Dec 28 - Animal rights

 

As we look back over the past several decades, a lot of progress was made in acknowledging the rights of groups that were previously marginalized.  Whether it is race, gender, or religion, we now recognize that these groups deserve equal rights in the way they should be treated.

If we are to look back at our current thinking 50 years from now, what may we then think of our behavior today?


The philosopher Peter Singer calls our treatment of animals "speciesism", we assume the position from christian dogma that humans are god chosen to use the rest of the species as we think fit. 

This is such a parallel to the chosen race concept in racism that it is hard to refute.

So what rights should animals have?

Are they justified to treat humans as just another food source, kill and eat us at will?

Should they be worshiped as a sacred species as commanded by some deity?

Maybe suffering is the criteria.

If they can kill us for food without us enduring much or any suffering, than humans as food for the lions is just fine.  An anesthetic to dull the pain, or even general anesthesia so we won't even know what happened takes away the concern for suffering.

Or maybe it is a matter of raising humans solely for the purpose of being food for the lions.  These humans would not have existed without that explicit purpose.  Does that make it any more justifiable to kill humans for food?

I really have no answers to these points.

It is everyone for themselves, survival of the fittest, might is right,  no room for the lofty consideration of rights and who gets to eat who to survive. The animals have to eat to survive or they will go extinct!


Wait!  why can't the entire animal kingdom turn into vegetarians? Then all of us animals can live happily together without the fear of being someone else's food?

But is that not "speciesism" too?  Plants are living organisms that reproduce, breath, and have all the characteristics of a living thing.  The argument that they do not suffer when we kill them for food may only be that they do not express suffering like us animals, making it easier for us not to empathize with their suffering.

We may not need to anesthetize a plant before we cut it off at harvest because we see no signs of suffering but does that make it right? Should we not hurt plants that move away when touched?

https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=plants+that+move+away+when+touched&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-002

If empathizing with an animal's suffering be the reason for us not to be cruel or to kill animals, is it just a matter of our empathizing mirror neurons in our brains driving us to an emotional decision rather than a rational reason not to eat meat?

Then there is the argument that we humans know better because of our rational faculties.  Only wild animals will eat other animals but we are above that.

Back to humans being superior than other species, that we know what is good for them more than they do?

The curse of the just, is our ethical sense getting in the way of our survival instincts in an evolution driven world?

Automation - quality of life enhancer or job killer?

We had our discussion on Monday about automation.  The discussion was prompted by various related material on the web.

First is Andy Haldane, chief economist, Bank of England, speech to the Trade Union Congress, London, titled "Labour's share".  http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2015/speech864.pdf 
Very interesting presentation with data and charts dating back three centuries of mechanization in Britain, and trends in productivity and wage increases.

Then there is the video of Clayton Christensen's presentation on disruptive innovation, how the established industries have to keep on innovating as the competitors from the lower levels keep catching up to them.  http://blog.deming.org/2013/06/clayton-christensen-on-innovation-and-macro-economics/

Thirdly, there is the video about robots replacing humans "humans need not apply", less academic and data based, and perhaps more on the alarmist side.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU


The data used in Haldane's speech showed that despite the Luddite's concern about machinery eliminating the cottage industry for cotton spinners and weavers, labor's wage increases have been keeping up with the productivity gains in the last couple of centuries.  He acknowledged that there is a lag in the last decade with the hope that the catch up will come.

But will it?  The increasing disparity between the top and bottom earners in our society may be an indication that the benefits of automation may no longer be distributed throughout society.

Haldane's speech also talked about the "hollowing out of the middle class", that while some of the workers displaced by machines have trained up for better jobs, others have moved down to lower paid jobs where they are overqualified for.  There is significant numbers of workers, though employed, are looking for more hours to work in order to get more income.

On the other hand, automation does more than just replace workers with machines.  In my previous life as an engineer doing automation projects for industry, the major financial justification for automation is not so much in labor savings as in better quality product and less production downtime.

Human ingenuity is great but no match for machines when it comes to consistency and repeatability to make a good product once the formulation is known. Machines do the tedium duty while humans now do the setup, tweaking, and troubleshooting.

We all witness the progress of the ATM, or automatic teller machine in the last few decades.  Setting aside the debate of whether we want to deal with machines or humans when we go to a bank, there is no doubt that 24 hour access to a bank machine is much more convenient for the bank customer compared to the 3pm closing that banks use to have.

