How thick a notion of equality should we have?

This evening at the Ideas Cafe, we discussed how far our society should go to provide equality of opportunity to its citizens.

I was introduced to the thick and thin notions of equality some time ago.  One good example of a thin notion of equality brought up by Mano at the meeting is having equal washroom space for man and woman in public buildings.  This would be equal but it does not address that more female washroom space is required to handle the same amount of female users as compared to male users.

A thicker notion of equality would take that into account and assign more washroom space for female washrooms.

Another example of thicker notion of equality is to provide breakfast for hungry children who do not learn well because they did not have breakfast before going to school.  The thinner notion of equality is to just provide the education to all children whether they are hungry or not.  The thicker notion of equality is to help the hungry children by providing them breakfast so that they are as ready to learn as the other children are.

But how far should we go with this?

Mano said that surely we want a society that values merit and that we should encourage all the worthy participants base on their merits.  If some of these participants started off from a more disadvantaged position, our society is missing their contribution if we do not bring them to the same starting point as others.

Rafi thought that we should be valuing participants based on their merits at the moment when merit is measured even if they happened to be lucky enough to be starting with an advantage.  It is difficult and futile to go too far back and try to make things up.

Shula said that as a society, we have to decide whether equality of opportunity is the highest ideal or whether equality of opportunity is just a means to help us get to a better society.

Presumably, if equality is the ideal, we will have to make things up to make it equal.  If equality is just a means to a better society, we should just look at merits at the moment without regard to what led to the current state of affairs.

Perhaps something in between is best?

Shula also offered that we can look at a thin notion of equality as removing barriers to equality.  The thick notion of equality then gets into compensating for the lottery of birth and circumstances.

But is providing breakfast to hungry children in schools removing barriers or compensating for their home circumstances?

Once we start compensating,  we run into the dangers of pulling the front runners back or equalizing everyone to the lowest performance level.  We also start creating injustice to individuals that are caught not getting opportunities that they should have because these opportunities are granted to others who had been disadvantaged in some way.

Rafi said some temporary adjustments are required to reverse the social inertia of stereo types, life styles, and identities; but these adjustments have to be temporary.  However, we all know that once implemented, these adjustments themselves become very difficult to remove.

We also discussed the point that these adjustments for disadvantaged groups may reduce the respect of their achievers who may have achieved without the help of the adjustments.  However, the benefit of a more equal society may be worth this.

It was a very lively and enjoyable meeting.

Knowledge, conservatism and religion

What is knowledge? 

While we started with discussing what is it that we really know to be true,  it became fairly futile as we soon realize that we do not know anything for sure other than that we think,  the famous "I think, therefore I am."

Sure,  there are truths like mathematics, logic and the like which are true with some definitions and axioms but it seems unsatisfying to only consider these as the only truths of things that we know for sure.

We want to think that some of our daily observations we "know" and will be true in the future - the sun and the moon will rise tomorrow, gravity will be around to cause things to drop, that we will enjoy our next meal. 

We also want to "know" that human nature is kind, there is love in this world, that good deeds are rewarded.

So there is a strict definition of "knowing" versus a more interesting group of concepts that we would like to believe that we know,  even if there can be "exceptions" from time to time. Is this strong desire to believe what we would like to be true call "faith"?

Another way of looking at knowledge is that we observe the world and our lives and these observations are like data patterns that comes into our brain or consciousness.  A bunch of ones and zeros to computers if you will.

This data on its own is not that useful until they start to form a common pattern with other observations so that we can start postulating a rule or hypothesis and start testing it on more observations.  Our confidence on the hypothesis grows with each confirming observation and we start to believe that we "know" and can predict the future outcome of a similarly developing situation. 

A pencil falls off the table, followed by a piece of paper drifting down, then the ruler.

We start to "know" that it is not pencils that have a peculiar property of falling but other things do too and they all fall with different speeds it seems.  Until Galileo's famous experiment at his local leaning tower, we "know" that heavier things fall faster than lighter things.  After Galileo's experiment, we "know" differently.

We read about crime on newspapers and we "know" that we should not trust strangers.

While these are not strictly true, they are more useful and therefore we sacrifice some truth in return for usefulness,  sometimes forgetting that we have made that compromise and act as if we really "know" enough to predict the outcome.

Can we therefore move on to say that wisdom comes from a pattern recognition of knowledge just like knowledge is an attempt to summarize data to make it useful?

Not so fast!  The line from data to knowledge to wisdom does not seem like a straight one,  there is a turn on the way to wisdom,  any suggestions on how to quantify this?  Your comments please!!!

Another discussion this week was on the peculiar common connection between conservatism and the religious.  Why is that?

First we have to define conservative;  Rafi offered the definition that a conservative is one who is content with how things are and not going to try anything new unless someone successfully convince him why he should do this new thing.  In other words,  I am going to sit in this comfortable couch unless you give me good reasons to do otherwise.

A liberal (or someone who is not conservative) is someone who thinks it is a good idea to try something new just because it is new unless there is good reason not to.

Religion in its various forms commonly offer that they have the answer and the truth.  With this basic position,  there is no need to change as they either already know the truth or have access to it through some supernatural being.  Is it any wonder why they fit the definition of the conservative so well?  why the two descriptions happen to come together?

New age spirituals and those who claim they are spiritual but not religious tends to consider organized religion as dogmatic and even not caring while preaching charity and kindness.  However,  this is inevitable. Once a religion offers an all knowing super being that possess the truth,  they cannot be wrong and they cannot change.  Thereafter, when there is a decision to be made between protecting the truth reputation of the religion versus doing a charitable act,  organized religion can only choose to protect their previous proclamations to protect their position that they know the truth.

The longer the religions has been around,  the more previous proclamations there is to protect. New age spirituals and cults have the luxury of a short or no history to burden themselves to be consistent.

