Bluebird of happiness

My dad's family is Catholic, the every-Sunday kind, and although I found church boring and we didn't really have a community there, being Christian was an important part of my identity, all the way through confirmation at age 13. I was very preoccupied, you see, with Doing The Right Thing, and the faith I was raised in was part of it. The next year, though, the movie Philadelphia came out, and in reading a scathing review in the Catholic paper we subscribed to, I realized for the first time that the church I'd grown up with and the moral self I was becoming were not compatible. Within a couple of years, I became an apostate, and eventually an atheist. It was a monumental struggle at the time, reconstructing a moral framework outside of the one I'd been handed, surgically removing the beliefs that no longer served me without losing faith that doing good mattered. But that was twenty-five years ago at this point: there's emotional scar tissue there but nothing I would identify as a wound. The experience was salutary, in the end.

A few times before my dad died he made reference to "something he wanted to talk to me about," but kept putting it off, seeming almost nervous. He eventually broached the subject; this might have been my last visit to them where he was really fully with us, in a way. He confessed that my apostasy had pained him greatly and he wanted to understand why -- or confirm that it was true what I'd told him all those years ago, that the issue was gay rights. And I said, yes, Dad, you've got it. He seemed relieved. I think he'd been worried that the rejection was personal, which it wasn't -- I had my issues with him but those were wholly separate. And he said, "You know, I've come to think that the Church has made a big mistake focusing on lifestyle issues like this. Your [lesbian] cousin E has made a really nice little family for herself, with those cute little kids. And that's what it's about." He wanted to hear before he died that I would consider returning to the church. I couldn't really give him that. But I did ask him, when you're gone, when I want to find you, where should I look? Which bits of Catholicism give you comfort? And he told me, and I mentally set it aside for planning his funeral, and we moved on. I hope he got what peace he could from the conversation.

Yesterday I learned that Pope Francis has been making a tentative push in the direction of reconciling with the gay community. It is a small gesture, right now: permission for priests to offer a blessing to gay couples, but only in a context that wouldn't look to anyone like a priest solemnizing a marriage. But this gesture was unimaginable to me at fifteen. I felt surprisingly emotional when I read the news. And I really wish I could call my dad.

I’ve been out on the bike three times so far this year.

Three weeks ago, bikes fresh from our spring tune-up, the whole family biked out to the Olbrich playground, maybe 4-5 miles round trip. It felt great. No soreness, no dysfluency from a few months’ hibernation — this is what’s meant by “it’s like riding a bike.”

Two weeks ago we went up the Starkweather path to one of the playgrounds along it. Had some tailbone soreness, I think, and then just as I was climbing the ramp to cross East Wash on the return, I noticed my seat was coming loose!! And like a fool I didn’t have any tools on me. I wound up having to walk it home. Lesson: bring an Allen wrench.

Yesterday I had a nice milestone: I went out with H, just the two of us. Last season I hadn’t felt able to keep half an eye on her because I didn’t have half an eye to spare, but this year both of us are more competent. We went up to Tenney for a park play date with her best friend and her dad. A short ride, maybe two-three miles round trip, but it felt like freedom.

Yesterday was also my first outing with my brand spanky new panniers. I splurged on Ortlieb and I am not sorry. A gorgeous pair of back rollers in robin’s-egg blue. I fit a book, a pair of galoshes, two balls, a carton of pneumatic rocket toys, several jump ropes, a pair of binoculars, my bike lock, and my purse. Stupidly, I did not pack an Allen wrench (but happily I did not need one).

In other positive news, I am now half Modernized.

G and I thoroughly enjoyed The Good Place, which if you haven’t seen it is absolutely worth the time — a sitcom about the afterlife. The series makes repeated reference to a particular philosophical text, What we owe to each other, so I ordered it from Amazon a few months ago. I am not a philosopher and it is very slow going for me. Some passages I have had to read five times before I had an inkling what was being said. In particular Chapter 1 bogs down in a long discussion of reasons, specifically what it means to have a reason, and I kept getting tangled up in an ouroborean way in how the definition seemed to hinge on itself, like, in order to make a reasoned argument for what you think a reason is, don’t you need to have defined it already?

