On Being 50, Almost Dying, and What It Means To Live

Yesterday was my fiftieth birthday. Inevitably, after opening gifts, talking to family, and eating delicious chocolate covered strawberries provided by my wonderful wife,  I started pondering some big, weighty questions.

Strangely, the moment that provides me the most clarity looking back over my life was when, at the age of 21, I almost fell to my death from a six-story rooftop in Paris clad only in my underwear.

I was living in a 'chambre de bonne' (a simple one-bedroom apartment with a squat toilet in the hall) near Montmatre. The idea was to spend a year living in Paris, train at a top-notch fencing club and figure out  what I wanted to do with my life.  Life was crazy, terrifying, frustrating. I was making almost no money,  training all the time, improving my French, and trying to have fun. One night I accidentally locked myself out of my room going to the bathroom wearing a natty pair of boxer shorts and nothing else. After I unsuccessfully attempted to rouse help from the landlord, I figured out that I had left the window to my 8 inch balcony open. To my 21-year-old brain, it seemed that all I needed to do was climb out over the roof, let myself down onto the balcony and all would be well.

There was a precise moment I figured out that this was a terrible idea. It was when I was scooting on my butt over the shallow incline of the roof, I looked out over the midnight Parisean skyline, and realized (A) just how high I was above the ground, (B) how my underwear had just gotten snagged on a hook designed to keep the roofing tiles in place, and (C) that I might die. The adrenaline kicked in and I began to panic. God knows how, but I unhitched my ass, lowered my legs over the precipice, turned around to face the wall, and lowered myself onto the balcony. I vowed quietly to myself that "this never happened, no one ever need know" and attempted to go about my life as normal.

But it did happen. I really could have plummeted to my death that night. It would have likely been tragic, newsworthy, and definitely a contender for a Darwin Award. I think of it now because I wonder what is different between that outcome and the one I'm living now.

The main things that stand out for me are not the most vivid experiences or the moments when I was  the most happy. The moments that matter are those when I made a difference in other peoples' lives. Some are negative, where I made mistakes, and caused damage, albeit unintentionally. I think of those with regret and shame and feel a certain longing for the Christian rite of reconciliation, where I could confess my sins and have them be absolved. These moments stick in my craw and serve as a reminder to hold myself accountable and pay attention to the impact I have on other people. 

But there are a few memories, where I was able to make a positive difference in the lives of others.

These were sometimes grand acts of generosity. 

I helped a buddy propose to his girlfriend by setting  up a romantic scene on Venice beach for them to happen upon during a Valentine's day walk. 

A colleague was sacked in the most disingenuous way on his birthday. I went to the Ralph's across the  street, bought him a bottle of Jonnie Walker Blue Label and hastily assembled an impromptu card that read 'Keep Walking'. 

I learned that an acquaintance was sleeping in her car, and invited her stay in my apartment for free while she got her life together. We were roommates for two years.

There are a bunch of other times, when smaller actions had an impact: apologizing when I needed to; forgiving  people when I could manage to; seeking communication with people that didn't like me; keeping my word when it was inconvenient to do so; trusting the generosity and competence of strangers; holding a stranger's hand when they freaked out on a turbulent plane ride. I dunno. 

Beyond meeting my wife, falling in love, and having our son, these are the things that mean the most to me.

If I had died that night, these are the things that would have been lost. These are the moments that  mattered. Other moments of pleasure, passion, joy, triumph, fulfillment, or accomplishment will leave no trace when I finally leave. The legacy we leave is the difference we've made. No more, no less.   

It's profoundly moving to think about this now, as a middle aged man arguably just coming into my power, I now have the chance to dedicate the rest of my life to love and support my family,  to be of service to others, and to make a difference for them.

This well-worn quote Bernard Shaw seems apropos:

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to the future generations. 

If there's a way of living a good life, of having few regrets, and even some pride in I am, these are the things I choose to look to. Going forward, I also know what to do to gather more of them. 

GAB, RWC, 4/16/2020

The Faces of My Colleagues

On a Zoom this week

Face-to-face with colleagues

Close up to grit and grace.

What an honor to see

The unvarnished fight

In their warriors’ eyes.

Catching an occasional

Glint of lightness

In the conversation

Moved me most of all.

Amid this current moment

Perhaps I’m not alone

To look around

At my colleagues

And see the heroes there.

Bereft of me

For Lee Vodra, For Chris Cornell, For all of us.

The only true loss is this loss of a soul,
Where once was a person, there now is a hole.

Now the only things left are the things of the past,
With a future bereft of your voice or your clasp.

The spaces you filled in the world with your song,
Now thud dully with silence as we all move along.

All the things that we have, all the things that we do,
Have no meaning at all, in the absence of you.

This leaving alone cuts us all like a knife,
The only true loss is this loss of a life.

Don't Be a Troll, Be a Wizard!

A vision for how scientific knowledge engineering could support data-driven policy development. This is a preliminary high-level strategic document to develop such tools to support efforts such as 314 Action.

By Gully A. Burns

“Trolls were large monsters of limited intellect.
They were strong and vicious,
but they could not endure sunlight”
tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Trolls

Technologically, we live in interesting times. On the one hand, social media technology drives political discourse into polarized shouting matches. Astroturfing bots contort the political landscape by pushing false narratives on Twitter with incendiary, ill-informed talking points. The ease of web-publishing makes it relatively easy to drown out informative scientific work by spreading misinformation in coordinated online media campaigns.

