Politics

The Progress of Humanity and History

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Pope Francis says in Laudato Si’:

113. There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere.

Here he denies that technological progress is the same as progress for humanity, and elsewhere he criticizes those “who doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology and without any need for ethical considerations or deep change.” This criticism seems to be related to the above statement. The Pope is not saying that progress does not exist; the “myth of progress” is not that progress exists, but that it is constituted by “the application of new technology.” In the same way, although he begins paragraph 113 by saying “people no longer seem to believe in a happy future,” he continues by saying that there is a “growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere.” In general, then, the myth may consist in saying that technological growth is sufficient for progress, and that progress is guaranteed without any special effort.

I stated in the previous post that a successful world will in fact tend to grow in goodness. This however does not guarantee that a world will always be successful in this way, and it is clear enough that improvement in one respect, such as technology, does not guarantee improvement overall. So it remains a question whether or not the world we live in is in fact successful, if it is in fact getting better, or not. It is certainly not staying the same, which means that it must be getting better or getting worse, but it could be that overall things are constantly getting worse, or that they go back and forth such that on average it is much the same as staying the same. The following posts will consider this issue.

Privacy

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Jacques Mattheij argues here in favor of privacy, beginning with an account of how the Nazis during World War II used an Amsterdam civil registry in order to track down and slaughter the Jewish people of the city. He concludes with this question:

If you really strongly feel that you have nothing that you consider private ask yourself this: Even if you have done nothing wrong, are you willing to publish your pin code, a high resolution scan of your signature, your passport, your SSN, your passwords, your photographs (naked, preferably), your medical records, the conversations with your attorney, the amount of money you currently have, your criminal record (if you have any), your bank statements, your tax returns for the last 10 years, your license plate and a copy of your driving license, your sexual orientation, your infidelities, the names of the people that you love, the names of the people you despise, the contents of your diary, all the emails you ever wrote and received, your report cards, your entire credit history, all the stuff you ever bought, all the movies you’ve ever watched, all the books you ever read, your religion, your home address and so on for all the world to see?

If you’re willing to do all of that then congratulations, you really have nothing to hide and the word ‘privacy’ means nothing to you. But if you answer so much as ‘no’ to any one of those or to any bit of information that you yourself come up with that you’d rather not share with the world then you too value privacy.

And if you’re not content with living in a world where all of that data is public then you’d better stop repeating that silly mantra ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide then you’ve got nothing to fear’, even if instead of death or identity theft your problems might merely be those of inconvenience or embarrassment when your data gets re-purposed in ways that you could not imagine when you sent it out in the world in a careless manner, and when you helped erode the concept of privacy as a great good that needs to be protected rather than sacrificed on the altar of commerce or of national security (especially from some ill defined bogey man, such as the terrorists).

Of course, no one is willing to reveal all of the information mentioned. The problem is that this conclusion suggests that privacy is good as an end, while his argument merely shows that privacy is good as a means to preventing other evils. The problem with the Amsterdam registry was not that it was a bad thing, but that men were able to use it for bad things. Essentially privacy means that certain information is not available to most people, and it would be strange to assert that ignorance is good in itself. If anything, it is a necessary evil. This is not just a technicality. Considering privacy to be a good in itself has actual harmful consequences such as the European right to be forgotten. Rather than seeing privacy as a great good to be protected, we should see it as a necessary evil which hopefully will someday diminish to the degree that other ways are found to prevent men from using information for evil purposes.

Politically Incorrect Algorithms

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More and more often one sees complaints such as this one from the Washington Post:

Fresh off the revelation that Google image searches for “CEO” only turn up pictures of white men, there’s new evidence that algorithmic bias is, alas, at it again. In a paper published in April, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University claim Google displays far fewer ads for high-paying executive jobs…

… if you’re a woman.

“I think our findings suggest that there are parts of the ad ecosystem where kinds of discrimination are beginning to emerge and there is a lack of transparency,” Carnegie Mellon professor Annupam Datta told Technology Review. “This is concerning from a societal standpoint.”

The Washington Post attempts to explain:

The interesting thing about the fake users in the Ad Fisher study, however, is that they had entirely fresh search histories: In fact, the accounts used were more or less identical, except for their listed gender identity. That would seem to indicate either that advertisers are requesting that high-paying job ads only display to men (and that Google is honoring that request) or that some type of bias has been programmed, if inadvertently, into Google’s ad-personalization system.

Both of these are certainly possible in principle, and only Google can know for sure. But there is a much simpler explanation. It is possible that men simply click on this kind of ad more often than women do. If so, the ads will be shown to men more often. That is what the algorithm does, and what it is meant to do. It shows ads to the people who are most likely to click on them.

Modern liberalism has a dogma: “Men and women are equal.” This is to be understood literally. They are actually equal in every respect. There is no difference between them except that we happen to use different names, for no particular reason.

This dogma of course is evidently false, more obviously so than the dogmas of Scientology. Men and women are different. They have different properties. They differ on average in basically every respect, since the null hypothesis is always false. The more we use unbiased algorithms, the more the real world will come into conflict with the false dogma of liberalism, much as geology and biology constantly come into conflict with Young Earth Creationism.