Philosophy and Faith

Matthew 18 in a Post-Facebook Society

I run a small RocketChat server. Nothing major, just a handful of friends in a private chat, my own personal contribution to the XKCD Chat Platform problem.

I’d love to have more of my friends in it, but RocketChat has a strength that is also its fundamental weakness – the “general” room. Everyone is in it. I can change that behavior if I want, but that’s not the point.

I’ve got 850 Facebook friends…and only five of them are in RocketChat. Now sure, the nature of the term “Facebook Friend” comes into play here; I’m sure my one FB Friend I met on AIM nearly 20 years ago may not be much of a candidate, nor would the sister of a relatively new friend I met in an online community but sent me a request anyway, but even if I put 90% of my Facebook friends into that category, I still would have trouble getting 85 of my Facebook friends in the same chatroom together.

It would eventually devolve into an argument. That argument would then have chilling effects on discussion thereafter – some people would leave. Others would ignore the general chat and stick to the PMs. Discussion after that would become surface level, as nobody wants to ignite another powder keg. Then, one inadvertently starts, and the cycle begins anew until there’s nobody left except whoever agrees with the last person to win the argument.

I feel like the advice in Matthew 18 is timeless and incredibly relevant, even if you’re more of an Atheist than Richard Dawkins…but I feel like there are concepts between the lines that are worth exploring. For those who aren’t familiar with the passage, it goes like this:

15 If another believer sins against you, go privately and point out the offense. If the other person listens and confesses it, you have won that person back. 16 But if you are unsuccessful, take one or two others with you and go back again, so that everything you say may be confirmed by two or three witnesses. 17 If the person still refuses to listen, take your case to the church. Then if he or she won’t accept the church’s decision, treat that person as a pagan or a corrupt tax collector.

The underlying assumption here is that there is, at some level, a mutual desire to rectify a relationship. Also assumed here is that there is a shared agreement on an authority. Both of those are less of a given in modern society. John Oliver said it well when he described a segment of discourse between an Infowars reporter and a very left-wing protester: “What we do have there is a nice distillation of the current level of political discourse in America: two people, who don’t really know what they’re talking about, being condescending to each other nonsensically until one of them lands a sick burn.” While in Oliver’s clip it’s unlikely that either party had a desire to achieve consensus, I submit that the notion of salvaging a relationship at the expense of winning a particular argument seems sufficiently lost on modern society. Getting one’s perspective shifted is a fundamental requirement in order to make any headway, but the willingness to do so seems to be in short supply.

Once there is agreement that the intent is to salvage a relationship, the private discussion between two people disagreeing is useful because it prevents the spread of rumors and helps to address small grievances on a small scale. To bring two or three witnesses into the disagreement is to provide an outside perspective; ideally one that would impact how both people would approach the disagreement, and hopefully the input would be received well enough to achieve a resolution without things escalating further.

Getting to the ‘take it to the church’ situation here, that part gets a bit interesting because of the concept of ‘church’ at that time – Jesus wasn’t describing a group of several hundred people with an elder board…though thinking about it a bit more, Jesus was talking to a crowd more familiar with the temple system, which very much did have a hierarchal structure and political power so I need to do a bit more research on that topic…but, I think it’s safe to say that there is a case to be made about taking the dispute to a mutually recognized source of authority, to whom both parties consider themselves subject to their ruling.

If, one party decides that the ruling isn’t valid for whatever reason, then “treat them like a tax collector” is notable in that, while they were considered so undesirable in their society that the gospels commonly reference “sinners and tax collectors”, indicating an “even worse than sinner” connotation…but, at the same time, the audience of this teaching still dealt with tax collectors. Perhaps it was begrudgingly, perhaps it was a “get in, collect your taxes, get a receipt, and get out” sort of a deal, but Jews still had to work with them, and every so often, there was a Zaccheus – a tax collector who turned from his ways.

I think this sort of clear and direct escalation is incredibly relevant today. The fact that society has generally turned to “sick burns” as a way to decide how an argument is won, and winning more desirable than reconciliation, is the sort of fundamental shift Jesus spent time encouraging His followers to avoid. The results of this shift have clearly caused a level of enmity that divides people who could probably “agree to disagree” successfully under Jesus’ system, but are sworn enemies on Facebook.

This leaves me with a sparsely populated RocketChat server, and social gatherings which are fewer and further between than even five years ago. Whether you identify as a follower of Christ or not, I can guarantee there’s someone you disagree with on something. You probably agree with them on ten others. Try focusing on that, and try salvaging a relationship. It won’t be fun, but it will probably be worth it.

AI, Art, and Dictionaries

So, a philosopher from Harvard wrote an article about whether or not artificial intelligence is capable of producing art.

This left me with two major questions: First, how do we define artificial intelligence? Second, how do we define art? I believe the answer to the question hinges on these two things.

Strictly speaking, a computer is capable of creating aesthetically pleasing pieces of media, and have been doing so for decades. Whether an audio visualization counts as art due to them being a result of a computer following a strict set of programming guidelines is the nature of the question – how few inputs does it take before the definition crosses over from ‘program’ to ‘AI’?

The term ‘AI’ seems to be a common enough buzzword, but I don’t think that Data or HAL9000 were deemed AI’s because they could tell bees from 3s with good accuracy (spare a thought for ‘Robot’ from Lost in Space who never even got a name). The Google Duplex system is a bit closer, but even it is incredibly easy to trip up even while staying on topic. Watson is good at jeopardy, but its success in its core purpose – cancer treatment – is a bit less rosy. I submit that current generation of what is called ‘AI’ consists of many very good incremental improvements, and is to be lauded. However, I don’t think it is correct to assign the description of “artificial intelligence” to a computer that can win Jeopardy but not understand the humor behind saying “let’s finish, chicks dig me”.

