Book Post for October

Tags

follow ozymandias271 for more sad gays, neil gaiman, neurodivergence, parenting, racism

Creating Your Perfect Family Size: How To Make An Informed Decision About Having A Baby: I hoped that this book would, like, give me information about how many children I should have, but instead it was just a long list of different things people think about when they have kids. You mean people who for religious reasons don’t use birth control generally have a lot of kids? I had no idea!

The Breastfeeding Book: Everything You Need To Know About Breastfeeding Your Child From Birth Through Weaning: I continue to have difficulties reviewing the practical advice in breastfeeding books, on account of I have never breastfed. It is inaccurate about the things breastfeeding books are always inaccurate about (yes, some people can’t produce sufficient milk; no, breastfeeding does not have all those benefits you’re claiming it does; yes, parents should be concerned about the iron levels of their exclusively breastfed six-month-olds). However, I appreciate the Sears’s characteristic kindness and empathy, and I wish their commitment to never making parents feel guilty for being unable to do something would extend to the parent blogosphere. I also really liked the chapter on how non-breastfeeding parents can help with breastfeeding, both through supporting the breastfeeding parent (cleaning, shooing away busybodies, giving them time for themselves) and through nurturing the baby (through babywearing, playing, and singing).

Norse Mythology: Neil Gaiman is always at his best when telling short stories, and this is essentially a collection of short stories, covering the major Norse myths. Grand, heroic, and with a sly sense of humor. Gaiman loves mythology and it shines out from every page of this wonderful book. Excellent for reading out loud.

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life: An excellent introduction to the practice of mindfulness meditation. Unfortunately, I only figured out halfway through that it was not actually intended for me, it was intended for mentally well people who want to try meditation, and Jon Kabat-Zinn has a completely different book for us crazies. Oh well.

The New Jim Crow: I feel like I am literally the last person to jump on this bandwagon but THIS IS AN AMAZING BOOK YOU SHOULD READ IT, especially if you have any interest at all in anti-racism and/or libertarianism. I started the book being like “well, mass incarceration is pretty bad, but it seems like a bit much to claim it is literally a racial caste system like Jim Crow” and ended it “welp, I guess mass incarceration is a racial caste system like Jim Crow.”

One point I found particularly insightful was her argument that to end mass incarceration you will need to enlist poor white people and middle-class-and-above black people by explaining to them how ending mass incarceration will benefit them. Poor white people receive the psychological wage of whiteness, which (in our colorblind society) has changed from “I might be poor but at least I’m not an [n word]” to “I might be poor but at least I’m not a criminal.” Middle-class-and-above black people receive benefits such as affirmative action, which ultimately uphold the system by promoting the pretense of colorblindness; if a black man can be President, it must be the fault of individual black people that they keep going to prison. To enlist these groups, a movement to end mass incarceration must explain why it is offering a better deal than the one currently on offer.

I hadn’t realized before how much we cut off people with criminal records from society. People who have committed felonies are not allowed in public housing or to get food stamps. In many states, they can’t vote or serve on juries; in many other states, they can get their right to vote back, but it’s an expensive process with many fees (this is not a poll tax because of reasons). There is massive discrimination against people with criminal records; making it illegal merely shifts the discrimination to black men more generally. Getting a job is often a requirement if you’re on parole. Since various bits of the government don’t talk to each other, people on parole can wind up with literally 100% of their wages being garnished, meaning that licit work is a money-losing proposition. Parolees are also often required not to talk to people with felony records; apparently no one who made this rule thought about the fact that in many neighborhoods a third of adult men have a felony record.Honestly, if I had to put up with all that shit I would probably commit crimes too.

One of the most striking points was the comparison between drunk driving and smoking crack cocaine, both of which were criminalized at about the same time. Drunk driving literally kills people, while smoking crack only rarely harms people other than yourself. The vast majority of people who drive drunk are white men, while crack is usually smoked by black people. Naturally, drunk driving is punished with a misdemeanor conviction, a week or two in jail, mandatory alcohol treatment, maybe your license getting suspended. Smoking crack, conversely, is punished with literally years in prison.

To highlight the scope of the problem: to get the number of people imprisoned down to even 1970s levels, which were already elevated, four out of every five prisoners would need to be released. This would involve perhaps a million people losing their jobs, many of whom are in rural districts that play an outsize role in elections (particularly since imprisoned people count for population size even though they can’t vote).

The argument that gangsta rap is a modern-day minstrel show is interesting. Like minstrel shows, gangsta rap portrays stereotypes of black people aimed at a white audience, although black people often enjoy them in part because it is a major source of black celebrities.

Out of the Darkened Room: When a Parent is Depressed: Protecting the Children and Strengthening the Family: By far the most valuable part of this book for me was the stories about children of depressed parents. Most people who mention that their parents were depressed are people who are fucked up about it. If your dad was depressed for most of your childhood and you’re fine, you don’t generally bring up your dad’s depression very often. But if you were traumatized by it, it comes up a lot. So it’s really easy for depressed people (me) to conclude that depressed people are universally shitty parents who fuck up their kids. And it was really comforting for me to read pages and pages of stories about mentally ill parents whose children were fine. In spite of having a parent who attempted suicide, had manic episodes, or lay in bed all day crying, the kids were happy, got good grades, had friendships, got into good colleges, and generally had perfectly reasonable childhoods.