Chapter 2, Values, had me in a muddle at first too, as “teleological” is one of those concepts that never quite sticks for me. But it was worth persisting for this phrase:

Understanding the value of something is not just a matter of knowing how valuable it is, but rather a matter of knowing how to value it — knowing what kinds of actions and attitudes are called for.

This felt like a sort of aha moment: the idea that a weakness of (certain types of?) consequentialism is that it treats as scalar a moral world that is fundamentally otherwise. A landscape that is not only multidimensional, but one in which the different dimensions are qualitatively different as well, maybe.

I don’t yet know how Scanlon will use this perspective in building the argument suggested by the title. I could imagine an argument in which individual differences, or classes of relationships, feature: what it means to value two friends with different hopes and dreams, or two people with whom I have different classes of relationships, could look different. Or I could imagine an argument in which this how-to-value theme is applied to different obligations: maybe our reasons for not killing and our reasons for not lying have a different texture.

I’m a little nervous about the way the end of this chapter seems to imply that what we owe to other people depends in some way on their capacity for rational thought. That can lead to some ugly places.

From now on, the theodicy problem for me will be: Why would a benevolent and omnipotent god give pancreatic cancer to Ginsburg, and not to the much more qualified candidate across town?

EDIT 10/2: Welp.

I learned to ride a bike a few years ago, when I had graduated for the umpteenth time and needed a new challenge. And when I say learned to ride, I mean it in the sense that I could get on my bike and make it go without falling over (much). But after I had balancing down, I only managed to make time for practicing a few times a year, and lots of the basic mechanics, including gear shifting, signalling, navigating other bikes and pedestrians and dogs, even hills and tight turns, were sort of bridges too far.

Anyway, fast forward to COVID and I'm realizing after a couple of emergency trips to MPOW that in the current situation, the non-driver transit plan I have heretofore pieced together for myself -- bus + spouse's car + Lyft -- is entirely unsatisfactory. Learning to drive suddenly ratcheted up in priority from "mehhh" to "jeez I really should have done that thing yesterday," but right now, it comes with a hefty side of "where do we put the kid while I learn?" Bike-as-transit, however, has a lot going for it. (1) I have the equipment. (2) I can do it on my own. (3) I'm already partway there.

So, following S's advice I've just been getting on the bike and riding as much as I can. I've tried to get out in the mornings; I'm awake, I'm not on tap for parenting, I can be slow and awkward and not clog up anybody's commute. We've also tried to take family bike rides most weekends. My third grader is considerably faster than I am at this point, so I'm always bringing up the rear. But that's fine!

The last weekend ride I took was a little bit rough, and even though the terrain looks flat on Google Maps, it felt .... not actually flat. At several points the hills were such that I couldn't make the bike go, which was worrisome from the standpoint of a would-be commuter. So today, I thought I'd give my commute a try, at least the first half of it. And it was actually super easy! I encountered nothing that makes me think this life plan will be a reach. This weekend, if I can get up early enough to beat the crowds, I'll see if I can do the full ten mile round-trip.

Riding felt much better today in a global sense, despite having lapsed in my practice routine for a week or so -- as soon as I got on the bike I felt like I knew what I was doing. That's varied a ton, but I think this morning was a new high point. I didn't tense up when I encountered other bikers or pedestrians, and I didn't have to think very hard about the actual mechanics. Scoping out traffic at intersections felt natural and easy today also, and I mostly took those crossings at speed when it was feasible. I worked on adjusting my pedaling speed to match the resistance the bike was getting, without switching gears, as the last weekend ride taught me that just downshifting when there's a hill to climb is not really a panacea. I also made a ton of progress on hand signaling, which will be a key skill to unlock as it's currently a major barrier to riding in the street. I think in 1-2 weeks, those signals will be under my belt, too.

Patricia McManus, speaking on the costs of systemic racism: "We don’t get the benefit of being who we think we are."