On the flip side, let’s discuss ‘art’. Though this video has its flaws (most notably comparing the best of the past with the worst of the present), the takeaway here is that what does and doesn’t constitute ‘art’ is so subjective that even defining it is subjective. If I, as a DJ, play a good set for a live event, is it art? If I do the same thing and post the recording on Mixcloud, does it then become art? If I produce a song using the sounds and plugins of Ableton or FL Studio and nobody else hears it, is it art? Does it become art if I do this a dozen times and release an album? Is is more or less ‘art’ than Handel’s The Messiah? Is beauty truly in the eye of the beholder, or is there really a need for some sort of a governing body who defines what ‘art’ is, especially for exhibitions? If the latter, then how do those people ultimately decide? As one example, to what end does context play a role – does a piece of graffiti become art because it was painted on the Berlin Wall rather than an abandoned subway tunnel or a chalkboard frozen in time?

The fact that it is so difficult to define what ‘art’ really is makes the question of AI producing art fundamentally unsolvable. If art is is defined by self-expression, then the definition of AI would need to include a ‘self’, and that AI would need to have something to express. If art can only come from emotion, then the entire wing dedicated to furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is on shaky ground since a nontrivial number of those pieces were simply ‘ornate contract work’ whose artistic merit is commonly tied to their owners or context. If art is defined solely as something aesthetically pleasing, then “$5 Million, 1 Terabyte” doesn’t fit that bill (unless the case counts as art), but assisted CGI does.

Once we can settle on how to consistently define ‘art’, then we can talk about whether AI can do it. If art can’t be defined, then the source and inspiration become irrelevant, ironically meaning that one can equally argue that AI is capable of creating art and that humans cannot.

Caller ID: The Cultural Shift Nobody Realizes

I’ve written before about how disruptive technology doesn’t always cause headlines. It was only twenty years ago that Caller ID was an add-on feature, that Ma Bell charged a premium for, and required a separate box to utilize. There were even commercials for it. Early cell phones didn’t have it at all. Today, it’s almost like cell phones themselves – so ordinary and ubiquitous that trying to explain a world before caller ID is like trying to describe a Yellow Pages or a card catalog.

But this isn’t about the technological advances of the CNAM protocol, or to take another nostalgic journey.

Caller ID’s cultural shift made avoidance possible. Prior to caller ID, one always had to pick up the phone because it could be someone important or desirable to talk to. It could well be a phone solicitor, but if one was arguing with another person, and that person called, there would be some sort of exchange. Even if it was an immediate hang-up, it is still a form of exchange. In a post Caller ID world, calls could be ignored in the same way that written communication like texts, e-mails, and letters could. Without Caller ID, ghosting would not be possible.

On one hand, this is ultimately a matter of technological enforcement of intent. In some contexts, this was a positive measure – people being harassed had a means of mitigation, and phone solicitation became less profitable – and by extension, less common.

On the other hand, it allows people to avoid conflict resolution. Still angry at someone? Intentionally ignore their calls. Don’t want to deal with a bill you’re late on? Ignore the bill collector. Feel like a conversation might not go your way? Send it to voicemail until you think it will.

Like anything else, these things are not always bad. Sometimes, it really is better to have a cool-off period before talking to someone in order to have greater success in resolving a conflict. However, as a society, Caller ID gave us a means of conflict avoidance, rather than conflict resolution. We got used to those capabilities and took them with us to our cell phones and text messages and IM apps, making sure that “block user” was always a possibility in every new communication app we used.

I’ll reiterate that these measures are good things when being used to ensure safety and security. The cultural shift, however, isn’t about the use of Caller ID in matters of safety. The shift is in the ability to use them for reasons of comfort, convenience, and control. Deciding whether we have used these tools for good or for ill is an exercise I shall leave to my readers.

September 5, 2018 by Philosophy and Faith 0

The Orville, and My Commentary On Its Social Commentary

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to actually get a blog post out the door. I’ve got a number of started drafts in my queue here in WordPress, but I’ve never managed to circle back to any of them. Recently, my life got overtaken by a server migration, and although it worked out as smoothly as a server migration is going to go, it was far from perfect, and I managed to learn that, in 2017, VMWare still doesn’t support drives with 4K sectors, and the QNAP OpenVPN module doesn’t seem to do split tunnel VPN. I also managed to handle the little victories, like finally managing to correctly configure a Raspberry Pi as a print server, and quickly learned that my stance that “graphics don’t have to be that good for a game to be fun” apparently has a base minimum, as a number of my original-Playstation games definitely have not aged well after I tried getting them running on a 1080p TV. On the personal side of things, I got to see my sister’s family twice in the same month, which was nice. I also have managed to retain a rhythm of washing my dishes in the morning, rather than turning it into a battle of endurance to get through a full sink.

Now that I’ve caught you up, let’s discuss the topic discussed in the headline.

I’m quite happy that The Orville is on the air. I watched the first two hours of Star Trek: Discovery, and was ‘meh’ at best about it. Two broadcast hours used to attempt to convince me to subscribe to CBS All Access to continue watching the series…and I get Klingons who don’t look like Klingons, who fight because they’re Klingons and for little other reason, a metric ton of backstory on a single character but about 90 seconds of screen time for half the supporting cast who all seemed a whole lot more interesting, and cinematography from someone who went to the Michael Bay school of lens flares. Discovery may do well with the critics, but Orville is far better liked by audiences, and both shows demonstrate a highly measurable difference between the two. Supposedly, Discovery has gotten better as the episodes progressed, but since I can’t set my DVR to record them or get episodes on iTunes or Amazon, I couldn’t say.