The steps for parenting well while depressed were:

1. Discussing depression openly with one’s spouse and other loved ones.
2. Learning about depression and resilience.
3. Addressing the children’s needs (for relationships outside the family, success away from home, reflection on and understanding of what they’ve gone through).
4. Planning how to talk to the children.
5. Having a family meeting with the children.
6. Continuing to openly discuss issues of mental illness and the children’s response.

In general, resilient children are realistic about what they’re dealing with (understanding that mental illness will recur and they can recognize it), are aware of and can articulate strategies for offsetting the effects of mental illness on themselves, and believe their actions make a difference and take action based on that understanding.

Note that while the book title says “depression”, it actually covers all mood disorders.

Smart Parenting for Smart Kids: Nurturing Your Child’s True Potential: grrrrrraaaaarrrrrrggghhh

Large sections of this book are not, in fact, “how to help your gifted child with the struggles of being gifted”, but instead “how to help your twice exceptional child with the struggles of being twice exceptional.” That would be great– as a former 2E kid myself I’m all for advice about helping us– except that the authors seem to have no idea that disabled gifted children exist. Clearly, infodumping, impairments in perspective taking, and difficulty making eye contact are just part of being gifted, not a sign that your child has autism at all!

Much of the advice provided in this book seems, to my mind, decent. However, it is interspersed with mind-bogglingly awful advice, particularly on social skills. For example, parents are encouraged to tell children who read at recess that they’re part of the school community (fine) and ignoring community members is rude (what? no it isn’t!). At no point is it mentioned that children might read at recess because they’re being bullied or as a way of managing their emotions during an overstimulating school day. Parents are also told to tell children that correcting teachers who teach incorrect facts is rude (even though it is literally the teacher’s job to teach things that are true). Parents are told to tell children to lie and pretend they like sports even when they don’t to avoid making other children feel bad.

All the goals here are reasonable. Reading at recess is not a very good way of making friends. Correcting the teacher in public is likely not to work as well as talking to them after class. It’s important to be tactful (“sports aren’t really my thing”) instead of blunt and rude (“sports are stupid and boring”). But for children with social impairments (whether subclinical or clinical) it is particularly important to give accurate reasons for your advice. It is not true that you have to hide what you’re interested in to have friends, or that correcting powerful people is always wrong, or that it is rude to ignore people you don’t like or who mistreat you if they happen to be a member of some broadly-defined “community”. While these might cause effective behavior in the short run, in the long run they will cause extremely ineffective behavior: pretending to be someone you’re not, letting your boss make a dumb decision rather than correcting her, tolerating mistreatment or even abuse. With children with social impairments you must tell the truth.

I remain deeply puzzled at the number of times parenting books tell me not to do my children’s homework for them. People, if it has occurred to you to make your kids’ dioramas for them because all the other parents make their kids’ dioramas for them and you don’t want your kid’s to look like it was made by a child (because it was), you are too fucking invested in your kid’s dioramas.

I recommend skipping this book and instead reading Mind in the Making.

Against Equality: Queer Revolution Not Mere Inclusion: This was an uncomfortable read in the best way; it really challenged a lot of my viewpoints and I’m not sure what I believe. Against Equality is an anthology of essays centered around the claim that LGB rights activism actually winds up reinforcing oppressive institutions: the military, the prison-industrial complex, and marriage. On one hand, I’m pretty sympathetic to the idea that it shouldn’t be particularly high priority to advocate for queers to also be able to commit war crimes, murder brown people, and suffer lifelong trauma. Like, why are you advocating for our full inclusion in doing something that no one should be doing in the first place? And it seems like the resources directed towards gay marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell could have been directed towards abolishing marriage and giving queer people in poverty more non-shooting-related options so the military isn’t their only way out. (Also, HIV healthcare access. The state of access to HIV-related health care is a disgrace.)

On the other hand, there is no requirement that every queer in the world agree with the political opinions of me, Ozy. Even if I choose not to donate towards or advocate for queer inclusion in the military, other queer people think joining the military is a noble sacrifice for the sake of their country, and it really isn’t that reasonable for me to object to their activism because of our shared non-normative gender identity. There are actual, practical, material benefits to military and marriage equality: I have friends whose literal physical safety depends on the legality of same-sex marriage. Why are we, the oppressed people, the ones who have to sacrifice for the sake of ending an oppressive institution.? Straight people first! It smacks of privilege, which was an annoying trend throughout this book (particularly when they talked shit about the rich white cis gay boys at the HRC– guys, choosing to become a performance artist does not magically take away your class privilege). Frankly, some of the concerns people have in this book are even more privileged than the ones they’re criticizing: arts funding? Really?

The HRC could quite reasonably object that they are the Campaigning In Favor Of Gay Legal Equality organization and DADT was obviously an example of gay people not being legally equal. While advocating for economic justice, the rights of sex offenders, open borders, and prison reform is great, none of them are gay legal equality, and the HRC should stay within its area of competence. Anyway, the natural extension of “money is better spent on homeless shelters for queer youth than pro-gay-marriage campaigning” is “money is better spent on African public health than on anything even remotely related to queer people,” so you know.