Say you were split, you were split in fragments
And none of the pieces would talk to you
Wouldn't you want to be who you had been?
Well, maybe I want that too

I had no idea what was going on in this book until the halfway point, at which point I became faintly obsessed. We see the protagonist of this novel in two timestreams: in the present, and in a nineteen-year flashback. In that flashback, she is one small part of an artificial organism: Justice of Toren, a warship kitted out with human bodies that have been colonized by and for an empire. But in the present, she has been severed from her ship and is on her own, still the ship, but also not the ship. This two-track structure is maddening until you understand, and then it is so beautiful and strange, feeling the difference in texture between the two lives this character has lived, starting to comprehend the scale of her loss.

There are several disorienting features about this book, but to me the moral disorientation surrounding the protagonist is the most extreme. The first-person structure instinctively places our sympathies with a creature who, by typical Western moral standards, should not exist at all, as she represents the ... deensoulment of a person. And yet Breq is not Humbert Humbert; we are not meant to hate her; as far as we can tell, she bears no moral culpability for inhabiting this stolen body. Through the course of the story she begins to be humanized, and although she does not quite see it for what it is, we do as readers, and we see too that it is not really a replacement for what she has lost. All this makes for a deliciously uncomfortable read, because there is no resolution possible, and the author doesn't even attempt one.

On my mind lately, this framework for reasoning from data:

1. What is the evidence?
   
2. Given the evidence, what should I believe?
   
3. Given the evidence, what should I do?

There is a front page WaPo headline right now saying something like, “Why R. Kelly’s accusers were rarely heard before now.” I am super ignorant about that part of the music world in a typical white person way and yet I feel like I heard that he was a predator for young teens around fifteen or twenty years ago! Who the hell didn’t know? What kind of crap gee-whiz journalism is this? Am I off base?

I feel like I’m about to take a group high-stakes test.

Citing D’Souza Pardon, NY AG Repeats Call To Change Double Jeopardy Law

An Open Letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Sometimes I wonder where, on a scale from one to Trump, to place the damage we are doing to ourselves because of Trump.

August 23 2006
August 22 2017

Not the trajectory I expected over that eleven-year span.

Oh well. August 23 2012 was pleasantly Nazi-free, anyway.

That Facebook Experiment has gotten me thinking about ethics in data science. Well, OK, I'd been thinking about it anyway, so this fifteen minutes of moral panic was well timed.

I've been thinking that there is really no code of ethics this young profession, so maybe I need to develop my own, where by "develop" I mean "steal cleverly from others." I've got a start.

I. First, tell no lies.
II. All models are wrong; some are useful.
III. Punch up, not down.

Headline in the New York Times today: Wisconsin Election is Referendum on Governor
Unfortunately, the headline isn't strictly true, because we're actually electing a Supreme Court Justice. But you know, careful deliberative justice, grassroots partisan political movement, what's the diff?

A recurring theme in my thoughts lately is: when you're in a game with rules you dislike, how do you choose your move? Do you act according to your own principles? Or do you choose the move that will best serve your interests, given the rules as they are?

Left to my own devices, I try to construe my self-interest broadly: I much prefer to act in accordance with general principles that make my conscience quiet than to act in a way that gives me short-term gains, but presupposes long-term losses. In the case of the Supreme Court race, the long-term losses are twofold. I hate judicial elections because judgments ought to follow the Constitution, not popular will. (Anyone who is a minority of any kind -- which is, I suspect, most of my readers -- should be conscious of this.) And I hate this one in particular because the circus that surrounds it is a reminder of what happens when that is not true: leaders think it's OK to ignore court orders, and their base agrees. Judicial impartiality, like human rights generally, is a collective delusion; but if we lose the delusion, I don't see how we can preserve a decent society.