For real now, I’m getting on topic.

As Star Trek has always done, The Orville takes its turn having episodes where social commentary is made. Two in particular have stood out to me this season. The first was “Majority Rule”, the seventh episode of the season where people upvote or downvote things they like or don’t like, to the point where sufficiently high downvotes can be cause for the cafe to refuse service, and doing an outlandish thing that goes viral is a criminal offense (with innocence and guilt, of course, being determined in the court of public opinion). There was a lot to unpack in this episode. My first set of questions had to do with how the society got to that point – what did they do before the badges? Before “The Feed”? How did the society calculate upvotes and downvotes before it was possible to automate it? How is it clear that a badge’s owner is the person wearing the badge? Next, what are the protocols for giving upvotes and downvotes? How frequently can a person receive an upvote or downvote from the same person? There’s only so much that can be covered in a 44-minute episode, but those questions remained in my mind.
However, I think there were even deeper points to be had in that episode. It was possible to be arrested for not wearing one’s badge. Who does the arresting, and if it’s a pure democracy, what set of laws are there to enforce? The real people in power, however, are the news anchors. I’m certain there were a dozen other things that happened that day of similar offense to that society, but they chose one thing to show the video to everyone. Who picks which stories get that sort of publicity? Because that person is the one with the power.
Additionally, it was abundantly clear how the mob mentality quickly became a part of the problem, and the challenges with basing the court of public opinion on what everyone else has already said. Conversely, the proposal that a voice must be ‘earned’ sounds right at face value, but fails at the next level in that the decision of whether a person has earned a voice is determined either by being appointed or elected, so it’s not quite the contrast it sets out to be. Finally, at the end when they flooded the feed with good news, it was said that nobody fact checks what’s on the feed. Hopefully, that one is self explanatory.

The other episode with its social commentary was the season finale, where Kelly becomes a deity to a planet in the bronze age, but which experiences rapid acceleration of time to the point where it is in the quantum age by the end of the episode. It’s clear that Christianity is the core target of the commentary where the planet’s evolution past religion is both positive and inevitable, as well as unsurprising.
I submit, however, that it’s riddled with plotholes. The child falls without anyone seeing that it happened. No one sees the injury, and no one sees the healing. For the next 700 years, the entire planet’s religion is based upon a single girl’s story for which there are no witnesses and no further contact with Kelly by anyone, and the belief system is the basis of the society? The belief in Kelly becomes exclusive, with no unbelievers shown to war with, yet people kill each other?
The Old Testament narrative has no shortage of examples of people having encounters with God, with witnesses. From the burning bush and the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea to seeing Canaan from a distance, Exodus is filled with miracle after miracle, and the Israelites winning more battles than anyone, with fewer numbers. Throughout the Old Testament, this is the case, and it’s the reason the belief system spent thousands of years being the bedrock of Judaism and Christianity. The “Kelly sees everything and is going to get you” line is intended to resonate with the Christian belief in God’s omnipresence, but that belief stems from God being creator; Kelly did no such thing and there was no basis for a Bronze Age society to attribute a healing to a single girl and also enshrining her as an omnipresent creator. Props to the priest who was willing to let the people decide, but from the moment that convincing a single priest was possible, it was obvious that wasn’t going to go anywhere. It was at that point that I felt the commentary went from exploration to heavy-handedness and persuasiveness at a level even Roddenberry didn’t have in Star Trek.
The reason Christianity is still believed is because there are still personal encounters with God, there are still miracles that take place, and there are prophecies verified to be true hundreds of years after they were written. I understand that not every reader shares these beliefs, and that’s to be expected, but it’s these core tenets upon which the basis of Christianity lives. The end run around all of them makes the parallel fall flat. A 44-minute episode lacks the time to delve into these things in detail, and I can understand that what they were going for was to see the situation through the eyes of Kelly who felt responsible for all the problems of the society. The ending with the statement that the society would eventually grow out of it as some sort of message of hope, I would argue, was also a core goal. Ultimately, the episode attempts to make parallels to Christianity while also basing the whole thing on the unsubstantiated claims of a single child. This setup makes the commentary feel more like a heavy handed fist rattling from McFarlane than encouraging introspection by those who still adhere to such belief systems. By contrast, this sort of commentary was done better in the episode of Star Trek: Voyager “Distant Origin”.

Overall, I’m continuing to look forward to season 2, and am glad it got renewed. Though I think McFarlane’s social commentary tends to toe the line for the sorts of commentary acceptable in current Hollywood (and by extension doesn’t seem to feel very risky or controversial as Star Trek was), The Orville is at its best when it blends its space exploration with humor and effective storytelling.

December 12, 2017 by Philosophy and Faith Uncategorized 0

Why Communicators and Tricorders will never exist…or shouldn’t.

I decided to dust off my copy of the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual, and see what it had to say about the famous communication devices and “exposition boxes” that became as much a part of Star Trek as Klingons and transporters. By what I read, I’m pretty certain they will never exist.

“But Joey! We’ve surpassed comm badges already! They’re called cell phones, and you have one! How can you say they don’t exist?” Well, that depends on how we define “communicator”. A thing that lets someone else who has a thing talk to each other? Sure, cell phones fit that role in the broadest mindset. However, dig just a little bit deeper and you’ll likely agree with me that they are likely to forever remain a plot device, rather than actually existing.

