Discussions and the power of language

Recently, I have followed the Armikrog Kickstarter campaign. Doug TenNapel, one of the guys behind the project, and the creator of Earthworm Jim and Neverhood, among other things, is against gay marriage. He also did an interview where he said some things that admittedly could have been said better.

I am going to do a defense of Doug here, because in cases like this I almost always root for the underdog. And even if I myself am a Christian, I hope that anyone who reads this will consider the merit of what I say in its own right. My whole experience with this Kickstarter campaign and the discussions that have been surrounding it have been the catalysts of this post, but the points are actually things that I have been thinking for a while, and should largely be applicable to the wider world. I will try as hard as I can not to step on any toes, but to say what I think is right.

Yet another caveat before I start: I do realize this is a tough issue for many homosexuals. I realize that there are whole lives of oppression, judgement and ostracizing involved in the issue. And perhaps the situation is too young to have stabilized, and it's too much to expect the discussion to not bound into the irrational when there are so many feelings involved. However, it seems to me there is a tendency now that those who have been oppressed for their sexual orientation now are gaining legitimacy and with it, more power. And anyone who has power has a responsibility to use that power in a good way. What I'm going to try here is to point out tendencies towards this not being the case.

The first thing that springs to mind is how abused language can get sometimes. I am in particular thinking of the term 'Homophobe' - a word packed with meaning, in a small bundle. It's not clear exactly what it's supposed to mean. First of all, I resent putting '-phobe' or '-phobia' at the end of words unless they're actually referring to a psychological disorder. Using the word in this way almost invariably is a way to discredit your opposition without rational argument, and nothing is more infuriating than getting discredited irrationally. One might even say that people who use such terms have a 'discussiophobia' - a (irrational) fear of rational discussion. But I digress. The point is, calling someone a homophobe when you know nothing about their motivations or beliefs is incredibly respectless (for more on what those motivations or beliefs could be, see below). To me, the term 'homophobe' is so full of meaning that it is meaningless. It cannot be brought into a discussion in the hopes of continuing in a rational manner.

Another meaningful but meaningless word is 'hate speech'. What in the world is that supposed to mean? If you say you hate gay people, or something that is synonymous, then yes, you're engaging in hate speech. But usually that's not when it is being used. Many of Doug's statements are being labelled as 'hate speech', although nothing of what he says condones hating gay people or promotes hating them (unless you consider being against gay marriage to be synonymous to hating gay people. But then, I think you need to look up the word 'hate' in some kind of dictionary.)

The second thing is how important context is. In the abovementioned interview, Doug and the interviewer had been chatting for a long while, in an informal style (if I remember correctly). He then said some remarks about gay marriage and he used some poor analogies to illustrate his point. I agree that he should have thought twice about using those analogies specifically. However. The way those things were taken out of context and quoted in various social media and gamer articles, etc. was pathetic. Any article that purports to write more than five sentences on the topic really should include at least the immediate context. Without it, it becomes a screamfest where those with the best quotes win.

The third thing is the comparisons of homosexuality to things like paedophilia, incest, zoophilia, etc: In some discussions about homosexuality, some of these other kinds of philias will be mentioned, and usually it results in massive chastise from everyone (at least the pro-gay people involved in the discussion), since "you cannot compare homosexuality with [insert some philia here] - they're totally different".

However. Usually the person who's bringing up this other philia isn't really comparing homosexuality to other philias. In the discussions I have seen, it's usually a matter of trying to take the statement "Homosexuality is on the same footing as heterosexuality" (or some paraphrasing of this statement) to its logical conclusion: Usually this statement is accompanied by 'because two people are in love, and that's all that matters'. And the point is then: Ok, let's try to apply this logic. Until homosexuality was accepted, used to be that 'all that mattered' was that 'two people of the opposite sex are in love'. However, there are several other implied restrictions. I'll try to exhaust the restrictions in the following sentence: "All that matters is that exactly two individuals of the species Homo Sapiens that are not closely related and whose age is no less than 16 that are alive and of the opposite sex are in love". So why are we removing the 'of the opposite sex' clause if we're not willing to remove any of the others? You could say that because the same sex clause is the only clause that wouldn't hurt someone. But this is blatantly false. You could for instance imagine allowing siblings that have undergone sterilization to get married - noone would get hurt. You could allow someone to marry someone else post-mortem as long as the person who died signed a contract saying it was his or her will. You could imagine an animal not being hurt by being married to a person. You could allow more than two persons to marry.