The weakest section is about marriage, partially through no fault of its own (at the time the book was published it was not clear that legal gay marriage would also help improve attitudes towards LGB people in general). The strongest section is about the prison-industrial complex, mostly because it outlines a mechanism through which hate crime laws strengthen prisons (they put people in prison for longer, mandatory minimums are still bad if you’re woke). I’d particularly like to highlight the excellent section on sex offender registries, false accusations of Satanic ritual abuse, and other abuses directed at people accused of being sex offenders.

The Persian Boy: Tragic gay romance novel about Alexander the Great and his extremely Slytherin boyfriend, the Persian eunuch Bagoas. If this summary makes you want to buy the book, you should. Reading the Persian Boy felt somewhat invasive, like someone had taken my id and spread it across the pages for anyone to see; given that I read it for the first time in middle school, this is probably because it made my id.

The Persian Boy is really an absurdly sexy book given that all the sex scenes are like this:

He really wanted love from me. I could not credit such fortune; nobody ever had before. In the past, I had taken pride in giving pleasure, since it was my skill; never had I known what it was to take delight in it. He was not quite so ignorant as I had supposed; it was just that what he knew had been very simple. He was a quick learner, though. All I taught him that night, he thought that by some happy harmony of our souls, we were discovering together. So, indeed, it seemed at last even to me.

(That is the entire scene.)

Like, that is definitely a sexy passage, it’s just that it is missing such normal aspects of sexy passages as “more than ten sentences” and “a reference to genitals” and “literally any idea of what the protagonists are doing.”

Be sure to read the afterword, in which Mary Renault is wonderfully snarky about all her sources.

The Health Hazards of Homosexuality: What The Medical and Psychological Research Reveals: I don’t recommend reading this book but it was definitely worth my ten dollars for the following paragraph–

The name of the website Feministing makes obvious reference to the practice of “fisting” (insertion of one’s hand into a partner’s rectum or vagina). The website’s banner shows a naked female form with hand upraised in the insertion position.

And also this passage, discussing the DSM’s change to the ‘paraphilia’ definitions so they can only be diagnosed if there is impairment in social or vocational functioning or if the patient experiences distress:

(Was the famous coprophiliac Adolf Hitler’s daily functioning impaired due to this practice, or did he continue to hold down his job – at least for a time?)

Also, it seems to me that if you’re going to spend all that time concern-trolling about the children you shouldn’t take creepy photos of teenagers at gay pride and illustrate your book with them. (I mean, did they consent to being in the homophobe book?)

Intersectionality: Key Concepts: I am the sort of person who buys books about intersectionality to read for fun and I was bored by this book. It’s basically all about the definition of intersectionality? Which, okay, fine, there are lots of people who are confused about that point, but surely you could knock out the definition in one chapter and then spend the rest of the time on an intersectional analysis of prison or agriculture or sex or something actually interesting.

All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting: Definitely a parenting must-read. Children make parents unhappy: they take away sleep, make it harder to engage in flow (one of the most pleasant human experiences), force you to spend large amounts of time with a person who doesn’t understand niceties like “clothes” and “not screaming,” reduce your freedom, make it harder to advance in your job, and aren’t even that fun– studies consistently show that interacting with children is generally less enjoyable than e.g. folding the laundry. Childrearing particularly tends to worsen marital satisfaction, in part because women tend to do more childcare, especially boring childcare (like toothbrushing, not playing catch) and watching the children while doing other tasks. (Interestingly, fathers experience more work/life conflict than mothers, perhaps because they want to feel like evolved parents.) Childrearing leads to social isolation and lack of sex, neither of which are exactly good for a marriage.

Parents feel like they must engage in “concerted cultivation,” driving their children from extracurricular activity to extracurricular activity, entertaining them when they’re bored, hoping to make them well-rounded adults; this is stressful and unpleasant. If you don’t do this, you feel like a bad parent who is dooming your child to never get into college and who will probably get kidnapped when you tell them to go play in the front yard. In the American colonial era, children made an economic contribution to the household from a fairly young age (even five-year-olds can pick weeds) and were mostly ignored before then. Now children are useless from a family perspective; their work is about improving themselves. The new uselessness of children is particularly grating on adolescents, who developmentally want to start contributing to society. This is part of the reason why parenting adolescents makes people really really unhappy. (Another part is that they keep getting into stupid fights about their children’s hair or music taste. Parents of adolescents: the research suggests you will be a lot happier if you commit not to fight with your child about anything other than issues of morality or safety, on which adolescents are generally much more likely to listen to their parents.)

Then why do we raise kids? (Other than a combination of ignorance, optimism, and the fact that in most states one cannot drop the child off at a safe haven once they are older than a few weeks.) Young children can yank parents out of their preoccupations, inhibitions and routines, allowing them to be more present in the moment rather than wrapped up in their anxieties and achievements. Young children can connect you to the physical world and encourage you to ask deep questions. And they offer an opportunity to give love without any return. While the experiencing self typically doesn’t enjoy parenting, the remembering self does; our relationships with our children are among the most important relationships in our lives, and being a parent consistently increases one’s sense of meaning. In the stories people tell about themselves, being a parent plays an important role.

