with needs like humans detect a planet with a band like our arctic tundra around the equator and glaciers elsewhere. Perhaps colonists could eke out a living, but not build a large industrial base.

Note also that when scientists make estimates of planets that could host life, they mean life that evolved for local conditions. Some other organism that evolved on another planet may have far more specific requirements for their own survival.

There has to be a net gain. Some of the time, a planet has to have at least TWO successful colonizations for this to be an expanding process. If we allow for some of the colonization efforts being failures, we need to replace them and still have a net growth.

Some have proposed a robotic colonization instead of one with living organisms. This does solve some of the problems, for instance relaxing environmental requirements. Our robots on earth are more and more capable with time. But that does not mean that there is no limit to what they can achieve even in the best of circumstances with millions of civilizations trying. A robot needs to quickly find materials allowing it to replicate itself, which are on earth mined from ores and then processed, at great expense. Then they must build a large industrial base, then construct two or more huge spaceships and launch them -- that is indeed a lot of work. What's more, most engineering systems advance by trial and error, getting feedback from earlier attempts to perfect later ones. But if the robot goes a thousand light years away and is even capable of sending information back, the time between one version and the next one improved based on experience is no less than 2,000 years.

I am not a skillful web searcher, but it seems there are far more articles on how robotic probes could proliferate than the immense difficulties. Perhaps this is akin to how conspiracy theories get huge press, and the debunkers write the facts but don't recycle them endlessly.

I have written ALL? In front of most of the proposed limitations, and so I am hesitant to write ALL! In front of this one. But to me it looks like the engineering challenges cannot be overcome by some rare local favorable circumstances, even with millions of civilizations trying.

For us to be surprised that we have not met any aliens, we have to be confident that some civilization somewhere can solve the "TOO FAR" problem to reach over very large expanses of space. The assertion that not a single one can solve that problem seems to me far more likely than any other explanation.

When I think about colonization efforts, I imagine a map of the universe with widely scattered islands of intelligent life. Most are single planets. Here and there just possibly colonization might have happened, proceeding to a small handful of nearby stars, or even merged togther. They form little bubbles. But the bubbles are way too far apart to meet each other reliably, let alone expand to cover the entire galaxy.

This seems by far the most plausible explanation for why we have met no aliens. Earth is not special, so there have been millions of other civilizations throughout our galaxy and others. However, not a single one of those millions can create a colonization effort that can grow arbitrarily large, and thus come into contact with us.

The second most likely explanation is the "Zoo Hypothesis", but that's an explanation for another day.

None of others seems remotely plausible to me.

Why 'Aliens are Plentiful but Unreachable' is an answer everyone hates

 I've been thinking about alien intelligent life again (just got abducted last night again, sigh).

Here is my conclusion again: Aliens are Plentiful but Unreachable. There are various other possible answers to "Is there intelligent life elsewhere?" What's the emotional reaction to each of them?

My answer is about the worst answer I can imagine in terms of human psychology and yearning.Let's go through the others.

If we are alone, then we are truly special, for once. Every other time we thought we were special we actually weren't. This time we are! (If you muse about deities, maybe there really is a personal God, the only one in the Universe, and they care about Earth personally. Just what purpose those billions of other galaxies are serving in God's plan is a mystery, but God's plans always are, right?)

If the reason we won't meet any aliens is that technological civilizations always burn themselves out quickly, that is a doomsday prediction for us here on earth -- and interesting. Maybe we could somehow avoid it! Or we'll fail, but we know they all failed too.

If aliens are close enough to just now pick up our radio signals (as hypothesized in the movie "Contact") then we might just now be coming to their attention, and we can expect a visit! Exciting!

If there are two or three other civilizations in the universe, we can at least dream about them in concrete terms and how they might be different from us. Maybe #1 is like this, and #2 is like that...

The "Zoo Hypothesis" is exciting. Millions of alien civilizations aren't acting independently. One of them is dominant, at least in our vicinity, and powerful enough to keep any other one from making their presence known. This one dominant civilization, for whatever reason, wants to keep us pristine and naive, uncontaminated by knowledge of a much bigger pond in which Earth is just the tiniest fish. That is a motivation we can understand and seems plausible. When and whether they will reveal themselves is a big question. It's a reason to look carefully at the skies because we might at some point learn enough to discover the telltale signs of a zoo. No one said the zookeepers have to have perfect technical prowess.

