Another Pluralist Rant

A few years ago I co-founded the Politics, Philosophy and Economics society at La Trobe University. There were very material reasons to establish the club, such as access to funds, power over the PPE degree and the ability to attract interesting speakers – yet there was a cultural agenda as well.

We would learn about international trade in economics, and then be privy to an echo chamber in international relations tutorials, as politics students disregarded and disparaged the contributions we had learnt only weeks before in international economics. Then a week later we would be presented with an economic model that assumes human decision making was uninfluenced by morality and watch students, and even lecturers, all too comfortable with speaking about it as the final word on the topic.

Facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue was one of our main goals. We thought it ludicrous that particular economic models, limited by mechanical assumptions, were often portrayed in textbooks and amongst some economists as the final word on a matter.

Comparative advantage is a valuable insight that government should take into account when directing investments, but isn’t the only consideration. The idea that the influence of the industry on the health or the politics of the country should be considered was quite foreign in economics classes.

To us, it was obvious that questions of human behaviour were best addressed in an interdisciplinary manner, using a variety of methodologies. But how could a group of PPE students solve this lack of interdisciplinary engagement?

Perhaps we could achieve this by making some basic engagement with philosophy more commonplace for people undertaking study which leads to public policy. Another approach was simply to speak to students about how intellectual engagement with other disciplines could provide a better framework, for thinking about the questions that they were oh-so-sure their two years or so of economics or political science gave them a unique capacity to answer.

Now I’m at Melbourne University, which as I’m constantly being told, is the best university in Australia. For all the differences in culture and attire (thank god!) the same lazy disregard for the value of listening to other disciplines seems prevalent. Listening to a senior criminology lecturer that specialises in white collar crime, as she disregards and disparages the discipline of economics in the space of business regulation should be on everyone’s bucket list. I’m quite confident that if you speak to anyone who has been in the PPE Society for any length of time you will hear similar horror stories.

The damage inflicted by this arrogant tribal culture is also evident in the low value some people put in their own disciplines. Unjustly, there are people from a number of disciplines that have been made to feel, as they have surely been told, they have no place in the world of public policy. I recently spoke to a women doing her PhD in anthropology. Upon asking what she was working on, she told me she was studying chronically ill patients.  Specifically, the effects that self-narratives have on their recovery. She then followed with the same question to me .I told her, which at the time was evaluating the efficiency of different funding models for hospitals. She then said, meekly, “oh, so something more practical.”

It’s astonishing because just a few days prior I was reading up on the disproportional financial burden that specifically chronically ill patients put on hospitals. If there are low cost methods and practices that could improve recovery times for these patients, such as doctors encouraging them to change the way they think about their injury, it seems to me a certainty that hospital managers would love to know. Whilst my analysis was a necessary part of making policy in the area, her analysis can almost be used for policymaking as soon as the results are in.

The tendency to ignore expertise in public policy making is well documented by now, and it’s hardly just the inexperienced students at the PPE society that have been talking about this. Peter Shergold, the former Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, has also weighed in:

“One of the most important ways in which natural tendencies to failure can be avoided is by making sure that public policy is informed by the experience of those who have to implement it; those who work at the counters, in call centres and directly with communities,” he said in a 2004 report.

I could give you more examples, from the failure of nutrition programs in Bangladesh* to the failure of radiologists to take into account the skills of sheep farmers, but I think by now you get the point.

So how do we fix such a problem you might ask?

I don’t know, maybe ranting will help.

* First few pages of “Evidence based public policy: a practical guide to doing it better”. by professor nancy carthweight

The quasi-market and the mob

The ability of providers to enter and exit a market has been demonstrated in multiple circumstances as an integral element of market efficiency. But what happens when the service providers exiting the market are service providers that have forged a strong bond with the public?

Regarding public affection as a problem may seem a little counter-intuitive, but this is an old problem, one that both markets and quasi-markets experience. The issue is that injecting choice and competition into the funding mechanisms that these service providers sets the stage for creative destruction that sees old providers bow out to make room for new ones. Unfortunately, many such services capture the public heart during their respective lifespans, paving the way for outrage, protest and bailouts when they fail.

Julian Le Grand summarised one such incident in relation to hospitals in his book “The Other Invisible Hand”:

“Relatively early on in the market’s lifetime, a major teaching hospital in London got into trouble because it was losing business to outer-London hospitals. There was considerable political protest, a consequence of which was that the hospital concerned was bailed out and the internal market in London suspended.