Nevertheless, I can't change the game by pretending I'm playing a different one. The rules of the judicial game in Wisconsin, and the stakes in this particular election, both encourage a partisan view. Prosser has not done much in the last year to win my affection; he hasn't written any recent opinions and he seems to vote with a bloc whose decisions, on balance, I don't like that much. He issued a press release in December allying himself with Walker, which is not really appropriate for an ostensibly nonpartisan campaign. The court itself is reportedly contentious and dysfunctional and he is rumored to be a large part of that; at one point last year, in a dispute related to official court business, he admits to calling the Chief Justice a bitch and threatening to destroy her. (Today's research at least taught me that I DO like the Chief Justice -- she is a scholar and her opinions show it.) I gather Prosser is not the only inappropriate person on the bench, but changing the lineup sounds wise and he's the one whose term is up. Overall, I think that my short-term self-interest will be served in two ways if Prosser is removed.

But it doesn't have to stop there. Years ago, apropos of I-don't-know-what, dolohov reminded me that democracy doesn't end on election day. Perhaps a gentle curmudgeonly rant about judicial elections is in order, for some place more public than here.

I have this tl;dr thing I've been drafting about our protests for two weeks now. I don't know if it'll ever be finished (what's the point in tl;dr?) but I need to put a shorter thing out there in the meantime.

If you asked me how I felt about this mess I wouldn't be able to do it in a hundred words or less. My mind and heart are spinning on so many levels right now.

1. On a shallow level: This is the most entertaining thing that has happened in my town, like, ever. It is like the Real World. Every day some politician pulls some outrageous stunt that gets everybody's attention and we can't talk about anything else. Every day someone capitalizes on all this excitement for profit in some breathtakingly obvious way. Today I ordered a T-shirt from the official restaurant of the revolution -- "Ian's Pizza: This is what democracy tastes like."
   
2. On a deeper level: I'm worried by these shenanigans because when the dust settles, I still have to live here. I supported my Senator's exit (and told him so) because I think it did something important -- it gave us time. Three weeks of daylight have given us all a pretty good idea what's in the bill and what its effects might be. Three weeks convinces me that union busting is not, by and large, something this swing state favors. But life goes on and politics goes on and I'm really concerned that the atmosphere right now is so hostile that the minority party can no longer serve effectively as the loyal opposition. Until the balance of power in our Capitol changes, they are all lame ducks.
   
3. On an intellectual level: I am totally bowled over by all the stuff that this has taught me about Wisconsin history, state politics, and activism. Yeah, there are some eyeroll-inspiring signs out there, with bad grammar or bad politics or just bad jokes; but the deeper lesson of the protests is that it IS possible to dissent with humor, without bitterness; and it IS possible, with cleverness and with patience, to change the story.
   
4. On another intellectual level, where I am both amused and annoyed: I actually think there is probably a decent, grownup conversation we could be having about whether public employees ought to have the right to unionize. It's an open question in my mind. But that's not the conversation any leader in our state has tried to have -- and that's the point, to me. I am convinced that our Governor has made these moves not to protect his citizens (since when are no-bid contracts to sell state resources in the best interests of any state? do we even need to have that conversation?) but to advance himself. And here's an heuristic for you: when someone makes an aggressive push to enact an unpopular law that removes established rights and reduces middle-class income in a recession without having a grownup conversation about why, that is a law we should not have, and that is a person who should not lead.
   
5. On a personal level: I've got a horse in this race. Although very little in my own life will change once this bill becomes law, the environment of my employment may change considerably, and not in a way that serves my interests. I'm also seriously worried about the many and varied economic impacts that the repair bill and the budget both will have on my town's economy. These cuts are synergistic in a way that has me wondering whether buying property in this state was a mistake. And maybe that's something my leaders should hear, too.

I'm going to vote for Russ Feingold for Senate today. He's been a consistent voice for civil liberties in the Senate. Wisconsinites, I hope you're voting for him, too. This isn't a case of "marginally better than the alternative." This is a case of "the alternative is actually terrible, and he is actually good."

We saw The Fog of War tonight, a documentary about, well, ostensibly it's about war but I really think it's a character study of Robert McNamara. It was a good movie, but uncomfortable. I left the theater with the feeling that McNamara died with a lot on his conscience, a lot of things he was only half owning up to. He said some interesting things. But his face made my own conscience feel itchy.