Let’s start with the most obvious example of this: Neither Kirk, nor Picard, nor Sisko pay a Verizon bill, and Janeway was too far away to do so. While cell phones require the PSTN to function, communicators and comm badges clearly do not. Even if we get as close as currently possible – fully decentralized, open source, peer-to-peer voice communication software, the call is still being carried by one’s ISP, rather than communicating directly between the initiator and recipient.

According to the technical manual, the maximum range of a comm badge is 500 kilometers. Even if we cut that down to 100km, that’s still beyond the horizon of virtually any planet that could be landed on by an away team without the gravity being a crippling problem, meaning that communicators can punch through at least some of the curve of a planet. By contrast, current technology would require roughly 5,000 watts of FM transmission power to achieve something even remotely close without a line-of-site, something very seldom seen between sections of an away team engaging in dialogue. Now, to be fair, it’s highly irregular for parties to be more than a mile or two away from each other when using communicators, but while some high quality Motorola walkie-talkies might get a mile range, they require both batteries and antennas which each exceed the size of a comm badge. Moreover, communicators and comm badges only experience static when relevant to the plot – literally no cell phone owner can say that they’ve been able to thoroughly avoid dropped calls or audio dropouts.

Let’s assume that the range issues are addressed by way of “subspace”; the magical portion of the space-time continuum that powers both warp and communications in the Trek universe. The next massive concern is how communicators decide the recipient of the message. When Kirk says, “Kirk to Enterprise”, does everyone in the ship hear it? Just the bridge? Furthermore, the “Kirk to Enterprise” is frequently heard by the recipients. Even if the computer onboard the ship is ascertaining that the message is for them, do away team communicators have that same ability to discern? Ultimately, the future has no concept of ringtones, except one time toward the end of the Voyager episode “Future’s End, Part 1”. The rest of the time, the message is heard ‘on speaker’, making that scene rather strange. In another episode of Voyager, Chakotay calls “to anyone who’s left”, as the ship has been largely taken over by aliens. How does the communication system know to reference explicitly Starfleet crewmen, and do so ‘on speaker’ without the hostile aliens hearing? I hear you all saying, “It’s just a plot device”, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t jive well with the notion that cell phones are akin to the communicators in Star Trek. The amount of technology required to facilitate communication between the communicators, over great distances, establish the recipient, do so without static or interference, and perform all of these tasks without a communication infrastructure beyond the devices themselves, is far beyond anything we presently possess.

Let’s then discuss tricorders, devices that have a sensor for basically-anything, and a tiny display that makes it nearly impossible to display the results which is only eclipsed by the minuscule size of the controls. Sure, today’s phones have gyroscopes, ambient light sensors, cameras, compasses, even temperature and pressure sensors, but how accurate are the readings? Enough for a racing game, sure, but does anyone use the onboard sensors for measuring with scientific accuracy? No, they do not. Would anyone be comfortable with a doctor taking measurements with an iPhone rather than dedicated tools? That’s unlikely as well. There is still a world of difference between the capabilities of a tricorder as a scientific measuring instrument, and the capabilities of current smartphones. As a counterargument, however, it’s surprising how infrequently (if ever) data communications between tricorders and/or the ship itself are used. If the comm badges in TNG are able to communicate 500km, shouldn’t tricorders have some circuitry of that nature implemented as well? They really should be better at that, and there are no shortage of moments where data transmission or nonverbal communication would have been helpful. I’ll close that thought by addressing the idea that my thoughts on that front only stem from pervasive text messaging that was not prevalent at the time of TOS or TNG. To that, I will say that the inclusion of a small CRT display in TOS implies an intended output, and by TNG, there was no shortage of text-based communication happening over BBS systems, IRC, and Usenet. The idea of transmitting messages that way was far from foreign.

The next time you’re watching an episode of Star Trek and think that their handheld devices already exist in more usable ways, the deeper implications illustrate that there is still plenty of work to be done to achieve the levels of functionality we see used to advance the plot.

August 6, 2017 by Computers and Tech Philosophy and Faith 0

The advertising echo chamber

My friend’s mother posted an article on my friend’s wall with respect to a set of privacy settings. As a matter of course, I do tend to read through such articles, since the endless maze of Facebook privacy settings tends to mean it’s well within the realm of possibility that I’ve missed one. I found yet another place where there were settings I’d missed – specifically my set of interests, upon which interest-based ad profiles are created. I proceeded to then remove all the data I could, though I’m quite sure that little, if any, is gone or will go away. My friend’s response to the article was this:
it’s nice getting ads that are relevant to me. If advertising is a necessary evil to keep costs low, I’d prefer to see things that are tailored for me personally.
His response did make me stop to think, as such things tend to.

Targeted ads are great for advertisers. It enables them to spend a bit more per ad while serving overall less ads and giving a higher level of return. I’m not intrinsically opposed to ads; this article in the New York Times sums up the problem perfectly. I held out for as long as I could, but ad overlays, subscribe to our newsletter” interstitials, and Chrome tabs with 400MBytes of used RAM for three paragraphs of text-based content brought me to the point where even I started utilizing ad blockers – and, by contrast, why I will never run ads here. As my friend pointed out, it’s at least partially a win for end users as well – an ad for a restaurant opening halfway across the country is a losing proposition for everyone, as is a Tesla ad for someone in an apartment complex or international air travel for someone without a passport. The fact of the matter is that I can’t blame both consumers and marketers for wanting ads and potential customers to align.