As a result, not only was the incentive for that hospital to improve removed, but, even more seriously, it had the effect of serving notice on hospitals, managers and consultants round the country that financial failure not only would not be penalized, but may even be rewarded—with a consequent dramatic weakening of incentives throughout the system.”
Aside from creating a counter mob of economists, there are a number of ways to help politicians resist such public pressure. One solution is to handball the problem, placing the regulation of the market under the authority of an independent agency, providing politicians with a scape goat and the ability to claim that said independent regulator has chosen (outrageously of course) not to act. This strategy has a successful track record in keeping enough political pressure at bay to allow some markets and quasi-markets to survive unmolested.
So what’s the solution? Well, perhaps Le Grand alluded to it in a discussion about capitation funding.

Capitation funding is a hospital funding strategy where demographic statistics are used to estimate the costs associated with the treatment and diagnosis of patients, from which funding is allocated accordingly.
One of the issues with capitation funding is that service providers try to avoid treating the most expensive patients, or patients that are more expensive than the compensation the hospital receives for their treatment. This might involve putting the most complicated patients at the back of waiting lists, referring them elsewhere or trying to get them to come multiple times so that they can be compensated for each diagnosis separately.

What’s interesting is that one factor which inhibits the hospitals ability to do this is ignorance. Because service providers don’t know what the cost of a patient will be until after diagnosis or treatment, they can’t know who to discriminate against. Their lack of information stops them from advancing their interests at the expense of the market.
Consider the following. An oversight body is created with the same auditing powers as a regulator, except that it cannot enforce any reforms, and does not publish all its reports and recommendations straight away. Instead, the body reports directly to the minister when it thinks a set of reforms need to be implemented within a specific time frame in order to facilitate creative destruction.
The subsequent decision about when to implement the reforms associated with some providers exiting the market is then left to the minister. Primarily because the failure of certain providers is more often due to political factors rather than technical ones, making the minister the most qualified party to deal with the fallout. The status quo is that the oversight body publishes the proposal as soon as it is finished, however, this may fail to deal with the initial problem.
Within this model the minister has the discretionary power to either make the announcement at a time when these reforms could be passed easily, and/or very close to the intended implementation of the proposal. By limiting, or extending, the time between announcement and implementation one can limit the ability of interest groups to oppose the change or give the minister more time to make his case. This provides the minister with an ability to claim that they are simply implementing changes advised by the statutory body whilst giving him/ her more of a chance of implementing the reforms.
If secrecy is maintained then entrenched interests will have less power to resist creative destruction in quasi-markets, in much the same way as the hospitals ignorance of complicated patients prevented them from using their power to sabotage the market.

A public friendly —perhaps even long term— alternative may involve trying to reason with interest groups, or even to attempt to educate the people at large about the value of creative destruction in markets. This would rob service providers of the ability to use emotional attachment to their institution to undermine the effective working of the market. The prevalence of this problem in regular markets (Cadbury, car manufacturing, Tasmanian timber) suggests this is not easily done. However, in quasi-markets where creative destruction is necessarily orchestrated, so as to avoid the complete shutting down of a hospital or school, one may be able to avoid a problem that also plagues regular markets by using the sly nature of politics for good.

Private interests or public institutions – a non-moral dilemma when using political influence

As a thought experiment, let us assume that you had the privilege to allocate 50 million dollars of public funds. These funds were originally intended for the Department of Health but a magical twist of fate has let you spend the money as you see fit. With the decision on how to allocate it is all yours, would you spend it on your own betterment or on more socially minded purposes?

Putting aside the moral aspect of this dilemma you may have with buying yourself a financially secure and luxurious future using public funds, would it be worth it?

After all, you will be making your country, where you and your loved ones reside, a worse place by potentially disadvantaging valuable programs. These programs could one day help you or someone you care about. They could do this directly, by you being a recipient of one of them, or indirectly by allowing business and innovation to continue enriching your life in a safe and healthy environment. Whilst you will be cutting the branch on which you sit, 50 million is such a huge sum, and the damage to your environment so limited, that it’s probably worth it.

However, if, instead of 50 million dollar in one budget, you pocketed 90% of Australia’s tax revenue over 5 budgets, would it still be worth it? Probably not: functioning property rights, welfare, army, public service and investments in the future will all be damaged beyond repair. It simply wouldn’t be in your interest to take so much because the secure and pleasant environment you and your loved ones need to enjoy hundreds of billions of dollars wouldn’t exist anymore.

This fantastical situation is closer to your life than you may imagine. You are part of a number of voting demographics. Unsurprisingly, evidence exists that politicians allocate more funds to voting demographics then to nonvoting demographics. Politicians do this, in part, because they want to win favor with the demographic. Of course, that’s less likely to work if they think the long-term cost of allocating the funds or favor to them is not worth it for them

The real-life equivalent to the 50 million dollar question may be “a politician is running on the ticket of advocating for only my ethnic sect/ tax bracket, is it a good idea to vote for him on that basis?”

