Online privacy and targeted advertising

I have heard all the dire warnings about how corporations are gobbling up my personal information and know far more about me than I would like. I suppose it's true. I will sometimes go to the privacy settings for Facebook or Google or some other place and set them to be more restrictive. But then within a year or two they change it and I have to go back in and do it again, some different way. A person gets tired. I don't read privacy policies any more closely than I read user agreements when they install software. Does anyone? I could disable cookies, but cookies are actually very convenient in customizing my personal experience.

One reason I'm not upset enough to take vigorous action is that the reason they are doing this (as far as we know) is to more precisely target the advertising they give me to be more relevant. Well, if I have to look at advertising, surely it's better the more likely it is to be relevant. Studies show that people are susceptible to various devious tricks and are being manipulated by all advertising. But I figure that's my problem. (On those rare occasions I watch TV, I deliberately get up and do something else when the ads come on). I don't know how anyone could legislate the removal of subtle manipulation in advertising. Perhaps I should be upset because this same data could be used for more intrusive purposes if it got into the wrong hands. I guess I'm just not in practice taking that possibility all that seriously.

Four years ago I experienced the ultimate in targeted advertising. I was looking for a new small car, focusing on the Toyota Yaris and Honda Fit. I used Google search. As a result, I started getting advertising related to cars, and it continued after I had bought my Yaris. One picture showed me not just a Yaris, and not just one of the same color (blue) -- it was a picture of the actual car I had bought, which I could identify by the background of the photo showing the lot where I had first seen it. The advertising certainly was precisely targeted!

Go instantly when the light turns green

One part of the good, spiritual life is to slow down and "go placidly among the noise and the haste". When it comes to driving in congested areas, I think this is bad advice in certain respects.

A lot of the time, I find myself in traffic and fervently wishing that the traffic would move faster so I can get to my destination more quickly. Such is modern life. I do usually succeed in not getting very upset about delays.

Yet some drivers are relaxed in unhelpful ways. One example is delays in starting up when the light turns green. Some might figure selfishly that surely they will get through the light, even if their speed can affect how many people behind them will. In the modern era, it seems like some have used the time at the red light to do something on their phones, and take a precious few seconds to finish up. Some just let their attention wander. I feel that in congested conditions drivers should be ready to go instantly when the light turns green. We expect drivers to react instantly to dangerous situations when their car is moving, so why can't we expect them to react instantly to a green light? The more people who react instantly for purposes of traffic flow as well as safety, the faster everyone will get where they are going. And whatever your spiritual goals, most of us, most of the time, are actually in a hurry.

A related issue is pedestrian behavior. I often walk at a leisurely pace, and on most sidewalks that doesn't slow anyone else down. Sometimes it is time to cross the street at a crosswalk. Cars must stop for a pedestrian. Once they are stopped, I as a pedestrian have the right to cross in a leisurely fashion. Yet I usually hurry across, and I wish other people would as well. To me, the ultimate in this one small aspect of enlightenment is to walk slowly on the sidewalk, hurry across the crosswalk, and then immediately start walking more slowly again.

I think I've even observed a social custom. Some pedestrians hurry in a certain way, especially when they just start crossing, and I speculate this is a social signal indicating their willingness to do their part to help the drivers get going again quickly.

Go at a leisure pace (placidly) when it doesn't adversely affect others. Go quickly when being slow would slow others down, in a world where most people are in a hurry. Speed for the right reasons is consistent with placidity.

A confusing second concept of "standard time"

When I was young I was like everyone else taught the difference between standard time and daylight savings time. Clocks were set ahead an hour to initiate daylight savings time, and set back an hour when standard time resumed (as captured in the saying, "spring forward, fall back").

Recently I saw a reference to some program happening in the summer that started at 10am Eastern Standard Time. At first I thought they were mistaken and meant to say Eastern Daylight Time, but then I realized that they were instead adopting a new meaning for the word "standard". It simply meant "what everyone in the Eastern time zone means by 10am." They could have solved their problem by saying the event started at 10am Eastern Daylight Time. But this solution is not available when you have an event which starts at the same time year-round. It sounds silly to say, "10am Eastern Daylight Time when we are on Daylight Time, and 10am Eastern Standard Time when we are on Standard Time".