It's not so much that I think McNamara was a terrible person, or more of one than anybody else. I think that nobody would be graceful in a situation where doing their job meant being an accessory (at least) to hundreds of thousands of deaths by fire and bombs and poison. What I take from that is that we probably shouldn't give people the power to kill hundreds of thousands of other people by fire and bombs and poison. I know, I know, a long list of "shoulds" that starts with flossing and doesn't make it out the gate. What can you do, you know.

I know a fair number of people who found graduate school, shall we say, not that satisfying. This may not surprise you if you've ever known any graduate students, but it probably should. Grad programs filter their entry pool pretty heavily on traits like academic achievement and interest; among the set that makes it in, you'd think hating school should be a fairly rare occurrence. What's going on here?

The canonical answer is that the unhappy ones are doing something wrong. The culture of higher education places the burden for success squarely on students, especially at the graduate level: no one can do the work of learning, or of career planning, for you. And there's some truth to that, for sure. However: graduate stipends are small, compared to the salaries of entry-level jobs that students would likely qualify for, and the justification is that tuition is part of compensation. When mentorship is weak or lacking, when professors' failure to read and comment on submitted work renders its completion meaningless, when standards for success are so ill-formed that decisions seem arbitrary -- those things, in a sense, constitute a reduction in pay.

So I started wondering the other day: why do we treat graduate school as school in the first place? Instead of pretending that learning to be a scholar is anything like learning to be a lawyer or a surgeon, why not move to a model more like other jobs -- where people are paid entry-level salaries for a few years while they learn enough to be hired later as independent workers (aka postdocs, instructors) and managers (professors)? I am not sure that it would have to cost more; compensation that currently goes back into the Graduate School could go instead toward salary for TAs and RAs, which, given professors' frank acknowledgement that graduate coursework is a waste of time, seems entirely appropriate to me.

My hunch is that this model would take some pressure off the mentor-mentee relationship, which is often fraught with expectations that go unmet. Rather than trying to turn everyone into Supermentor, it seems more sensible to adopt a structure that acknowledges reality -- your professor is just another boss -- and encourages scientists to take responsibility for their careers by paying them and treating them as young professionals instead of as students.

Follow up from Harper's on those Gitmo deaths.

I was musing on this yesterday, and -- here's the thing. Part of what made the years under Bush so very demoralizing was my conviction that institutions, given power, do not give it back; that is to say, the damage Bush did to our way of life seemed very likely to me to be permanent. A lot of people called me a cynic. At one point a good friend told me to stop channeling her anarchist husband (you know who you are). But I really couldn't see where I was wrong.

Obama was -- and I still believe this -- a best-case scenario for a follow-up to Bush. His civil liberties credentials were higher than most, certainly better than Gore's or Kerry's were, as he pushed for and got a significant victory for due process in Illinois, a corrupt state if I ever saw one; he came to power with a decently-sized mandate; his biography marks him as a man who thinks deeply, the most likely kind of man to care about the principle of a thing. And he's worked really hard to move the country in the direction that Democrats prefer... on most issues. But I can't help but notice, since January 22 of last year, the civil liberties issues have gone pretty much nowhere.

It's possible that he's just got other priorities, yes. I see why he'd want to put healthcare at the top of the agenda, especially with an ailing Kennedy at the helm, especially now that we see what happens when a Kennedy dies. "Events, my dear boy, events." I see why war is something where the slowest you can possibly be is reactive and most of the time that's too slow. I see why a collapsing economy would get your attention, and it should. I know all this.

But. But the government is big -- really goddamn big, the kind of big where I suspect any effort to map it on paper would risk creating a black hole -- and there is no reason he couldn't be paying a whole passel of brilliant young feds to work on these issues from the policy side while Congress and the military sort out healthcare, the economy, and the war. No reason, perhaps, but sheer self-interest.

Never trust a headline.

New York Times: Pay Rises for Leaders of Colleges, Survey Says

Chronicle of Higher Education: Paychecks Stagnate for Presidents of Many Public Universities

Hat tip to Language Log.

It's poaching time!

While walking to the bagel place this morning, I encountered a small tan thing on the sidewalk. I stopped and bent down to look at it. A mouse! A blind mouse, mewing soundlessly. With a squished face and no hair. Wait, no. I looked closer. Are there voles that size? Or moles? What IS that thing?