The reason deliberate deliberation on this non-moral dilemma is important is because the rewards may be more forthcoming then the costs. An election promise could come to fruition within a few months whereas the consequences of revenue problems or sectarian division can take years to come back to bite you – and when it does you might not even know why your buttocks is aching.

At this point you might have noticed how information poor you are. You don’t know exactly how much you will benefit from a given policy or politicians, or if you do you don’t know what will happen as a result in years to come. You don’t know what the alternative politician will do to the institutions or sect you are trying to advantage. Even worse, there is nobody to help you to quantify the costs because even in the rare cases where we do know how to measure the quality of institutions it is well beyond us to measure the effect of a specific policy on them and extrapolate from that the impact on you and your loved ones.

Much of the rational choice themed economic literature around rent seeking assumes that the conflict before the perpetrator is between accountability/ punishment mechanisms and the potential size of the reward. Maybe, in some cases, rent seeking has more to do with self-interested short term thinking winning over against self-interested long term thinking. Such a model would emphasize tools that combat hyperbolic discounting as opposed to accountability.

As for myself, my life is too good, I have too much to lose and am too aware of the horrors of the Middle East to take such risks by aligning my political power in the pursuit of self-interested short term personal gains. Perhaps if I was in direr need of firewood I would more readily collect wood from the branch on which I sit.

Guarding against the return of the tribes

Those of us born in the 90’s are too young to remember when there was such a thing in Australia as Protestant and Catholic public institutions. The Victorian Public sector, so I am assured by a former secretary, was an institution for smart catholic boys. This was because many other relevant places would simply not hire you if you were catholic. It’s certainly nice to be on the safe end of such a dangerous situation.

A lot of things can lead to the return of the tribes, although perhaps not these specific ones. An international incident between two groups which are both present in Australia (see Sunni vs Shia conflict in Sydney), a politician or business which profits by generating schisms along certain identity lines (I’m sure you don’t need an example from me here). Indeed, one doesn’t have to scan the news too hard to see little instances which assure us that tribalism is still alive and well in the hearts of many Australians.

Fear, in this context, works to focus the mind on one aspect of an identity. When Serbs (or Sunnis or homosexuals) are threatened I am a lot more focused on being a Serb than I am on any other, previously no less central, part of my identity.  Conflict makes identity simple and peace makes it complicated.

In this context, building up shock absorption capabilities is a priority. One way to do this is to make it harder to profit off of making identity simple. Another is reducing isolation with the aim of multiplying identities, with the ultimate aim of reducing passions through this division.

This is a technocratic task but a lot starting points are available to the policy maker:

• Undermine or remove tribe based schools, isolation aids fear
• Regulate marketing with a mind to removing adverts that play off tribal sentiments
• Make unwelcoming institutions more welcoming to reduce isolation
• Look at migration policy with a mind to avoid some of the actors from the second paragraph
• And my personal favourite; Pagovian taxes on place of living based on homogeneity indicators. Treating the comfort people get from living amongst people who are like them as a negative externality.

This damage mitigation approach will not gain universal endorsement.

Partially this is because it begins by accepting that a certain degree of tribalism is beyond eradication. Imperial, or communist, detribalisation can be achieved in relation towards particular tribes. However, new ones will replace them and the old task of total national unity is a pie in the sky which humanity lost a lot reaching for. This approach facilitates no national unified spirit. If successful, these policies will not create a unique monocultural nation where one people dominate one land. The nationalist dream will remain unattained, funnily enough, for the sake of national security.

Others will reject it because these measures grant no cultural security to their favoured minority groups. Not all cultures will maintain the large claim they hold on the identity of certain people. At the extreme end of this approach, Aboriginal, or Jew, will simply be one of the many things an average Australian may be. It will make as much sense to focus on one of them as it makes for you to focus on your star-sign or blood-type. They are all things that are a part of the person, but passions are too divided between the many coexisting forms of identity to warrant any unique attention to one of them. This goal may be rejected as assimilation and a destruction of heritage, and indeed some special dances and songs may be lost.

Hopefully, even in rejection, both these groups, will have gained an awareness of possible trade-offs in this area, or the simple enrichment that comes from a different perspective, by joining me for some contemplation.

At this point I feel it would be remiss to not acknowledge the impact Michael Walzer’s – Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, had on these thoughts.

A personal choice between a Partnership of Perspective and a Market of Ideas

Modern Western dialogue has become too competitive and this is detrimental to intellectual progress. This piece will trace where this attitude originated from and highlight some of the undesirable consequences I have observed regarding the tendency to treat dialogue as a competition.