However, is there no utility for generally unrelated ads? I personally don’t use tampons, but knowing a few name brands may be helpful if I ever need to pick them up for whatever reason (or, conversely, know that I’m in the wrong aisle if I’m looking for toothpaste). I might not be financially able to fly to Tahiti between now and the end of the Trump administration, but what if I wanted to go on a more cost effective vacation two years from now? I could assume Florida or SoCal, but there’s no shortage of places to travel domestically. Have you ever stopped to think about your computer’s backup? Carbonite might be the most well-known name at a consumer level, but who knows what tomorrow brings? Altaro and Veeam are excellent. With John Deere getting the ire of farmers as a result of their fight against equipment repair, being aware of the existence of Kubota as a competitor might be worth knowing. If you’re not a homeowner, is there still value in knowing how solar panels are financed, or the types of pipes and other plumbing equipment are available? I’d say so.

Advertising as a whole has been distilled from “trying to educate consumers about a potential need which, conveniently, this product solves”, to “make consumers feel like they’d be better having what we’re selling”. Now yes, this clearly a generalization. There have always been creative ads, as well as ads that tried to appeal using information that were far from star examples of truth in advertising. At the same time, compare this Valtrex commercial and the Wikipedia article on genital herpes (no, I’m not linking it). If Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline can be of the persuasion that TV commercials for fibromyalgia or post-menopausal osteoporosis are worth airing, then I submit that there is a use for advertising that provides awareness over stressing immediate purchases.

It is for these reasons that I submit that perhaps an echo chamber of highly curated ads based on existing known needs may contribute to a lack of diversity of thought. I fully realize that leaving it up to the advertising industry to spend money on ad space to increase the overall understanding of our society isn’t exactly a winning expectation, but I also believe that interacting solely with like-minded people, seeing ads solely for things that are deemed relevant based on stated interests or activities, and interacting primarily with businesses who cater primarily to that particular group, ends up becoming a monoculture. If you want to see what I’m talking about, ask your friend to borrow their phone and spend 15 minutes browsing the internet, and see if their ads are anything like yours.

I removed all my interests from Facebook, because I don’t want targeted ads. While I’m sure they’ll target me anyway, I’d rather have at least a cursory awareness of what Nordstrom has on sale or new carbon fiber fishing poles, than to get an endless barrage of ads from Motorola or Samsung regarding phones I already know about.

But hey – if my thoughts on the matter were widespread, targeted ads wouldn’t be sustaining the internet as they are.

May 3, 2017 by Computers and Tech Philosophy and Faith 1

A.I. Cupid?

The interwoven topics of data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data are common topics of discussion amidst some technical forums I frequent. For the handful of regular readers here, you know that most of those topics fall under the “#DoNotWant” category. It’s this sort of thing that causes things like the purchase of wild bird seed or the time of day you pay your bill to affect your credit rating. Data mining is how Target found out a teenage girl was pregnant before her parents. Self-driving cars are great until that realization hits that you’ll never own the car¹ no matter how much you pay for it.

But despite my major aversion to all of these things, I still think there’s at least some good that’s possible. Watson is helping to diagnose strange diseases at rates and accuracies that rival the most skills doctors. A more crude form of AI has helped over 200,000 people successfully fight parking tickets. And I wonder if online dating could be one such area.

If you haven’t had the privilege of trying an online dating site, consider yourself fortunate. Nobody really likes it; it’s really the cesspool of humanity. Guys commonly open with crude remarks and make girls feel uncomfortable, girls commonly fill their picture slots with heavily-filtered duckface selfies at the expense of actually writing a profile, and the fact that ghosting is an actual thing done by both sides is almost as sad a reflection on our society as the fact that most of those conversations started with a “swipe right” in the first place. It’s really a pretty sad state of affairs when 59% of US adults consider this a “good way” to meet people to date.

So, in what sort of ways could AI help with this task? Let’s start by coming up with metadata with which to help influence matching. Are you a night person that can’t stand morning people who expect coherent thoughts (or worse – excitement) by 6AM? Are you a morning person with a group of friends who keep inviting you to things well past your bedtime? Logon times and frequency could help match this. What about profile length? Does a given user prefer lengthy profiles to succinct ones? Does the quantity of pictures of a potential match have an impact on their swipe direction? What about the use of a mobile app or website vs. a desktop, or the type of device? Does the user log in multiple times daily, or are they a once-a-month type? Is a given user more likely to send the first message? What about sending the last message (or failing to do so)? How long does an individual communicate through the service before providing e-mail or phone number? All of these are ways that the usage of a dating site itself could help narrow down the possibilities.

Then, there’s the more invasive sort of thing. Does a user prefer particular colors in photos? Are there common words in the profiles of their likes and dislikes? On the flipside, if a user is consistently declined, do they have anything in common with others who have been declined by the same set of users (especially ones who have been liked by that user) that can help optimize their profile? Could this information even help provide an “estimated interest level” and prioritize high-interest matches? Could users be penalized for ghosting or crude remarks, or conversely given preferred status for positive discussions? Let’s go for broke and incorporate an analysis of e-mail accounts and social media profiles, or even Amazon purchase histories, Netflix watching lists, and browser history to get the most complete possible profile of a person. Comparing that level of data between two people may make it entirely possible to get it right on the first swipe.