So automation benefits enterprise owners in saving costs and making better products.  It also benefits consumer of these products and services in terms of the quality and availability of these items.

Is society as a whole benefiting properly by automation in this way?

Thinking back a few decades ago, when Eastman Kodak came up with the Instamatic camera and film, a manufacturing plant was built in Rochester, New York, to make these items.  Residents in that area were employed in good paying jobs to produce these items that consumers want.

Contrast to the present day, when Apple came up with the popular iPhone, iPad devices, they go all over the world to get the best low cost producer to make the products.  Workers in California did not get the drag along effect of manufacturing jobs to assemble these devices but the consumer gets a lower cost product.

For someone in the developed world who is not an innovator, machine or robot implementer or serviceman, software developer, should they be content with jobs in the service industries?

Are manufacturing jobs an outdated concept?

There was a time when the majority of our population was in agriculture to feed ourselves.  There is now less than 5% of the population in farming compared to over 75% before.  We have to conclude that people have moved away from farming as a career and we no longer think that we should get rid of the farm machinery so that we can create more farming jobs.

The Economist Magazine had an article about German manufactures going digital. The first chart here shows the prominence of manufacturing for Germany with the percentage of GDP due to manufacturing only second to China while we see countries such as Britain only have less than 10% of their GDP due to manufacturing.

The other chart shows how the stock market values the digital companies over famous manufacturers like Daimler, Siemens, and BMW.   How is it possible that Apple can be valued at ten times or more than each of the German car manufacturers?

We are surely witnessing the move from traditional manufacturing to digital age just like we had the move from agricultural to manufacturing a century ago.

Chris, a web designer and programmer, was in the discussion.  His take on automation is more than machines replacing manual labor.

Chris sees automation as the crowd collaboration of ideas.  Examples such as Wikipedia, open source software development let computers or servers co-ordinate ideas from various people in a common forum.  Without a human coordinator or curator, the group forum grows on its own, free of bias and censorship by some central figure or filter.

There is so much benefit from these collaboration efforts that the old ideas of patents and copy rights, originally conceived to encourage innovation, no longer applies.

Welcome to the new meaning of automation.

Moving on...........Coming back!

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Spin and trust

I went to Mano's cafe discussion on "spin" Wednesday.

We have all heard of "spin doctors" expert at crafting messages and strategy to push a particular point of view while sheltering the weaknesses of that view.  Pushing the positive, casting doubt in the opponent's position, emphasizing certain aspects to take attention away from concerns, all become part of the arrows in the spin doctor's quiver. 

Some at the cafe would like to think that spin is everywhere these days, that we are bombarded by people and media wanting to sell us something or influence our thinking towards their objectives.

Resisting the call for an early definition of the term, Mano led the group towards a narrower and more focused conception of spin as oppose to other forms of communication where only certain aspects are emphasized.

We all lean towards discussing the positives in social situations while avoiding negative and critical remarks.  Are we "spinning" our message or the conversation?  Most of us will likely say no.

There are those among us that have strong beliefs about politics, the environment, and other issues and they advocate their position strongly often without mentioning or giving equal time to the weakness of their viewpoints.  Some may classify this advocacy as spinning for perhaps a lot of us would just consider it as something that persons with strong beliefs do.

Then there are those with good intentions for their audience but see that the most effective way to get their audience to the better place quickly is by a little white lie or something that is not completely true.  An example of this is for a senior center to oversell their entertainment events in order to get seniors to come to the center. 

The staff knows that it is good for the seniors to get out of their homes to come to the center to socialize. So if they cross the line to say there are lots of entertainment at the center when formal entertainment only happens twice a month,  it is only for the good cause of getting the seniors to come out.  The ends justify the means.

Perhaps more would consider this spinning the message as the truth is being stretched.

Still, some would say that this is all done with good intentions and perhaps not what we think spinning is.

Euphemisms are becoming more and more prevalent.  Are we spinning when we use the new euphemistic terms instead of the old negative ones?

In concentrating on the positive, euphemisms share a common feature of what most people think spinning is.  But we are likely not ready to say someone is spinning when he refers to difficulties as challenges.

So spinning by the "spin doctors" have to go beyond the above.

Mano characterized spin as a concerted campaign to put out a message that the speaker do not fully believe in.

Individual incidences of euphemistic language or expressing what one believes in do not quite meet the mark.  It has to be a concerted effort to spread a message that one does not quite subscribe to.

The spinner is careful that the message is vague enough that it cannot be proven to be a lie but have enough coloring to persuade the listener towards the intended direction.