We often hear the metaphor of a ‘marketplace of ideas’ used to explain how free expression leads us closer to ‘truth’. For this piece I will treat this idea as not merely a positive one, but a normative one. I take for granted that a competitive spirit and a desire to convert others to our perspective on a matter is a motivator for some people, some of the time, to engage in dialogue. A market of ideas feeds off this tendency. Yet I am concerned with the implications of encouraging this competitive spirit through the forums which facilitate our dialogues.

One such forum is Intelligence Squared Australia. For those unfamiliar with the format of debate hosted by this organisation this explanation from their website sums it up nicely: “The audience votes on the motion before and after hearing the arguments, providing both a ‘democratically’ voted winner, and by looking at the shift in sentiment from ‘before’ and ‘after’”.

The incentive structure impels speakers to provide arguments in favour of their position, and craft strong attacks against the arguments of their ‘opponent’. Putting aside those speakers who might lie or resort to hostile tactics to gain an advantage, my concern here is that competition detracts from the ‘task’ of understanding. The incentive structure is not built with the intention of providing a deep understanding of the other speaker’s perspective. The ‘opponent’ need only understand the arguments put before him well enough to discredit them, and make his argument appear more credible.

I cannot prove empirically (without funding) that in dialogues, on a given topic, with a random sample of relevant intellectuals, a debate will result in speakers having a shallower understanding of their counterpart’s take on the matter compared to a panel discussion. Yet the fact the incentives are structured to prioritize persuasion over comprehension make this possibility seem likely to me.

I have seen before the extent to which the other person’s actual opinions can become irrelevant. For five minutes (I checked the time), a couple of colleagues had been heatedly discussing multiculturalism. I interrupted and asked that they both define the key term in their discussion, ‘multiculturalism’. Shock and awe! They were not even vaguely talking about the same thing.

I am sure the more engaged readers have also encountered these cases of misunderstanding. I have seen quite a few on IQ2. My concern, and observation, is that due to the distraction of competition the task of definition is liable to be ignored. The heat that competition brings into an argument is simply not congruent with painstaking nature of the task of demarcation that is so vital for mutual understanding.

Another possible problem is the risk of a competitive mindset leading to yelling or other nastiness. This can make the entire exercise of dialogue unbearable to the listener and the speakers, risking disengagement. The unjustified salience of the charismatic and the confident also appears to me particularly pronounced in competitive settings.

The insistence on approaching dialogue as a competition is not an imperative, nor a compulsion, but is rather a habit of the mind that can be changed. Even if the institutions around us encourage competition it is indolent to concede to these subpar engagements without due consideration.

For quite a while now my attitude has been quite different. Free speech leads to truth (empiricist truth) through a different process:

First, a few people have an interest in specific question.

Next they determine to answer the question.

They utilise each other’s unique insights and combined brainpower to help shed light on the question for themselves (for the subjective aspects), as well as gain further insight into the empirical aspects of the riddle before them.

Dialogue is a partnership. Through an attitude of intellectual partnership I can gain information, enjoyment, and insight. It is a taxing pleasure to engage in dialogue as a source of sensory excitement or to bolster an ego. The tax is levied in the form of unattained insights. Instead of focussing on being persuasive, I strive to be calm and clear with my intellectual partners.

I do not pretend that any of this would be useful for research. Yet should any of you determine to try dialogue grounded in intellectual partnership, I would be interested to see if you experience the same informative and pleasant change I did when I abandoned my stall at the Market of Ideas.

Some thoughts from the Labor conference

Event title: Labor Staffers: Lessons for the next generation
24july, Melbourne exhibition and convention center.
On the 24th of January I travelled to the CBD to go to a labour staffer’s event. Heard some interesting stories.
Kaila Murnain is quite a veteran of the Labor party. Quite a long and impressive resume, look it up. She told a few stories, two stood out to me:
The first began with her saying “knowledge is power” and “talk to the person nobody else talks to”. Demonstrated her point with an example: There was an MP nobody talked to and nobody wanted to include in the campaign. So she talked to her. And she learned that this women was on a dating website and one of the men who indicated he was interested in her was from the liberal party, in fact, he was a candidate. Furthermore, he was married. So they included her in the campaign and used her to attack the candidate. This story was told as a teaching experience in a meeting intended to educate to be staffers. My favourite bit of the story was when Kaila finishes by saying something like ‘but don’t worry, it was ok, he was a bit of a sleazebag’ (paraphrasing).
The next story was set during a campaign for a marginal seat where a Doctor was facing the distinct possibility of losing. There were two pre polls which indicated the man should campaign in two different places. Unfortunately, there was only one candidate. Luckily the man had a brother. Also a doctor, who lived in Sydney. He had a moustache he grew for 32 years. So, this story goes exactly where you think it does. Kaila flies to Sydney to convince the brother to shave off his moustache and campaign in the area one of the pre polls indicates whilst his brother campaigns in the other one. For the sake of integrity they both introduced themselves as Doctor.last-name. The moral here was to “know your candidate”. The MP, after all, did not volunteer his brother.