But then there's my answer. If alien civilizations are to be counted in the millions, then we are nothing special. Just a run-of-the-mill technological civilization. And worse -- we never get to meet the others! It's like the universe saying, "You're not important. There's millions more just like you. But you'll never meet them! I won't tell you a single thing about a single one of them! Nyah-nyah!"

The Mystery of Labor Unions

 

Like most people of a leftist inclination, I grew up with a favorable opinion of labor unions. It was the workers against the owners, the relatively poor against the very rich. Unions were good. I can see that and get behind it in practice, but as I get older I find myself more and more mystified when I try to think through the theory of labor unions.

Surely there is a positive role for a place where workers can talk and plan and organize and come up with proposals. Improvements of a "qualitative" nature are sensible. If workers dislike some policy out of proportion to what the owners gain from having it, perhaps they will give it up. If in contrast the management is holding onto some program for fear of worker reaction, perhaps they will find that workers don't care about that as much as they thought. Give and take.

The story I heard is that US aircraft carrier pilots early in World War II complained to their superiors that they felt doomed. It was a job with a high death toll, and they would keep flying until they were killed. Management saw their point and instituted the "tour of duty", where if they survived a certain number of months or years, then they could leave and go to less hazardous duty in the US -- training, in this case. The story is that this policy paid off many times over as the training of new pilots could be influenced by the actual experience of veterans who had operated under real conditions as opposed to just the theory imparted by people who had never been there. Something of a digression -- but it wasn't a zero sum game of pilots against higher-ups.

But at the core of the negotiation in the case of US labor disputes seems to be that the workers want to earn more and the owners want to pay less. Without unions, the rule that classical economics would suggest is that there is supply and demand. The owners pay what they need to hire the workers they need, and the workers don't work for a wage if they can do better elsewhere. Unions seek to organize workers who are particular in some fashion (trade, industry, employers) so they can get more. But how do we know how much they deserve? Is it just the result of a bitter contest?

Backing up a bit, the workers and the unemployed make up the vast majority of the electorate. If they choose to do so, they could devise any policies they want. If the current constitution (let's restrict ourselves to the US) prohibits certain things, they could convene a constitutional convention and come up with a new one that was entirely to their liking. They could order all the wealth in the country to be divided up evenly. It's probably a very good thing they don't do this. Although I can't find the reference, my understanding was that Zimbabwe ordered a radical land distribution, but the new owners knew little about organizing agriculture for selling to world markets and there were very serious economic consequences. "Owners" who do nothing but collect dividends from shares of stock are worth little, but I am convinced that the well-paid upper management in most industries (short of the CEOs) are highly skilled people doing vital work that few other people can do. It is suitable that they are paid well.

What keeps the relatively poor from taking over? Some of it might be a genuine belief that rich people deserve to keep most of their money. Some of it might be the overall effect of "rich people control everything" as applied to the democratic process. But there have been exceptions. The 1930s New Deal set in motion a radical redistribution of wealth and income in the US that lasted decades.

Whatever mix they represent of the interests of rich and poor, government has passed significant legislation limiting what employers can do. There are child labor laws, safety requirements (as in OSHA), and minimum wages. In theory, this seems like the right approach to me, in contrast to unions. In practice, with the rich wielding (in fact) a great deal of power in elected government, perhaps unions are a source of worker strength. But the fact that their beneficial effect is so uneven is troubling.

I had some more detailed information about labor disputes at Verizon 10-15 years ago than most people because I knew a contractor there. Verizon inherited some of the unions of the old AT&T ("Ma Bell") when that company was broken up. The situation at Verizon? The unions mass their forces, and Verizon prepares for a strike by training professional employees to take over union tasks. A strike comes, both sides expend lots of effort and resources, and it is eventually settled. One contentious issue was the health plan. The union wanted to keep their relatively generous plan. The less generous one that management proposed was in fact the same health plan that all the professional employees (of supposedly higher rank and status) had. Who was to say what justice was? Did the organized workers deserves better health care because they were organized?