Its jaw opened and closed freakishly as it looked at me. A limb popped out to the side. A webbed limb. Then another. Suddenly it was alive. I gasped and recoiled, and it did the same, and flew madly away.

One of the things I like about having friends is that they can do stuff I wouldn't do and I can see how it works. It's a very low-cost way of expanding my horizons.

One of my horizons that maybe needs expanding is my vision of what adult life is supposed to look like. I think I have a fairly rigid, implicit idea of The Responsible Adult Thing, and it looks very placid, all the ducks lined up just so. But I know some perfectly responsible adults who have done all manner of wild things involving career changes and unexpected moves and extra degrees and family upheavals and visa struggles and houses bought and rented and sold again, and somehow they all seem to land on their feet.

Thanks to everyone out there who's done something crazy while I was watching. It's good for me.

If you, like me, follow the debates about gays and civil rights, you have probably heard the following argument:

Gay rights supporter: This is just like the civil rights struggle for blacks!
Member of the black community: No it isn't -- your identity is a behavior and one you can hide -- we can't stop being black!

I think both parties are right here, actually. I think the gay rights supporters are right in that the existing structures are obviously unjust and are maintained at least in part because people who got a good spot in the hierarchy don't like people trying to butt in line. This is where they are similar.

But I think the black community is right in that there is some fuzzy space between being a thing and doing a thing. The simplistic way it's often put, between unchanging identity (on the black hand) and a chosen lifestyle (on the gay hand), is misleading. "Being black" isn't just about skin color: like any community, there are ways-of-behaving that carry meaning for group membership, too. And conversely, "the gay lifestyle" isn't something most people choose at random out of a catalog, but falls out of inclinations that are themselves very difficult to change. (Witness the relatively low success rates of reparative therapy even among the extremely motivated.) Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that blackness is the neatest parallel to gayness.

So lately I have been pondering a different parallel: fatness. Here's what I think they have in common.

Both fatness and gayness result from a very deep biological urge that is calibrated to make you want something different from what is considered normative. In the case of gayness, you want to have sex with people of the same sex; in the case of fatness, you want more calories than you will actually burn. While it is popular to talk about self-control, I think most people who are not fat probably don't have to exercise much self-control to eat the amount that they do: their satiety mechanisms very likely kick in at an earlier point and make the idea of more food unappealing. I think this compares rather well with gay sex, a behavior most people avoid chiefly by not being very interested in it in the first place.

This leads well to the next point: moral panics. Both fatness and gayness have inspired an awful lot of tsk-tsking in their day, sometimes at fever-pitch. Sometimes it is couched in moral terms, sometimes in public health terms -- but in both cases I am pretty convinced it is not actually about health. Not that you don't see different health risks faced by (some) gay individuals and (some) fat individuals. It's just that that's not what the conversation is really about. Underneath the moralizing, it's really about class; and disgust; and sex. And I don't have a lot of patience for that.

Finally, the most important commonality here: Even if there were solid scientific consensus that These People Must Change And Here's Why, solid science doesn't have a hell of a lot to offer either group. Reparative therapy, as I note above, has pretty low success rates... but in my understanding, dieting is even worse, if getting to "normal" is the goal. Yeah, in the short term you can abstain from sex or follow a calorie-limiting diet, and maybe you'll be "less gay" in some sense, and you'll probably lose some weight. We know the behaviors to target, in other words. But we don't know how to change the thing beneath the behaviors, the thing that made you gay or fat in the first place, some mix of genes and experiences and the choice landscape you live in. And without changing that, after the intervention is over, you're likely to revert to doing what comes naturally. So in both cases, the question emerges: Even if you're convinced that change is a good thing here (and, I should note, I'm not), are such modest changes worth the cost of shaming people on purpose?

I'm sure there are also a lot of ways that the two things are not parallel. (Feel free to point them out to me.) Still, the next time I hear someone bemoaning Fat America, I'm going to listen through my new gay filter and see what the conversation sounds like. It might be instructive.