Less horrifying was the reflections of the staffers on their position. One of the panel members was asked about the need for a university degree for the position of staffer. From memory it was Corri McKenzie who commented about how privileged and lucky she feels to have been able to wield the influence they do. As such, one should go to university before becoming a staffer so that you can ‘make sure you have something to do with your influence when your chance comes up to use it’.
The point regarding the large amount of influence staffers have was reinforced by the Hon. Tony Burke MP who recalled at least one instance relating to a decision involving the forestry industry in Tasmania that was changed by the insistence of a staffer who spoke to an MP after a meeting on the matter. Funnily enough, he mentioned in the same hour, with no hint of despair, that there are no educational requirements to being a staffer and that he had staffers of both blue and white collar backgrounds who were equally good.
A few thoughts:
It’s concerning how much influence the man who fetches a ministers tea can have. It’s both sad and comforting to see that this man’s awareness of his own inadequacy for the influence that comes with being able to take the role of the king’s barber. Sad because there is no system in place to momentum this influence in a good direction. Comforting, because it means there is at least some motivation, even if only intrinsic, for the man to educate himself before influencing the decision-maker.
When contemplating the first two stories a quote comes to mind:

The ‘law’ being cut down here is the integrity of Australia’s political institutions, and the trustworthiness of politicians and political parties. The ‘devil’ is the other political party. The insane zealot is the staffer and political campaigner who uses tactics as those recited in the first two stories. The man standing against him? absent.

Rowdy things and wrong things

Been a while, lots of reading been keeping me busy. So we had World festival recently. And the universities various clubs and organizations have been hosting weeks. As in China week, Indonesia week, Okinawa week ect. 

These involved mainly dancing and food. Can’t say I really got into it. For example I went to an Indonesian week event to support a friendly who was performing. It got so Rowdy and noisy I had to excuse myself. This is a pattern I see a lot here, that an event with an artistic aspect (dance or music)  is deliberately made into something rowdy. I don’t know if this is simply because of the large proportion of students here who are young or if this is particular to this university. I guess we must have parties in my uni back home, I wouldn’t be surprised if this element is more a function of University Dorm life more generally.

More generally the level of academia her is truly horrifying. I don’t understand how so many humans are able to so incapable academically and intellectually at such a grown up age, I mean this in the sense that I struggle to digest what I see and hear. A Professor who teaches here speaks of 3^rd year university students who have never written an essay and other similar levels of inadequacy. And you see it in the students: mass negligence that is not comparable to the small amount of absenteeism existent in my university back home.
Discussing the education system with people here is quite interesting. It makes me wonder to what extent education experts are aware of the need to regulate education culture as well as incentive structures. But back to the stories:

Turns out it is quite standard for a person to do a degree in IR or what-have-you and then go work in something completely disconnected, such as a pharmaceutical company. This is not so much because the person is unable to find a job in IR but rather because in order to get A Job it is a requirement to have gone to university. It is viewed as a sort of endurance test. The company provides training on the job. I may or may not have spoken about the very little thought that is given to one’s marks here, much more attention is given on resumes, at least according to the universal consensus of several people I have spoken to, to extracurricular activities. So there are many clubs on campus and many ways to work within university organized bodies which do things like manage floor meeting and host events. This is the way people think to make themselves stand out, rather than by marks. Not completely foreign to us but the extent is the point of dissimilarity.

Another recent story exposes another difference. A Pilipino teacher was in a Japanese culture class and started telling the class about how when he was young he was rather ill and his grandmother preformed a healing ritual and consequently it was discovered what was harming him. He then asked if anyone in the class if feeling unwell. A girl said she did, he calls her up. So he pulls out the candles, puts on music and attaches a bandana to his head and does a healing ritual. Turns out she felt ill because on the way to class she walked by a plant and disturbed its spirit and consequently the plant spirit made her ill. *Sigh… I will keep the long rant against barbarian superstitions and in support of Western Civilization to another day. I spoke to a professor here and it turns out this is no aberration. In the classroom a professor may teach whatever he wishes. “the classroom is his kingdom”. This explains some of the strange stuff some lecturers felt comfortable referencing in classes and the occasional thick roots back to their own research areas. So lack of regulation lead to more divergence in outcome – but there is a cultural factor too. No lack of regulation would have made students in Australia put up with THAT.