I really take issue with the "if you're against gay marriage, you're a homophobe" logic. It's a black and white logic that belongs in some kind of fascist state, but not in a democracy with free speech. If you're against gay marriage, you're against the concept of two people of the same sex going through the ritual we call marriage. That's it. Now, the reasons behind such a stance are varied, and some people probably are what some other people could legitimately call homophobes (or at least homo-dislikers) - as in, they don't like people who are homosexual, period. However, most other people, even those who are against gay marriage, get along fine with people who are homosexual, and don't hate those. In fact, I want to stop using the word "hate" here, because it's a really strong term and usually the feelings that are associated with this cannot be well described by this word.

So what reasons can people have for being against gay marriage that are not related to an irrational hatred towards homosexuals? Some people think it's just 'wrong'. That is, somewhere in their gut, there is a feeling of wrongness about the concept of homosexuality, and they're not particularly inclined to suffocate that feeling. And then you might say "Well, those people are the same kind of people who thought interracial marriage was a bad thing, and they were clearly wrong!"

Well, no. They weren't "clearly wrong", because there are no criteria upon which to base a verdict of correctness, unless you demand that everyone should be a consequentialist - that is, racial intermarriage has had no significant negative consequences, and lots of positive ones, so it must be the right thing to do. And being a consequentialist is totally fine, but there must be room for other types of ethics as well. Some people base their ethics system upon how they feel about some issue. And saying that only consequentialists are allowed opinions on some matter is inherently undemocratic, so such people must be allowed their say as well. Then there is another set of ethics, coming from the religious sphere. And this is more critical, in my mind. Especially when it comes to allowing in-church gay marriage, or even forcing churches to marry gay people, I can see why people would react. The point in that case is this:

• A religious person could believe that the most important thing in the world is to serve God.
• Part of serving God is trying to live as He wishes us to live.
• There are parts of the Bible that indicate He doesn't wish us to live in homosexual relationships

Now, then, imagine that your church not only starts saying that homosexuality isn't that big of a deal, but even starts sanctifying it. As in, saying that God actually wants us to do this. Where did they get the authority to say such a thing? How can they say this in good conscience?

And then the most cited answer is that Jesus told us to love one another, and so when two people are in love, we should sanctify it. Now, I'm not claiming to know what God wants, so I'm not going to say that people who think that God wants us to sanctify homosexuality are wrong. But I will point out that this particular line of reasoning is clearly wrong.

The main thing to say is that there are several kinds of 'love' talked about in the Bible. Usually, what Jesus and the apostles are talking about is 'agape', unconditional love, and that which is to be strived for by all Christians - as in love for your neighbor. The 'love' that we're talking about in the context of marriage is usually affectionate and erotic love, which is something else. Admittedly, the Church has done its part in confusing these terms, since we usually quote some passage by Paul in weddings which talk about the virtues of love - but this is agape, and shouldn't really be used in that context, except to say that you should also love your partner unconditionally as a Christian. Other than that, it has little to do with two people being in love. And this is why you cannot simply say that when two people are in love, God likes it, no matter who they are. Maybe He does, but that's not the point of much of the Bible, at least.

The last thing I can think of that I would like to rid these debates of is the concept that the people who are against gay marriage somehow are on a 'lower plane' of intelligence. Comments such as 'There is no point in discussing further with you, because you're obviously stuck in a prehistoric way of thinking' or the like can sometimes be called for, but more often than not when I see it in use it just serves to give the impression that you have run out of good arguments yourself and use this as a way to invalidate your opponent because of that fact. Admittedly, this is a more general problem, but in the gay marriage debate I more often than not see the proponents of gay marriage assuming that they're somehow more enlightened than their counterparts.