Then there are unions where the employer is the government. I knew a little (very little) about the teachers in the Newton (Mass.) school system, who were organized. Compared to other school districts, they were paid well, but still went on strike for higher wages. Who was to say what was right? Newton teachers didn't need to settle for less than they were worth just because others were being judged to be worth even less. But who could say what they were actually worth?

Unions can also be cumbersome and slow to react. This same Verizon contractor was setting up her office in a union building and was told she was prohibited from plugging in her devices because it was a union building. She had to wait for a union employee to plug them in for her. Something is wrong here. Imagine trying to unionize employees of stores that rented VHS tapes. The industry was hot at its peak, but disappeared so quickly a union would have been useless. Perhaps a silly example...

I'm not sure what to think about today's (US) world in terms of labor. There are lots of what we used to call "white collar" workers who are expected to return text messages 7 days a week. And yet I think most would say they have initiative, empowerment and flexibility that so far exceeds factory workers from 100 years ago that it's hard to even think about comparing them in terms of exploitation. Workers at Google and Apple may not be unionized, but the company treats them well in a competition to keep the most talented.

On the other hand, there is the horror of part-time jobs with irregular scheduling. You never know when your shifts will be in advance, but you must be ready to work when called. Along with leading to a disrupted life, this effectively prevents a worker at one part-time job with taking another to supplement. We can imagine the federal government stepping in to limit this practice, in the same vein as minimum wage laws.

One proposal I have made to help with economic inequality is "wage magnification" (http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2021/03/wage-magnification.html). It is nowhere on the political map, but in principle it seems like the right kind of solution to income inequality.

But when unions go up against management, do we have anything short of a knock-down, drag-out fight on our hands? Is there any principle governing what the proper level of pay is? Our political system itself is in a knock-down, drag-out mode, but the parties to the fight are elected by voters. Even in a Republican-dominated era, they are deterred from simply ending Medicare or Social Security, because they fear their voters would rise up and desert their party. Instead they have to chip away at it and weaken the programs gradually. Even so, they must be alert to the swing voters who could shift the balance of power to Democrats. However imperfect, there is an anchor there to guide us.

My Problem, or Society's Problem?

There are lots of situations where the members of some very small set of people would like or need something, and there is a basic choice to make: Does society deal with it, or does the individual deal with it? If it costs the majority little or nothing, then the solution is obvious. The potential problems arise when there is some sort of cost to people in general of the accommodation for the few.

One example is the sheet of paper in many official mailings giving in a wide variety of different languages the basic message, 'This is important. Don't ignore it." That seems reasonable. People who speak a wide variety of languages get a mix of important mail and junk mail, and this seems like a reasonable way to distinguish the two. It's easy enough for English speakers to ignore. I wonder if there is a legal penalty for including such a piece of paper in marketing mail -- or maybe it just wouldn't be very effective advertising. I'm also thinking that these ubiquitous pieces of paper cry out for some slang term, but I haven't heard it yet. 

Phone  trees only came into widespread use after I was an adult. But initially there was never a "To continue in Spanish, press 2" message. Now there is. This is I trust a cost/benefit tradeoff. Someone judged that there were enough Spanish speakers that it was worth it. Or perhaps it came out of an activist demand, and including it earned points with activists for the Spanish-speaking community. But it costs everyone a few seconds on every phone call. In contrast, something like Braille instructions on ATMs have no cost. Perhaps a half-second version, like "Espanol, dos" would be obvious enough to Spanish speakers and save us all a second or so on every call.

Some people are sensitive to fragrances. Some people like to wear fragrances. Do the sensitive ones have the right to determine that others can't wear fragrances? Or is it the responsibility of those truly sensitive to fragrances to plan to be elsewhere?

I was a partaicipant in a series of pot luck dinners starting ten years ago, at which people were required to provide a label with each dish listing the ingredients. This is significant work to prepare this list and display it. The solution I would favor is that those very few with serious food allergies should bring a bag supper and let the cooks prepare their dishes without having to document them.

I have heard about serious peanut allergies, based on which any traces of peanuts are banned in an entire classroom -- maybe an entire school? Might it make more sense to designate a few schools or classrooms as peanut-free and let the peanuts crunch freely elsewhere? 