But on the other hand, advances in information science drive public engagement in science. Citizen scientist projects permit laypeople to contribute directly to research. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provide pedagogical support for technically demanding subjects to more communities than ever before. The information infrastructure of science itself is evolving to change and accelerate the path towards discovery.

These two aspects are sharply opposed, especially when it comes to online discussions of policy. The first approach is based on misinformation, manipulation, provocation, and storytelling. These approaches are generally developed by unscrupulous operators attempting to control a particular public narrative through any means necessary. Let’s call the instigators of such methods ‘Trolls’. The second approach is based on hard work, research, a nuanced view of reality in the service of the pursuit of scientific truth. This less-popular, more long-term (and therefore more powerful) approach requires diligence, honesty, intelligence, and patience. To emphasize the contrast with the formerly-mentioned misbegotten misinformationists, I here propose that we call people pursuing this endeavor ‘Wizards’. Thus, somewhat, in the spirit of pure geekiness, we frame the argument as a perennial war of political storytelling between two factions: wizards and trolls.

Now, the mission statement of the 314 Action nonprofit group, reveals them to be clearly on the Wizards’ team. Their primary goal to empower scientific information to carry further within the process of setting policy, either by electing scientifically-trained politicians or by empowering data-driven policy and scientific research within society.

My work in scientific knowledge engineering (and, more broadly, in artificial intelligence) directly supports 314 Action’s vision by developing technology to be used to improve access to complex scientific knowledge. Moreover, the people 314 Action are seeking to introduce into public life would be trained to think scientifically and to adopt pragmatic, data-driven methodologies. Put simply, if 314 Action provides the wizards, then we can provide the spells.

I elaborate further below.

A Challenge Problem: the Argument over Climate Change

Once of the key issues raging in public policy discourse discussions in the United States is climate change. Debate in this area largely centers around the following question:

Is the planet warming up because of increased CO2 in the atmosphere from human activity and energy use?

This is a contentious question despite a groundswell of public support amongst progressives, combined with a broad consensus over the majority of scientists working in the discipline. Most researchers either explicitly or implicitly agree that this is indeed the case: the global temperature is increasing directly because of increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (most likely caused by human energy use). Broad literature reviews generally confirm this point of view and even large scale organizations that enjoy widespread public trust such as NASA agree full-throatedly that climate change poses a serious threat to humanity as a whole.

But there is also a powerful counter-movement at play within conservative circles: climate skepticism. Proponents of this position claim that the science is not settled, that potential risks of climate change to humanity are being unnecessary amplified by liberals for political gain and that numerous details in the published account don’t add up. Conservative bloggers attempt to ‘debunk’ published studies with a wide range of counter arguments ranging from honing in on small scale anomalies, personal or broad-based ad-hominim attacks against climate scientists or climate activists and the general use of misinformation to bombard opponents with assertions of facts to simply wear them down and silence them. These argumentation tactics could commonly be described as ‘trolling’ and can quite effective at convincing observers that their arguments are better. Put simply, these tactics work very well.

Trolls vs. Wizards

The important issue here is that the debate being carried out on social media, on the news and in the public eye generally is not based on scientific norms for understanding how phenomena work. Scientific discussions are typically based on abductive reasoning: argument from evidence to the best available explanation. In the blood sport where teams of trolls strive to defeat their opponents by any means necessary, the meagre weapons of abductive reasoning can do little to withstand the assault of scorn, derision, and bullshit (a word that we use here based on a precise technical definition).

But, knowledge is power. Science is, after all, very much like magic. Science is the basis for technology, and try as they might, trolls cannot accomplish anything remotely as powerful. They can sway public opinion, but they cannot cure disease or prevent natural disasters. They cannot send ships into space or understand the mysteries of fluid dynamics in the upper stratosphere.

We must enable the explanatory power of scientific knowledge to address these counter-arguments as explicitly and powerfully as possible. At present, the scientific community does not possess the necessary power to challenge the trolls. This is was best said by Ben Goldacre in the last chapter of his book ‘Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks’. He writes:

“To anyone who feels their ideas have been challenged by this book or who has been made angry by it - to the people who feature in it, I suppose - I would say this: you win. You really do. I would hope that there might be room for you to reconsider, to change your stance in the light of what might be new information (as I will happily do, if there is ever an opportunity to update this book). But you will not need to because, as we both know, you collectively have almost full spectrum dominance. Your ideas - bogus though they may be - have immense superficial plausibility, they can be expressed rapidly, they are endlessly repeated, and they are believed by enough people for you to make very comfortable livings and to have enormous cultural influence. You win.”

Personally, I am not comfortable with this easy capitulation. I prefer to take a leaf out of Gandalf’s playbook even when faced with a daunting powerful foe.

Countering the troll ‘full spectrum dominance’ will require the development of transformative approaches to remove barriers that laypeople experience in understanding complex scientific concepts. We will need to make the work more inclusive and more democratic. We may need to transform the way scientists work and the way science is taught. This will require impeccability, creativity, honesty, and courage.

Information Science Wizardry

So, here are some observations and strategies to consider going forward.