after hearing this story I shared it with a nearby Japanese girl, for emotional reasons. She did not appear to see the problem. she spoke of tolerance towards people’s beliefs and all that jazz.  At some point during the conversation, where mostly I was rather calm all things considered, she said a sentence I have never heard before in my life. “I do not like critical thinking”. I was astonished and slightly disgusted but there was nobody else there to share in my shock and horror. I asked her why. “because it is mean.” It actually had a very emotional effect on me. I did not think I could be upset the opinions of irrelevant beings anymore.

This attitude is perhaps rather strong in this girl and perhaps more bluntly articulated than in others but it is certainly not the exception in this place, this is the rule. It is so common here that a western girl who has been here for a while has commented that my critical/ judgemental attitude in class is a refreshing western exception. Needless to say, I much prefer the critical thinking and intellectual discourse of the PPE Society cohort to this culture.

Aside from this series of unfortunate events I delivered an 8.5min long 5min presentation on the influence of the internet on political discourse (half of those due did not even present). The gardeners still wear hardhats. The announcement telling non-university residents to clear the premises still sounds off in Japanese and English every day at 9:50pm and my sleep schedule is still as messed up as the seniority-wage system in Japan.

on circumventing the traditional risks of sharing sensitive information

First off, funny story:

>sitting in a restaurant with humans

>3 Muslims in the group with us

> girl with a black Hijab (a bit hard to miss) looks at Manu, frowns

>”is there anything here without pork?” she asks the waitress

> waitress seemed confused about what the girl asked. Clarification? *Mumble mumble*

>after a bit of  confused conversation the waitress finally asks an amazing question:

>”do you want a meal with pork or without pork?” 

Anyhow, there was a girl I know who was unhappy recently because she shared a piece of information with another girl with the agreement  and the girl would in turn keep this information to herself. Unfortunately for the first girl the second girl did not keep her word and shared the information with a party that seemed to be pretty high on the list of parties that the first girl did not want to receive the information. I daresay this is not an uncommon human problem.

I will save you the whole conversation but here is what I think might work to reduce the chances of this occurring in the future:

 a significant factor in why humans share information they want to remain hidden is the emotional discomfort removed by sharing personal and sensitive pieces of information. humans, as social creatures, struggle, for the most part, to eliminate this discomfort without sharing the information with another human.  As such it is attempted to assess, using social skills, whether or not a given human, one wishes to confine in, is trustworthy. If the assessor thinks the person is sufficiently trustworthy he/ she will take the risk and share the secret with them. As economists would know costs can come in form of risks of a negative occurrences in the future rather than a guaranteed and steady price. The problem here is obvious: imperfect information, humans don’t always accurately determine who will handle sensitive information appropriately.

Relying on Social Skills makes sense if one lives as humans have for most of human history: with little contact with people in faraway lands and spending most of their time with one social group. However if the piece of information refers to a specific social dilemma or involves a specific social group it seems to me the last person you want to trust is someone who knows that social group. If you have the freedom to do so: confine in someone from a different social group. Even more effectively, one could speak to a person in a foreign land who has no convenient way to break their pact with you by sharing the information with anyone who 1) knows who you are or 2) would truly bother you if they found out this information about a person they are likely never to meet.

This is obviously ineffective for some secrets, like ones involving serious criminal offences, but in the case of the girl in question this was probably not the case. This technique would seem to me to be more feasible in this day and age than in any other. We have numerous occasions to meet people from radically different social circles with a chance of basically 0 of meeting exactly the person/ people you don’t want to hear the specific secret and an even lower chance of discovering they both know you. This method shouldn’t even, generally speaking, need to be implemented instead of the traditional defence mechanism of assessing trustworthiness using Social Skills, one could use the simultaneously.

People with access to diverse friendship circles with little contact with one another are obviously at an advantage here. Migrants with contactable friends from their birth nation who have skype, people who study in a uni far away from their high school friends, people with friendships with foreigners, people from hobby groups and close relationships with family would be at an advantage here. So it’s a judgement call to what extent you want to apply this in your own life. However, it seems rather reasonable to me, given this opportunity given to us by our modern lifestyle, to at least consider utilizing it rather than thoughtlessly using the traditional, and somewhat instinctive, method utilizing Social Skills alone when easing emotional burdens by sharing sensitive information. 

 

New Habits, girlfaces and the end of quarter.