When time zone does not need to be specified, the natural and obvious solution is to simply omit "Standard" and "Daylight" entirely. We can just say "10am" and there is no confusion.

But if you also need to specify the time zone, it is much less common to say "Eastern Time". We have an itch to fill that in as "Eastern Standard Time" or "Eastern Daylight Time". Most web sites (<one example>) have no generic word. The brief definition <here> is "The standard time in a zone including the eastern states of the US and parts of Canada" where the word "standard" is overloaded to mean "typical". <Wikipedia doesn't have a solution for this problem>  either.

"Standard time" came from the 19th century idea of dividing the world up from East to West in vertical stripes so that in Georgia it's 8am, but just over the line in Alabama it's 7am. It arose from the needs of railroads, the first time that people were moving long distances rapidly and cared about exactly when they arrived and left. Before standard time every place was on its own solar time, where noon is when the sun is highest. So in the course of a day "noon" would ripple across the countryside one town at a time. But that was very confusing for people using railroads running east and west. With standard time, noon comes at one instant to the entire Eastern time zone, and then in another instant it comes to the entire Central time zone.

"Daylight time" was motivated in part by economic benefits (real or imagined). But the basic insight is that people like daylight, and in the summer some of it is happening between 5am and 6am when everyone is asleep. With daylight savings time, that extra hour of daylight is shifted to the evening when people are awake.

So we have one word "standard" capturing the idea of time zones, and now the need arises for another one capturing the idea of "whichever of daylight versus standard time is currently in effect". "Usual", "Customary", and "Common" would be possibilities, but none feels right. The minimalist idea is to just get used to talking about Eastern Time, Central Time, Mountain Time, and Pacific Time. But these are uncomfortably short and lack a certain official ring to them. As best I can tell, this is a problem without a single emerging solution.

I sometimes solve the problem by saying I'm on New York time. Everyone in the world knows what that means approximately and can easily look up what it means precisely. I suppose other equivalents would be Chicago time, Denver time, and Los Angeles time. It's true that people in Europe may not know what time zone Denver is in -- but they can easily look it up on the web.

My dim view of "they" as singular

In my post on <polling and interrupts> I argued for fair treatment and compassion for all minorities, but suggested that we should deal with the very small minorities when they come into our lives and do not need to make space for them in our minds until they do.

One <radical suggestion> was for everyone to start using the singular "they". But short of that, there is also a movement afoot to say that people should be able to tell us that they wish to be referred to as "they" instead of "he" or "she" to reflect the fact that they are very uncomfortable being forced into a binary gender decision.

Let's give some history on other issues around personal pronouns. Starting in the 1970s, more and more people felt we should no longer refer to a generic person of indeterminate gender as "he", which had been the custom in English (and just about every other language, as far as I know). Some words in a language are ambiguous and we can tell from context which sense is intended. But here it was often hard to tell, and it really did support the idea that a standard ordinary human being was a male, and females were this other, special case.

There were various solutions. "It" was a non-starter because it implied non-human. Another was to use a new pronoun such as "ze". This didn't work because it is very hard to change language in such a fundamental way. Another was to use "they" in a singular sense, though grammatically plural. We do often see "If a person talks to you, they are being friendly", but it makes many people uncomfortable and just doesn't work so well in many circumstances.

So the solution we adopted was to use "he and she", an effort which has been largely successful. "He" really does imply a male these days, and some variant of "he and she" is used when the gender isn't clear. This was a change that benefited fully half of humankind (and arguably benefited all of us).

More recently (notably the last ten years or so) trans people have become much more prominent. The typical case involves someone who was assigned a sex at birth but has since decided that they identify as the opposite sex. They make no demands on the English language, but request that we use the pronouns that match their new gender identity, even if they look more like the one they were assigned at birth. This does not require changing the language, just moving a person into the other gender category for linguistic purposes.

Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying that "Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent". It is in the same spirit as a <dignity culture>. "All citizens are assumed to have a sense of dignity and self-restraint, and everyone is expected to, at least at first, give the benefit of the doubt to a disputant to see if a conflict can be resolved peacefully." You expect to take some insults and insensitive remarks and let them roll off your back. If your gender identity is not 100% clear, a stranger using either set of pronouns should be tolerated. If your relationship with them will be more than casual, you can "interrupt" them and tell them which pronouns you would prefer, and they should try to honor your request.

Now non-binary people have come along who dislike both "he" and "she". Using "he or she" doesn't work with an individual person, since the point is that neither word applies. Some hate these pronouns so much that in their interruption they ask -- sometimes insist -- that we refer to them using "they" as a singular. (I do not know what is objectionable about plural "they" -- maybe someone will enlighten me). This requires changing the language as much as use of a new set of pronouns such as "ze" would, and just feels very unnatural to lots of people. One reaction in line with dignity culture would be for a non-binary person to welcome both sets of pronouns as opposed to neither. Each set reflects a part of such a person even if it doesn't reflect all of the person.

Humans are an overwhelmingly binary species when it comes to gender. Until the idea of non-binary identity became fashionable in the past ten-odd years, it's a good guess that 99.9% of people were happy to identify as one gender or the other.

One theory for the recent surge in non-binary identity is that such people have always been present and suffering, and are finally free to break free of the shackles of binary identity and tell us who they truly are. Another is that in our rush to welcome enthusiastically all minorities, the intersectionalist is happy to identify this new minority, honor them, and look at themselves and even feel virtuous if they could consider themselves non-binary too.

It's unclear how many people will genuinely, truly consider themselves non-binary after the dust settles. My hunch is it will remain well under one percent. It is very hard to change language. A mighty effort was required to get us to adopt "he and she" for a generic person. The preferences of a tiny group of non-binary people won't provide enough impetus for a genuine change.

A somewhat parallel case concerns speakers of other languages whose names English speakers always mispronounce. When we are interrupted by someone in that position who offers us a better pronunciation, we can try to use it. My rule would be that we should try to use whatever they tell us that is consistent with the sound rules of English, but we can't be expected to use finer distinctions that are not part of our language. We will not distinguish the two "k" sounds in Arabic. We will not use click sounds of the sort found in Xhosa. Using the proper tone for a tone language like Chinese will likely be very difficult. Dignity culture requires those with such names to put up with our best effort.

Perhaps the "singular they" is an intermediate case. Some people will be able to use it easily in speech. Others will manage it writing. That's fine with me. Some will simply refuse to do it because their commitment to the language is stronger than some individual's desire to change it. That's also fine with me.

Friendly nativism

On the whole, I most enjoy spending time with people like me. That includes introverts, those who are highly educated, those who enjoy wry humor, word play, and complicated games and puzzles. It includes atheists and agnostics. It includes those whose instincts are broadly leftist. It includes those who are willing to take unpopular positions if that's where the evidence leads them. I feel a bond with those who were also born in the 1950s and grew up with experiences similar to mine. It includes those born in America who are native speakers of English.

Of course I do spend time with others, and try my best to respect them and find the common ground we share. But I don't feel bad if I spend time mostly with those who I share many attributes with. Similarly, I'd slightly prefer it when the people I meet casually in day-to-day life also share some of those attributes. The more they share the better.

I went to Swarthmore College (as did my daughters and my ex-wife). Once I was in a group of six where we realized we had all gone to Swarthmore, a rather high-end private college. This didn't lead us to reminisce about the place or talk about its superiority. But the tone changed. We could raise subtle ideas that we might not with a more mixed group lest they think we were trying to show off, or would misunderstand, or if the ideas would require us to make a lengthy explanation.