1. Modern information technology is changing many aspects of scientific work, creating new opportunities and paradigms. Amongst these methods include:
   • The scalability and speed of ‘big data’ systems allows easy analysis of very large data sets
   • Deep learning and modern machine-learning methods provide groundbreaking AI performance in tasks like Data mining, Natural Language Processing, Image Classification and Document Processing.
   • In particular, deep reinforcement learning permits robots and automated systems to win games and learn complex behaviors
   • Forecasting methods provide powerful new methods of generating predictions based on data.
   • Social Media research permits us to track and understand some of the impact of misinformation in society.
   • Science information infrastructure is beginning to provide systems for reproducibility, scalability and increased rigor such as Workflows, Ontologies, Information Integration systems.
   • A key capabilty is tracking the provenance of knowledge: What is the evidence that supports our argument that a given claim is true?. This is an area of continuing, active research.
   • Creative methods for data visualization are becoming more common and more powerful.
2. Within the climate change debate, previous attempts where scientists have adopted ‘trollish’ methods failed spectacularly.
   • When researchers in England attempted to convert their scientific perspective into a political strategy, leaks of their emails that revealed their attempts to construct a robust and compelling poitical argument involved ham-fisted attempts to silence critics and steer the conversation. ‘Climategate’ ensued, doing real and lasting harm both to the climate change debate and also to the credibility of academics as a whole.
   • More recently, attempts to create an expedient, powerful, simple talking point was the often-quoted ‘climate consensus’ figure. This was the product of a 2014 paper that boldly states: “Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW (anthropogenic global warming), 97.2% endorsed the consensus” (ref: Cook et al 2014). Unfortunately, even a simple review of this study’s own data, reveals vulnerabilities in the study that are easily revealed, see this blog post: ‘a climate falsehood you can check yourself’. Attempting to use the dark arts of spin when creating a scientifically-driven policy argument is a bad idea.
   • We cannot and should not attempt to play these people at their own game. We will lose.
   • At the 2017 White House Correspondents Dinner, Hasan Minhaj said “We’re living in this strange time, when trust is more important than truth”. (video). We have to find ways to establish trustworthiness with people who currently don’t believe the research and choose instead to grasp, easy-to-understand, wrong answers.
3. Currently, the most accessible repository of the world’s scientific knowledge is the scientific literature. This provides a valuable resource for knowledge engineering work and building models of what is reported in the literature can provide insight into the underlying subject and influence public opinion.
   • This was the general idea of the Cook et al. 2014 consensus study but they did not dig deeply enough into the science.
   • What if we could take this further and use machine reading methods to extract and organize the evidence reported in the 12,000 papers they examined?
   • What if we could illustrate this evidence and showcase the scientific argument in precise detail?
   • Perhaps we could help tailor our view of the politics to more closely align with the scientific evidence, rather than only using the scientific evidence to bolster a preconceived underlying political position.
4. There are other related efforts attempting to render aspects of public life more fact-based and data-driven. This provides a working community of data-providers, developers and end-users as well as possible frameworks for increasing the scope and impact of technology in multiple areas.
   • The FORCE11 group (‘Future Of Research Communication and E-Scholarship) is a wide-ranging academic / industry community with a broad mandate to bring about the transformation of scientific communication.
   • ‘Solutions Journalism’ provides a powerful appraoch to communicating uncomfortable issues to the public. By surveying how problems are being solved and then framing discussions of difficult subjects, propopents of this approach have shown that members of the public are more engaged and receptive to reporting when framed in this way. Such an approach could work well for how we communicate the application of scientific methods to policy.
   • Steve Ballmer, the ex-CEO of Microsoft, has financed and driven ‘USA Facts’, a website that examines the financial ‘score card’ of the United States as if it were a business. A recent Freakonomics podcast (‘Hoopers! Hoopers! Hoopers!’) showcased this interesting project and dealt briefly with the subject of outcomes and how one might measure them. This is the purview of the social sciences and likely requires some expertise from within the field of education theory or psychology to really
   • A number of non-profits have similar missions: ‘Data 4 America’ is one such organization.
5. The public are very receptive to scientific content when it is presented in a compelling and interesting way.
   • Organizations such as the Technology Entertainment Design conference (http://www.ted.com/) are massively popular and provide an excellent template for packaging and presenting complex and compelling scientific ideas.
   • Blogs such as framework Radiolab, Science Friday and Freakanomics regularly describe new scientific developments in a public forum with great results.
   • MOOCs (such as Coursera) and online courses provide a wide range of course material to teach complex subjects. ‘Science Driven Public Policy’ could be a subject that we could develop and teach.
   • Citizen science projects (such as Galaxy Zoo and FoldIt) permit members of the public to directly contribute to the scientific endeavor. This is interesting, fun, educational and could be a vehicle for engagement for science-driven policy.
   • Academics typically present their ideas as powerpoint slides, but animation and storytelling methods could better illustrate their work to the public. An excellent example of this technique is this video by Pindex describing the Dunning Kruger effect (and narrated by Stephen Fry).
   • It is important to note that metaphor and analogy are crucial tools that help translate complex scientific ideas into commonsense language. Finding the right framework for this messaging is an important aspect of this communication.
6. We must recognize that this is an adversarial situation where our opponents will use literally every rhetorical trick to counter a scientifically-defined viewpoint. We must counter the trolls directly by understanding, unpacking and attacking their arguments. We should do so explicitly, ruthlessly and with as much transparency and authority as possible.
   • A terrific example of how the trolls work is the PragerU, right wing ‘educational’ website. Consider this anti-climate change video which attempts to debunk the Cook et al 2014 consensus paper. Some of the arguments are nonsensical (including an absurd apparent attempt to appeal to an antivaccination argument), but some carry a little more weight. The production of the video and carries the listener through the logic of the argument well, making emphatic statements that boldy bullshit the listener to serve their underlying argument. To counter this, we should analyze, deconstruct and refute their argument, perhaps in the same format but with a great deal of underlying support from data and established existing research.
   • The work of Walton et al. 2013 on Argumentation Schemes provide a fascinating theoretical framework for formalizing how arguments are put together. This is an approach widely used in developing AI-support tools for legal argumentation, but could well be applied here.
7. Finally, Computational Social Network Sciences is a powerful emerging field of AI research, that can provide insight in the emerging online world of politics. Colleages such Emilio Ferrara and Kristina Lerman study how people interact with policy through social media, social bots and each other. Understanding the dynamics of these interactions could be crucially valuable in developing effective technological strategies.