Being right is much more important than being compassionate.

Does this also seem like what a conservative would do? Staying the course rather than trying the new route?

I cannot help but use poor Galileo one more time.  After being condemned by a previous pope for proclaiming that it is the earth that revolves around the sun,  not that the sun revolves around the earth,  he was finally pardoned by Pope John Paul in the last decade. 

Why did it take this long?  Does the Catholic church still think that the sun revolve around the earth?  Did the previous pope that condemned Galileo not get the message right from god?  Can popes be wrong from time to time? Which pope is right if one pope pardons someone who was condemned by another pope?  Can we trust a pope that can be wrong from time to time?

It is a tall order to be possessing the truth, be right all the time, and to be defending that reputation even with hind sight.

Jan 12 What differentiates right from wrong?

Tonight we had the Ideas Cafe at the new location in the Waves Coffee House at Columbia and Bagbie in New Westminster.

It was a heated discussion, a lot of which evolves around how notions of right and wrong are different in different cultures with different value systems and how some of these conflicting systems can live together.

First of all,  though,  we need to clarify that there are many types of right and wrong.  We are not dealing with factual and logical outcomes of observations or mathematics but more with our evaluative judgment of human behavior. More in the moral territory than legal, religious, or traditional areas.

1.  Some suggested that we will know if certain actions are right or wrong base on the reaction and emotions of the people out there affected by these actions.  Our sense of right and wrong is ultimately based on how our actions affect other people. This ties in with the previous post on morality being the behavior code with other people.

2.  While most would agree that our sense of right and wrong were first introduced to us by our parents in our upbringing,  we continually re-evaluate this and shift our sense as we are exposed to other ideas and arguments.

3.  Our sense of right and wrong guides us in locating the dividing line between these two opposing segments.  While we all place this dividing line differently due to our background and life experience,  it is important to note that we agree on most things like not killing and stealing etc.  We tend to concentrate on the disagreements but we do agree on the majority.

4.  It takes a long time for us to shift our moral compass or sense of right and wrong.  So it is not realistic to look for an answer that will instantly reduce the conflict from social groups of different backgrounds having disagreements on what is right versus wrong.  A continual dialog and patience is required.

5.  Our desires motivates us to action and these actions often affect others.  We negotiate with others to best satisfy our desires while they satisfy theirs.  The sum of these negotiations is a consensus on how we can live harmoniously with others while satisfying our respective desires and form the basis of what is right and wrong.

6.  Logic and recognizing other points of view is eventually what leads to better harmony in living with others. Education and reflection on history shed light on this.  Even previously privileged social classes can now look back and see that it is better with more equality even at the loss of the privileged status.

7.  There are times when we can feel something is wrong but cannot "put our finger on it".  This may be an emotional reaction such as seeing cruelty to other humans or animals,  seeing others being treated unequally, or perhaps from the inertia of our upbringing.

It was actually quite a lively discussion obviously not reflected in this write-up.  What can I say, come and join us some Wednesday!

Oliver.

Why do we worry?

Tonight at the Ideas Cafe we discussed what is worrying, whether there is an opposite to worrying, is there an optimal level of worrying that we should have..............

1.  We can think of hope as the opposite of worry.  While hopelessness is not quite the same as worry,  hope is close to an opposite.  Another thought is that "over confident" is the opposite of worry.  This is instructive as to the value of worry, that we may become over confident if we have not worries at all.  Of course it can be that there is no real opposite to worry,  that the opposite to worry is not worry and that people who are not prone to worrying just ends up doing other things instead of spending time worrying.

2.  Worry is like an internal alarm system to alert us to something bad that may be about to happen.  In this analogy,  worry is a good tool to bring our attention to something that may turn bad so that we can do something about it.  The analogy is also useful in looking at nuisance alarms that bother us but are not really that useful to us.  Therefore worrying about things that are not worthwhile is like having nuisance alarms,  it saps our energy without doing something useful for us.

3.  Worrying can only happen because we have the capacity to anticipate the future and to look at the possibilities that can happen.  Young children do not worry before they can project and anticipate into the future. Teenagers worry a lot about things that seem unimportant to adults.  As they mature,  these teenage worries fade and are displaced by more substantial issues. Some think that our worrying decreases as we age and mature while others think that we may worry more as we age as we are now experienced in more ways that things can go wrong.  Perhaps it is the net balance of the two trends as to whether we become less or more worrisome as we age.

4.  Worry can be a cognitive state of recognizing a worrisome situation,  or a mood when one is more pessimistic of how things will turn out.  It can also become debilitating when one is gripped by it instead of using it to trigger some preventative action.

5.  An internal dialog often happens when one worries.  It can be an imagination of what is to come and how the various possible scenarios can be handled or it can just be thinking how bad it can be without being able to find answers as to what to do.

6.  Sometimes, worry results from having too many options making choosing difficult.  This is typical of high school graduates facing the important decision of choosing a career when anything seems possible at that point.

7.  Worry, like any other emotional response, can be tamed through practice.  While the initial worrying response to a situation is an emotional reaction,  our response to this reaction can be to delegate the responsibility to someone else, to buy insurance for a possible accident, to come up with a proper action to mitigate the outcome of concern etc.  We can always delay it, sleep on it, just so that it does not over power us.  We can also convince ourselves that we have done what we can and that the rest of it is out of our hands and therefore not productive to spend time worrying about it.

8.  Does language play a part here if there is no direct opposite to the word worry?  Is there no such word because we do not have this sentiment or do we not feel this sentiment because there is no such word in the language for us to think about it and communicate about it?

I am sure I have missed out some of the discussion as it was an active discussion tonight.  Please feel free in commenting on what I may have missed and post some of your thoughts in the comment section!

Oliver.