So I’m out of roo. My Brazilian friend who bought 6.85kg is still hacking away at it but all of mine is gone. But I restocked on all my other foodstuffs. See my eating habits here are something odd even by my standards: several mandarins, 6 or 5 eggs, a single meat (roo, chicken, beef) eaten uncontaminated by the mixing of ingredients , frozen raisins and frozen dark chocolate. This is what I eat on a normal day. she’ll be right.

On the theme of different habits: i heard a lot of people here complain about loneliness and boredom. So its very possible I am having a radically difference experience of Japan from most people here on exchange. Most of my time is spent doing academic/ gaming stuff in my room and I’m fine. We have internet, how can anyone be bored?

Got my two tubes of Vegemite and boomerang. So I will find an opportunity soon to fuck around with the boomerang but, more importantly, it turns out Vegemite is disgusting. It is utterly revolting. So now two Japanese persons gratefully received tubes of Vegemite imported from Australia. My good deed for the year.

Am finishing first quarter now. The semester is divided into two quarters here, where different subjects are taken each quarter. So I just finished my last lectures of Business ethics (didn’t learn much) and Organisational behavior (A++) . I will definitely be implementing what I learned from the latter in building up my PPE club.

It is reasonable to be cautious when generalizing from personal experience about a culture. So it is reasonable to assume that if Everyone I meet in Japan is of the opinion that anime is mainstream here and it appears that it is popular in the city I am that it can be concluded it probably is the case that in Japan, as a whole, anime is popular + stereotype is evidence.  However if I meet one Japanese person who likes knitting it is not sufficient basis to generalize to all of Japan. in between these two we must make generalizations with varying degrees of caution about a culture/ country/ peoples.

With this caution in mind I am starting to get the impression that there is something particularly… submissive about the girls here. Maybe submissive is the wrong word. Maybe recluse, shy or restrained are better words. It feels almost like they are suppressing their personality to some extent, beyond the way we all do. I don’t like it. That having been said, It is hard to expect there would be much academic conversation here if this was not the case here, but this is certainly not helping solve my dilemma.  

I also met my first Mormon and my first lesbian. It’s like Alice in wonderland meeting all these strange creatures from the books she read in her real life. Like the other day I figured if we can get the short people here to do a dance/ song and no matter what the dance is I will be constantly thinking of the lollipop guild song.

Today I saw a European girl knock on the table instead of clap. I asked – apparently it’s a normal thing in her land. Also Europeans, statistically speaking, drink lots of coffee. Like 7 or 5 cups a day is not  considered a point where it is reasonable to say “you are a freak who needs rehab” in Europe.

Actually this trip has been a gateway to American culture as well as to other cultures. Let’s just say stereotypes exist for a reason.

Got bored with archery a while back btw so I stopped.

Also turns out gyms here have no punching bags….

 

Random rant

I am sufficiently lucky/ social genius to have most of my criticism and external character analysis come from friendly faces (unlike politicians). So apparently I am “too facts oriented” and “talking to me is like writing an essay” (thank you Cameron for that last one). well maybe i can redeem myself yet:

So long story short I had an essay to write and I didn’t care about the mark I got, so was a bit lazy and it sort of just became a rant. The topic was dissecting critically one thing about your culture – so i chose political correctness cause i hate it like poison. i will save you from the full essay , here is just the criticism bit. i take no responsibility for any facts here. also i defined political correctness as: 

“Political correcness refers to particular way of attempting to change the ideas that are shared in society, primarily for the sake of avoiding offending people. Political correctness can be expressed through the placing of social or economic presures on organisations and individuals in order to get them to not speak their mind.This is to be differentiated from trying to get someone to stop sharing an idea through convincing or through trying to share alternative ideas to undermine the receptability of the public to their own.”

enjoy the rant and don’t get too offended: 

There are several good things that political correctness suppresses and they will be addressed in order: humour, critical thinking, a political culture and civil society involvement.