Book Post for July

Tags

all cops are bastards, cixin liu, effective altruism, ozy blog post, parenting, racism, robert heinlein, there is no justice and there is no judge

Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America: This man can write. This is one of the few nonfiction books I’ve ever gotten invested in like it was a novel. I was on the edge of my seat: were the call-ins going to work? Would Kennedy soothe the ruffled feathers of Insert Bureaucrat Here, or would they end the program forever? Would he ever be able to convince the cops that his idea works?

Unfortunately, the writing style that makes Don’t Shoot suspenseful also makes it light on things like ‘evidence’ and ‘examination of alternate explanations.’ Don’t expect many references to peer-reviewed journal articles here.

Kennedy argues that open-air drug markets and inner-city homicides are the result of perhaps a few dozen men, and literally no one else likes it. The police want to win the drug war, but don’t know how, instead resorting to failed broken-windows policing and arresting small-time drug users; feeling like failures, they blame the black community for encouraging violence and drugs. The black community, noticing how many of its members are incarcerated or harassed by police and yet drugs and violence still run rampant, conclude that police are racist and not trying hard to get rid of the drugs (perhaps even putting the drugs in the community themselves). Even most of the gang members don’t like the violence; after all, who wants to have a life expectancy of less than twenty-five?

Kennedy’s proposal is essentially identifying gangs that kill people and going after them as hard as they can, arresting gang members for everything for public urination to violation of parole, and telling them that the harassment will stop as soon as the killing does. That way, gang members can save face, and everyone can stop shooting at the same time, without any gang having to unilaterally disarm. In addition, he proposes ending open-air drug markets (which he considers to be considerably more damaging than friend-of-a-friend drug markets, since the latter exist in white suburbs as much as black ghettos) through gathering enough information to arrest the dealers, calling a meeting, and saying “we are not going to arrest you unless you decide to deal in public again.” Kennedy’s suggestions appeal to my worldview: people respond to incentives; people are generally not stupid or evil, but instead behaving in ways that make sense to them given their circumstances. However, perhaps I should be even less likely to agree with something so intuitively appealing.

A Manual For Creating Atheists: The author of this book, Peter Boghossian, apparently makes a habit of three or four conversations per day (!), often with strangers, trying to get them to become more rational. You can be minding your own business, checking out at the grocery store, making small talk with the other people in line, and you mention you’re a naturopath and suddenly this guy is asking you to cite peer-reviewed evidence that it works. I mean, his book is full of advice that seems reasonable about how to do this thing, if you wanted to, but why on earth would you want to?

My response to this book was mostly making a mental note not to sit next to Peter Boghossian on an airplane, before I got to his obnoxiously stupid chapters on unreason in the academy and ways to make faith less acceptable in society. He characterizes academic leftism as accretions on classical liberalism– and before you say “well, maybe he doesn’t mean actual classical liberalism”, he specifically traces the academic left’s origin to John Locke. Someone should perhaps tell him that Marxists hate liberals and the Enlightenment.

Boghossian argues against the DSM saying that culturally accepted beliefs aren’t delusions, presumably because he wants religious faith to more routinely qualify as a delusion. I agree that the ‘culturally accepted belief’ heuristic isn’t exactly principled, but there is an obvious difference between the cluster of psychotics and the cluster of Pentecostals. For instance, one would not expect Pentecostals to stop being religious if they are given anti-psychotic medication. Putting Pentecostals and psychotics in the same category makes the DSM useless for psychiatrists, its actual purpose. Besides, the only obvious alternatives to an unprincipled heuristic are the DSM listing out what beliefs are and aren’t reasonable, or relying on clinical judgment. The former seems rather outside its core competency, and the latter opens up every unpopular belief for pathologization. Does Boghossian want a teenage atheist in the Deep South to be diagnosed with a delusion because he doesn’t recognize the obvious truth of God’s love?

Boghossian’s beliefs about ending oppression in the developing world seem to be of the “something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done” variety. He ignores the wide variety of excellent feminist activism in the developing world, from the International Planned Parenthood Federation to Girls Not Brides to postcolonial and Third World feminisms. He pushes for feminist groups to spend more time on condemning Islam, without any examination of whether condemning Islam would actually improve the lives of Muslim and ex-Muslim women in any way (or, indeed, whether it would make them worse). Such feel-good, non-evidence-based activism does not belong in a book that claims to be about skepticism.

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make A Difference: The best introduction to effective altruism I have ever read. In an engaging and readable style, MacAskill covers standard effective altruist concepts, such as replaceabilty and expected value; the last set of chapters explain clearly what actions you should and should not take, in light of effective altruism. Crucially, there is little to no normative ethics; instead of fussing around with children in ponds, MacAskill assumes that you have at least a little altruistic motivation, and instead focuses on teaching the skills of thinking like an effective altruist.