Clearly, I have been defending mostly one part of the debate in this post, and as I mentioned at the beginning, this is because I tend to side with the underdog. However, it is also because I really cannot stand it when a debate revolves around strawmen and misunderstandings that arise because of lack of appreciation of context. Granted, both sides are guilty of this, but as I see it, the pro-gay marriage side at this point is the more powerful part (in the arenas where I tend to be located, at least - I'm not saying that pro-gayism is the majority in the world or anything like that), and so they have more of a responsibility to do their debating properly, as I see it.

Bureaucracy and object-oriented programming

Today, as I had to grapple with certain aspects of real-life bureaucracy I was struck by the similarities between bureaucracy and object-oriented programming. I did a search, and found this:

Five (good) lessons the government teaches us about object-oriented programming.

I suppose there are some concepts in there that are outdated (in some communities) - for instance, I have the impression that in Python, the encapsulation concept isn't thought of as that central (cf. the 'consenting adults' paradigm). But still, the article makes good points, I think.

I think the main difference between oo programming and bureaucracy, or rather, why these concepts work so well in one case and not so well in the other, is that humans when working together as in a bureaucracy is not remotely like a logical machine. One cannot trust the output from one 'object'. The processing times are much larger. And the instantiation overhead is way too expensive in bureaucracies - people have to learn to cope with new regulations, departments, and so on.

I wonder if this can be extended somehow.. is it possible to make a model of real-life bureaucratic processing based on other programming paradigms, like a procedural programming one? If I have time at some point, I'll try to think about this more.

Context in grading

This is another grading-related post, but it's also about context, which is one of my favourite terms.

I believe context is extremely important. Understanding context is what keeps humans from being machines. I think at least eighty percent of interpersonal conflict comes from disregarding or misunderstanding the context. Probably I will say something on this later.

But this post will be on context when grading. I don't have that much to say on the topic, but I needed to point out that when you grade exams, the ultimate goal is to assess whether the student has grasped the curriculum or not.

A person who is bureaucratic by nature (i.e. has a tendency to ignore context) will simply look at whether the student has written down the correct answer (in the natural sciences, that is). If it's not on the paper, it is irrelevant for the grading process.

And by doing so, the bureaucrat has failed to accomplish the goal of grading - namely to assess the student's grasp of the curriculum.

That is because what is written is not the only source of information available to the grader. Being a human, the grader also has access to the context of what is written.

As an example: If a student, during an explanation of some kind, uses the wrong word for a key term, the bureaucrat will automatically see that as an error. Don't get me wrong - it might be an error, but only insofar as it demonstrates a lack of understanding by the student. How to we ascertain this? By examining the context. If a student otherwise clearly shows what he/she is talking about, demonstrating an excellent command of the subject matter, then this error in wording shouldn't be taken as a symptom of lack of understanding, but simply as a symptom of momentary forgetfulness. However, if, along with this error, the student writes an explanation which shows that he/she has just been memorizing the curriculum, not really understanding what is going on, the error can be taken as a symptom of lack of understanding. In other words, the context determines whether this error should be penalized or not!

More on context later.

Dancing

I dance. It's a partner dance, and it is a source of great joy. I can heartily recommend learning to dance, especially a partner dance.

Someone once described dancing as 'illustrating the music'. This I find to be a beautiful and accurate description. Listening to the music, trying to anticipate what's coming, and then doing something that you think fits to that, is a lot of fun.

There is also the joy of finding a 'connection' with your partner. Sometimes, when you dance, something 'clicks' and you and your partner are able to read each other, complementing each other's moves. This is close to being a transcendental experience. It's as if you're drawing something on paper with another person, and you both know what you're going to draw, so the lead draws the main structure, and the follow embellishes the structure, turning it into something beautiful.

This experience does, though, require some skill, both for the follow and the lead. I think there are two types of skill required: Motoric skill (being able to control your body) and creative skill. I will embellish on the latter below.

When you first start dancing, you learn 'turns', which are moves or short 'dance modules', if you like, that you can string together while dancing. Learning turns is vital, especially if you're a lead. However, one can easily get into the mindset that 'in order to become a good dancer, I have to learn a lot of turns'. This is incorrect - or rather, it is correct, but not for the reason you think.

Some of their rules can be bent. Others... can be broken.