What can we do?

Our goal would be to enable the use of innovative, cutting edge, AI research within the context of policy development. Our strategy for doing this would be by developing methods to leverage and utilize scientific expertise and knowledge in politcally-relevant situations. If we could also better understand the rhetorical positions of identifiably-anti-scientific positions within public discourse. If we understand our adversaries, then we can defeat them more easily.

An initial pilot effort could be to re-examine the scientific literature described in the Cook et al. 2014 consensus study by developing detailed semantic models of the data being cited in those papers. Our job is to explore and explain the science to the public: exploring, explaining and educating through accurate reporting of the abudictive reasoning used to understand what is going on. We may explicitly contrast our approach to that of non-scientific arguments being made but always from the point of view of educating people to think scientifically, and never engaging in a polemic, fruitless discussion. If a climate-skeptic cites counterevidence, we will attempt to understand it rationally and scientifically. After all, as scientists we want people to poke holes in our models and find their flaws. Here, we would welcome such things with politeness and appreciation.

Multiple challenges threaten this plan:

1. Scientific work is complex, difficult to understand and challenging to execute. In order to be able to execute their work well at all, scientists perform technical feats that are difficult to record accurately, let alone reproduce. Work in the field of semantic E-Science (including ontological modeling and workflow development) make it possible to reproduce even very complex data analytics, given the additional time and effort required to model them.
2. There is a lot of knowledge to work through. curating information from the literature is a slow and laborious process (especially since scientific arguments do not tolerate errors well). Developing methods of automation of the curation task may speed up how representations can be populated. Needless to say, this is an area of active research and might form the basis of a focused study on the climate change literature.
3. Communicating complex scientific ideas is difficult. The popular science media community provides a vehicle to do this through magazines, podcasts, books, television and other media. Relying on these traditional methods can only go so far. Data visualization methods can provide a far more compelling and exhaustive view of a complex subject. This astonishing representation of the casulties of WWII is an example of a series of data visualizations that tell a compelling story in a linear fashion. We may need to examine new, non-linear methods to explain and explore the complexities of the subject of climate change.
4. Engaging people in this endeavor requires us to go beyond simple research. For this work to have an impact, we will require outreach and involvement far beyond the simple development of novel technology.

This post really has three purposes. Firstly, to frame the challenge as a conflict against a well-funded and powerful adversary. Secondly, to pitch the idea of developing scientific knowledge technology to ‘wizardly’ advocacy groups. Finally, to propose an initial pilot study. This vision document seeks only to present a picture of how to do this in broad strokes in a single, simple domain: clarifying and solidifying the climate change debate. From these humble beginnings, we we would ultimately seek to provide better access to research for policy makers wanting to incorporate existing research from any given field into their platform. 

American Evil

At around the 6m 50s mark in a podcast from FiveThirtyEight leading up to the 2016 Presidential Election, Nate Silver said the following:

“I’m not sure what words to use but there’s something profoundly evil about the Trump campaign at this point… and the people he attracts to it… and I think that’s the right word to use”

Trump and his cronies are so utterly and obviously machiavellian, incompetent, dishonest, cruel, cowardly and self serving as to almost be the sort of caricature we might see in a bad movie.

And yet he has been elected by a fair democratic process. He has been elected by normal, ‘good people’. By voters with good intentions willing to overlook and justify almost anything to grant themselves permission to support an ideology based only on preserving power and self interest for themselves in some way.

Evangelicals overlook his clear moral failings. Military men overlook his lack of strategic common sense. Conservatives overlook his lack of ideological credentials. Working class people overlook his abusive and obnoxious wealth. Racists and misogynists derive validation from his rhetoric. People are drawn to his charisma, and his sheer brazen bluster, mistaking it for strength and courage.

And there’s the Alt-Right; the idealists, the true-believers (if ever such a motley band of opportunists could ever be called ‘true’). In front of the camera, these guys talk about their right-wing cultural identity and rail against immigration, the establishment, and political correctness with a cute nod and a wink. But behind closed doors, they just love to throw around Nazi salutes, use Nazi expressions like ‘Lügenpresse’, and self-identify as ‘conquerers’. Given that Steve Bannon (‘The Most Dangerous Political Operative in America’) is now the main strategy advisor for the White House and that the motto that best captures his political mindset is “Honey Badger doesn’t give a shit”, its clear that their policies are simply belligerent, crazy, harmful, unfair, and ill-thought-through.