So then we come to immigration. I find many aspects of it morally difficult, especially how to treat long-time illegal immigrants and how to make decisions about refugees seeking asylum. Illegal immigrants do work that few native-born people are willing to do but also suppress wages. But my point today pertains to one specific aspect of this: Among those who simply want to move here, is there a role for preferring people from some places as opposed to others? My suggestion is that in a country that is predominantly descended from Europeans, we might reasonably give preference to Europeans over those from other places. This is the spirit of a <1924 law>:

"The Immigration Act of 1924 limits the number of immigrants allowed into the United States yearly through nationality quotas. Under the new quota system, the United States issues immigration visas to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States at the 1890 census. The law favors immigration from Northern and Western European countries. Just three countries, Great Britain, Ireland and Germany account for 70 percent of all available visas. Immigration from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe was limited. The Act completely excludes immigrants from Asia, aside from the Philippines, then an American colony."

In 1965 this ends, and the same article says "President Lyndon B. Johnson, called the old immigration system “un-American,” and said the new bill would correct a “cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.” "

I'm not sure why.

In 1965, "the quota system is replaced with a seven-category preference system emphasizing family reunification and skilled immigrants." Those are also reasonable criteria for an immigration system. Reunifying families could in theory keep the same ethnic mix, except that people of some ethnicities are far more interested in getting to the US based on family reunification than others.

What would immigration look like if we applied moral considerations distinct from political realities? One possibility is to simply allow open borders. Another would be a giant lottery, where all human beings (or family groups) would have an equal chance of admission regardless of where they came from. Neither of those resembles our current system very much, nor would I think most people would favor them, especially the first.

For comparison, consider Japan. Japan allows very little immigration. At some times it has favored those of Japanese heritage in the diaspora who sought to return to Japan. Now I don't know whether lots of Japanese actively hate foreigners (they do have a fierce nationalism in their past, on display before and during World War II). But certainly one possible modern position is that Japanese aren't superior to others, it's just that Japan is a place where Japanese live. Looking at the situation from afar, this doesn't bother me.

Is the US different because we are a nation of immigrants? I don't think so. European immigrants did displace Native Americans, something that from a modern perspective had no moral justification. But however we got here, America today has a certain mix of people of different backgrounds, and it makes sense that different groups would favor immigration by people like them. But Europeans would likely prevail in the political process. The 2 percent rule in the 1924 law allowed some measure of equity.

In my mind how we treat people who are in the US who are of different backgrounds is a very different question. I feel strongly that all deserve respect, none deserve discrimination in employment, housing or anything else. It is completely consistent with approving more would-be immigrants from some places over others.

A desire for people to live with "people like them" can express itself in many forms. The most extreme is ethnic cleansing, removing those from an disfavored group from where they currently live. Another is hostility and discrimination against the disfavored group, perhaps encouraging them to leave. A third is restricting those who you invite to immigrate to the community. The first two seem highly repugnant, but the third seems to me entirely defensible.

I don't see any real danger of a slippery slope. In practical terms, those Americans who are worried about immigrants might be more inclined to treat well the people who are here if they didn't have this perception that the new arrivals were taking over or going to overwhelm them with numbers.

I don't feel strongly about this. Maybe there are counterarguments I'm not considering. I will continue to argue strongly for non-discrimination against all Americans, however they got here. But I don't see anything morally problematic about quotas based on ethnicity.

The other Bart is selfish and lazy

The closest I came to answering the Big Questions was in <this post>:

'The best answer to, "What should I do with my life?" is to pick something, decide that it's what's important, make it your own, and work for it. In the absence of objective morality, there is no argument to be made as to why any choice you make would be fundamentally, profoundly right or wrong.'

In line with that approach, I seek to do good in the world, mostly online, and in this blog tell the truth as I see it, hoping it might influence some people positively.

There is another side to me, however, that sees things differently. It is aware that I am only on this earth a brief while, and the fact I am conscious at any given moment is a sort of miracle. In the absence of any meaning or compelling goals, I seek to avoid pain, try to be comfortable, and seek pleasure. I feel no very close connection to any other individual people. Puzzles and solitaire computer games are frequent diversions, as are YouTube videos of things I find interesting, not all of them G rated. I don't lie, cheat, or steal, though I don't have any profound justification for those choices -- it's just that those things would make me feel bad.