Learning turns is an important means to another end, it's not an end in itself. The true end in dancing is to be able to illustrate the music in exactly the way you want yourself. Turns can help you on the way to that goal, but eventually, if you insist on only doing 'turns' that you have learned before, they will constrain your dancing. At some point, you will find yourself in the situation where you know that you want to illustrate the music in a specific way, but you find that you don't know the turn to do that. And that is the point at which you must start to break free from the turns. You must take what you know, based on doing turns, and turning that into creative music-illustration.

 The above is probably true of all creative endeavors - you learn the ropes, but in order to be truly creative you have to understand that the ropes are structures that eventually will constrain you.

Assigning grades

In my series of extremely interesting grading-related posts, I want to raise a question about the assignment of grades.

Namely, how on earth are you supposed to assign grades? The ideal, at least in my institution, is that the grade distribution should be Gaussian after removing the fail grades. So far, there are three "schemes" I can think of:

• Giving grades based on some "objective" scale - i.e., if students get ninety percent or more correct on their exam, they get an A, a B if it's between eighty and ninety, and so on.
• Total relative adjustment of the scale: The top ten percent of the students gets an A, the next twenty percent gets a B, and so on.
• A "hybrid" solution. You find natural cutoff points that are not too far away from the "objective" scale so that the number of people who get an A and so on are approximately correctly distributed.

The first option is the most ideal one. It is also the one most likely to give rubbish results, the reason being that there is no such thing as an objective scale. First of all, an exam is in itself a random sample of questions based on the curriculum (at least in the natural sciences), not a complete assessment of the knowledge of the student. Second of all, what the teacher thinks the students should know is not what the students actually know. Sometimes a question is harder to answer than the teacher thought. To think that an objective scale like that can actually exist is naive. Finally, unless the teacher is actually the perfect intellect, the resulting distribution won't be Gaussian. I will concur, though, that in the case of social sciences and the humanities, where the exam's score isn't as easy to determine in terms of right/wrong answers, this scheme might be preferred. Also, in low-attendance courses, it might also be possible to actually take the time to give a well-founded total percentage instead of just averaging over the percentages per question.

The second one is the most appealing to me, at least when the number of students taking the course is large, which is when you would expect something like a Gaussian distribution anyway. The main criticism against this scheme is that the grades become relative, so that an A one year is different from an A the next year. I posit that this is a problem with all of the above schemes. The "objective" scheme will be subject to variation because the teacher is not God, and because you typically don't give the same exam year after year. There is a point at which the second scheme will give larger variations than the objective scheme, but as long as the number of students are high, the total relative adjustment scheme will be more robust than the objective scheme.

The third option I think is an ok compromise if you feel uneasy about the total adjustment scheme. I dislike it because of its non-automated nature - i.e. even once you have assigned a percentage to an exam, you still have to make subjective judgements. Also, it seems to me this method is prone to even more arbitraryness than either of the two previous ones.

It is worth to note that most grading systems explain grades in terms of level of understanding - i.e., an A means that "the student has an excellent command of the subject" etc. In these terms, the objective scheme is the preferred one - there should be no a posteriori tinkering with the results based on the distributions! However - it's impossible to a priori know where to draw the line. If you say that an A should be ninety percent correct or more, then you might end up with no students getting an A because your standards were too high. You might say "well, that's too bad for the students - we cannot lower the bar just because the students do badly." But the point is that you don't know whether you're lowering the bar, because the concept of an ideal 'objective' test is flawed from the outset! If you base your grades on the actual empirical distribution, there still will be incentive for students to do well, because only the best ten percent of them will get an 'A'.

Ideally, then, one should change the whole meaning of the grading system. Instead of saying that grades reflect some kind of absolute skill level (which is a flawed concept anyway, unless you spend extreme amounts of time or unless the number of students is low), the grades should simply reflect which percentile you ended up in. I.e. an 'A' should just mean that the student was among the top ten percent of the class, and so on.

I'm not sure yet what we'll end up using for these exams, although we have used the third approach before. If I have the time, I will write some code to do some statistics on the results of this one to see if there are interesting patterns to be found.

Degrees of procrastination

The other day, I was supposed to start grading papers but ended up spending the whole evening watching YouTube videos from some TV show.