To my mind, if you voted for Trump, you’re in one of three groups. The first group are those people who have been played for a sucker and actually bought into the lies and hyperbola. The second group are people who understand full well what he is doing and are willing to ignore his failings for their self interest. The third group are those who are true believers in his inhuman, post-truth ideology as an appropriate means to an end.

If you’re part of the first and second groups, likely you hold in your heart some version of the ‘deep story’ described beautifully by Arlie Rothschilde in her book ‘Strangers in their own land’. You might feel that you have been left out and forgotten by the progressive elites who let undeserving minorities thrive whilst ignoring the needs of good, patriotic Americans. You may have squared your decision by arguing that Hillary’s policy positions were going to do more harm than those of Trump, Pence, Reibus and Bannon.

Like all the good people who paid money to the Trump University scam, you’re being played.

Chances are, in the style of the current divisive rhetoric that passes for civil discourse, you likely counter serious questions with pithy, off-the-shelf answers that simplify and belittle the conversation. You probably reduce important weighty issues to one-line counter-arguments because it appeals to your sense of patriotism and makes sense in conservative echo-chambers. Its not your fault, you’re being fed propaganda by the newsdesks of Breitbart, Fox, and other misinformationists. At some point though, you’ll notice how the blatant manipulation, lying and bullying impacts us all and realize how this was never what you signed up for.

If you’re in the third group, you are pulling the levers and pressing the buttons of the vast right-wing bullshit machine. You drive so many unethical dealings with so little willingness to ever do the right thing at any level that I now realize that this is a concerted, thought-out strategy.

It is no accident.

This is what I call 'American Evil'.

‘American Evil’ gave us slavery and the need to have a civil war to abolish it. It gave us segregation and Jim Crow in the south before the showmanship of the civil rights movement was able to force things to change. It gives us 30,000+ gun deaths a year through misinformation and the dark arts of political lobbying. It gave us the sub prime mortgage crash with no consequences to the assholes that caused it. This what gave us the utterly absurd SNAFU of the second Gulf War, our disastrous occupation of Iraq and the subsequent rise of ISIS there.

American Evil is the process striving to preserve power through any means necessary. It is the notion of tough expediency and the need to make money above all other things. It doesn’t recognize it’s own failings. It thrives on belief, authority and loyalty. It demands that you stand during the national anthem and it calls you a terrorist if you say your life matters.

A frankly incredible documentary from VICE news (‘A House Divided’) gives rare insight into the toxic, polemic environment that gave rise to the Tea Party, pervasive Republican obstructionism and Trump. In an interview with the legendary conservative pundit, Frank Luntz, the documentary recorded the following extraordinary exchange:

VICE: Washington is now Toxic and it seems to be galvinized into inactivity. 

Frank Luntz: That’s not the way politics used to be. Now they don’t know each other. There’s a segment of the Republican Party that would rather blow everything up than try to fix it; and they believe that they’re acting on principle. But principle is not the be-all-and-end-all. It is a blood sport. It is how much damage can I do to you. How much can I destroy your reputation. How can I hurt you so much so that not only are you destroyed but your dead relatives in the old country can feel it. We fucked up. We killed the goose that laid the golden egg. We fucked it up. Nobody’s listening. Nobody’s learning. It’s all just one big gabfest. 

V: If it’s toxic and it can’t be fixed, where does American politics go from here? 

FL: That’s why I’m telling people I’m going to New Zealand. I’m going to buy fifteen acres somewhere and I’ll sell off fourteen, so if you want to buy an acre, let me know. I’m not kidding. I’m going in December.

V: Wow. 

FL: At some point, the economy just stops functioning. The Greeks did not survive. The Romans did not survive. The French did not survive. The British did not survive. Why should we think the American empire will survive? I don’t know and I, unfortunately, will probably still be alive (I wish I wasn’t) when this whole thing comes tumbling down.

If Frank Lutz is right, there will be consequences for all of this; possibly long lasting impact on our civil rights; our economic prosperity; our effectiveness as a society to solve the problems we face and our reputation throughout the world. Echoing Romans 6:23 (“The wages of sin are death”), our communal future rests in the hands of good people, those people who voted for Trump and have not yet realized the likely consequence of their actions on the country, its citizens and its future.

I pray that those people start to see Donald Trump’s true nature soon. I pray that they realized that the course he is driving us towards is disastrous and horrifying. If you are one of those people, I pray that you turn back to the dignified and powerful promise of what American Freedom actually stands for and join us in the fight against, quite literally, the forces of evil.

The Greatest Trick The Devil Ever Pulled

A fictional character in a movie once said: “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. Perhaps this is true, but I think certainly that, at the very least, the state of our national debate about guns runs a close second.

The Devil’s work is inherently based on convincing lots of good people to take actions that directly or indirectly cause suffering. He does this subtly, with lies and deceptions, with simplistic arguments that are usually too good to be true, with ideologies and propaganda. He does this by playing on our rawest emotions, on our anger, and our fear, our righteousness and our indignation.