Even committed EAs can learn a lot from this book. I mostly stopped feeling vaguely guilty about things I wasn’t doing anyway. Buying fair trade has little to no effect on people in the developing world, and may even lower their wages. It doesn’t really matter whether you turn your lights off or unplug your TV; the best methods of reducing your carbon output are flying less, eating less meat, purchasing a mysterious kind of magic called ‘loft insulation’, and buying offsets. Voting, however, is surprisingly important, for much the same reason being vegetarian is (it isn’t that likely that you make the difference between a desired outcome and an undesired outcome, but when you do you get all the credit, so it works out as positive expected value).

My husband is mentioned in this book! And he is in the acknowledgements! My husband is famous.

The Drug Wars In America, 1940-1973: Essential history for libertarians and anyone who’s interested in the operation of American state power or the reasons behind America’s failed drug war. The Drug Wars in America follows how America transitioned from a tax-and-regulation-based model that focused on narcotics to the modern war on drugs. The thesis is essentially that the drug war has never been about eliminating the drug trade, because someone would notice that it wasn’t working. Instead, the drug war serves other purposes of state power: for instance, American foreign policy goals, maintaining the discretion of police even after their professionalization, increasing the profits of drug companies, and policing inner cities. Detailed and well-researched.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing: Why is this classified in ‘Zen Spirituality’ on Amazon? Is it because the author is Japanese? While it does have a spiritual element, the element is clearly Shinto. It’s not the “Japanese art” of anything, also! It’s Marie Kondo’s art of decluttering and organizing! She made it up.

I love this book! Essentially, it’s a reframe of decluttering. Most decluttering defaults to assuming things should be kept and then comes up with rules about what you should discard (e.g. things you don’t use for six months). Konmari, on the other hand, defaults to assuming things should be discarded, and then comes up with rules about what you should keep (e.g. things that ‘spark joy’). You don’t keep things because they’re a present, or they were expensive, or you might use them someday, or you want to be the sort of person who uses them, or because you’re too lazy to throw them out. But on the other hand if you like something and it makes you happy, you get to keep it, even if other people would think it was excessive.

Konmari has a certain animist element which I loved, but which some people might dislike. For instance, she suggests thanking the items you discard for their service to you, greeting your house each day, emptying out your bag each evening so that it gets a chance to rest, and folding your clothes in a way that will make the clothes happy; she talks about how whenever she goes to declutter a house she introduces herself to the house and asks permission first.

Many of the negative reviews seem to be from people who don’t want to declutter. That is an absolutely fine life choice which I do not judge, but I rather wonder why they’re reading a book subtitled ‘The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing’ then. I don’t read books about how to cook meat and then go “ugh, zero stars, it was constantly telling me to eat meat and I’m vegetarian.”

Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children: I love this book! Definitely on my list of top books about parenting.

Teenagers are notoriously moody, disengaged, and impulsive; as a person goes through puberty, their sleep schedule shifts later, so that they usually want to go to bed around midnight; in spite of this, high schools begin earlier than elementary and middle schools; moodiness, disengagement, and impulsivity are symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation. And then we punish kids for sleeping in class! I think this argument is, in and of itself, enough reason for a person who is capable of doing so to homeschool their teenagers.

Children learning through imitation goes beyond the famous ‘violence in media’. In an experiment in which some children read books about why sibling rivalry is bad for several weeks and some didn’t, the former group had more sibling rivalry. The reason is that to convey the moral ‘sibling rivalry is bad,’ the books of course had to depict siblings arguing with each other– and children learn behaviors through modeling and imitation! If a preschooler sees ten pages of bickering and two of making up, there’s five times as much bickering for them to model themselves after. This suggests a truly wearying task for the parent who wishes to censor their children’s media, because it’s not like Common Sense Media screens for People Behaving In A Non-Violent Yet Annoying To Parents Fashion.

If you’d like to keep children from lying, the best strategy is to model telling the truth yourself (and remember that preschoolers think that being mistaken is the same thing as telling a lie, so apologize if you’re mistaken!), to not teach children to tell social lies, and to make sure that it’s always a better idea to tell the truth than to lie. If they might get punished if they lie, and they will definitely get punished if they tell the truth, then they will of course lie. Your kid is probably good enough at lying that you can’t tell whether they’re lying a lot. All teenagers lie to their parents; the teenagers who lie to their parents the least are the ones who argue with them the most, which the parents find stressful and upsetting. I wonder if reframing the arguments as ‘my teenager trusts me enough to tell me about things they want’ makes that better?

The Three Body Problem: I clearly have an inaccurate model of the censorship opinions of the Chinese government. I would have expected them to heavily censor information about the Cultural Revolution, but literally the first third of this book is a very stirring, evocative argument that the Cultural Revolution is bad. Apparently I am mistaken about Chinese politics! Which makes sense because I don’t know anything about it.

Anyway, this book is great, completely deserving of its Hugo for Best Novel, precisely the sort of richly imagined, well-written, well-worldbuilt, suspenseful, sense-of-wonder science fiction that is the genre at its best. The science is hard as fuck, at least from my position as a non-physicist, and the characters are well-done without distracting from the shiny neat ideas we came here for.