I sometimes muse about the possibility of an evangelical organization of nihilists, enduring any hardship to convince others that life has no meaning. It makes me smile because, well, why would you endure hardship for something with no value? Or, to quote the immortal Tom Lehrer approximately (you think I'm going to look it up, in this frame of mind?) "Like so many modern philosophers, he was intent on giving advice to people who were happier than he was." Perhaps it preceded, "Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it."

This perspective oscillates with the more noble one that is the source of all these blog posts, much as <some optical illusions> leave our visual system switching back and forth between two interpretations of an ambiguous figure.

I mention this for the sake of honesty, and perhaps for the benefit of others who are in this state sometimes, so they might feel less alone.

I have at times suffered from deep depression, but I consider that sort of negative experience of life to be quite different. Part of it was probably just plain old neurochemistry. The other, cognitive part was distress experienced within a clear set of goals and values -- things I held to be important, and the depression was largely based on how my life was not in line with those goals and values.

Perhaps the good life is picking some one thing that is important and devoting oneself to it completely. But for some of us there are doubts and competing perspectives about what is good and what is worth effort.

Implications of Evo Psych for tribal loyalties

There are many evolutionary tendencies that do not cause discomfort. It's uncontroversial that we like eating and sex, and seek to avoid pain, snakes, spiders and heights.

An example with ambiguous implications is tribal loyalty. One example is rooting for the local sports franchise. The story I heard is that in some Texas towns, the high school football rivalry is a source of intense interest, and most adults in a given community will be delighted for weeks if their team wins the big game, and dejected for weeks if it loses. Pro football engages far more people in a national pattern. Here is a map of <NFL loyalties>. I don't hear many people being especially troubled by these loyalties. If forced to think about it, they recognize that the coaches and players are hired help with no geographic ties to the area who may be traded away at any time. One stark perspective is that fans are actually rooting for the uniform -- for laundry. I am susceptible myself, but also not comfortable with it. Maybe it's just a harmless diversion, but along with rooting for the local team goes rooting against the rivals. "Yankees suck!" is not a sentiment in line with the values most of us would like to live by.

Origins? In our hunter-gatherer environment of evolution, raids back and forth were sometimes violent. It was in everyone's interest to be strongly committed to the success of their own "people" (perhaps encompassing multiple bands) and merciless to the enemy. Sometimes women were stolen, but we can speculate that when such a woman started bearing children, it was in her genetic interest to switch loyalty to the new band.

Another manifestation of this tendency is our commitment to people of our own race, ethnicity, social class, religion and nationality. Today people of good will are motivated to accept others who are different as part of our emerging multicultural world. We can just dismiss commitment to "our own" as bigotry with no redeeming qualities, but it deserves more respect than that. In this case our goals might be better served if we recognize and honor this tendency within ourselves and then set it aside to accept those who are not like us and treat them with respect. If the tribal tendency itself is shamed and derided, it will fester uneasily.

It is worth a long pause to appreciate that a world with a single culture is an especially rewarding one. It is especially comfortable when everyone speaks the same language, has the same religion, looks the same, and shares a host of values down to the level of what is polite and impolite. At its best, it does not involve putting down others; they are simply absent and irrelevant. In today's world we have to give that up as groups mix more and more, but we are giving up something that was properly experienced as positive.

I argued that with no objective morality, we must choose what is important to us and <make it our own>. To the extent a person lives in a homogeneous society, what's important is decided without any need for questioning or even awareness that things could be different. The illusion of meaning is intact.

The ease with which our loyalty to our band was extended to our city, region, or nation is remarkable. We haven't had time to separately evolve a commitment to a nation of millions of people, but people feel it strongly and easily. Overcoming it to become a citizen of the world in our gut as well as with our mind is no small thing.