Political correctness has been used in Australia to suppress humour on a regular basis. Sometimes an example lends itself for our analysis through the national media coverage, as is the Chaser’s “Make a Realistic Wish Foundation” sketch example listed earlier does. However the majority of humour Australians experience is not from the media but from their everyday interactions with other Australians and humorous statements the said. It is obvious some of both types of humour is limited by political correctness, however there is good reason it is not simply crass, hateful, drivel that is lost. A significant portion of popular humour is offensive in nature. John Cleese’s research on his own movie A Fish Called Wanda[1] indicated that the three scenes ranked as being the most offensive scenes were the scenes people considered to be the most offensive. This indicates it is not necessarily just unfunny jokes that are repressed at the behest of political correctness. In Australia political correctness is used by everyday citizens on a regular basis to discourage humour for reasons completely disconnected to whether or not the individual in question enjoyed the joke. I have personally seen people laughing at a joke and then, after the laughter, encouraging the speaker to not say jokes of this nature again. The primary reason for this is that the joke may upset someone else who hears the joke in the future. In this way political correctness reduces the incidents of humour as humour that is perceived by the politically correct individual as possibly being offensive to other people is politically corrected. An example could a joke that is related to a certain event that is deeply emotional or painful for some people, like the holocaust. In Australia a joke relating to the holocaust, in any way, is widely considered to be completely intolerable. However is other cultures, like Israeli culture, jokes relating to the holocaust are accepted to a much higher degree, to the point that they appear in mainstream television. So in this way everyday Australians use their feelings and intuitions regarding what could be considered offensive by certain groups in order to suppress humour on the basis of those perceptions. It is relevant to point out that this is not evidence based suppression and that human intuition regarding what people consider offensive is not a scientific tool, especially when there over twenty three million Australians in Australia. So not only is political correctness used to suppress humour, but in Australia it is done with little evidence regarding the quantity or intensity of offense caused by the joke or comment. I have personally had the unusual experience of being politically corrected regarding jokes about the holocaust by people who know less about the historical event then I do, are not Jewish as I am and do not have any family who was in the holocaust, as I have. They simply assume humour is always used to devalue the importance of an event and decide, with no more information or inquiry, to apply political correctness. This notion or humour devaluing events would be seen as palpably absurd in Israel who uses humour in its culture to emotionally cope with events such as the holocaust and suicide bombings. Bureaucracy, is defined as authoritative organized decision making based on information. I think one of the worst things I can say about Australian political correctness is that it incentivises the suppression of humour in an inconsistent and most unbureaucratic manner.

Critical thinking is also something I consider to be vital and healthy for a society. In Australia it is not unusual for political correctness to be applied liberally and without thought in order to discourage the expression of certain ideas. Those ideas, which often times, in my experience, are palpably absurd (such as the idea that climate change is a hoax) are often met with political correcting instead of actually being engaged with as ideas. This same correcting is, however, also on occasion applied to the questioning of ideas that are rarely questioned and whose questioning is not absurd. This is easily testable by asking in a discussion which is based on human rights as to their source, worth or relevance. In the Israeli Mossad[2] the rule of 10 is used to question convention and avoid groupthink. This is an example of institutions deliberately attempting to avoid groupthink.  Political correctness often amounts, in my country, to discouraging the tenth man from speaking and questioning the conventional wisdom or a deeply held conviction by instilling a widespread fear of offence.

This issue relates, and is very similar to, the problem of political correctness limiting political discussion. Certain issues are so limited in what one can say in a typical conversation without experiencing the pressures of political correctness that many have preferred to not speak on the matter at all. the problem with this is multifaceted: firstly it makes some of those individuals feel as if they are oppressed due to their political beliefs. If whenever a person speaks their mind on an issue they are given social signals of disapproval rather then met with actual argumentation a feeling of righteous oppression may set in. The best evidence I can supply for this assertion is in the form of empathetic thinking. Imagine in your own mind if it is logical, with regard to humans, that this pattern of thought will arise as a result of political correctness, especially if the issue is one close to your heart. Secondly they will be more ignorant as a result of this as it contributes to what David Hume called the “separation of the world of learning from the world of conversation”[3] in his unpublished essay titled “OF ESSAY WRITING”. Essentially, if politics becomes a area of discussion where ignorance, idiocy and wrongheaded bloody-mindedness are met with political correctness many people will be incentivised to not speak on these matters. This is unhelpful as these same people will still hold their ignorant views however now, with the addition of the suppression provided by political correctness, they will keep these views amongst themselves and not state them both to challenge our thinking, a good thing, and open their own to criticism. This is particularly the case in Australia in regards to issues such as migration, aboriginal issues and addressing Islamism in Australia. Thirdly, political correctness makes it particularly difficult to put pressure on governments to address these issues. The case is very analogous to overregulation of a sector of the economy discouraging people from entering it. Excessive regulation on speech on certain, highly sensitive, political issues has facilitated those political issues receiving less airtime then they would have otherwise. Lastly, one should be concerned about the problem of stress. Political correctness makes something that ought to be pleasurable and informative, political discussion, a stressful task where one must worry about the possibility of social punishment through political correctness instead of just about understand and being understood. 

 

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozNKwaqdlA8

 

[2]http://matspen.co.il/tag/%D7%97%D7%95%D7%A7-%D7%94%D7%90%D7%93%D7%9D-%D7%94%D7%A2%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%99/

[3]http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Hume/hmMPL40.html