Now, let’s be clear. I’m an atheist. I don’t think the Devil is actually real, in the same way that electrons, black holes or mitochondria are real. I think of the Devil as a helpful metaphorical construct. It presupposes that all the ‘evil’ in the world is created by an intelligent, malicious, despicable adversary. I think that the Devil is real in the way that market forces, the rule of law or the right to bear arms is real: a way of looking at the world with consequences. What makes it interesting are the consequences of looking at the world in that way.

We all have evil thoughts, desires or reactions. Why not imagine for a moment that, when we have those thoughts, they are coming from an external source, from some form of dark intelligence? If we realized that the person behind those thoughts was someone who didn’t have our best interests at heart, then that might make them easier to ignore, condemn and turn away from. If that were possible, might we not become stronger, less prone to succumbing to temptation, anger, malice or cruelty? Might we not become better people?

Inevitably, any discussion of Good, Evil and the Devil might well descend into a religious or moral argument about scripture or culturally-scoped definitions of what good and evil are. I’d like to simply invoke the presence of suffering as a direct consequence of the presence of evil. From minor things (such as racist comments) through to criminality, drug abuse, deadly violence, suicide, murder, terrorism, global warming, war, and even the ultimate depths of horror of which mankind is capable, like genocide, the key aspect of evil is that it causes suffering. How do we where evil is lurking? Find the suffering, and it's probably close by.

A brilliant commercial about racism in Australia shows several situations where white people interact with Aborigines and a man softly whispers to them “What do you think she’s up to?”, “Don’t make eye contact”, or “Go on, it’s only a joke” to trigger nasty little moments of discrimination. This is the Devil in our thoughts; conventionally sitting on our collective shoulders to lead us into temptation and treat our fellow man cruelly. The commercial’s message is about racism, but the image of the whispering man: disheveled, seedy and sounding oh-so-reasonable in his small, shitty way provides us with a working image of one aspect of the adversary at play.

If we build on this image and imagine too that the Devil is slippery, deceptive and insidious. I think that there is a diabolical irony to the machinations of evil. Milgram’s classic study in obedience describe how people can be coerced into performing truly awful things in a closed setting by enforcing people’s obedience. In this famous psychology experiment, test subjects thought that they were issuing painful, dangerous electric shocks to actors pretending to take a test so that they would be ‘shocked’ when they made mistakes. The actors would fake screams in response to the supposed punishments meted out by the test subjects who were themselves under scrutiny to see how far they could be made to push the severity of the punishment through instructions, encouragement or simple orders to do so. A recent book reexamined Milgram’s original findings to show that our common interpretation of his results are wrong: simply ordering someone to do something awful from a position of authority rarely worked. However, a high percentage of subjects would go further if they were told there was a higher purpose to their actions. The people willing to do more damage were not simply drones following instructions, but zealots doing what needed to be done for a just cause.

At least partially, this is how the Devil works. True believers can be more easily persuaded to cruelty, darkness and atrocity. He tricks people irrespective of faith, political persuasion, nationality or culture. He cultivates our desires, reactions, judgments, hatreds, and fears. He gives us a suitably lofty ideal to believe in and pursue, blind to the human suffering lurking in the consequences of our actions, and then sits back and laughs as we tear each other apart. He terrifies and horrifies us, turning some people into monsters so that we then see monsters everywhere.

The idea that the Devil has a sick sense of humor is worth considering too. Consider a recent news story where a woman was captured on camera berating a group of Muslim men in a San Francisco park saying:

“You are very deceived by Satan. Your mind has been taken over... brainwashed... and you have nothing but hate.”

Her speech is sanctimonious, righteous and pious but her actions embody pure xenophobia, religious prejudice and violence (she throws a cup of coffee at one of the men). Clearly, she is doing the Devils work, and her religious convictions render her blind to the contradiction between what she was saying and doing. If you are a Christian, you sincerely believe in God and the Devil, but you don’t think the Devil is directly trying to trick you into being an asshole as a matter of principle, you might want to rethink your approach. This is the sort of sneaky, backhanded slipperiness your enemy is up to.

Furthermore, in our modern, interconnected, information-based world, the lies that lead into darkness can amplified endlessly without effort by politics, by the chitter-chatter of the news cycle and of course, by social media. A clear example of the scale and destructive potential of this amplification can be most clearly seen in the story of Justine Sacco, who posted a thoughtless tweet about AIDS shortly before boarding an 11-hour flight to South Africa and by the time she landed, millions of people actively hated her. The viciousness and scale of the public shaming she received was extreme. Describing how this process played out in a NYT article, Ron Jonson wrote:

Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing. Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so.

Where did all this celebration of her downfall come from? Collectively, from a bunch of otherwise well-meaning, ‘good’ people, doing the Devil’s work with gusto.

So, if we put this together: (A) everyone has thoughts, feelings and drives that have us do things with negative, ‘evil’, consequences. (B) It’s easier somehow to ignore or dismiss these consequences if we have an ideological position on ‘how the ends justifies the means’ or if we’re simply unaware, oblivious or unconcerned with those consequences. (C) The amplification provided by mass media means an immense momentum can be derived from popular opinion across huge numbers of people.

If you take these elements and then throw in the hellish, ridiculous clusterfuck that is gun violence in the United States then you have the Devil, dancing a jig and cackling madly on a ripe harvest of 30,000 butchered souls every single year.