Don’t read the back. It spoils. Actually, avoid the reviews of it too. I don’t know why everyone decided to summarize this story using the shocking twist, but they did, and knowing it made my experience of the book a lot worse.

The Hatred of Poetry: Literary criticism is fun. Lerner argues that poetry is widely disliked because the goals it sets itself (being both a universal song that anyone can relate to and a personal expression of the poet’s soul) are impossible individually, much less together, and thus poetry is disliked because it is never capable of doing the thing it’s trying to do– even though its failures may be beautiful in their very failure. Mostly great as an excuse to read William McGonagall to Topher, who got to the fourth line of The Tay Bridge Disaster before threatening to divorce me to make it stop.

Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed: Please Stop Helping Us appears to be under the impression that a large amount of black violence is caused by use of the n word, gangsta rap, use of non-standard English, and sagging pants. As someone who reclaims slurs that apply to myself, listens to music that glorifies violence, occasionally speaks non-standard English, and sometimes shows people their underwear, and who has never felt the slightest desire to shoot anybody, I suspect there are other causes here.

Please Stop Helping Us claims that parts of the prison-industrial complex such as the crack/powder sentencing disparity aren’t racist because they weren’t originally created for racist reasons, and then turns around and discovers “just because your policy wasn’t intended to be racist doesn’t mean it doesn’t disproportionately negatively affect black people” as soon as they’re talking about the minimum wage. And he talks about how historically black colleges and universities have a very high dropout rate and therefore are failing their students and should be closed, and not three pages later quotes someone who mentions that historically black colleges and universities disproportionately educate poor people who probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all otherwise. Like, gee, maybe that’s relevant in the assessment of whether they’re failing their students? In short, sufficiently dishonest that I do not update my beliefs based on its conclusions.

I Will Fear No Evil: Well, now I suppose I know what transformation fetishists read before the existence of transformation fetish porn. Also, Heinlein’s dirty old man character is obnoxious– I have literally zero desire to be inside the head of one of the men who has sexually harassed me– and he isn’t much better when he’s a trans woman instead.

Effective Altruism as Anti-Colonialist

Tags

effective altruism, ozy blog post, racism

Many anti-racists are rightfully leery of intervention in the developing world. Historically, the consequences of white people lifting up the white man’s burden have not exactly been great. Slavery was justified on the grounds that it civilized black people. Europeans inflamed racial tensions, sometimes tragically leading to genocide. Boundaries were drawn more for colonialists’ convenience than based on the actual tribes that lived there, causing conflict even today. And of course all that colonization began with wars with the people of color who impertinently seemed to feel no need to be saved.

In the modern day, the developed world has mostly managed to avoid conquering places. Instead, our current hobbies include screwing up the developing world’s economies with the International Monetary Fund, propping up dictators and training their militaries in torture, encouraging people to imprison gay people, and committing war crimes that involve the murder of children.

I think effective altruism, however, is not white-saviorist or neocolonialist. Indeed, its success in avoiding these failure modes is striking, given that its membership is overwhelmingly white and from the developed world and has a collective racial politics that can be best described as ’embarrassing.’

I think effective altruist thought has two key points that keep it from becoming colonialist.

First, effective altruists tend to emphasize evidence. It’s all too easy to make assumptions that people in developing countries really want what you think they ought to want, regardless of their stated preferences. It’s all too easy to blunder into some complex system you don’t understand and mess everything up, because you have a PhD and none of these people have a fourth-grade education and how could they possibly know more than you do? It’s all too easy to tell yourself a beautiful story about the grateful natives and ignore the facts on the ground. It’s all too easy to decide that clearly what would really benefit people in the developing world is whatever benefits you.

The corrective to these tendencies is a radical insistence on figuring out what things work and doing them. Not what things sound nice to rich white people half a world away, not what things make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, not what those smart people in very good suits said totally ought to work, but what things actually work. And then you keep tracking what things work and when the situation on the ground changes or it turns out you’ve made a mistake, you don’t double down. You do a different thing that works.

The other corrective, frankly, is a hefty dose of humility. There’s a reason that a lot of recommended effective altruist charities are in public health. Economic development involves a host of assumptions about how economies work and how to trade off different values and so on, any of which can be mistaken and then you have an utter disaster on your hands. Deworming only requires the assumptions that deworming medicine works the same in Africa as it does in Europe and that most people do not like being infested with worms, both of which seem to be on fairly firm ground.

Second, effective altruists care a lot about autonomy. Give Directly does what it says on the tin: it gives poor people in Africa unconditional cash transfers. Much to the surprise of burden-carrying white men everywhere, it turns out that if you give people money they make basically reasonable decisions about what to spend it on: they buy livestock, furniture, and iron roofs. It turns out that people generally know their own needs better than you do, and you should generally trust them instead of assuming that you know better. Consider the effective altruist proverb: if your intervention cannot outperform giving poor people cash, you should just give them the cash. This sort of essential respect for the preferences of people in the developing world speaks well for our ability to actually improve things, instead of just making ourselves feel better.

The Problem With “Creep”

Tags

abuse tw, disability, not feminism go away, ozy blog post, racism

[cw: defense of finding people creepy. moebius, if you read this post, I will Frown.]