On the whole the Americans with Disabilities Act was a good thing, giving access (notably for people in wheelchairs) to places they couldn't access before. But when I look at specific examples I often wonder if 90% of the benefit might have been achieved for far less money. Elevators are very expensive. If the ADA requires that a renovation include an elevator, that's money that could have been spent on other things. Alternatively, simple renovations that would improve most people's lives are foregone because the required elevator makes them too expensive.

I save for the end two examples that seem to be controversies with political overtones: trigger warnings and pronouns.

The "trigger warning" is given in advance when some sort of content contains things some groups of people might find upsetting. It might be, "this show depicts graphic violence". I don't object too much if it's voluntary, though I tend to think it's a waste of people's time. As I see it, life in general comes pre-marked with one big, implicit trigger warning: You might see upsetting things. I am more passionately against trigger warning scolding, where the content maker is castigated for not having included one. Implicitly there is a competition here among various sensitivites people might have, whereby some are more important than others. A trigger warning might be demanded on behalf of some group by sympathizers who wish to show their support, whether or not the group itself feels the need for a trigger warning.

Some poll showed that 90% of Native Americans had no problem with a football team named the Washington Redskins. Whether the poll result was valid or not, it raised a few key questions... Had people thought about identifying the offended group and asking their opinions? Or was the real objection that the rest of the population thought it wasn't suitable, independent of actual effects on an actual minority. That might itself be a valid reason, but if so it's best to be clear about it.

I enjoyed the Harry Potter books, but got only partway through one movie before deciding it was too violent for my tastes. But I never expected anyone to put a trigger warning on the movie.

Pronouns. 'What are your pronouns?' you may be asked. Perhaps they are to be filled in on name tags, or included in online signatures.

Perhaps there is a significant population out there that is traumatized when people meeting them for the first time don't use the pronouns they would like, but I don't believe it. I can see they might find it a bit tedious, but not especially upsetting. The old, tried-and-true method we had was to look somebody over, and with 99.5% accuracy determine from their appearance what pronouns are appropriate. A few people whose appearance didn't match their gender were stuck correcting people. The same rule should continue to serve us well today. If you want to use something that doesn't match, it's up to you to tell people. (After they tell you, it's polite to try to use the ones they request.)

Consider for comparison people who are deaf or who don't speak English. As they move through American society, they will constantly have to set people straight by conveying their language situation. If they wish, they could wear a nametag alerting people to this situation, but it's up to them. The same goes for people whose pronouns do not match their appearance. But they're the ones who wear the tag. Our mental space should be freed from worrying about pronouns of the people we meet. It's only when someone alerts us to the fact that they prefer other pronouns -- or are deaf, or don't speak English -- that we need to deal with that. But to follow the analogy, we do not need to put "I am hearing" and "I speak English" on our nametags!

One reason some people might oppose everyone specifying preferred pronouns is a hostility to gender identification that does not follow biological sex. I'm sure this is true, but the issues I raise are a sufficient reason to oppose the practice, and I myself am supportive of individually chosen gender identification.

On the whole I think our society has gone too far in the direction of accommodating the needs of very small groups of people who have special needs when they meet one particular condition: They occupy everyone's mental energy and attention even in the vast majority of circumstances where no such very rare people are present.

I Never Found Unconditional Love

My 50th high school reunion just happened on Saturday. I included a link to this blog in my "bio" that was mailed out to classmates in advance of the reunion. I wondered if perhaps I would get canceled for some of my less popular views, but I didn't (and perhaps no one read a word).

I have no reason to think my life is nearly over, but the idea of living as if each day was your last is good in some respects. And so I choose today to offer (to those who really want to know) the most important element of my own emotional truth, as best I understand it.

When growing up, there was no one who said or conveyed "I love you no matter what." I could get approval for being good, but never unconditional love. A great many people don't have that, but perhaps I felt its lack more than some others, and in any case this is about me. Surely the best way to get it is to have it just handed to you along with your childhood.

Popular songs told of the power of romantic love, and how the right girl or woman could fix everything. In particular, the right girl would offer unconditional love. I believed it. This is very destructive if taken as actual advice. When was I supposed to have learned not to take it literally?