According to this report from the CDC for 2013: across the whole US, there were 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 accidental deaths by firearm discharge in that year. There were a total of 2,596,993 deaths from all causes, so roughly 1.3% of all fatalities in 2013 were caused by guns. This is a little less than the number of people who died in motor vehicle accidents in the same timeframe (35,369). Consider also that in 2013, the number of people with non-fatal injuries from firearms was 84,258, and these injuries were likely to be extremely serious with a lifelong impact. Another tragic aspect of firearm violence is that it disproportionately impacts young people, spiking around age 20–24 so that when those lives are snuffed out, all of the good that they could have ever accomplished is extinguished too.

Now, since we’re talking about the Devil here, a key aspect of the human cost of the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon us is that someone is pulling the trigger to take a life. These are not impersonal medical tragedies or natural disasters but individual human beings acting as killers to destroy people’s lives. What act could bring the Devil greater joy than that? Not only are the souls of the killed flocking to his door, the damned souls of the killers await their judgement when the time comes.

And if we attempt to trace the suffering of bereavement, loss and tragedy that inevitably follows gun violence, the greatest evil present in the conversation is how disconnected the conversation is from the issues at hand. We aren’t talking about practical measures or treating the issues intelligently. We’re lambasting each other, personalizing the conversation, ceding too much power to invested parties with a clear conflict of interest (the NRA) and making this about culture wars between liberals and conservatives, the constitution, government tyranny, a strangely structured definition of ‘freedom’.

There’s so much obfuscation, confusion, powerlessness, rancor, and inaction, I just know that the Devil is behind it all. People demonize and ridicule people on the other side of the conversation; disingenuous arguments are made based on biased advocacy positions with no grounding in logic or data; overly-simplistic arguments are wrapped in illogical appeals to patriotism to justify them and finally, some people make enormous amounts of money from the sale of guns with no regard of the dangers to public health that ensue.

I think that the way forward is to better understand the opposing side’s point of view. The two different ways of looking at the problem are based on the different reaction we all have when we think of being faced with an attacker armed with a firearm.

Gun rights advocates think practically in terms of the tactical requirement needed to defend yourself in this situation. You need to be able to stop whoever is trying to kill you and the best way to do that is to shoot them first. The only way you could possibly do that is if you own and carry a gun yourself. Gun rights advocates argue that they need to able to own and carry guns freely for that purpose and strongly resist any legislative efforts to prevent them owning or carrying these weapons. Rather than calling these people ‘gun rights advocates’, let’s call them ‘tacticians’.

On the other side, gun control advocates think practically in terms of the sociological and strategic conditions of preventing your attacker from obtaining a gun in the first place. It should be difficult for dangerous people to own weapons and oversight needs to be put in place to prevent that from happening. Naturally, gun control advocates strongly push legislation that should supposedly prevent people from owning or carrying guns, and this puts them at odds with tacticians. Rather than calling these people ‘gun control advocates’, let’s call them ‘strategists’.

The sheer horror of the presupposition of what anyone might do in a live shooter situation drives the fundamental, primal contradiction at the heart of this discussion and paralyzes any practical approaches to solving the problem. Simply put, tacticians and strategists tend to be drawn into intractable arguments because the consequences of being wrong is that people die (and of course, we all feel that our viewpoint is the best way of stopping that from happening).

So, let’s push the agenda in a different way. Let’s leave the Devil to argue about ideology, the dangerous stupidity of our opponents, and all the other tired, old tropes that lead us endlessly nowhere. Let’s instead talk about practical ways to reduce sufferering.

How do we stop people from dying?

Perhaps we should have the tacticians talk to police organizations, the FBI, martial arts schools, trauma specialists, and EMT doctors to figure out the best ways to help people protect themselves, and to train people effectively at doing so. This sort of engagement could also help us keep an eye on people for erratic or self destructive behavior, raising red flags if there is any cause for concern. Similarly we could then have the strategists talk to mental health professionals, epidemiologists, criminologists, yet more trauma specialists and EMT doctors to figure out how to prevent truly dangerous people from being able to obtain and use firearms. Most importantly, let’s have the tacticians and the strategists talk to each other and come up with both tactical and strategic measures that can reduce gun violence. Forget everything else. Just stop the killing.

Imagine how furious the Devil would be if we slowed the flood of death, murder and suicide into hell from gun violence? He’d probably try to take steps to prevent this from happening. He might send out corrupt agents to spread incendiary lies and misinformation to set us against one another. He might make the image of being able to kill for justifiable reasons attractive in popular media. He might come up with dodgy pseudo-religious arguments that justify violence by a tortured reinterpretation of scripture .

Oh no, wait, that’s actually what he’s doing right now.

So, naturally, you could dismiss this argument simply because, well, I’m an atheist and I don’t really believe any of this stuff anyway. You might say: “You might not believe in the Devil, but he certainly believes in you”. It’s true, I don’t believe in the literal truth of the Devil’s existence, but my view is that we should use the idealogical constructs of religious faith as effective moral weapons and strive to reduce suffering as our primary goal.

I also think that the Devil has been running a terrific counter-espionage campaign. He’s convinced everyone that he’s easy to spot: he’s got horns and fangs, he’s debauched, and carries a clear malevolence that is easily recognized. I know that if he was real, he wouldn’t look this way. He’d be handsome, rakish, charming, convincing, rich and sexy as hell. He’d convince you do all sorts of thing that would cause suffering in others and then persuade you that you were on the side of the angels all the while. The Devil works in mysterious ways and the only barometer we should trust is the tell-tale scent of the presence of evil: suffering. If we focus on that, and don’t allow ourselves to be distracted by the Devil’s lies, we should be able to actually solve the problem of gun violence in America.