The spinner takes advantage of a common trust we have with other human beings that in any discussion, we are working with each other in an honest effort to get to the truth. We may be mistaken and lead us down the wrong path but that is an unintended mistake.

The spinner intentionally nudges his audience towards a path he does not believe in and violated the unspoken trust we have with those we communicate with.

This is all well and good but what about lawyers who advocate for their clients, some of them are criminals without disclosing issues that can hurt their clients?  Are lawyers spinners by virtue of their commitment to their clients?

Here, Mano considers it as a separate case in a well known legal system where we all know that lawyers represent their clients in an adversarial environment against the prosecutors.  This is different than the spinner who tries to come across as looking after their audience's interest while promoting the interest of those who hire them.

So, when a car salesman said he is representing the buyer's interest in going to the sales manager to get a better deal for the buyer, all the time acting as if he is on the buyer side throughout the buying process, he is spinning.

But how is that different from the lawyer?  Don't we all know that the salesman work for the car dealership and not for us?

Don't we all know that there are right wing versus left wing think tanks?

Don't we know that all political parties want to stay in power and craft all positions towards that end?

Don't we have ideas of which magazine, newspaper, or media outlet is left or right leaning?

Are they spinning or are they advocating their true beliefs?

One thing is for sure.

Spinning, the use of euphemistic language, emphasizing the positive, not telling the negative, all lead to a cynical public.  We are always on the watch for what is not said, when the missing message is coming to bite us, when we have to pay the piper.

Public trust is the casualty in all this.  We view every message with suspicion and consider trusting individuals as naive.

But trust is the glue needed to hold modern day society with our complicated division of labor and deep specialization with thin general knowledge.

Spinning is short term and narrow gain at the expense of losing valuable trust in the long term and we all pay for this erosion of trust with the spread of cynicism and general mistrust.

Dec 2nd. Abnormal versus atypical

Some time ago we read a book by Judith Butler in our book club where she made the difference between atypical versus abnormal when referring to aspects of gender not usually encountered by the general public.

It is only when the two words are put side by side that the difference became so revealing.

Most of us think of ourselves as "normal" and think nothing of considering those different from us as abnormal, rather than just plain different.

It is easy for us to think of the average of a group characteristic to be normal for that group when a better description is that it is typical of that group.

There is a sense of exclusion implied by the term "abnormal" that lends it politically explosiveness.  It is the first step in drawing the separation line between the "in" and "out" groups.

In contrast, atypical merely acknowledge that there is a difference without imparting a value judgment of whether that difference matters in any respect.

The examples used in Butler's book are of those born with sexual organs that were a mismatch with their gender identity.  The label of "abnormal" led to "corrective" surgery, hormone injections, and other interventions in an effort to make individuals more like "normal" members of society.

Some of these individuals ultimately felt so out of place between their physical body and their gender identity that they have surgery to undo all these prior efforts.

For most of us who are not doctors and nurses attending births, we are not aware of the various birth "abnormalities" that happen because they are rare in percentage terms. Babies born with an extra finger for example, are a harmless feature.  Yet it is hard to find another word to replace "abnormality" for this.


It was not that long ago that homosexual tendency was seen as "abnormal". It also carried the belief that this "abnormality" can be "corrected".

Now that we understand that it is a mere difference in preference and attraction, we can still say it is atypical based on numbers within the population but no longer consider it as abnormal.

So are there instances where abnormal can be use appropriately?

We can perhaps consider good health as a normal condition and that someone stricken by disease is abnormal and expects to return to perfect health later.

Here again, consider someone with an amputated limb from an injury that will never grow a natural limb again.  Is this person atypical or abnormal? Or both?

It is becoming more and more like determining normalcy is a subjective judgment term that cannot avoid separating someone from mainstream society. Applying the normalcy test implies that there is a correct way to be and shuts out the diversity of possibilities that exists without judgement.

So should we give up on the notion of being normal altogether?  What will be life like if there is no standard of being normal?  Nothing will be considered as deviant behavior?

It may not be so bad.  No more discrimination and moralizing by third parties. All legitimate actions based on consent of the parties involved.

What about the strange incident of the person who had an agreement with another to be killed and eaten?  Surely that is strange, atypical, and.... abnormal?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Meiwes

Is that not reason to pass judgement?

So some things should be judged and condemned.  What are they?

Some videos on abnormal and atypical:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtJCGGMUa5Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B2xOvKFFz4