Yente is a well-known character in Fiddler on the Roof for being a matchmaker, and she was good at it in part because she knew everything about everyone, for good or for ill. The art of matchmaking requires more than simply a few photos and a laundry list of favorite foods and movies (or, heaven forbid, a collection of emojis) to be effective. I think that such a system could be effective, more so than the current situation as it presently stands. The question is whether letting a computer program mine vast amounts of data to become a 21st century Yente by determining the true nature of a person is the sort of tradeoff that makes the data collection worth it.

For some, it would be. And I submit that there is a fortune to be made as a result.

April 17, 2017 by Philosophy and Faith 0

“Calm Down”

A meme has made its rounds on the internet on more than one occasion. It reads, “Never in the history of calming down has anyone ever actually calmed down by being told to calm down”. A variant of it reads, “Telling a girl to calm down is like trying to baptize a cat”. Now, there is definitely something to this concept, but while most people just take the laugh at face value and move on to the next adorable kitten, I did what I normally do – spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating the notion. Here’s what I came up with…

Most people have a normal state of ‘calm’. Sure, Bill up in the psych wing at General Hospital might not be, but if you ride the subway to work you can probably walk from one end of the train to the other and not find someone going bananas. So, if most people are ‘calm’ by default, then the person who is not calm has some sort of external force preventing them from being calm, and what is being demonstrated is the result of that force on them.

When interacting with others in that state, their agitation will be apparent and relevant to those with whom they interact. Sometimes, saying “calm down” is the result of trying to get someone to speak slowly enough to understand what is being said so that assistance can be provided (a 911 operator would be a go-to example of this scenario). In most cases, however, the phrase “calm down” is not dealing with that sort of a situation. Usually it has a far more nefarious and even hurtful undertone.

“Calm down” can frequently imply that it is the agitated person’s responsibility to force themselves to act in a manner contrary to how they feel. It also indicates that the second person does not place the same value on the situation which has caused the person’s state of unrest, which can imply that the person is a poor judge of a situation, or that assistance will not be provided because the two people cannot agree on the proper value to place on that situation, resulting in further agitation. The person has basically been told, “I don’t care about what’s bothering you, I’m not going to help you resolve the matter, and further interaction requires you to act in a manner contrary to your feelings right now”. When phrased this way, it is far more apparent why saying “calm down” is not the way to diffuse a situation.

“So what do we say instead, Joey?” I thought you’d never ask. “What’s wrong” is usually a good start – it implies that you are listening to what’s troubling the other person. If you’re unable to help, say so, but make it clear that it’s because you’re unable to, rather than unwilling. If you are able to help, be sure to ask first – imposing help upon someone who doesn’t desire it will likely become more agitated because their assessment of the situation is such that the complexity has increased, rather than decreased. Sometimes, having a platform on which to state the problem out loud is enough – think about the times when a joke “sounded better in your head”, and consider that the phenomenon of something being more clear when being spoken aloud happens in other situations as well. The brain uses different sections for speech, which is why speaking aloud can greatly assist in solving the problem. Finally, even if you assess a problem to be far less urgent than the person speaking, ensure they know you are not simply dismissing it, but have given it actual thought and consideration yourself. It may not help in the moment, but it will ultimately assist in the relationship as a whole.

Keep calm, and carry on.

February 10, 2017 by Philosophy and Faith 1

Fireproof: The Movie Loved By Christians Who Don’t Have High Standards

At the behest of a reader and stemming from an in person discussion, I present to you my rant.

For back story, Fireproof is a 2008 movie from the Christian movie production studio Sherwood Pictures. It is intended to show God’s grace and providence as a couple headed for divorce makes a last ditch effort to avoid the fate. I think the premise is noble, and I’m certainly not opposed to what it’s ultimately trying to say. “It means well”, though I’m certain anyone who read the title of this blog post knows what’s coming. I’m certainly not entirely on board with Jim Sterling’s critique in its entirety, though you’re going to see some overlap…

Let’s get past the terrible visual effects of the houses on fire (not once did I ever believe anything was aflame), and the awkward dialog that isn’t rivaled by half the Writing Prompts on Reddit, Kirk Cameron’s inability to actually act like someone who’s upset with their wife, and focus on the massive plot point problems.

First off, in the initial “I want out” scene, Cameron very clearly avoids using the word “bitch”. Why was this? Because it was a Christian movie…and we can’t have swearing in a Christian movie! Nevermind that they were both unsaved at that point, they were talking about divorce and an allusion was made to causing her physical harm, and Cameron expresses a litany of derogatory remarks toward her…but the use of an expletive is where they apparently drew the line. This sort of double standard illustrates a chronic problem I see amidst Christian culture that while the Bible says, “Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth”, unwholesome words did proceed from his mouth, but somehow what was actually said was acceptable, while the word “bitch” was not. While we’re focusing on this scene, we’ll keep in mind a very important thing that happened: SHE was the one who said “I want out”. Not him. This will become important later.

So Cameron, still an unsaved person at this point in the movie, goes to his dad who says to do ‘The Love Dare’. Now, that scene right there so heavily wreaked of product placement it seemed like it was a scene right out of The Truman Show…but whatever. To be fair, my bias might have something to do with the fact that most displays at Christian bookstores at the time had the movie and the book displayed right next to each other. So, unsaved man agrees to follow a book firmly rooted in scripture and Christian principles for…reasons, I guess. “But he really loved her inside!” Yes, yes, I know…but the kind of things The Love Dare encouraged him to do were massive steps of faith for someone who doesn’t already have some level of faith in God, and it wasn’t until far later in the movie that his wife expresses any form of positive response. Remember: she said “I want out” and he has no faith in Christ at this point, so there’s basically no reason for him to agree to it…but we’ll assume that God was working in his heart anyway, because plot.