I recently finished reading Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. Its thesis is basically that humans have evolved for literally millions of years to be able to tell when other humans are up to Bad Shit. Therefore, when you get a weird feeling you can’t explain that another person is just bad news, that feeling isn’t actually causeless. Your intuition is systemizing information on a level that you don’t have access to. Bad feelings that you don’t have any good reason for are actually the most important kind of bad feeling– they’re the ones that are most likely to be the product of your intuition knowing something that your rational mind doesn’t.

I am pretty sure that his argument is accurate. However, the problem is that your intuition didn’t come from God knowing exactly what the signs of someone being bad news are. It learns from experience and from its surrounding environment. Sometimes it’s a personal quirk: a person might be scared of bald men because his rapist was bald. But sometimes most people share an intuition that a group of people is bad news. Most nonblack people are, on a certain level, scared of black men. Most neurotypicals parse autistic body language as alien and therefore threatening.

One random person finding you scary is just noise. Most people you interact with finding you scary is a Serious Problem.

Some people suggest that the solution is to ignore our intuition. But, as de Becker points out, intuition is an invaluable source of information. As a person read as female and a borderline, I am at tremendous risk of being raped or abused. I don’t want to throw away my best tool to prevent myself from being raped or abused.

Another solution is to consciously memorize what information your intuition is working from. The problem is that that means that, whenever you meet a new person, in the back of your mind, you’d have to have running your Are There Signs That This Person Will Hurt Me module. This is totally doable– many people who are routinely at risk of violence do it– but it’s also tremendously psychologically taxing. It’s harder to form relationships when you’re consciously thinking about whether the person will hurt you, and most people feel worse when they’re regularly thinking about the possibility of violence. In fact, that sort of suspicion is a kind of hyperarousal, which is a symptom of PTSD.

At the same time, I’m not sure that that would solve the problem. Because humans have been working off intuition for our threat assessment for so long, we don’t necessarily have a good model of what, exactly, our intuition is paying attention to. The factors we don’t know are relevant could hurt us. And humans are usually really bad at consciously reasoning with probabilities, even when we’re really good at subconsciously reasoning with probabilities: most people will give wildly wrong estimates about how confident they are in a belief, but they’ll still behave fairly rationally about, say, the risk of a car accident (at least more rationally than they would if they tried to do explicit probabilities).

Another solution is to only trust your intuition when it’s not about a group you know you tend to be afraid of. If someone is black or autistic, one might override their intuition; if someone is white or nonautistic, they might not. The problem here is that black people and autistic people are still sometimes up to Bad Shit; blanket trusting any group of people is a bad idea. On the other hand, perhaps this method could be combined with the conscious-reasoning method: if you are interacting with a group you tend to have inaccurate feelings about, then you should do conscious checks for red flags, but if you’re not, you can rely on your intuition. That could help with both situations.

I am not sure how to help this problem in general. One step might be to have fewer media depictions of Scary Black Men and so on, so that people’s intuitions stop learning that members of those groups are terrifying. Another would be for individuals to have friends who are members of groups they’re scared of (vouched for by other friends, of course) so that they can teach their intuitions that those groups are not actually scary.

It might also be good to attack it from the other angle: instead of making people’s intuitions more accurate, make people feel less bad about being a false positive. For a lot of people, coming off as creepy feels like they’ve done something morally wrong. But, as long as you don’t actually have ill intent, coming off as creepy isn’t morally wrong. In many cases, it is a product of another person’s subconscious racism, ableism, or other -isms; in some cases, it is a personal issue; in some cases, you accidentally did things that made other people feel uncomfortable, and while it is bad to deliberately do things that make other people uncomfortable, it can’t be wrong to make mistakes. People who find you creepy probably don’t want to interact with you, but the fact that they found you creepy doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.

Notes Towards a Theory of Cultural Appropriation

Tags

ozy blog post, racism

I’m white and while I have been educating myself about racism I still have a lot of things to learn. So please don’t consider this post a “this is the be-all and end-all of what cultural appropriation means”; this is just my current understanding of cultural appropriation, which I am presenting in the hopes that someone will tell me where I’ve wandered off into the wrong direction. (Also, I’m going to be using the abbreviation “POC,” which stands for “people of color.”) 

The definitions of cultural appropriation I’ve found are usually something like this: “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission.” This is a bit difficult to understand to me, because I find it hard to grasp how you could get permission from a culture. You can only get permission from people in that culture, some of whom will be all “dude, whatever, don’t give a fuck” and some of whom will be all “the fuck? Why are you doing that? Give that back!” (Even the Seminoles, who have an actual tribal government the Florida State University Seminoles talked to to clear their mascot with, have dissenting Seminoles who are pissed as fuck about the whole matter.)

I think that part of the problem might be that when people use the term “cultural appropriation” they mean one of about four different things:

1) Dressing up as or incorporating in your art or naming your sports team after an offensive stereotype of POC. This is the definition that comes up every Halloween when people insist on dressing up as Pocahotties and Injun Braves, and when Victoria’s Secret decides to put Native American headdresses on their models. I am not sure why people think this is okay. Do not dress up as an oversexualized stereotype of the people your culture fucking committed genocide against. Similarly, this point covers Native American sports team mascots, Urban Outfitters “Navajo” bracelets, etc.