Procrastination is familiar to everyone, so I'm not going to talk much about what it is and to what degree that particular phenomenon is annoying me personally. I am more interested in combatting it.

That is, if it is possible to combat it. Is it possible to avoid procrastinating when you have a dreary task you have to do before you can do something you really want?

If it is possible, I think doing so is going to require a mix of several techniques. One technique that I think could be handy, but haven't really tried yet, is procrastinating
to a lesser degree.

For instance - as mentioned above, I was supposed to be grading papers but got stuck watching all the videos I could find from the particular TV show I found interesting that afternoon. Whether I found the TV show interesting in itself or whether it got more interesting because of the drearyness of the task that I was supposed to do, I don't know.

Big on inventing - not so big on procrastinating.

But what I realized was that there were so many things I could rather have been doing in that time - things that were less dreary than what I was really supposed to be doing, while still way more productive than watching YouTube videos. For instance, I could have done some Scheme programming to learn that better, or I could have written blog posts, or working on that music playlist manager I have been thinking about, etc. That would have been a good compromise between my desire to procrastinate the exam grading and my need/desire to develop as a human being.

So why didn't I? Because of the nature of procrastinating. I didn't set out with the goal of watching YouTube all afternoon. In the beginning, I just felt like watching a couple of videos. After watching a couple of videos, I just wanted to finish watching the videos from that particular show. Of course I didn't research whether that was actually feasible to do within a reasonable amount of time, which it of course wasn't. I ended up watching videos until bedtime.

The point of the above: I don't know until after it has happened that I have been procrastinating. So it's all well and good in retrospect to say that I could have done something else that would have been more productive, but I was already going to do something else - I was going to do the actual task at hand. It just... didn't happen.

Which leads to the conclusion that procrastination can't be fought. At least with this technique. At least with this technique alone. But maybe, by combining this 'lesser evils' concept with other methods, it actually can be possible to do something about it? This is something I will try to explore, and I also think this blog will make it easier to do so.

In retrospect, this post... I don't know. It's bad. Everything above has been sa id already, my someone, somewhere. Probably by a lot of people, a lot of places. But that's to be expected with this sort of blog, I guess. I just hope my posts improve.

Music makes me less productive and does not stimulate creativity

I enjoy music (wow, REALLY?? How profound and unique!) (Shut up.), and I am divided temporally over whether it's a good idea to listen to music a lot.

One the one hand, it's supposed to have all these nice effects on your brain (although while I'm writing this and researching my statements, they're not as well documented as I thought).

On the other hand, I find that when I listen to music, it becomes harder to get anything else done. I have a certain number of "Programming" tracks on my computer that I believe will have minimal disruptive effect on my work flow (being mostly instrumental tracks), but even listening to only such tracks I believe makes me less effective than I would without music.

This is related to a problem that I really want to get rid of - not being able to focus properly on the task at hand. This issue deserves a blog post on its own, but in short, I really need to build better focus discipline. And I don't think listening to music is helping with that. Rather, it is making me addicted to constantly needing stimuli that is stronger than what the task at hand is able to provide. Right now, for instance, as I wrote the last sentence, I took a break to check on some social medium. It's a terrible situation, and I must get out of it.

And it's not only while working - whenever I'm travelling, for instance, I have had the habit of bringing my music player so as to avoid the drearyness of doing nothing. I am actually slightly afraid of not having anything to do (other than entertain myself).

I think it's vital for me to accustom my brain to the notion of not getting stimuli at all times, and that if it wants stimuli, it had better make it up by itself.

Beethoven - did not constantly listen to music on his MP3 player

Doing this to your brain, however, is hard work. It yearns for input. Withdrawal happens. And somehow, it eventually manages to come up with some reason why listening to music at every idle moment actually is good for you, after all.

However, this time I must try to fight it. This blog post shall be a testament to my determination. I will try to stimulate brain activity by not listening to music, instead letting the mind wander to wherever it wants and explore that realm.

This is not to say I won't ever listen to music. I probably still will on a daily basis. But I will try not to fool myself into believing that the best way to stimulate my brain is to listen to music, and I will try to avoid music whenever I need to focus, to work, or whenever I have time wherein the only possible activity is to think. Thinking is a good thing!