Meanwhile, she’s found this doctor guy who treats her like a valuable person, a heavy contrast to her husband. And, to the shock of no one, she’s drawn to him. And…they kiss. Why does she do this? Because she feels no love from her husband – literally every woman I’ve spoken to, saved or not, has resonated with the appeal of a wealthy doctor taking an interest in them when their husband is busy giving her mostly-dead flowers. As a side note, literally no guy I have ever known who is making even a halfhearted attempt to express appreciation for their significant other is dumb enough to give below-gas-station-quality flowers. It is perfectly possible to take the same $20 and go to a supermarket and get something far more presentable. While the scene was intended to illustrate laziness, it came across as the opposite, because finding flowers that dead takes effort.

So, through some heavy-handed parallels with his firefighting career, and dialog about this with his firefighting buddies – y’know…because avoiding a looming divorce is exactly the kind of thing that people talk about at a fire station. Again, we’re dealing with unsaved people…save the one-dimensional guy who is only there to illustrate the perfect marriage and say “it’s hard work sometimes” when showing zero struggles and a wife who responds positively to him.

Now, as the wife and the doctor are getting closer, our unsaved husband continues on The Love Dare with no feedback (I lied: he gets feedback in the form of a longer to-do list). Then, he has his ‘Come to Jesus’ moment. Incredible a gift as Christ’s salvation is, Christian movies have distilled it into this highly cliché moment that is the second most predictable scene in a Christian movie – the first being the “I don’t need God” guy dying in a car accident toward the end but before the ultimately-happy ending for the saved people. In fairness, film does have limits to how exactly one can visualize a change in heart. That brings us to the third most cliché scene in the Christian movie genre…

The post-salvation cleansing montage! Yes, he got rid of his computer because of his porn addiction – y’know, the porn addition his wife called him out on before, (sarcasm warning) because she totally wasn’t having sexual fantasies about her doctor friend up until this point, and as we all know, lustful fantasies are only sinful if they involve the internet. Glad he took a baseball bat to the screen, his Quicken files or wedding photos or any other pieces of helpful, useful, important data might have survived! (/sarcasm) Or did he only have a computer for porn and do nothing of value on it at all, even in 2008? If he was using Turbotax and didn’t have a backup of his tax records, he’s just committed a crime and he’ll probably need those tax records in divorce court, but that’s not a big deal, I guess. Anyway, he doubled down on cutting out all the things that were getting in the way of his focus on his marriage, even though it’s several weeks into “The Love Dare” and she still hasn’t given him any indication that his efforts were anything but futile. Again, this is bothersome because of its underlying implication: either Cameron has attained massive amounts of faith two weeks into his salvation, or we have lazy script writers who treated reconciliation as inevitable. Look, I’m all about faith that can move mountains, and it’s incredible to see. I’ve witnessed it in my own life, in the life of friends, and growing up in church means that hearing such testimonies are wonderfully common. I just don’t expect it in two weeks’ time from someone facing a divorce with no indication that the divorce isn’t inevitable. Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem with the building materials in one hand, and a weapon in the other (Neh 4:17), and it would not be any less an expression of faith for Cameron to continue The Love Dare while simultaneously preparing for the divorce.

Now, we get to the dying father-in-law whose surgery, conveniently, cost the exact amount he just so happened to have had in savings for his boat. Anyone who didn’t predict exactly what happened as soon as the numbers were revealed to be so elegantly aligned gets to go sit in the corner and think about that. Anyway, our friend the wife believes her doctor friend just gave $24,000 to save her dad, and that a “thank you lunch” was going to settle the books. Sorry, I’ve yet to meet a saved person who would do something like that with a tenth of that amount, and she just assumes a “thank you so much” is going to cover that, in that context? No, it doesn’t. Her almost comical inability to express even the slightest skepticism in the doctor’s motives is the only reason why we have the big reveal at the end. That level of egregious naiveté went beyond lazy writing to outright insulting.

We then come to find out that he gave up his boat to save her dad, and we’re all floored by the level of sacrifice shown here, as well we should be…because this is either the most incredible demonstration of faith in God ever scripted into a film, or he is so royally incompetent and thoroughly lacking wisdom or common sense that he should probably run for public office. I know I keep harping on this, but it’s very important: she said “I want out”. Anyone here been through divorce court and have the husband win? Especially the kind of husband acting the way he was up until the past week? No. No you have not. She has not said anything indicating that the divorce papers he found on the counter were negotiable. As far as he knew, he was going to end up in divorce court despite all of his efforts to make things right. If he had half a brain cell, he’d know he was going to need that money for his legal fees. If not the fees directly, that savings account is guaranteed to be a prime target for the settlement because “she paid all the bills”. If she can prove that, the judge isn’t stopping at simply giving her half. Spent or not, that pile of money has got a big red bullseye on it once the court proceedings start. Divorce court doesn’t look at money you presently have available to you, or how you spent it, the judge looks at gross earnings over the course of the marriage.