I’m… also not really sure why people call this cultural appropriation, because to me it seems like a pretty cut-and-dried case of “offensive stereotypes are bad.”

2) Do not use sacred shit from religions you don’t belong to. This is basic respect. People take their sacred shit very seriously, and it greatly upsets them when you use their sacred shit in ways other than the approved-of one. Do not upset people for no reason. (This guideline also applies to non-POC religions, of course, but very few people put on Mormon temple garments because they look cool.)

3) Do not use things associated with POC in ways that reinforce stereotypes of POC. For instance, do not do Tantra because it is spiritual and exotic and ancient and totally sexy. It is a common Orientalizing stereotype that Asian people are exotic, spiritual, and the heirs to ancient wisdom; thinking that Tantra is awesome because it is exotic ancient spiritual wisdom from the East is playing into that exact stereotype.

Similarly, white-people dreadlocks are problematic. Black people still face all kinds of racist shit– from white people trying to touch their hair to losing out on jobs– if they style their hair the way it naturally grows instead of making it look like white hair; it is incredibly fucked that black people having their hair the way it naturally grows is considered “rebellious.” Many black people are, understandably, somewhat irritated when white people decide that it is cool and countercultural to have dreadlocks. For black people, dreadlocks are a rebellion against a racist society and a statement of pride in their race; for white people they’re… um, cool because, like, black people, man.

4) Don’t steal POC’s ideas and cultural artifacts without credit. See also: the entire history of rock music. Rock music was deeply influenced by black musicians– blues, gospel, vocal groups. So of course white men like Elvis and Bill Haley ran off with their ideas and got all the credit for being musical fucking geniuses. Because, y’know, white. Similar things happen with everything from nail art to feminist theory.

It’s difficult to figure out a way to deal with this toxic dynamic. “White people, you don’t get to wear nail art or listen to rock music” is a suboptimal solution. I think ultimately the solution is to be very intentional about pointing out your influences and promoting the careers of talented POC within your field and seeking out POC’s work instead of assuming that what white people are doing is the only interesting culture that’s going on. (For instance, it would be incredibly dishonest and fucked of me to pretend that my thoughts on class and race within feminism and polyamory aren’t influenced by Audre Lorde, or that my thoughts on masculinity or love don’t come straight from bell hooks. I am not original.) But I’m not sure if that’s enough to end that dynamic.

So. That’s what I have. Your thoughts?

Assorted Thoughts on the Definition of Racism

Tags

ozy blog post, racism

[While I’m at App Academy, my blog is in reruns. Enjoy a classic Ozy post, salvaged from the sands of time by the wayback machine.]

I have concluded that part of the problem with talking about racism is that the word “racism” can be interpreted to mean about four different things.

Some people use “racist” to mean “having explicit beliefs about someone based on their racial background, particularly if those beliefs are derogatory.” (We can call that Racism-1.) Other people use “racist” in a broader sense, which encompasses subconscious, unintentional racism and systems that tend to treat people of different racial backgrounds differently (even if nobody means to treat people differently based on their race). (We can call that Racism-2.) At the same time, some people use “racism” to refer to an individual’s beliefs (Racism-A) and some people use “racism” to refer to an overall societal structure (Racism-B).

This causes much confusion, because anti-racists are usually working under the Racism-2B definition and ordinary white people are normally working under the Racism-1A definition (or maybe 1B). So you get a lot of conversations like this:

Anti-racist: You’re racist!
Ordinary white person: (checks beliefs, still doesn’t believe that black people are inferior) No, I’m not. I’m not racist at all; I’m colorblind.
Anti-racist: Of course you’re racist, all white people are racist.
Ordinary white person: …That’s really racist.
Anti-racist: No, it’s not, you can only be racist against people of color.
Ordinary white person: …
Anti-racist: …

I tend to use the Racism-2B definition myself, so I would like to say some words in its defense. Most white people don’t explicitly believe that people of color are worse than white people; we’ve had a very successful forty-year propaganda program explaining that people of color and white people are equal and Martin Luther King is great. However, most white people do get more scared when they walk by a black person late at night than they do when they walk by a white person, we do feel more comfortable living in a majority-white neighborhood than in a majority-POC neighborhood, and we do all kinds of other racist things we don’t explicitly know about.

Because the non-explicit-belief racism is more common, it’s also more damaging. Most of the hiring discrimination against black people isn’t because people believe black people are terrible. It’s because they want to hire someone who fits in, you know, is like us, is in tune with the culture of the company, who seems competent and together and smart, and what a coincidence all the people who are like that are white.

And the thing is… it’s totally possible that some majority-black company will not hire me because of my race. (Although people of color can be biased in favor of white people too– it’s not like people of color live in a Magic Not Picking Up On Cultural Racism Bubble.) But I’m in a much better situation than a black person, because most companies are biased in my favor and against black people. An act of hiring discrimination has very different effects on a white person and a black person; you can’t look at the act itself without looking at the context within which it takes place. Which is why I call discrimination against white people “prejudice” and discrimination against people of color “racism.”