On Fighting

“Americans love to fight,” declared George Patton in his speech to the third army in 1944; it’s clear to me now that although this assertion might well be true in general, most Americans have no real idea how to fight. Many people mistake raw aggression for martial prowess. They don’t realize that this sort of bluster shouted loudly and naively in the media-driven, over-opinionated echo chamber of US politics weakens our capability to form effective military strategy, fight, and defeat our enemies.

We are at war with the atrocity-embracing terrorist warriors of the Islamic State. Now, more than ever, we need to understand what is involved in fighting, and also to understand what the consequences of fighting are. With full disclosure, my thoughts on this matter are not derived from any military experience but from fencing and martial arts; I’m not a soldier, have never served and have only handled a firearm three times in my life. I think there is an important difference between fighting to defeat someone and fighting to kill them (and, thank God, I’ve never known the latter).

In conflicts between animals of the same species, the act of fighting is a small subset of aggressive behaviors that serve to establish dominance in social relationships. Most of the time, situations involving aggressive behavior consists of threats, chest-beating, bullying, and intimidation: schoolyard antics that establish dominance but usually don’t lead to anything serious. This is typically what people think passes for being a badass but is not necessarily anything to do with actually being good at fighting per se. When most people think about any sort of conflict that could possibly involve violence, they might offer such pearls of wisdom as ‘We need to show them who’s boss’, ‘We’re going to fuck you up’, or possibly ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ (my favorite).

This is how most people think fighting is done.

And although this may be enough reason for silverback gorillas to go at it, just establishing some sense of national dominance should not be the reason we send our soldiers to war. Given its costs and dangers, I would hope that the underlying reasons of why we fight would be more evolved, humanitarian, and practical than that (but I could well be wrong).

Beyond that, anyone adopting a blusterous, over-confident, hyper-aggressive approach in a fight typically puts themselves at a tactical disadvantage. Tactics in a combat setting always involves deception and misdirection. Brute force and overwhelming power has its place, but skill, sneakiness, and intelligence are more effective (just read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to see how ancient Chinese military geniuses approach this whole question). Fundamentally, discipline, capability, courage, deception, and skill are the determining factors that make good fighters.

Also, it pays to take your adversary seriously. There’s a great scene in HBO’s The Pacific when Sgt. John Basilone confronts his soldiers for saying that they just want to get out there and ‘slap a Jap’. He screams, “You can call them anything you want but never ever fail to respect their desire to put you and your buddies into an early grave!” Know your adversary and you will be better able to defeat them.

Furthermore, if you can find a way to treat your adversary with humanity and respect then you may avoid paying the grave cost of losing that humanity. In his chilling but brilliant book On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman carefully elaborates how warfare causes moral injury and PTSD to combatants as natural individual consequences of fighting and killing. At length, he describes how some groups resort to the deliberate use of the ‘Dark Power of Atrocity’ as a means of fighting: the use of reprisals, targeting civilians, terrorism, carpet bombing of cities, and sexual violence such as systemic rape. Grossman writes:

There are many benefits reaped by those who tap the dark power of atrocity. Those who engage in a policy of atrocity usually strike a bargain that exchanges their future for a brief gain in the present. Though brief, that gain is nonetheless real and powerful. … One of the most obvious and blatant benefits of atrocity is that it quite simply scares the hell out of people. The raw horror and savagery of those who murder and abuse cause people to flee, hide, and defend themselves feebly, and often their victims respond with mute passivity…

In a following passage, Grossman then goes on to say:

Once a group undergoes the process of bonding and empowerment through atrocity, then its members are entrapped in it, as it turns every other force that is aware of their nature against them.

In simple practical terms, a groups that adopts atrocity in its methodology will create enemies that will never surrender or submit to them. When faced with an adversary like that, the only recourse you have is to fight tooth-and-nail to the death. Also, in so doing, the degree to which you then embrace atrocity and inhumanity to fight your enemy is then the degree to which you will be trapped by the same dark power. To quote Nietzsche: “Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Another movie, The Boxer, beautifully illustrates the difference between a fighter and a killer. This is the story of Danny Flynn, a boxer wrapped up in the politics of IRA-controlled Belfast. His character contrasts with that of Harry, an IRA commander responsible for the fight against the English and the Unionists. The main difference between the two men is that Danny simply fights without rancor or murderous intent, Harry fights to kill and destroy his enemies. Of the two men, Harry is far more damaged, more inhuman, and less likely to function well in a time of peace. The horror of war lives and breathes in Harry; he embraces it; he likes it; he uses it.

We should be wary of becoming like Harry when we fight.

So, in the current fight with IS, we face a calculating, barbaric enemy whose main goal is to terrorize us. To fight them well, we must pursue a military strategy that defeats their soldiers (by killing them, capturing them, or causing them to surrender) and undermines the narrative through which they gather supporters. We must also avoid the dark trap of using their own barbarity against them. The cost of that path is too great and will only lead to a greater spiral of death in the next monstrous enemy rising from ISIS’s defeated remnants.

So then, what are we really fighting for? I’m not sure if have a good answer for that question. I do know that we need to fight well with intelligence, cunning, and humanity to win.