Well up into my 50s, far past when I should have known better, whenever I started a relationship, I would feel this strong tendency to melt into the joy of unconditional acceptance. This sort of weakness was a turn-off to partners. Part of me knew that I had to be reasonably strong as a condition for the relationship, but this other tendency dominated too often. If I had to be strong, then it wasn't unconditional love, was it? The one relationship that really worked was my marriage to Sarah, and a key reason was that I didn't love her with the passion I had the others. It was a compromise. "I really have to marry someone if I want to have a family, and who's the best?" There were many considerations.All candidates were former girlfriends, but all the others had rejected me at some point, and Sarah never had. I wonder in retrospect if that was important.

I gave up on receiving unconditional acceptance 16 years ago from my then-girlfriend, but realized I had already given it up in any other friendships, and knew there would be no future relationships. It was a major life goal, and not one I achieved. My wariness in trusting that any sort of affection is profoundly "true" has carried over to friendships, including family.

Short of acceptance that is unconditional is the variety that is at least warmly felt and genuine. I have struggled with that too.

In high school and before I had many fine qualities, made people laugh, and got considerable approval. I think I have always genuinely cared about people I consider my friends. But I was also not "with it" in many ways, and was always worried (with some justice I think) that there were important emotional realities that other people understood that I didn't. I was accepted into one key group in high school (known as "the clique") but felt that with one misstep I could be instantly dropped. In high school I was surrounded by a great many attractive girls, a few of whom I even knew were interested in me. But the wrong choice could surely lead to derision and loss of all my friends. This criterion allowed me to feel interest in only the most popular girls. I also had no idea how to relate to a girl in that sort of situation -- no adult men in my life modeled this for me. My long-time therapist seemed stumped on that question too -- where do men learn this?

College was where I had my first five romantic relationships, none of which lasted more than a couple months but which were at least real and not just possibilities to dream about with intense anxiety. I had many individual friendships and even was accepted into a group of friends. But even among them, I recall feeling I lacked the "standing" in the group to try to invite anyone else in, for instance.

With my wife Sarah we had the sort of relationship that grows from affection, common activities and mutual respect, and those years 1981 to 1986 were the happiest of my life. Unfortunately other stresses were unleashed in by the birth of our children, and ultimately the marriage ended in 1998. Sarah in retrospect labels her difficulties starting in that period as "mental illness", and I surely contributed my part as well.

Parenting was an entirely different sort of activity. I tried to love my daughters unconditionally. I felt I did, but they were "good" kids and did nothing to seriously test the truth of such a commitment. But still I wondered if I really could deliver the genuine article, since I had lacked that in my own childhood.

After college, friendships were more difficult to maintain and more varied. I recognized and "owned" my strong introvert tendencies, and felt at peace having just a few friends.

The theory as I understand it for those lacking unconditional love is to provide it yourself. You love yourself as you would have wanted to be loved. It remains somewhat mysterious to me. Perhaps there is bootstrapping, or connecting different aspects of life in new ways, or "faking it until you make it" or taking a leap of faith. I can't say I have felt like I had much success. Perhaps the way my cards were dealt it was always out of reach.

There are of course a great many other ways to build a worthwhile and interesting life, and I feel I have done well with those for the most part. I am proud of what I have done, in fatherhood, friendship, service to community, and the life of the mind. I succeeded in a career of which a few jobs were arguably advancing human welfare in modest fashion. But today I have admitted to this other piece of life that I wanted and never got.

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?

Societal Incoherence About Death

Here I go writing about death again. I guess I have written about taxes, but that's not on the docket for today. However inevitable taxes may be, they really aren't quite as profound an issue.

I'll start with capital punishment. I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I don't have the sort of emotional revulsion against it that characterizes a lot of death penalty opponents. The government decides someone has done something so horrible that they deserve to die, and the government sees to it that they do. Why the strong reaction?

I think it is because whatever they might believe intellectually if pressed, emotionally the opponents feel life goes on indefinitely (emotional reading: forever) so the government has cut short an emotionally infinite life by ending it. (Quite likely death penalty proponents have the same view but feel good about that aspect instead of bad about it.) As far as I can tell, questions about whether the execution method meant a person died in pain are basically a manufactured concern. If there is any truth to the idea that an execution victim died in pain, it is only because the medical establishment refuses to cooperate -- there are ample ways that medicine can help someone die without pain if that is their goal. I don't mind their decision, but it would seem more honest if they said so plainly.