Moreover, it was rather miraculous that the father-in-law recovered, and did so as readily as he did. Really, it was more likely that the father-in-law would have had complications which would have left them in massive medical debt, divorce court would have been how Cameron spent his accumulated vacation time, and if his $24,000 nest egg wasn’t spent either writing checks to her or his lawyer, it would have been quite helpful to cover rent for his studio apartment while he gets his pay garnished through alimony checks. He’ll likely end up living at the firehouse for quite some time. Is it any less faith to have a conversation to check to see if his wife’s mind has changed at all? Isn’t is simply wisdom to ask if she’s willing to give him a bit more time to prove that he’s truly making changes that we, the audience, know he is? The audience knows that she has been softening and reconsidering, but he doesn’t. While some might say “well duh! of course it’s not faith if you know things are going to go more smoothly!” I’ll retort, “at what point in the movie do we see God giving him a clear sign that it was His will to do what he did?” It’s true faith if it’s clear God called him to clean out his bank account and help someone in need. It is a gamble if he’s “doing the right thing because of convenient circumstances” with no clarity one way or the other. If he’s helping his father-in-law with the express intent of his wife ultimately finding out as she does in the film, then it’s not faith, and it’s not altruism, it’s very expensive manipulation with a coincidentally positive outcome. No matter how this act is pitched, it’s got massive problems in direct conflict with biblical principles, but since the marriage is restored and the father-in-law survives, this is overlooked.

What does his wife do upon hearing that the surgery got paid for by her husband? Well *then* she tells her man candy that she’s going to remain faithful to her husband – the kind of thing that any unsaved, secular humanist woman would do. Her husband not treating her well established a vacuum for doctor friend to fill, and his change in behavior removed the emotional need for her to have a guy on the side. There was ZERO sacrifice on her end – the doctor was used while he was needed and then let go. She refused to acknowledge effort and intermediate steps, she did nothing but point out her husband’s failures and shortcomings, she didn’t show any sign of reciprocity toward him (instead putting that effort into her man on the side), and this is all a result of her not only saying that she wanted out, but going to a lawyer without him to get the paperwork for it while actively pursuing an emotional bond with her doctor friend? Let’s call it what it was: she cheated on her husband until it was convenient for her not to. No, she didn’t have sex…but I’ll debate anyone who says that a physical sexual act is cheating, but actively pursuing another person as an emotional replacement while intentionally and consistently giving your husband the cold shoulder isn’t. She asked for the divorce, got the paperwork, didn’t show her husband any level of appreciation for his attempts to change before he bet the farm, cheated on him, and somehow she’s the victim in all this because he yells and wants a boat? Sorry, I’m fresh out of sympathy.

…And, once his sacrifice comes to light and she finds the book, she completely reconsiders, takes the divorce off the table, puts her wedding ring back on, they have their slow motion silhouette kiss in the firehouse, she has her come-to-Jesus moment, and they live happily ever after. Of course the filmmakers wanted to express some form of equality, so they had Cameron’s father character indicate that the roles were reversed when they did the love dare. I’ll simply take them on faith at this point, because there’s about a thousand questions I have regarding this arrangement…but really, it again felt more like a sales pitch to ensure that it was clear that women could try the things in the book, too.

Now, all of that being said, I really, really am glad for all the positivity the movie has expressed. I am grateful for all the hearts and lives it touched. I am grateful that there is even a forum where people go to help each other get through the more difficult dares in place. I believe The Love Dare is ultimately a good thing for Christian culture, I believe it’s a good thing for our society, and I absolutely believe it’s scripture-inspired…I truly and sincerely believe that God can use anything to advance His kingdom and reveal His glory. However, Fireproof is incredibly one-sided, tenuous in its adherence to scriptural principles, sets unreasonable expectations for both sides, is imbalanced in how it assigns responsibility, and wraps everything in a neat little bow in order to ensure that everyone who saw it got the warm and fuzzies when it was over – because if there’s anything that is more cliché in a Christian movie than a come-to-Jesus montage, it’s a perfectly neat and thoroughly predictable ending. After all, if the movie ended with Cameron’s wife following through with the divorce anyway, Cameron declaring bankruptcy, the father-in-law dying, and Cameron having to rebuild his life from the ground up being a missionary in a third world country that lacked running water, The Love Dare wouldn’t have hit the New York Times’ bestseller list and churches wouldn’t be showing it at their annual Married Couples Weekend Getaways.

Edit: Made some grammatical changes and rewordings for clarity.
Second Edit: Some more clarity changes.

November 3, 2016 by Philosophy and Faith 3

Beware your biases…and how they’re being reinforced

Go and read these two articles. I’ll wait.

http://lifehacker.com/how-sites-like-google-and-facebook-put-you-in-political-1787659102

http://lifehacker.com/this-graphic-explains-20-cognitive-biases-that-affect-y-1730901381

Did you read them both? Good. Now go read them again. I’ll wait.

Did you read them a second time? Half of you didn’t, and the other half didn’t read them the first time, so I’ll summarize.

The first article describes the fact that Facebook and Google tell you what they think you want to hear. Are you conservative? Don’t expect any liberal news in your Facebook feed. Are you liberal? Don’t expect Google News to show you conservative articles. Maybe you’re a person who prefers an echo chamber. That’s your right, but I would encourage you to at least recognize that it is a right you are exercising.

The second article is a bit less social media specific, and talks about the psychology behind our own self-built echo chamber. Are you more worried about being killed by ISIS, or by a car accident? Most people are worried about ISIS, but the ISIS death toll, as of January, is a bit under 19,000 people, exactly half as many who died in car accidents just in 2015. This is an example of “Salience”, number 16 on the list of cognitive biases we face as humans.

It’s vitally important to be aware of these things when making decisions, be it what cell phone to get, or who to vote for. Know what’s manipulating the information you’re using to make a decision…and whether you’re really making a decision in the first place.

October 16, 2016 by Microblog Philosophy and Faith 0