The time before an apparently unnecessary death can also count as pain and suffering. Notably, if someone is in an airplane that stops flying at a high altittude and descends in a free fall and crashes, the passengers might have a minute or more before they actually hit the ground and die. This entitles the survivors to more money in a financial settlement. When the space shuttles exploded, there was great interest in whether they died instantly or were conscious long enough to know they were dying.

The incoherence comes from the contrast with deaths that are unavoidable - an aged person has a terminal illness. In that case, the person dying is doing the right thing if they are peaceful and accepting. A death notice might say that someone died peacefully, surrounded by friends and family. The notice never says they died in great pain, or that up until the end they were angry and frantic that they were about to die, or that they were bitterly disappointed that their loved ones were not there. Why the difference? I submit that at that point people have discarded this emotional illusion that people might live forever if no one kills them.

I also have this hunch that great concern about a person's last days or hours or minutes rely on the notion of an afterlife -- even among those who would deny that they believe in an afterlife. If consciousness is forever extinguished at death, there is no special significance to the last bit. But in contrast, suppose we are dealing with a case where you are about to leave your homeland forever and go to a foreign land, in an era when there would be no further communication. In that case, you might care a lot what your last experiences of your homeland were. How the story in one land ended matters a lot if you are going to a new land where you can contemplate the old. If your best friend says they really hated you or your wife reveals that the children you thought were yours were fathered by somebody else, then those revelations will stick with you for the rest of your life in the new land -- and those who are left behind will know it. On the positive side, reconciliation with people you were on bad terms with will make your future life more peaceful. The people you left behind will be much happier if you leave seemingly content rather than perhaps totally distraught, as they will think (perhaps correctly) that that will influence your life in the new land -- that you did not leave gracefully.

Returning to the case of death rather than emigration, those who go on living who retain emotionally the idea of an afterlife (even if they don't believe it intellectually) will be happier if the person dies peaceful and accepting.

The alternative that the death penalty opponents want for the perpetrator of a heinous crime is a life sentence in a harsh prison environment. The quality of their life there is not of great concern -- at least they were not killed. Their distress, day to day, is finite, while if they were executed, the distress would be infinite.

If I remember correctly (I'm not going to look it up again), the guillotine did not get its name from the inventor, but from a French legislator of the time who argued for its use because a death sentence's purpose was to deprive someone of life, not to torture them. Apparently standard methods of execution before then included a variety of torture implicit in "breaking on the wheel". Burning at the stake also qualifies as torture. Apparently beheading with an axe wielded by hand is an iffy proposition, and if botched can amount to torture, while a guillotine was reliable in beheading without botching. So that was an issue being debated in the late 1700s, while at some point in the 1900s the terms of the debate shifted to no execution at all as opposed to no torture. I fully support an end to torture, whether at the end of life or any other time.

I don't know if death penalty opponents care greatly whether the victim was frantic and distraught just before the execution or peaceful and accepting, but they do care a great deal about this with regard to an unavoidable death. Sometimes I get the sense that joyous celebration of someone's life starts with the idea that they died peacefully and accepting. Survivors seem to be celebrating the death itself, since as we all really know, death is inevitable. I'm aware of this reaction in myself, though not proud of it. If some very old celebrity dies, I am often not aware of even one moment of grief, but with a sort of relief. They were bound to die, so now it's happened, and I can check off my list another of life's expected events that happened. If we actually actively mourned each death (say, if you read the obits regularly) you would rapidly be swamped by compassion fatigue.

But if you have a uniform sense that there is no afterlife -- no way, no how -- then someone dying early at someone else's hand isn't inherently a cause of more horror than the inevitability that they will die within a matter of decades in any event. If you're aware for a minute in a falling airplane that you're about to die, well, bummer! If they execute the wrong person, then... Oops! They still didn't end a life that was emotionally infinite -- they cut it short by at most a few decades.

I'm still staunchly opposed to the death penalty, but it doesn't make my top hundred list of things to be passionately concerned about. I suppose for me its importance derives from how important it is to other people. I also don't think that the mindset that leads to celebrating the execution of a hated person is a good thing, but exploring that would be another topic.